Transform Sales Performance: A Deep Dive on ServiceTitan Sales Pro

Why increasing average tickets matters to your business

Start by assessing how much it costs your company out-of-pocket to send a service technician to a customer’s house after factoring in costs for marketing, lead generation, call booking, dispatching, drive time, wages, fuel, equipment maintenance, etc. 

While it depends on your trade and region, Mahdessian says it costs, on average, about $400 to send one service technician to a customer’s house. If your gross margin is 50%, that means you have to generate $800 per job just to break even. If you want a 20% profit margin, you have to generate $1,000 per job on average to make a profit.

The bottom line? To reach that higher average ticket, technicians need to execute on every sale.

“A few years ago, when the economy was thriving and everyone was flush with money, it was really easy to make money even if you had less-than-ideal execution,” Mahdessian says. “But now, where the macroeconomic situation isn't as strong, where wallets are tighter, we’ve got to be near perfect in our execution on every job to consistently make the healthy profit that I think all contractors deserve.”

But how do you know if your techs are executing in the field? What’s their process? How do they greet customers, present options, or introduce financing? Do you have any visibility into the onsite interactions when technicians make the sale?

“No, we didn't have any way of knowing what was going on,” Blanton says of his techs’ process before Sales Pro. “Our ride-alongs were nonexistent. We didn’t have time to do it.”

That’s exactly the problem Sales Pro is trying to solve, Mahdessian says. Contractors can gain some visibility into their techs’ interactions with customers through ride-alongs, but they’re often too busy to be consistent with it, and ride-alongs don’t always provide the full picture. Without full visibility, contractors often struggle to measure performance and coach effectively.

With CSRs, ServiceTitan helps you measure how many calls each CSR answers and how many jobs they book. If your CSR metrics show low performance, you can easily listen to call recordings to understand the CSR’s process and coach them on specific ways to improve their booking rates.

To give contractors that same kind of visibility into their techs’ sales performance during onsite interactions, ServiceTitan built Sales Pro based on the same idea.

What is Sales Pro?

“Sales Pro is an analogous product, where it will record the conversation in the field between the technician and the customer. Then the technician, the manager, or the owner can review that recording, find opportunities for improvement, and coach how they run the process in the field so we can see higher average tickets, higher close rates, and, ultimately, higher revenue per job,” Mahdessian says.

Sales Pro, powered by Siro, automatically records and analyzes sales interactions with deep integrations into ServiceTitan and built-in content from industry experts. Here’s how it works:

• When the tech arrives on the job, they click the “arrive” button on the ServiceTitan mobile app.

• Sales Pro automatically starts recording, with no further action required by the tech.

• When the tech closes the job, Sales Pro automatically stops recording and uploads the recording to ServiceTitan.

• Techs, managers, or owners can view a transcript of the entire recording, play back the entire recording, or review specific parts of the conversation.

“Sales Pro shows me all the stages of our sales process—greeting the customer, asking if I parked in a good spot, putting on shoe covers, building rapport, learning about the home, presenting options, financing, and so on,” Mahdessian says. “I can click on a specific stage and it will take me directly to that part of the conversation.”

To speed up the process of identifying specific areas for improvement, you can use the “Ask Sales Pro” button, and the system’s advanced AI will help you figure out exactly what areas the tech needs to improve upon. For instance, Ask Sales Pro might identify the common objection of a customer wanting to talk to their spouse before moving forward, and show you the exact spot in the conversation where the tech missed an opportunity to get the spouse involved earlier in the process.

Understanding the unbiased feedback factor

Techs view feedback as critical to understanding what they’re doing wrong and identifying specific ways to improve their performance. At Blanton & Sons, the techs crave the “unbiased” feedback they receive from the Sales Pro recordings but may view the same feedback from a manager in a negative fashion.

“A lot of people nowadays don't like taking criticism at all,” Blanton says. “They think you're attacking them constantly and always telling them they're doing something wrong, so they get into a defensive state of mind. But with Sales Pro, it's the unbiased coaching that it's giving them, they're listening to it, and it's working for them.”

While managers and owners can still leave performance feedback in Sales Pro, technicians can hear recording clips from top technicians to see how they handled overcoming customer objections to close the sale, Mahdessian says.

For example, a high-performing tech might handle the customer-needing-to-talk-to spouse objection by saying the following:

“Absolutely, Ms. Jones, I totally understand this is a very significant purchase and it’s very important to get your spouse involved. So we can be ready for the conversation, I think these are the foremost, most important points your husband needs to be aware of:

This is going to save you $100 a month on your energy bill. This is going to help prevent the asthma symptoms your son gets. 

In fact, I suspect he's going to have additional questions. While I'm here and available, do you want to hop on a call with him real quick?" 

Mahdessian says this may be the same coaching feedback the tech receives from a manager, but it often falls on deaf ears for whatever reason.

“But when a tech hears this from a peer who used it yesterday and saw success with it, they realize, ‘Wow, this stuff works!’” he adds. “And that's how we get the performance improvement on a daily basis instead of waiting for end-of-week training sessions.”

Sales Pro inspires techs to spend more time investing in their own learning and development, which benefits the tech’s performance and, ultimately, your company’s profits. 

“We've taken this approach with Sales Pro by effectively building the Instagram or TikTok of learning, where we take the best clips, the hottest clips, the most successful examples, and we put it into a feed that technicians can just scroll through, browse, click, play, and listen to the next one, and create this culture of constantly learning,” Mahdessian explains. 

Sales Pro’s new approach to coaching works much better at Blanton & Sons, as compared to the previous weekly training meetings where techs failed to engage or pay attention.

“I'm constantly finding them when they're at the office in the mornings, grabbing their Sales Pro, listening to recordings, or even just coming up to their sales manager and saying, ‘Hey man, I didn't do too well on this job here. Can you listen to this call with me?’” Blanton says. “We've never had that before, and it's really boosting our company's morale and helping our technicians.”

Gaining customers’ consent for recording

Initially, you might think customers will be resistant to the conversation recordings, but most people are used to those kinds of processes in today’s digital world. A service technician recently came to Mahdessian’s house and told his wife, “For your own safety, for training and quality purposes, we actually record the experience.”

“That made me feel so much more comfortable about a stranger being in my home when I'm not there,” he says.

At Blanton & Sons, customers receive a text message letting them know a technician has been dispatched to their home. At the end of the message, the company tells the customer, “This service call is going to be recorded due to quality purposes. Is that OK?”

“We've only had one person ever respond to the dispatch text saying, ‘Please do not record,’” Blanton says.

You can also include a similar message in your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) for inbound calls or in your job-booking confirmations. Mahdessian says about a dozen states require two-party consent, which requires both the tech and the homeowner to give consent for recording, while other states only require one-party consent.

“I really encourage you to get your own legal advice,” Mahdessian says.

Benefits of Sales Pro analytics

Sales Pro provides insight on the top objections your techs receive from customers by analyzing all of your calls. Once you identify the top objections, you can browse audio clips to see how the top technicians handle this objection. Then, you can push the audio clip out to your techs to listen to remotely, rather than pulling them off the road.

“Not only is this more efficient for you, but it's also more impactful because role playing in front of a group typically only goes so far,” Mahdessian says. “Half the techs don't even believe this stuff will work. But when they hear examples from their peers in the field, they all understand this stuff works and it works really well.”

You can also click on the “coverage” tab to see how well your team is sticking to the sales and service process in the field, as well as which specific parts they skip or don’t adhere to. If they tend to fall short on selling memberships, for example, you can find the best recordings for pitching memberships and coach techs accordingly.

Sales Pro even measures your team’s voice tone, talking speed, how many questions they ask, how interactive they are, and more. Sometimes, a simple thing like slowing down how fast the tech talks makes all the difference, Mahdessian says.

Sales coaching tools are becoming mainstream

More contractors today are using sales-coaching tools to increase profitability, but many other systems on the market fail to address three important challenges, Mahdessian says. 

Challenge #1: What percentage of jobs get recorded when there is no automatic recording?

“Before Sales Pro, customers who were using another tool, the recordings were between 20% and 50% to 60%. With Sales Pro, that becomes 100% overnight, and there are multiple benefits to that,” Mahdessian says.

1. When jobs are recorded, you see better performance. 

“Would you rather see better performance on 30% of jobs or would you rather see better performance on 100% of jobs?” Mahdessian says.

2. Job recordings eliminate conflict and tension between managers and technicians.

When techs forget to record, managers often want to know why.

“It just introduces unnecessary conflict and tension in a relationship,” Mahdessian says. “Why have that when you can just automate the recordings, you never have to have this conversation again, and you can only focus on learning development and the positives?”

3. Job recordings protect your business against customer claims.

“Customers no longer are doing one to three quotes to double-check companies. They're doing five, six, seven, or eight,” Blanton says, adding that when the customer finally selects your quote, they’ll often mix up the details from other contractors. “It's really helped us combat a lot of refunds, and ‘he-said, she-said’ conversations.”

Challenge #2: Other tools rely on manager feedback only

“Technicians don't love being told all the things they should have done better,” Mahdessian says, especially by managers. “They actually believe it when they hear it from another technician. But also more importantly, when you do it through the real-time audio clips, it really boosts engagement.”

Challenge #3: Inconsistent technician engagement for learning 

Because the focus of training sessions relied on manager feedback, the technicians were not always engaged and may already be overwhelmed with work.

“A handful of the best techs would engage, but the vast majority of them wouldn't,” Mahdessian says of other programs. “Our approach, this Instagram-like approach of clips in a feed drives massive engagement.”

Another feature in the works for Sales Pro is the audio summary of a job, which ServiceTitan plans to launch in November. This feature will automatically send the tech an audio recording about the customer, the job site, the job info, previous estimates, previous diagnostic forms, and the entire history of the property.

Mahdessian provided a sample of an audio summary of a job below:

ROI of Sales Pro

Mahdessian says his hope is that everyone will see the same kind of results as Blanton & Sons, but he believes Sales Pro can at least help most businesses increase their average tickets by a few hundred bucks.

“You'll see somewhere around a 10% increase in your average ticket, 10% increase in your close rate, and if you do both of those things, you’ll see a more than 20% increase in your actual revenue,” Mahdessian says. “That’s what we believe is the power behind Sales Pro, and it'll only get more powerful. This has been by far the highest adopted Pro product that we've ever launched in such a short period of time.”

Ready to sign up for Sales Pro? You can sign up for Sales Pro and any Pro product with a typical one-year contract or buy month-to-month without a contract. 

>>Book a demo to learn more about Sales Pro.