As a manager, your primary goal is to turn talent into performance. Building and developing your team from day one is essential to unlocking their full potential and ensuring both new hires and seasoned pros contribute to your company’s success.
In a recent webinar, Jerry Rollins, Sales Coach and owner of BGDG Group, and Keith Mercurio, ServiceTitan’s Sr. Director of Executive Success and the CEO of Ethical Influence Global, explore proven ways to unlock sales growth by improving your team’s skills.
It all starts with building a culture of trust, Rollins says.
“Trust is key to the whole thing,” Rollins says. “Your employees have to trust you, and you have to trust your employees.”
The three most important ways to build trust with your team include:
Excelling at weekly meetings
Conducting one-on-ones
Performing ride-alongs
Before diving into each of these areas, Rollins suggests reading the book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni, who uses a pyramid to describe each dysfunction or obstacle to building trust. At the bottom, Lencioni says, you’ll find the No. 1 dysfunction—the absence of trust—which serves as the foundation for all the other dysfunctions.
“If you don't have trust in your business, you can't grow your business,” Rollins explains. “And it starts with the employees. It doesn't start with the customer, the vendor, or the owner. It starts with your employees.
“You just take care of your people, then you let your people take care of the customer, and then the customer takes care of business. But it starts with trust,” he adds. “If your employees don't trust that you're looking out for their best interest, that's the dysfunction.”
Weekly meetings
How often do you meet as a team? Weekly? Biweekly? Monthly? How long is each meeting, and what’s on the agenda?
Rollins suggests regular weekly meetings are best, paying particular focus to providing training and resources for a specific topic in under an hour. And spend less time on housekeeping items, and more time on training, especially sales training.
“It's training so they can do their job a little better,” Rollins says.
In his sales coach training session at Bradham Comfort Services (pictured below), Rollins says he shared the advice of legendary basketball coach John Wooden, who says there are four laws of learning:
Explanation
Demonstration
Imitation
Repetition
“You have to pick a topic and explain what we're talking about, why we're talking about it, and what it means to them. Adults need to know why,” Rollins says.
And then you want to demonstrate during the team meeting. If you’re training techs on how to ask good questions of the homeowner, ask those questions and demonstrate how you do it. Then, split into smaller groups to do role-playing and imitation.
The fourth law, repetition, is key.
“Repetition is the reason flash cards work. If you do that enough, you learn,” Rollins says. “If you practice all the steps in a service call or all the steps in a sales call, that repetition is what really molds you.”
Also, Mercurio says managers and leaders must master the process they’re teaching, coaching, and demanding of the team, and be able to demonstrate it as well as anybody in the organization, from the front of the room.
“Explanation and demonstration are the keys to this,” Mercurio says. “You have to be the ultimate master of this content and be willing to stand up in front of that audience and show them over and over again.”
Rollins agrees, and says he loved Wooden’s four laws of learning advice so much, he expanded them into eight.
“It sounds like this, ‘explanation, demonstration, imitation, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition,’” he adds, with a laugh.
To excel at weekly meetings, Mercurio suggests drilling down on one specific topic, rather than trying to cover a broad range of training areas.
“One critical point of the process is all that you're going to want to teach and coach on in a given session,” Mercurio says. “One segment. Literally, the first 30 seconds at the front door, or asking questions around one specific issue, or presenting options. That’s the only topic of the session.”
Each team member also needs to understand their role, Rollins says.
The CSR’s role is to book the call.
The dispatcher’s role is to send the right tech to the right job.
The technician’s role is to capture the customer.
“The magic happens when we knock on that door and we capture that customer,” Rollins says.
There are five ways to “capture” a customer:
Do the repair.
If no repair, do a tech-generated lead to a project manager for replacement.
Sell membership services to the customer.
Earn a 5-star review.
Cross-trade by offering other services to the customer.
And you can conduct your weekly meetings around any one of those five topics.
“You can say, ‘Hey fellas, next week, we're going to talk about memberships. What's the best way to sell a membership? How do you bring up memberships? When do you start talking about it?’ So, you're preparing the group,” Rollins says.
Mercurio says he might do training on the same topic for four or five weeks in a row, which enables a system of accountability and continuous follow-up.
“I might have four meetings in a row about selling service plans or memberships, and five weeks in a row, we might be doing just the ‘greet’ step,” Mercurio says.
Each week, those meetings include small chunks of specific focus with specific actionable items. Then, the next week’s meeting follows up on those actionable items, linking together each session to ensure techs report back on their learnings.
It’s also important to understand how much it costs your company to send one service technician to a customer’s house.
“They're now estimating that just to arrive at a customer's home is anywhere between $1,000 and $1,200 in actual costs, between marketing fees and all of the overhead, to roll that truck out. That's how significantly expensive this work has gotten, to be able to even attain the opportunity,” Mercurio says.
As a result, it’s critical to capture the customer in one of those five ways mentioned above.
“If your conversion or capture rates are 60% or 70%, that means 30 out of every 100 customers were so unimpressed with the experience that they paid you to leave without fixing what it was they called you there for,” Mercurio points out. “When we go to a customer’s home and don't in some way serve them or capture them, that’s someone we’ve lost $1,000-plus to.”
To reiterate, conduct weekly meetings that focus on a specific segment of the business. Train techs on the five focused areas to capture the customer, train CSRs to improve their call-booking experience, and train your techs or salespeople to close more sales. Ideally, all of those training sessions with specific groups happen on a weekly basis.
“Sometimes, we think that weekly operational meetings, housekeeping meetings, or general function of the business meetings are what we mean by a weekly tech meeting,” Mercurio says. “I'm saying that with your technicians, your salespeople, your customer service reps, that once a week there's a training that involves their actual skill set with the customer being skill practiced, trained, and coached upon.”
One-on-Ones with Technicians
Mercurio believes manager one-on-one sessions with technicians is the most important meeting you can have inside any organization on a regular basis.
“And 80% of our coaching, 80% of our influence and awareness of our team members, can occur through one-on-ones when done brilliantly,” he adds.
Mercurio recommends conducting weekly or biweekly one-on-ones, for a minimum of 30 minutes and preferably up to an hour. They should also be held at the same place, same time, and with the same tone. And one-on-ones should not be mistaken for ride-alongs.
“It should never be a surprise or an anxiety-ridden experience to walk into a one-on-one,” he says. “A one-on-one should create an environment in which that technician or team member knows what to expect, where to expect it, and for how long.”
The one-on-one should also be driven by the employee and supported by the manager, meaning the employee comes to the meeting with their own agenda of critical items.
“There's an expectation of coaching taking place in that one-on-one,” Mercurio explains. “Your team members are coming in with one to two items that they've identified where they’re not succeeding or they want to get better at, and they're bringing those items to you. They're bringing that conflict to you and they're now seeking coaching from you.”
Rather than the manager dictating to the employee on what they need to do, the employee puts some skin in the game and identifies areas where they need coaching to perform better.
“I've been coaching for about 15 years now, and one of the things I know is that in order for coaching to be successful, the person has to want to be coached,” he adds.
Mercurio also hears common objections to one-on-ones, such as “Well, we don’t do one-on-ones, but I talk to my employees all the time,” or “I don’t have time to do one-one-ones.”
The first reason is why you really need to do one-on-one meetings with your employees.
“If you're talking to your employees all the time, both of you are being inefficient, distracting, and getting in the way of more productive work that could be done,” Mercurio says.
“No time” is the second most critical indicator for doing more one-on-ones.
“You'll start to create more time if you create intentional, efficient, and concentrated one-on-one time with each employee,” Mercurio says. “And that's where their productivity and yours will actually skyrocket.
“The more you do one-on-ones, the more time you're going to have, and the less you're going to need to communicate ongoing throughout the week with each team member, because you're going to have a dedicated space to be able to have those conversations,” he adds.
Rollins says it’s really just about mastering time management.
“Honestly, it’s the most important meeting you're going to have the whole week,” Rollins says.
With new hires, the manager may need to do more of the talking during the initial one-on-ones to explain and demonstrate operational processes. With more experienced employees, you can discuss specific areas they’re working on, their goals, and intentions.
“I like to create expectations and then just simply have objective conversations about performance against expectation,” Mercurio says, adding that the conversations with longer-term employees often evolve as their own personal development grows. “We might be talking less about their average ticket and more about their aspirations in the organization.”
Ride-alongs
While physical ride-alongs are not the same as one-on-ones, Rollins says they provide a great opportunity for you to coach your employees and provide feedback.
“Feedback is a gift,” Rollins says. “You want to make sure you have an agenda. You want to say, ‘Hey, here's our goal today.’ Secondly, you should say, ‘Hey, I'm here to coach you, not really critique you. This is good for you. I'm not doing something to you. I'm doing something for you. But at the end of the day, we're going to have some feedback, and we're going to give you one thing to work on.’”
As for how often you do ride-alongs, every company is different. Some claim to do them weekly, but that’s not always the case. The ultimate goal is to just make sure you’re doing ride-alongs on a continual basis.
“If you have 50 technicians, it's really hard to get out with them,” Rollins says. “Inherently, we love to do it. We think it's the best thing. We should do it.”
With physical ride-alongs, Mercurio says, managers must be intentional with their coaching.
“Ask yourself, ‘How do I remove obstacles? How do I use this opportunity to see how I can remove obstacles to make my technicians’ and sales team members’ jobs easier,’” Mercurio says. “You can see and learn so much in the field. The ride-along creates an opportunity for us to see all the barriers, all the little things that are getting in people's way.”
But be careful to not roll out too many new processes or checkpoints designed to prevent an undesirable result in your business.
“You end up creating so many barriers, so much bureaucracy, so many inefficiencies, and so many frustrations for the technicians, the CSRs, the dispatchers, the people who are out in the field, all in the means of trying to prevent something from happening,” Mercurio says. “Instead of thinking, ‘What are the things we can remove that allow our team members to get the result that we want them to get, that make this seamless, that make this an amazing place to work?’”
To overcome the obstacle of scaling a regular cadence of ride-alongs, ServiceTitan created Sales Pro to help businesses conduct virtual ride-alongs.
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Sales Pro, powered by Siro, captures and analyzes in-person interactions between your technicians and customers to identify areas for improvement. With automated recording to simplify training and save time, Sales Pro offers real examples from top performers, reducing the need for ride-alongs and making coaching more efficient.
With virtual ride-alongs, Mercurio says the goal is to create a culture of ongoing improvement, transparency, sharing, and support. They’re not intended as a means of surveillance to check up on your techs to make sure they’re doing what they say they’re doing.
“The beauty of Sales Pro is because it's integrated into the product, we're able to actually ensure a 100% recording. With those recordings, what we create is a number of different opportunities,” Mercurio explains. “With this virtual technology, what we're able to do is create a scenario in which peers are able to listen to their peers, technicians and salespeople are able to listen to themselves.
“What we're wanting to do is create a culture of coaching, which will allow and really encourage our team members to want to listen to themselves, use the software that can highlight key insights using AI, and also be able to then share calls with one another,” he adds. “And this starts to create that high performance culture where people are really lifting each other up.
“It gives us insight. It gives us an opportunity to be in there and to be working alongside and shoulder to shoulder with a lot more people than we'd be able to be with if we had to do them all physically.”
Success leaves clues, Rollins says, and it’s important to celebrate those successes.
“We can find out what they're doing wrong, but man, we can celebrate what they're doing right, so it's that culture of accountability and a culture of talent, and then more talent comes to you when you raise the level for everybody,” Rollins says.
To learn more from Rollins and Mercurio on leadership coaching and mentorship, check out The Pro You Know, now available to Sales Pro users. Industry experts will share tips on coaching for sales mastery, leadership development, mental resilience, and process efficiency.
“With The Pro You Know, we're here to support, challenge, and evolve with you,” says Sarah Ghirardo, ServiceTitan Director of Pro Product Content. “Because when people are given the right tools and the right mindset, they don't settle for average, they choose extraordinary. And that's what this coaching is about.”
