Best Practices in the Field

ServiceTitan Makes it Easy to Leverage Good-Better-Best

Considered par for the course in service sales, price objections from homeowners and other prospects happen every day in the trades. But how do you best respond to a customer’s price objection, or prevent them from happening in the first place?

While there’s no silver-bullet approach to success, one key factor—value—makes a huge difference to first understanding those price objections, then overcoming them, says Jerry Hanessian, a sales professional with more than 20 years in the trades. 

“You haven’t given enough value to whatever you’re selling, whatever service you’re providing, or whatever product you’re installing,” Hanessian says. “Once negotiations start and you haven’t brought value, then you’ve lost control.”

One way to show that value is by putting the customer in control by creating good-better-best options for solving their problem into an easy-to-create sales presentation on a mobile tablet, then handing it to the customer. 

That educates the customer and creates better understanding. 

“People have to believe there's a need before they buy into any solution,” he says. “Showing customers pictures of the problem, and good-better-best solution options, allows them to decide for themselves. Education is huge.”

Estimate Templates

Make creating good-better-best easy to drive average ticket

Rachel Stepowoy, who recently joined ServiceTitan after being Enterprise Administrator for a family business that includes seven Roto-Rooter franchises in Ohio, Michigan and Illinois, made estimate templates a priority once the company grasped the day-to-day with ServiceTitan software. 

That changed the game.

“In the back of our heads we remembered these templates existed but didn’t realize just how important and helpful they would be,” Stepowoy said. 

Implementing Estimate Templates gave her technicians, who have commissions as part of their pay, a way to sell better or best options to customers by explaining the benefits and offering those options on every dispatch. And they made customers happier, too.

Roto-Rooter’s most frequently completed task, found through ServiceTitan data, was cabling a residential branch drain, so that’s where Stepowoy started. By updating the task descriptions, building specific codes for specific jobs and adding relevant photos and video links, she created descriptions that would sell themselves while educating customers and offering options for cable, hydrojet, combo clean and drain product. 

“With the old description, we had a picture of a cable machine,” Stepowoy said. “People don’t care what our equipment looks like, they want to understand the process. Looking back, it seems so silly now.”

The new estimate descriptions are more specific, offering good-better-best options for the specific job they’re performing. 

Rather than one general description, the Estimate Templates are divided by much more specific job types—kitchen drain, shower drain, etc.—and include expectations for the homeowner, explanations of the processes with photos and video, and warranty information. 

The new descriptions allow the technician to explain the value of the service relative to the cost, and to easily point out the meaningful differences between the options. 

In ServiceTitan, technicians find the templates by clicking estimates, then add estimate, and all the saved templates appear. The technician only needs to select the appropriate one.

LISTEN NOW: The power of Good-Better-Best Options

Tips for Estimate Template Training

Stepowoy offered the following tips for training technicians about Estimate Templates:

• Do training in person, not by Zoom or teleconference. 

• Teach them how to hide the prices while presenting so the customer can focus on the education, not the sticker shock. 

• Encourage techs to show the photos and videos to deepen the customer’s understanding.

• Consider training one technician in advance and use them as a test case to find errors and spot weaknesses before you roll the templates out to everyone. 

• Remind them never to assume the customer doesn’t want options, or can’t afford them. Offer options to everyone. 

Also, educate the technicians on the reasons behind providing options and education for customers, including better reviews, bigger average tickets and improved customer satisfaction. 

“Without the why, I feel like we would have had much less success with this,”  Stepowoy said.  

Why do options and education matter? Without options, Stepowoy said, companies limit their company’s potential and lose the trust of customers.

“Today’s customer lives in a world where expansive choice is the norm,” Stepowoy said. “They expect to have multiple choices available to them whenever they are making a decision. Presenting options gives the customer control.”

ServiceTitan Estimate Templates make offering those options easy. The result?

“Offering targeted solutions leads to more success,” she said. “The decision-making process is made simpler.”

LISTEN NOW: Rachel Stepowoy on estimates templates