Gaining additional clients, both new and recurring, will keep your business afloat. And building maintenance services companies are not any different. Owners and managers will tell you their main objective is to “sell more.” At the same time, it’s crucial to consider your selling approach and ensure you have a detailed long-term plan.
This is why we’re discussing the top advice for professionals that provide building maintenance services today!
Tips for Maintenance Services Companies
Quick sales are lovely when you’re just starting in the building repair industry since you can swiftly create funds and reinvest in the firm to recruit additional staff and acquire better equipment.
Sustainable development, however, becomes more important once you’ve established yourself, assembled a strong team in the office and in the field (wherever the office may be these days), and invested in management software, even if it’s just a basic program with no frills.
Go straight to what’s important to you:
- Identify your unique selling proposition.
- Show that you are familiar with their client’s journey.
- Provide several service plans.
- Assist clients in picturing your service strategies.
Establishing a middle ground between major commercial structures and smaller initiatives is necessary for sustainable growth. It also entails finding a balance between attracting new clients and cultivating repeat business (e.g., shop chains). In essence, avoid putting all your eggs in one basket.
Imagine earning 90% of your revenue from servicing the heating systems for hotels in your neighborhood. That source of revenue may have dried up in 2020 due to the significant decline in hotel occupancy, requiring you to change course. Diversifying is good, but you want to do it on your terms, not those dictated by external forces.
Let’s look at these 4 suggestions for sustainable building maintenance services company growth to ensure that never happens:
- Identify your unique selling proposition.
What unique service can you provide to customers? A unique selling proposition (USP) is essentially business jargon. Since most of those who decide to employ businesses like yours to provide maintenance services aren’t service professionals, your unique selling proposition must be pertinent to them.
A manufacturing floor manager, for instance, doesn’t care whether you invested in Honeywell SensePoint gas detectors. Let’s be honest: They probably don’t know if it is a good, awful, costly, or inexpensive detector, and they also don’t care.
They really want proof that the device works so that any potential gas leaks can be found and rectified right away with the least disruption to their operation.
Therefore, one of the finest selling strategies for building maintenance is to focus on the advantages for the client rather than your company’s advantages.
You’ll also want to boast about the ease of your USP. Every building management, whether in charge of hotels, offices, factories, etc., wants to know that your business will ensure they have as little hassles as possible. This USP will place you well ahead of any rival, from providing customers with an automatic booking site where they can schedule meetings without phone calls and back-and-forth emails to expert digital bids for uncontracted work and, ultimately, simple unified invoicing.
Every consumer, whether large or small, residential or business, ultimately wants the best. So, every time you approach a new client or submit a maintenance proposal, consider what their largest pain point is. You aim to demonstrate a solution for getting rid of it.
- Show that you are familiar with THEIR client journey.
On that point, it’s simple to speak and talk about understanding your consumer, but doing it is quite another story. This is especially true if you choose to vary your services because you may encounter a wide range of consumers, each with unique requirements.
However, one requirement they will all have is the necessity for seamless client journeys.
A customer journey may consist of all your interactions with a customer, from making an appointment to collecting payment. The total consumer experience is created by combining them. Naturally, you want satisfied clients who will buy more services from you in the future.
The issue with that is that, regardless of your result, only the client gets the last word on their whole experience and whether it was favorable or bad. For instance, even if you followed the words of your building maintenance services companies, a client may still be dissatisfied if you violated its spirit by canceling service visits until the last minute.
Getting accustomed to using a client journey map is another excellent advice for companies that provide building maintenance services (like the one we delve deeper into here). In a proposal or face-to-face meeting, you may use this to show prospective clients that you are aware of every step of the process.
This is why you did your research and bought the tools necessary for consolidated invoicing, which saves the customer a tonne of time and stress by presenting them with a single invoice containing all the pertinent information rather than having to sift through numerous individual ones slowly.
- Provide several service plans.
Consider strategies to give customers control over the process as another sales tactic based on their psychological needs. Offering a variety of alternatives when you’re tendering for contracts makes the decision makers feel like, well, they’re making a decision, just as enabling managers to arrange their appointments or pay their invoices online. The alternative is to give them a firm number and end the conversation.
This is a traditional “good-better-best” or GBB pricing plan in business terminology. AmEx utilizes it to promote its gold, platinum, and black credit cards, each with a range of advantages, just like Alfred Sloane used to distinguish Buicks and Chevrolets from Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs.
You may use it to bundle your services so clients can understand why one choice is preferable to another and feel in control of the process. When selling maintenance, allowing people to compare will increase your sales.
After all, without the Cherry or Vanilla flavors, you wouldn’t know if Coca-Cola was indeed the greatest Coke. The fact that customers are still doing business with you at the end of the day, regardless of the service package they select, makes it a win in every way.
- Assist clients in picturing your service strategies.
Creating service plans involves having a variety of quotations available and a method of presenting them so that the client can easily perceive the advantages and related expenses.
The most straightforward method is to use a specialized quotation program, such as PandaDoc, or the built-in quoting capability if your software has one. This component would ideally incorporate your inventory data and technician rates and shifts to account for after-hours work or more specialized operations.
The creation of an outstanding quote needs to be your top goal when you are selling maintenance. Each of your rivals will submit a proposal with a price, and some aspects of the paper may be highly similar from business to business.
Your design must be optimized if you want it to stand out.
Your estimate should be, in essence:
Something that is branded stands out from the competition, and people genuinely want to look at
