[Business Issues] Should They Be Selling?

Everyone knows that not everybody’s a salesperson. The lesser-known fact is that everybody can be — including service technicians.
This is the belief of both Harden Blackwell, president of family-owned Terminix Company, Greensboro, N.C., and Tommy Fortson, president of Terminix Service, Inc., Columbia, S.C., and they run their businesses accordingly. Instead of being dependent upon full-time salespeople to sell pest management and termite services, they make it part of their service technicians’ jobs to sell, as well as service.
In their presentation entitled Residential: Getting Technicians to Service and Sell at PestWorld 2005 in Nashville, Tenn., Blackwell and Fortson spoke with attendees about the pros of blurring the line between service technicians and salespeople, as well as the difficulties.
Blackwell said that while keeping salespeople and technicians separate may work for some companies, it’s not how he chooses to run his company. One reason for this is that he finds full-time salespeople to be hard to recruit, hard to train and hard to keep on staff. And, while a good salesperson can greatly increase volume, it goes right back down again when that person leaves.
“It’s a constant roller coaster situation, is what we’ve found over the years,” Blackwell said. “So, what we like to do is have a couple full-time salesmen in each one of our offices, and then have four to seven PMPs (pest management professionals) selling.”
Fortson said he believes that training technicians to be universal PMPs, or “keymen,” as he likes to call them, is a way to keep them from getting “burned out.” Training a technician to be a keyman means training them to do just about everything that needs to get done: pest control services, termite services, selling those services, etc.
“In our minds, he or she represents our company totally,” said Fortson.

TESTY TECHNICIANS. While both Fortson and Blackwell have met with success in combining sales and service in their technicians, they both also acknowledge the challenges involved. One of these challenges is convincing the technicians themselves that they’re capable of being universal PMPs, or keymen.
Blackwell said there was employee resistance when his company first made the change from separate salespeople and service technicians to universal PMPs. “When we first started trying to get our technicians to sell, everything we heard was ‘I don’t have time to sell. I’m a technician. I can’t sell. I don’t want to sell,’” he said.
However, Blackwell found that with some encouragement and motivation, his technicians both could and would help to sell their services. In fact, in 2004 his PMPs sold about 36 percent of the work his company sold in total — only two percent lower than the 38 percent his full-time salespeople sold.
Another part of achieving success with the universal PMP approach is to make sure, when hiring new employees, to hire ones who are both willing to try to sell and also likely to be good at it. “You need to have somebody with the right personality, who is not afraid to speak and deal with customers, and they can be extremely successful,” Fortson said.
One important thing is to be up front from the beginning with potential employees. Blackwell said that his company tells people right away that they’ll be expected to both sell and service. And, in order to aid in finding out who is and who isn’t a good match for this job, both Fortson and Blackwell use personality profiles. They said that while these profiles are not 100 percent accurate, they can be very helpful.
“It helps to hire people who have the behavioral style and the motivation conducive to selling,” Blackwell said. “We profile everybody we hire, and we like it.”

MANAGERS WHO MOTIVATE. Motivating people to sell is another challenge in taking the keyman approach to a pest control business. It’s definitely not always easy to do, but it is essential in achieving success. This is where management comes in — managers must be the ones to help create motivation using everything from money to goals to competition to good old-fashioned encouragement.
“It’s much more complex to manage one of these branches than a traditional branch,” Fortson said. “When you have a traditional branch, you line everybody up and they go out.”
However, with the keyman approach used by Fortson, technicians are typically more involved in tasks such as planning their schedules. And while they may still want a manager’s help, they also want to be a part of the planning process. It’s more of a give-and-take situation than one where the technician just does as he’s told.
“It’s much more difficult to deal with, but it’s very rewarding,” Fortson said.
Blackwell also spoke about how switching from traditional separate roles to selling technicians requires a huge commitment from management and people that are higher up in the company. “You just can’t walk in one day and say to the technicians ‘You’re going to sell,’” he said. “It doesn’t work. The person at the top has got to force this thing down.”
It’s also very important that managers help technicians overcome the fear of selling, which is a part of their resistance to it. Good training can help them overcome this fear, and so can smaller yet very helpful things — like having information easily available regarding the services customers already have, and the services that could potentially be sold to them. This way, technicians can refer to this information when they’re out on their routes instead of just trying to remember it all. Blackwell also recommends keeping pricing as simple as possible because technicians are often worried they might make mistakes when quoting prices to customers. Sending managers out with technicians the first couple times they make a sales and service call is another good way to help them ease into selling along with servicing, and to diminish fear.
Praise and money are other good motivators to sell. The praise should come from management, and the extra money from commission on sales. “We’ve got people who make a sale, and they call the manager,” Blackwell said. “The manager will say, ‘That’s fabulous. Do you know how much money you made?’ They figure out pretty quickly how much add-on money they could make.”
Requiring employees to set sales goals and helping to incite competition among them are other things management personnel should do in order create a company culture conducive to the universal PMP or keyman concept. Whether a sales goal is $100 or $1,000, it is still a goal and it gives employees something to shoot for. Both Fortson and Blackwell will accept anything above zero dollars as a goal.
Competition can encourage people to sell because of the “if he can do it, I can too” mindset. Blackwell said his company ranks every technician each day, so everyone can see who sold what. “Where one salesman is, they don’t get really motivated,” he said. “But you put two salesmen in a branch, the competition kicks in. It’s the same way with PMPs.”
CULTIVATING RELATIONSHIPS. While making the transition to having technicians sell has its difficulties, and running a pest control company using the universal PMP approach can be very challenging, both Fortson and Blackwell remain strong supporters of this approach. They say they see proof of its success in their turnover rates and in their profits.
Turnover rates are kept lower by the perks that come with being a universal PMP, or keyman. Fortson said his technicians have variability in their daily schedules, and a feeling of proprietorship because they are basically the only ones working in their own particular territories. All of this lessens the “burnout factor,” and that means employees are happier and remain at the company longer.
Blackwell said that his company’s revenue-per-employee jumped significantly when they began having technicians sell. While technicians may think that being “just technicians” means they can’t sell, both Blackwell and Fortson know being “just a technician” can actually be quite an advantage. Technicians often have relationships with their customers, and their customers trust them. “When you get slick salesmen, who are just polished and know the whole deal, they can be a little intimidating,” Fortson said. “You don’t have that with (service technicians). These are very sincere people approaching it from a personal standpoint.”
Blackwell said that having technicians sell helps to remove a lot of the competition from the marketplace because of this relationship between technician and customer. At his company, they’ve found that if customers are going to buy a service, they will buy it from their technician — they won’t call around and ask other companies for prices.
“The point of the matter is it proves that you don’t have to be the best communicator in the world,” said Blackwell. “You don’t have to be the most sophisticated person in the world. All you’ve got to do is have a relationship with that customer.”

The author  is based in Madison, Wis., and can be reached at mpeters@giemedia.com.