June brings a lot of opportunity to your door – or rather to your truck’s door when it reaches the door of your customer’s home. This opportunity comes from the marketing that reaches your market when prospects and customers are reaching for their phones (or email or websites or search engines) to find the solutions to their problems.

That’s you. You’ve got the answer that solves their discomfort and inconvenience. You can fix what’s wrong and make it go away – or you can fix what’s wrong then show the customer how you can do so much more. The ones who will do this problem-solving and make these upsell recommendations are the ones who drive the trucks of opportunity to your customers’ doors – your in-home technicians.

The right word or nudge or explanation from a knowledgeable service tech with decent communication skills can make a tremendous difference in the total ticket amount – and with each (or most or many) tickets increasing by small (or large or medium) percentages, it’s obvious how this adds up.

So train your techs to recognize opportunity (aging systems, frequent repairs, predictable problems). Train them to communicate solutions that their customers will find of value. And make sure they can explain your financing options! That’ll get your company more from the single service call, but techs also have several more ways to feed the sales pipeline.

For example, train them to ask for referrals and to recognize testimonials. A testimonial, after all, is simply a compliment that someone gives you (and then agrees you can use). Let them know of the importance of extra touches like yard signs in the homes they’re servicing or door hangers in the neighborhoods. These items also serve as testimonials and provide “social proof” that someone trusts you enough to make the call – and that your company stands by your work.

This is particularly important when contracting has, like any industry, bad apples that ruin the whole bunch. According to the Better Business Bureau, home improvement scams rank third in the top 10 consumer complaints. Yes, we all despise the bad guys who give our good work a bad name. But with the right word or nudge from your tech, your company’s name will be the one that matters most.

You’ve got the answer that solves their discomfort and inconvenience. You can fix what’s wrong and make it go away – or you can fix what’s wrong then show the customer how you can do so much more.