Service as a selling point for your product?
Friday 1 May 2020 Tags: Hardware, Mindset, Added value
Service as a selling point for your product?
Second-fiddle services for your Sales department will never become profitable and will end up as an annoyance for your organisation. If you don’t give it value in the first place, it will never be properly valued.
Through service you can become distinctive
An entrepreneur in heat pumps lets his consultant convince him to set up a Service department. In this way, he can distinguish himself from the competition.
The entrepreneur gets busy, frees up two employees and appoints them to the Service department. Much promotional fanfare follows to inform his customers that they will receive full service as from now. The Sales department considers it a great additional commercial selling point, and the vendors eagerly include it in their sales discussions. They involve their colleagues of the Service department in the sales discussions with potential customers in order to make a good impression.
No service without hardware
With every heat pump sold, however, the colleagues of the Service department wonder why no service agreement was concluded. To which the Sales department invariably answers: “We must first sell the hardware and then we can see whether there is a need for service. Without this hardware, there is no service to be provided at all. Trust us, as sales professionals we know better than anyone what the customer needs."
What is the future of service in this company?
It is very clear that they will never sell a service contract. The mind-set of Sales is patently obvious: selling hardware is the business. It’s about high turnovers and personal bonus targets.
“Discussions about service will only distract the customer and raise too much resistance in the sales process,” is their opinion. After all, why would we risk a turnover of 35,000 EUR per heat pump for a service contract of a mere 1,200 EUR annually?
Why will service never become a success here?
The Service department will never become a success here because:
- the value of service is not experienced internally and therefore not presented externally,
- service is not an inseparable part of the proposal offered by Sales,
- Sales are set in their ways: ‘selling hardware'.
Potential value of service
In the end, the Service department will only be putting out small fires for Sales and customers, on an ad hoc basis. In short, the Service department has become the organisation’s drain. This is caused by the traditional mind-set of focusing on hardware and solving problems in an ad hoc way. And this has nothing at all to do with value creation. So service will never be given the value it deserves and can potentially have.
What will change their mind?
Start analysing your complaints registration today in collaboration with your Sales team. Determine which two complaints cause your customers the most pain. How can you prevent these complaints? What knowledge is required for this? What is the value of preventing this complaint for your organisation and for the customer? Calculate it and assign it that value. In what form would you offer it?
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