Selling and Lead Generation

I often talk with customers about airflow by comparing it to a person’s blood pressure. I’m working on building clean visual aids I can share with customers on my iPad or over a virtual conference call. Tools like the NCI Blood Pressure Chart help a lot.

The ComfortMaxx report itself is an essential visual aid. It gets customers to ask questions because they can see that things are not right with their systems. Then they ask how we can fix it, and they usually buy the repair.

This process alone builds strong lead generation for us. We find our customers getting so excited about having been a part of the solution, and they tell their friends, neighbors, and family what a cool experience they’ve had with Canco.

Because I’m a salesman, my job is to offer different opportunities for customers with varying equipment choices. I use an app on my iPad called Air System Upgrades, and I use that to show customers that what I am offering is to ‘renovate’ their system.

Note: The above-mentioned app is from a training program Canco went through with Tom Wittman and isn’t available in the Google or Apple app stores.

Renovating means something very different from replacing their system, which takes us to a higher sales cycle level. People are typically more open to the suggestion to renovate their systems. But I always make sure to price out the renovation, explain how we will test the system after finishing the work, and then see if there’s anything more we can do.

Customers tell us that no one else talked about doing that type of work.

I’d guess that around 95% of the people hire us because we helped to educate them. Then they proudly tell their friends, neighbors, and family about it. We help them by sharing the appropriate Home Comfort brochure from NCI. We leave these with customers, and my guess is that they share the documents with others.

But today, many people don’t want ‘paper’ products. There is a big move to do everything paperless. So that’s another challenge we have. Leave-behinds and third-party endorsements need to be electronic documents, and I am working to make that so within my sales presentation.

Lead Tracking

As the team at NCI preaches, ‘If you don’t measure, you’re just guessing.’ This is true when it comes to the company’s business side, and right now, we are not that great at measuring and tracking our leads. We recently upgraded our service management systems at Canco and are in the process of creating such tracking. It involves creating and using forms that will enable the system to track sales and leads.

Once we get this done, we will be able to document sales and lead statistics, then pull reports. This will allow us to interpret that data and better manage our marketing and our internal and external processes.

The plan is to be able to track the number of leads generated from testing, the number of sales closed from those leads and possibly using the data to set lead goals for each technician.

In the end, I believe that our approach to creating leads and closing sales is based more on our customer education process and our approach to testing and measuring. In the future, with a real-time ability to track those leads and sales closings, we will move even further ahead of our competitors as High-Performance HVAC contractors.

Will Horner is the sales manager and HVAC system analyst-trainer at Canco ClimateCare in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada. Horner joined Canco in 2005. He is a firm believer in training. He has taken all the HVAC design courses offered through The Heating, Refrigeration Air-Conditioning Institute of Canada – Skilltech Academy. Horner holds current designations as a Residential Air System Design Technician and Residential Hydronic Design Technician. You can reach him via ncilink.com/ContactMe.