Harnessing TitanAdvisor: Expert Tips for Your Business | Podcast Ep. 03 | Mastering ServiceTitan

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Welcome to Mastering Service Titan where we get expert advice from power users. I'm your host, Josh Liu, and today I'm here with Krista Landon. Krista is the marketing and IT manager at Gulf Shore Air Conditioning and Heating. Krista, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Super, super excited.

Yeah, I'm excited too. You're known as the queen of Titan Advisor. I don't know if you knew that, but I just wanted to share. I wanted to share with our listeners that you had a Titan score of 132 when you were still in implementation phase at Service Titan when you first joined and you have reached a peak Titan score of 198, if I have that correctly. And I just wanted to ask, like, why should people care about Titan score and how has it been impactful at Gulfshore?

Oh, everyone should care about their Titan Advisor score. It is the like blood flow of how you are using Service Titan and the pulse to which that you are implementing new features, prioritizing features that best meet your company's goals and needs. Just in a snippet, like without Titan Advisor, you wouldn't know how you are using the program efficiently or not. So that's the best way to quickly look at it and go, okay, there's room for improvement here. Even I do that.

Right. And for those who have not heard of Titan Advisor, I think most people know what this is, but if they have no idea what this is or they forgot, what exactly is it and how does it work?

Yeah, on the office side, it's the little tiny rocket ship up next to your head and shoulders profile image. So click on the rocket ship and go for a ride.

Awesome. It's a. It's a crazy ride. There's multiple steps along the way from taking off to mastery and optimization and different pieces. And I know Titan Scores and Titan Advisors also customize for every business, depending on what trades you operate in, what size and things like that. So it is, it is custom in terms of the strategy of like using Titan Advisor to guide which workflows you implement or which ones to improve. I remember in our pre interview you talked about depending on the season, it really shapes your strategy with Titan Advisor. Can you talk about that a little bit?

It does. So I am big on not overwhelming people. Especially we are still considered a small business. So everyone wears multiple hats. Just like myself. I'm in charge of marketing and I'm in charge of it. So as much as I love Service Titan, it's not the only thing that I do to day in and day out. So implementing larger things or things that are going to take time to discuss and orchestrate different workflows or improve workflows, I prioritize doing those in our off season when I have more time and when our teams have more time to spend and learn the proper workflow and not just getting it done, which I understand this time of year for us is all about just getting it done at the end of the day. As long as all the boxes have been checked, it may not be the best workflow ever. We might have three memberships in someone's account today, but at least the membership got activated and we converted it. So for us, I try to ensure that doing those large projects of new features or different things that we're trying to prioritize inside Titan Advisor and implementing doing those in the off season with our team and I'm really, really big on including them and going, hey dispatch, this is what's coming down the pipeline for you or accounting. This is what is coming out in the next update or this is what I just found in Titan Advisor. How do we want to roll this out? Is this even something we want to use? And really taking their feedback Again, at the end of the day it is my job that the owner has put me in charge of if there is something that has to be done that way inside service site. And it is my job at the end of the day to kind of hold that boundary and go, okay, no, that workflow isn't correct and we have to do it this way, but let's all have a conversation and get on the same page.

That makes sense. And in the off season you have the time to implement those big changes and during the busy season you mentioned that you improve existing workflows but you don't do these major changes. So right now in the busy season, are there any existing workflows that you've improved upon or do you remember the last example that you guys implemented?

Yeah. So the biggest one for me is there's a few Titan Advisor low hanging fruit scores that you can get by just automating reports. So one of them was for automating a report for abandoned calls. And that's something that I don't have to burden my dispatch or CSR team with. That's something that I can create that report, monitor it and still get the points from Titan Advisor, but turn something on to exceed my improve my score and improve our utilization of service Titan, but not burden any other team members with. And come this fall it'll be something that I share with them and then pass over that report and the maintenance of those reports to them. But right now it's just something that I'm doing, maintaining, looking at, monitoring, ensuring that if there are any excessive abandoned calls that I can jump in there and spend an hour or two and chip in and knock away a few of those abandoned calls that just need to be classified correctly. So got it.

And that's probably really important in the summer when there's a lot of calls coming in.

Yes, yes, our team does do a very, very good job of clicking on the little green bubble when it comes in. We do get higher abandoned calls after hours when it goes to our answering service and so on those come Monday morning when, when our team gets in the office, you know those are low priority items to handle when the phone starts ringing. And so they don't always get classified throughout the week. And so that's where some sometimes that I can jump in that week and go okay, I can pick up those 30 calls that came in on Saturday who can take 10 calls from Sunday and let's just knock these out and get them reclassified and you know, pull my fair share as well. I'm here to help. So.

So that's a perfect example. And I bet there's so many other things within Titan Advisor, really within service Titan as a whole that people can implement and chip away at. It may seem overwhelming at first when people log into Titan Advisor if they haven't seen it for a long time when they look at it and they're trying to identify, wow, what should I take on next? How do you give advice for what to prioritize?

Yes, my favorite thing to do is to set my business goals goals first and those change by the season as well. And so every three to four months I go in and recategorize our goals and then re look at what is recommended for us and then from that needs attention and recommended which flows from our business goals. I can then put those into our current plan and that's where you can go in and customize your plan. Whereas something that may be popping up in relation to your business goals could you could classify in there and work on but it's just four quick things that you can start tackling. And so I always keep four in there. I reevaluate them every month and sometimes I don't always complete them every month. I mean our goals change. Something that I may thought would have been a quick win might turn out to be something that I've got to work on in the off season because now it's going to take more people getting on board and orchestrating different workflows and education of what I'm trying to implement. And so I just always try and go in and once a month recategorize within our current plan and optimize my time to focus on those four things. Now when I first started with Titan Advisor, that wasn't part of the platform. And so for me, how I did it when we first started is I just went section by section. I went through launch and got through everything that was in launch and then went through, started through acceleration and then into optimization. And so I just kind of take it bit by bit, master it level by level and then before too long, hopefully I'm in mastery. But I mean, no one's made it there yet, so hopefully it'll be me.

It's funny that this podcast hopefully helps people master service time. And it's really interesting because Titan Advisor is now customized that way where you can pick your business goal whether right now I want to focus on driving revenue and then it'll find the features, the low hanging fruit items that relate to that driving revenue. Because, you know, some features are maybe for saving time and efficiency, others are might be better insights or reporting. And so it's really cool how Titan Advisor is custom that way. I don't know if a lot of people know that that's an update now that they can start with.

No, for sure, yeah. Right now my business goals are driving revenue because it's peak season. I gotta get as much money in the store as we can right now because come October, we're in the panhandle, Florida. Come October, you know, the weather gets real nice here. No one's, you know, windows open, windows not open. You're just comfortable and you know, so then increase efficiency as much as possible. We want to get as many calls booked on the board as we can and work through as many as our team can do in a day and then gain business insights. Like those are our current business goals. Like we just have to serve the people.

Yeah. Are there any within the top recommendations for your business? Are there any that you're eyeing now like, ooh, this is a good opportunity for us to work on next?

Yeah, all these are something that I need to do, which is great. So all of these are things that I can do on the back end. So it's showing right now that we're no longer receiving points which we used to for match jobs to technicians with the right skills. So that means that I need to go in there and figure out which jobs aren't matching to skills and maybe reevaluate and add new skills to my technicians and my job types. So that's something quick and simple that I can do on the back end and it doesn't need to affect anyone but can make a huge impact on how we utilize service. Titan send email marketing campaigns to customers. So it's showing that I have a delay in points due to automated email campaigns. So we use Marketing Pro. And so for me that's something quick and easy I can come in here and do in the next three days is create a new automation campaign. We used to have two or three running in the off season for expiring memberships and recurring services and a few other things. And so I kind of turned those off to decrease call volume for around memberships. But I'm sure I can think of three other campaigns that I can create and automate right now for open estimates. Outstanding invoices likely. I'm sure people have forgotten to pay that. You know our area is tourist driven and so they're not necessarily here but their house went down without air. So out of sight, out of mind. So I'm sure there's three or four automated campaigns I can go in and create and get those points back up and then engaging customers by responding to reviews. We get about three reviews in a day on a good day. And so that's something that it's showing that I've been lacking on the last week, which I will admit I did not respond to my reviews in the last week. So that's something that I can go on in quick win and there, right there, I would be up 15 points. No 5, 3, 8. 14 points.

Wow. I love how we just workshop that live and I really appreciate your transparency and honesty. Just showing us what the opportunity areas are. And it's cool how Titan Advisor will pick out the things based on those goals in this time for the summer. And it also looks pretty opportunistic and lucky that you get to do it all on the back end. You don't have to go out to other people and make this big change. If there was one in there that you couldn't do by yourself. What's your first step? How do you get someone on board to drive change?

So the next biggest one on here is offer customer pre built estimates. So that's using your templates and that's one where a few of our technicians will get on board with it for a couple months and then they may you know, slack off. And so really with that getting the buy in with PriceBook Pro, we were able to turn on Titan Intelligence for our templates. And I think going in there and possibly printing those out and reevaluating with my service team on, hey, this is what Service Titan is showing. That is our pre built templates. What on here do we maybe need to change, evaluate, add, subtract. They're all good, better, best options. So it's just three estimates, not a whole lot that we have to evaluate. So that would probably be one that I would bring up to my service manager and say, hey, like how do we get the team back on board with this? I understand that they're just in the process of completing the estimate for the, the only, only the one repair that needs to be done today. But how do we get everyone back on track with using these good, better, best templates?

That's a good one. And it's such a good example of at the beginning of the conversation you said you talk to people to get their buy in and really see like who's really invested in this and can help drive this change forward. It reminds me to, of a principle around change management and leadership where sometimes you have to make a change and you have to do it fast. And that's like there's a speed aspect to change management. Then on the other hand, there's this aspect about buy in and getting people really invested in the change. And sometimes speed and buy in are at odds with each other. So if we want to implement something really fast, sometimes it's what they call a tell sell. Hey, I'm going to tell you what to do, I'm going to sell you on it. We're doing this but you have less buy in, but you have a lot of speed. And on the other hand, if you want to get a lot of buy in with everyone, meeting with everyone, taking their advice and feedback and agreeing on what we're going to do to move forward. It takes a lot of time. So you reduce the speed, but you have a lot of buy in. In a situation like using estimate templates for the summer, how do you navigate getting everyone bought in but also like, gotta move on this quickly?

Yeah, I probably would start with our service manager and meet with him one on one and say, okay, look, these are the 30 templates that you know, we already have pre built in here. What do you see is popping out that doesn't seem right. That wouldn't be a good fit for our clientele. And then working with him and Then from there taking it to the service team and say, okay, like, you've got a week. You've got a week to review these. And then after that, you know, we're going to start implementing that. You've got to have three options for every opportunity. And so I'm making it really easy for you to now choose the template that's already created or you can custom build three estimates. But we want to see three options per opportunity. And that's something we can easily track on the dashboard and see how many options per opportunity are. Is our team quoting. And you know, we've done a really great job of dissecting Service Titan by business unit. So I can easily click, click on just my four business units that's related to my service team and see, okay, they're only offering like 0.85 per opportunity. So sometimes we're not even offering an option. That's a problem. And I mean, my Titan Advisor score tells me, you know, that they've been slacking off because they're not getting the points for it anymore. So, you know, that would be kind of like how I would maybe do that and then I would maybe incentivize the technician for the next, like week that had the most options for opportunity and get the, get them seeing that, like, okay, this is doing great things. We are making more sales. Revenue is up more this month than it was last year, which overall I can report that thanks to Service Titan, we're up 12% this year just in our service department from revenue last year. So we've only been on service site in a year and a half. And last year we were up, I think it was like 10 and a half percent in the service department for the entire year. This year to date, we are up 12%. That's amazing from last year. So awesome growth.

Yeah, that is, that is awesome. And it's really cool how you're getting to hear, peek behind the curtain of how you would actually think about implementing these things live, you know, giving them a week, making sure to get the buy in. But starting from the top of who owns that department, how about in terms of culture? A lot of people don't like change. And I can imagine at your company, if you're the person who's like, we need to change this, we need to change that, there might be some pushback. How do you encourage them to get on board with change and hop on the ride of Titan Advisor?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's where we're kind of in an awesome circumstance right now where Gulf Shore is growing is that we're still small enough that we are a tight knit team. And if I bring a new workflow in Service Titan or a new update that comes quarterly, my team is relatively adaptive. Already on the office side of, oh, that's neat. You know, we all watch the blue collar nerds like release notes and then I dissect the main release notes that come out from Service Titan, but I send them all the YouTube video and I go, just go, watch it, report back what you want. And then at the end of it, when the release actually comes to us, then I'm like, okay, this is now could be live in our account. How do we want to use this? And I am blessed that that the team in the office is really, really amazing at heeding my advice that's coming down from Service Titan of using proper workflows from the beginning, which I think is why our Titan Advisor score was so high out of the gate, is that when we chose Service Titan and we went through the six weeks of onboarding and implementation, I found out about Titan Advisor like a week or two in and immediately I was like, okay, this is the pathway for which I ensure that we start Service Titan with the proper workflows out from the beginning. So it's not, oh, well, I think you could do it this way. Or isn't that how that other company used it in that. In that one webinar we were in. And instead it's, this is exactly how Service Titan has designed it. And there's no gray area of how do we do that, how do we don't do that? This is it step by step depth. And we only implemented it that way. And so for us, starting out with such a high Titan advisor and then just growing it as the year, year and a half has gone on has been easy because we started out that way.

Yeah. So for those listening who are new on service time, maybe in onboarding right now, take that advice, see if you could beat Krista's score of 132. I don't know, that might be pretty challenging, but it sounds like for those who aren't new, they might be like angry at themselves right now, like, oh, I wish we had set it up right the first time. And I bet that effort in the beginning saves you so much headache later down the road of having to change.

I mean, a lot of it. You know that that is true. And I will give a shout out to Service Titan with the free ember session going through that really powered us. After being On Service Titan. I think we were on Service Titan just shy of eight weeks before I joined Ember and shout out to Joel. He was phenomenal at working with my team over those six weeks. And in that you focus on section by section getting through the different tasks in launch section by section. And so Joel does a really great job and meeting with other contractors, like minded, like sized, you could have a collaboration effect of oh, okay, so that's how I could bring that to my team or oh, well, that doesn't take anybody involved but myself to do that. I have that, I have that authority to do that. And kind of getting like your feet under you and going like, okay, there are some things that can be done on the back end of Service Titan that doesn't take the entire team being involved to make that decision and it doesn't impact them.

Shout out to Joel, Shout out to Ember sessions. We will link Ember sessions in the description below, below. So if you want to learn more about those and how to meet with other like minded folks to learn how to implement service time for your business and collaborate, I'll put the link in the description there. And yeah, it seems like as you're starting with Titan Advisor, there is kind of this filter that you're making in your head of like, can I do this now on my own or, and, or do I have to involve other people? Like is this going to be a big change? And so that's a good filter to tackle the low hanging fruit you can just do yourself and then evaluate the rest along the way.

Yeah, and I will say that for us it was beneficial starting like the year off the way that we did with implementing Service Titan in our off season and then going into it into season and being like, oh, so that's not how we did it. Last year was a great growth year and learning year for us. We learned so much about Service Titan, Justin, by like doing it. And without just doing it, we would have never learned like, oh, that isn't how that was supposed to work. I mean we changed memberships in the middle of our peak season because they weren't working. How we had them structured last year. And so it just wasn't working. And it's no fault to Service Titans. It's likely my fault. I likely didn't set it up correctly but it wasn't functioning. And so we just regrouped and we just scrapped our entire membership program that we had in the past and threw out a new one to our entire team, to all of our current clients and to our new clients. And we were just like, this is it, here we are. And it's been so much better.

So, wow, right in the middle of peak season. Can you share a little bit more in detail? How did you set up memberships before and what lessons can you give to those who are setting up now of not to do?

Yeah, with that membership, the way that we had it before, it was a three tiered system and I just don't think that I had it set up correctly with recurring services and the added benefits with offering discounts in the price book. We were constantly having problems where they would be on our lowest membership, which would get like a 10% discount and then somehow they'd be getting the 15% discount from the higher tier membership that we had. And so there was little idiosyncrasies like that that would happen. And, you know, being so new to Service Titan, looking back, I can kind of see exactly where I went wrong. But in that moment when we were going through that, I was like, okay, let's just go, let's just. We talked about it for years of just getting rid of a tiered membership program and going to a one membership program. Maybe we should just do that now until we all get better at selling memberships and converting them in the field and make it easier on us inside Service Titan right now. And so it was from ownership down that we made that decision to go, okay, maybe this is the best time to do it. We just did it and it worked great. In the month of May, when we rolled out our new membership plan last year, we can. We were converting at 28% on memberships. So on service calls of people that were not on memberships, we converted 28% now for the whole year. Last year we only converted, I believe it was 19% over the whole year. But that month of May, our customers were loving the change. Our technicians were loving the change. We had the buy in. It was fast. It was not something that we took weeks on to think about. I think we made that decision from discussion about it to decision to getting the new memberships in program, like in Service Titan and selling them. I think it was like three weeks. So it was super, super, super, super fast.

That's amazing. Were there any hiccups along the way where technicians like, oh my, we're going to change all our memberships now in the middle of the summer? Can't we wait till the fall? Did you hear any of that?

No, I think all the technicians were really, really excited about it. The prior membership plans and it probably wasn't so much a service titan related issue. It was all from us, from a marketing and ownership issue that I don't think that we set them up for success. For selling the three tiers, there really wasn't much in a difference between the three. So I think our technicians struggled and trying to convey why they should choose this option versus this option versus that option because there really wasn't much difference. And so I don't think it was necessarily a fault to the technicians. I think it was a fault for ours that we were not setting them up for success. And now we can see that. And so going forward, if we do choose to add more tiers on in the future, I think it would be different.

That makes sense. And are there any other trials or tribulations with regard to Titan Advisor that you've learned in the last year using it and trying to implement change?

Oh, my biggest trial and tribulation is don't dwell on your score day to day. Take a look at it at a quarter at a time. I mean, just right here in the last month my score has gone from 189 to 161 over a period of a month, up and down. And so you really cannot come in here and look at your Titan Advisor score and go today it drops another 10 points. Oh my God, what am I gonna do? You know, it, it really, really depends on how people are doing their job, what they're seeing day to day and how they're actually doing the proper workflow versus the quick and fast. Just get it done. And so for me, I, as long as we are incrementally increasing every quarter, that's all that I care about. And that's what I report back to, to my owner is look, yeah, it's not the greatest score today at 161, but over the last quarter we grew up to 193 and we stayed at 193 for like six days. So what we did implement, January through, you know, February was great and it was impactful, but now that we're busy, it's kind of those workflows have slacked off and so we'll get back there and you know, our average right now sits at about 180 to 1, like 75. And so every day it changes because it updates. Every midnight or something like that, in the middle of the night updates. And every day it changes. And I just come in here and go, okay, well let me take a look at why it dropped 10 points. And then if it's Something just minuscule. Not really a workflow issue. I don't even care about it as long as the points come back up in the next 10 to 14 days.

That's a really wise way to look at it. Quarter over quarter instead of daily, or else it's just riding this emotional roller coaster of, yay, it's up and then, oh, it's down. So it takes some time, I bet, to. To develop that wisdom over time.

It, it, it does. And, you know, in the beginning, it was a little tougher to understand that. So it definitely does take time. But now that I have just seen our score just steadily go up, I'm like, I don't care that it's not at 190. I don't care that it's not at 200 yet. I know we'll get there. I know that what we're doing as a core will project us to be higher than that in a few months, because what I'm implementing on the back end this time of year by myself is going to push us. And then what my team continues to do and do, the proper workflows in the future will project us, you know, far, far above what we are right now on average.

It's such a good mindset to have. For those who are inspired and want to tackle Titan Advisor and open up that can of worms. What advice would you have for them if they're interested in getting started with it or hopping back in if they haven't looked at it in a while?

Oh, definitely. Set up your business goals in your current plan. Start there, look at your business goals. Go do your needs attention. If you don't see anything in your needs attention that fancies you and inspires you to dig in and learn more, then, you know, do some more research and put other things into your current plan. But just start and pick four things.

And then from a personnel standpoint, it's really interesting. At Gulfshirt, you guys have this model where you are the person responsible for Titan Advisor, and I'm not sure if that's how it's done at all companies, but is that a model you would recommend is like, pick one person to really own Titan Advisor.

Oh, a hundred percent. If you don't have somebody owning anything, who's going to take responsibility for it? If you don't assign it to someone and say, okay, it's your job to go in here and do this, and this is now your responsibility to make sure that we are implementing anything that we can to the proper recommendations of Service Titan and Get our points up. No one's going to take responsibility for it. I am also the type of person that just likes to take ownership and has excessive ownership issues. And so when I learned about this, I was like, this is perfect for me. And this is gonna work because it's things that I can see as, you know, we're progressing and going, oh, okay, well, you know, I've got three out of four points. Well, how do I get four out of four points? Just because I got two out of four? How. How can I do better? So for me, it's been great.

If there's an owner listening right now and they're thinking, hmm, who should I pick on my team to make in charge of Titan Advisor? What qualities should they look out for in that person?

Oh, I would definitely look for your most enthusiastic person that's already enthusiastic about ServiceTitan, because really getting into the admin side of this and getting into Titan Advisor and understanding the backend side of Service Titan takes a mindset of someone that's enthusiastic to learn about the program. If you're not enthusiastic about it, you're not going to get in here and dive in and really understand what Service Titan and how they want you to use it. So that would be the biggest thing. Find the person that absolutely already loves the program, uses it as properly as they probably have been taught. Because, I mean, there's workflows that, you know, I witnessed in a recent Service Titan webinar that I was like, well, that's not the best workflow. That's not. That's not how it's designed to work. You can do it that way, but that's not how it's supposed to work, you know, and that's just a taught thing. You don't know what you don't know. So that would be my biggest recommendation. The person at your organization that already is super, super excited, anyone that you know loves to get into the community would be another one. If they like to get into the community or the Facebook masterminds and dig in, I would highly recommend that they get their certified admin certificate as well. If they can make it through that, they can manage Titan Advisor no problem.

Amazing. Such good advice for owners out there who are looking to give this to someone on their team to own. Look for someone who loves Service Titan who is involved in the community. If you're a service titan, certified admin or part of that program, that's also a great sign. So that's such a good place to start. If you already have someone who owns Titan Advisor. And or maybe you want to just go back and look at it again. It was a great piece of advice you gave to start off, too, is just set your business goals or reset them and then look at what the top recommendations are for your business. Titan Advisor will automatically create those for your business, your size or industries, and then look at those four and then start evaluating. Like you said, can I do this on my own? Is this a backend thing or do I need to get some other people involved to implement change? So I think we have some really good actionable steps for our listeners to take today. And other than that, I appreciate you so much. Coming on, our Titan Advisor queen here at Servicetitan and would love to speak with you again one day. Maybe we could do around two?

Yeah, let's do it.

Awesome. Thank you.