How to Drive Revenue with 5 TitanAdvisor Wins | Podcast Ep. 42 | Mastering ServiceTitan

We found some Data that said 80% of the revenue in trades companies come from 20% of their services, which is just absolutely wild. It's a wild stat. So first thing I would do is talk to your technicians, get the buy in from the techs.

Welcome to Mastering Service Titan, where we get expert advice from power users. I'm your host, Josh Liu, and today I'm joined by Sina Sadei, the senior manager of customer programs here at ServiceTign. He manages Ignite, Ember and Spark programs here at ServiceTyan, and it's been here for over seven years now. So, Sina, welcome back to the show. You're also the first returning guest, so pretty excited.

Thanks for having me back, Josh. I'm super excited and really excited to talk about Titan Advisor.

Yeah. Today's topic is how to drive revenue with five QuickTitan advisor wins.

So.

So we'll be covering a lot and we'll start off with the first Titan Advisor win of learning how to close more jobs by offering second look financing. And actually, before we dive into second look, can you first talk about what is integrated financing with ServiceTent in general?

Sure. So one of the options for financing is obviously getting that financing integrated inside of the system. So service finance is probably one of the biggest ones that people use. Wells Fargo has been integrated, but think of it as a way to bring in those financing applications into this system and have it all in one place and all inside of the system. Inside of Service Titan.

Perfect. I think a lot of our customers are already using the integration and I did want to reiterate that the integration is at no additional cost. I know there's sometimes a misconception of like, oh, I already use financing, I don't want to pay to integrate it. But that myth is dispelled. There's no additional cost. You can keep your financing partners, integrate them all in the service line in one platform. I was trying to find the stats earlier because there there's some pretty impressive numbers that show our customers who use integrated financing versus those who just use financing outside the platform. The ones who integrate it have higher close rates or higher revenue. I forget which one it is, but it's pretty impressive. The impact.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense if you have to go to another system, click a ton more buttons. Oh, I don't even remember my login for this other system. There's just so many steps and barriers to sort of finish that application or whereas inside of the systems it's all just sort of streamlined.

Exactly. So now within integrated Financing. What is Second look financing?

Sometimes customers will apply for financing and they may get declined for, you know, a plethora of reasons. There could be a ton of reasons why someone gets declined, but maybe they still need that new AC unit or a new water heater. That's where those Second look financing comes into play, where a little bit lower of an entry, there may be some higher fees, but at least there's an option out there for folks who get declined from that first look financing.

Gotcha. And can you talk a little bit about Turns? I think this is a newer partner that we're working with. And how exactly does it work?

Turns? Yeah, Turns is one of our Second look financing partners. And again, we talked about it's inside of this system. It's integrated inside of Service Heighten, which makes things very streamlined. And I think we've been with turns for quite a while, which is fantastic news. But yeah, they're just another one of our Second look financing partners. So just in case that first look doesn't work out, customers still have an option to get some more financing.

If someone's listening and they hear, ah, Second look, you get more fees, like, maybe I don't want to do that. Why might they choose to go with Second look financing and pay those more fees? Like, why? Why is it worth it?

You're still getting the sale. At the end of the day, you're still selling that system or selling whatever sort of replacement needs to happen for that customer. And obviously we're making a happy customer as well. They get that new system, they get that new AC or water heater and they're able to have, you know, hot water or a cool system. Because summer's coming up, Josh, and it's been getting hot here in Cali.

That makes a lot of sense because why get a $0 job versus a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars job, even if the margins a little less, at least overall, you're still getting that revenue.

Yeah, we're still closing that job and the customer is still getting the system that they need.

So for customers who are already on the integration, how do they get Second look financing set up?

So inside of settings under integrations, there's a financing tab and that is where you can set up a lot of these financing integrations, which is very nice.

Perfect. And I'll include a link in the description of how you can reach out to the fintech team to get set up on this. So for those of you who are already integrated with Service Titan's Integrated Financing, you can Chat with their fintech team. They provide trainings on these kinds of things to help you get set up. How many points do you get in Titan Advisor for having second look financing?

Yeah, this is one of the cool parts, right? It's inside of Titan Advisor so it's being measured and I'm looking at the success criteria. So you get a total of two points and it's the percent of jobs in the last seven days where after a unsuccessful first look financing was offered, technicians offered that second look financing. So if you're over 80% and again it's only looking at those jobs after that first unsuccessful look for financing over 80%, you're going to get yourself a nice lop in two points.

Awesome. Now moving on to the second Titan Advisor win. Here to help you drive revenue, we have the follow ups and following up on conversion opportunities. I feel like most people use this. Is that right or are would I be surprised that some people are still not following up?

I hope most people are using this. It's a really good way to make sure you're not missing out on any revenue because where better to look than in your own system for those unsold estimates and following up on those things to convert those sales.

Gotcha. And I know you mentioned before we start recording there's a mobile side and an office side. Can you talk a little bit about both just in case people are unaware?

Yes. Don't forget your technicians can also be following up on these unsold estimates. So actually as part of this Titan Advisor feature, part of this setup is actually granting that permission to your technicians. So if at least 80% of your sales technicians are granted that access to the follow ups, you will get the setup portion for this specific Titan Advisor feature. Some folks love that they have technicians following up. Some folks love having the office follow up. I don't think there's a right or wrong but I just think establish a process and a system and just know that it's possible from both the technician side and the office side to follow.

Up and then you get a maximum of. Is it five points for this one?

Five points. This is a big feature. Five points is a lot of points inside of Titan Advisors. So what the success criteria is actually looking at is the percent of open opportunities for jobs completed in the last 30 days which have a next follow up date that is no later than seven days ago. Essentially just making sure we have a follow up or we have a date where we know we're going to follow up with a customer. If over 75% of those follow ups have that next follow up date. You're getting a big five points. It's a big one.

I'm not sure if we're, we can share the exact numbers, but Janelle on our team was telling us, I think it was people over a hundred points versus under 100 points. In Titan Advisor there was like a huge revenue difference.

It's true. Yeah. There's, there's just the data that we have where essentially you use more of the system. Josh, you're going to be getting more roi. And a lot of these features that we're talking about, they come included inside of the system. They're not an extra fee. So why not take advantage of these things that are literally inside of your system, make your business more efficient.

That's a great point. All five tips we're going to cover today are all core features within service time that you don't have to pay extra for. Technically you're already paying for them and so why not maximize that usage? And if you're below 100, please get over 100 in your Titan Advisor score. It'll make a massive difference.

It will. And join Ember sessions. They're free, we host those and that way you can have someone like myself or someone on my team walk you through some of these Titan Advisor features to get you over that 100 threshold.

Yeah. And in the Ember sessions you're paired up with like other businesses similar to you or across the country. And you can learn best practices from each other too.

Right, and exactly. It's a group based program where Titan Advisors are main sort of point of focus. That's where a lot of the things that we're talking about are driven by those features. And it's non competitors. We want to have open and honest conversations. So you'll be grouped with let's say 15 to 20 other contractors who are just all over the U.S. maybe we'll have some in Canada, but we just want to make sure they're at least 150 miles apart so you all can have those open and honest conversations and someone else to bounce something off of. How nice to have somebody else in your same shoes and sort of ask questions knowing that they're, you know, three states away. You don't got to worry about them sort of being your competitor. And it's free. And it's free.

Amazing. Yeah, we'll link that in the description too. If you're not in a number group or part of one, please join one. There's no reason why you shouldn't be part of one for the third one. This one's also a big one. I'm looking at the notes here. We have five points for offering pre built estimate options. I feel like this is a huge revenue driver for people who don't know what these are. I think that would be kind of a small group, hopefully. But what are pre built estimate options?

We've often heard we want our technicians when they're on site to be able to create multiple estimates for their customers so that they have multiple sort of options to choose from. Of course, the technician can just sort of build it one by one, adding everything that they need to add, or they can use the estimate templates that we have. So estimate templates, they can just click a button and it adds multiple options for them. And then of course, they can edit, delete, add as they need to. But really nice way to sort of streamline a technician's workflow to make sure that they are offering multiple options so that their customers have sort of, oh, I want the good, or oh, I want the better, or you know what, maybe I want the best because I'm going to be making a big investment.

Yeah. And we won't go super in detail about the Nitty Gritty how to get it set up on this episode. We'll actually include links to videos for every feature that we're talking about today in the episode description. So you can click through and just watch and follow along to actually get it set up with estimate templates and offering multiple options. I think as long as I've been at Servicety, I've heard this set, like, mentioned many, many times. I feel like most people know they should be doing this, but, you know, in the ember groups, like, what are you hearing out there in terms of the biggest challenge? Like, why don't people offer these?

I think the first thing that we always hear is they're a little bit scared of the setup. They see that, oh, you know what, this might take us a really long time, or, oh, I don't have time to do this. Busy season's right around the corner. And I would just challenge that mindset. Sure, it's going to be an investment up front, but then when busy season comes around, your technicians are more efficient so they can get to more jobs, which drives more revenue for your business. And that's sort of our theme for all of our features that we're talking about today, driving revenue. So it may seem daunting, but Blue Collar Nerd has an amazing video on building estimate templates. We've also got some resources as well. And then Josh alluded to the TAD tune up videos that will also be talking about this specific feature. So don't be scared. We, we've got you covered. We got your resources, make the investment. So that way down the line you become even more efficient to drive even more revenue.

Do you have any recommendations on where to start when it comes to building estimate templates? Like is there an 8020 approach here? Or how do you like ease into it with your technicians?

Totally. In the 8020 you referenced. Let's talk about that for a second. We found some Data that said 80% of the revenue in trades companies come from 20% of their services, which is just absolutely wild. It's a wild stat. So first thing I would do is talk to your technicians, get the buy in from the tax. What are these estimates you constantly have to build over and over? Let's template ties that. And that I think is two birds with one stone. Because not only are we getting the data from the technicians, but we're getting buy in because we're asking them and sort of showing them, hey, you want a template, we will make it exactly as you like through these estimate templates.

I love that as a starting point because first you're helping the technicians just save a bunch of time and once they have the templates going and they're saving time with it now, maybe you can layer on, hey, you already have one template. Why don't you at least offer a second or third option? And that way, as I've heard people in trade say, you're not offering ultimatums anymore, you're giving them options to pick from.

And people do like options. And if you don't know where to start, I would say at a bare minimum have a template that just has good and better and the better option has your membership on it. That way it's just very simple, it's just one extra thing. But if you don't know where to start, at least have a good, better template with at least your estimate, your membership, excuse me, on that better template.

That is a great place to start. So if you're listening out there and you're one of those people who don't offer multiple options, which is would be crazy, please ask your technicians what are the most common estimates that you're making. Let's save you some time and build one template or five templates for those most five common services and then just add an additional one which is the same estimate with the membership on it. Is that what you're saying.

Exactly.

Okay, perfect. And how many points do you get for this one in Titan Advisor?

This one also has a total of five points. There's three different parts, but a total of five points, which again, five points in Tiny Advisor is massive.

Like I said in the beginning, the 100 under 100 versus over 100 people, five points is like 5% of that. It'll get you pretty far along the way. And it sounds easy, I know, like just in the software. I know there's training that goes with it and behavior change, but maybe you can take that 80, 20 approach and just get them started. Yeah.

And one other thing I will say on this topic of estimate templates is talk to your technicians to get those most common estimates. Once you build those templates, train the technicians as well. Have an all hands where you're bringing in all the texts, and have one of the techs walk through building that estimate and then build it the same way using templates. And it's a really nice way to sort of show the technicians the wifm. What's in it for me? Why would I be doing this if I've been building estimates for 30 years? Well, here's why, Josh. It's a lot more efficient. And at the click of a button, you've got yourself multiple options.

You should have them race, race each other.

Timing and race winner gets a $20 gift card.

I love it. That's estimate templates. I feel like we've been talking about that one a lot. Every webinar I'm on about driving revenue, that one has to be mentioned because if you're not doing it, you really, really should be moving on to another price book feature in terms of maximizing upsells with upgrades and recommendations for people who don't know what these are. What are upgrades and what are recommendations?

Upgrades and recommendations. I always like to give the iPhone analogy for upgrades and recommendations. So these are things you're going to be setting up inside of your price book per item. You, you can also actually set this up at the category level. That's a little bit of a pro tip. Think of yourself as, what are we on the iPhone 15 today? I forget what we're on. I think that's what I have. The iPhone 15 upgrading would be an iPhone 16, an iPhone 16 Pro. You're literally upgrading what we're talking about versus a recommendation. You got an iPhone 15, you could get a screen protector, you could get a case, you could get a charger to go in your car. It's a recommended thing to go along with that service or unit. So I think the iPhone analogy is the easiest way to sort of break down upgrades versus recommendations.

How does it work when you set it up for categories versus specific items?

It works the same way in terms of the system functionality. It will just pop up for the technician when they're adding that service saying, hey, these are recommended, or hey, this is an upgrade to, you know, let's say that AC unit or water heater.

Okay, cool. And I can see how this plays into building multiple options. Right. So maybe you pick a service that's the one you always offer and then are you saying as the technician picks that service at the bottom of the screen or something, there's like an upgrade where they can add that to another estimate or.

Exactly. It'll be at the bottom of the screen and when they click add, it'll be a little pop up at the bottom saying, oh, like these are also recommended to go along with this service. So to your point, Josh, maybe our first, first estimate just has the service. Then we go in and create that second estimate and we add some of those recommendations. That way again, we're offering the customer multiple options, not an ultimatum.

Okay, and how does setup work? Are you just linking these things together or what's that look like?

Yes. So inside of the service itself, if you scroll down towards the middle of the screen, there will be a section for upgrades and a section for recommendations. And one other thing I will note is you can have multiple upgrades and multiple recommendations. So don't just think you sort of tied to one. You can have multiple in both of those sections.

Very cool. I'm going to ask the same 80, 20 question here. If someone's looking at their price book, they got no upgrades set up, no recommendations linked in there. Where should they start?

First thing I must say is, again, talk to your technicians. There's also plenty of data that you can run. There's a lot of reporting inside of service site to sort of see what's been your most used items or most used materials. The other thing that I would add for upgrades and recommendations is use those estimate templates. I mean, we talked about that earlier today. If you know that, you know, 90% of the time someone gets service A, they also get these other three things. Just add that into the template. Why not? And again, your technicians can delete things or add things as they need to.

So if you're listening and you're the price book person at your company, this is a great one where you can run some reports Find out which services you're selling the most often and which additional items sell and pair well with those services. Maybe you can use a combination of reporting and talking to your technicians. Hey, does this look right? And start with that 8020 approach. Take that top most common services and then you on the back end can just add in or link all those upgrades and recommendations and they'll just pop up for the technicians out there in the field.

Yes, when they're adding in those services it'll be a pop up and then it'll also be at the bottom of the screen for upgrades. The other thing I would say is use edit mode in the price book. When you're doing this, you can edit and filter by category to add those upgrades and recommendations en masse. Or if you're an Excel person, you can export your price book out and do everything in Excel. But I like to stay in the system. Edit mode has been super clutch. So if you're that price book person like Josh mentioned, don't be afraid to use edit mode and use your filters to make your life much, much easier.

And if you're not the price book person, please share this episode with them and say, hey, what do you think of this little project we can take on? This one sounds like one where you don't have to get a lot of buy in and change management. Maybe you could just do it on the back end and then as technicians are pulling up services, they just get those additional upgrades and recommendations at the bottom where they can just add it on and it's a little easier to find.

Yeah, definitely not as much training I think for estimate templates versus upgrades and recommendations. But always good to mention it because I don't know about you, when I click a button and I get a totally different screen, I'm like, what's going on here? What is this? So always nice to just sort of enable, enable the text as well.

Totally. So yeah, just get it set up and then tell them, hey, by the way, now that when you, when you pull up a service, instead of you having to find that whatever earthquake strap or whatever for the water heater like now it's just going to be at the bottom. Like you could just click it and add it on pretty easily. So good call. So you know, yeah, if they listen to me, then there's going to be an uproar with the technicians and last one here, driving revenue with replacement opportunity tags. Can you talk a little bit about this feature?

Replacement opportunity tags. How do we know when that aging equipment is ready to be replaced. And the answer to that is replacement opportunity tags. So this is something once again set up in your price book, and it's going to be on your equipment types, your equipment types. We've been talking about points all day. This one's another big five points. I feel like from this episode you can get like 20% of the way there if you're at 0 to 100, which is fantastic. But for this one Specifically, at least 25% of active equipment types have a replacement opportunity tag. Not only does that let your dispatcher know, hey, this might be a job where we can replace that piece of equipment, also lets the technician know when they've got that aging equipment and they can see that tag of AC replacement or whatever that tag may be.

So is this tag just like any other tag that you set up in serviceign, or how do you. How do you distinguish between this specific replacement opportunity tag versus other tags?

You're totally correct. It's set up the same way. You're going to go into tags inside of settings and just build that tag, and then you're going to go to the price point to equipment types to link that in there. And that's what's going to tell the system, hey, their system is, let's say, over 10 years old. We need to throw that tag on that job to let the dispatcher and the technicians know we have a potential replacement opportunity here.

Okay, and who uses these tags? Is it the CSR is collecting the information right at the top of the call, or is it, yeah, like you said, the dispatcher, or I think it's.

The dispatcher more so often. What's nice about these replacement opportunity tags is they will actually automatically just go on the job if that equipment is older than whatever threshold you set. So in the equipment type, one of the fields right above the tag is the replacement age. So what should the system say? Hey, 10 years. If a. If a unit's over 10 years old, we need to put that replacement opportunity tag on there. And for the dispatcher to know, hey, we might need to send a sales check out for replacing this piece of equipment. And then of course, the technician knows I've got an opportunity to sell a replacement.

Got it. That makes sense. This one seems easy to set up. Am I, am I mistaken here?

No, this one is probably of everything we talked about today, this one's literally create a tag, go to your equipment types and put it in legitimately. The easiest one. And five points, y', all. Five big ones for this one. So really low lift yeah, that's how.

Much emphasis or impact we feel like this one can make. So out of all of them, maybe this is the one you start with if you're already not doing it. I feel like people would be crazy to not do this one or if they don't have it set up already. I don't mean to make you all feel bad out there if you're not using replacement opportunity tags, but it sounds like a no brainer.

Yeah, it. It really is a no brainer. Super low lift in terms of setup and it's a quick win as well. A lot of the features that we talk about sort of throughout Titan Advisor, some of them have that little purple clock icon that lets you know to quick win, which means it's low effort to set up but produces very nice roi. And this is a quick win for feature indeed.

Perfect. So there you have it. Five features within Titan Advisor to help you drive revenue and just in time for the summer, which is exciting. And I did want to reiterate the TAD tuneup videos. Could you talk a little bit about those again?

So I'm sure some of you have seen we have a playlist on YouTube called the Tad Tuneup series where every quarter will have some features that we sort of want to focus on, which we talked about today during this point podcast. We will also supplement this podcast with videos on the specific features themselves with more in depth sort of setup discussion. And it's all recorded by the facilitators on my team. So shout out to the the squad here. But really nice way if you're a visual learner and you want to be able to watch a video and then set these things up as you go. Tad tune up series inside of YouTube. We have plenty of videos already in there and then these five features we talked about today will slowly but surely be rolling out throughout the next coming weeks.

Amazing. So I'll link those five videos to cover the five features we went over today and then we'll put the Tad Tune up series on YouTube in the episode description as well. Cena, thank you so much for coming on the show again and just reminding. I think a lot of this is reminding customers what's available. I think it's pretty rare to have like something completely brand new and innovative and we are doing a lot of those things, but it's equally as valuable to go back and just be reminded of some of these fundamentals, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. And one thing I'll sort of leave, leave the crew with here is you spent a good investment Getting into service Titan and I like to give. I love analogies. I've been giving a lot of analogies today. You bought a Ferrari, which is service titan. You bought it for the bells and whistles, the reporting, the beautiful visuals on the dashboard and and things like Titan Advisor. So it may get lost, especially in busy season. But when things slow down and you have some time to work on your business rather than in your business, use these things, use these tools. And you have so many resources at your disposal through Ember sessions, through these TAD tune Up series. So please use this stuff. You bought a Ferrari, stop driving it like a Camry type of thing.

My second car was a Camry and it was a very old one that did not operate very well. So yes, do not drive it like a Camry. Last thing for Ember sessions. I know throughout the year the tone of the conversations must change. I'm curious, during the summer, are you hearing any like best practices in terms of how people may change during the busy season?

Yeah, it's really around capacity for our customers. Obviously we want to start running a lot less middle maintenance is during summer and running as many service and sort of new sales and replacement calls as possible. So how are we making sure we've spread out our maintenances across the year? How are we making sure that our dispatcher has been extremely efficient, sending technicians to the right calls and the right job? So again, it's all around data. Use the data that you have inside of your system, run those reports, talk to your dispatcher, making sure that they are set up for honestly extreme success.

Beautiful. Join an Ember session. Please hear how others are dealing with this crazy season and how they implement change. And with all that, we will catch you on the next episode. Cena, thank you so much for coming on again.

Thanks again for having me, Josh, and really it's a pleasure to be here again.