Why Your Techs Aren’t Selling High Ticket (And What to Fix)

If your techs aren't selling high ticket, it's probably not their fault. Most owners, when they look at their numbers, they think that they have a sales problem, but really they have an organizational problem. Maybe their training's bad, maybe they're solving for the wrong thing, or maybe how they present it is just not in a way that a customer would buy. Most businesses are just solving for the wrong pain point, and they're solving for the pain point that isn't valuable enough. I'm John, and I'm the CEO of Wilson Plumbing, Heating, Cooling in Ohio. And we run a $40 million plumbing, HVAC, and electric business. Over the years, we bought 14 companies, and in most of those businesses that we're acquiring, we notice the same problem over and over again, and it's that people are solving the wrong problem. And when they solve the wrong problem, they're not getting enough value for the solution that they're there to solve. So a few examples. One would be in HVAC. There's a lot of companies out there that believe that the best way to service their customer is to repair that system until the end of time. And for some customers, that is the exact right thing to do. But for others who don't want to keep paying tax to a problem, they would rather put in a new system that's more high efficient, it would save them fuel costs, and that they can finance over time. So you'll find that people are fixated on the wrong problem, which, hey, every customer wants to save money, and not, hey, every customer over the long term might be better suited with this solution. And the difference is humongous. The repairs might be a few hundred dollars, the replacement might be $15,000. They're just focused on the wrong problem and they're presenting the wrong solution to that customer. You see it in the way they market. They're chasing these low-value jobs with the hope that over a long enough period of time, someone will accidentally realize that, hey, I do need this bigger solution. So that way the company doesn't feel like they have to bring it up or try to upsell it or offer the solutions. A lot of companies out there get sort of weirded out by the concept of sales, but at the end of the day, we're all in sales. Everyone is in sales every day. In order for our company to run, in order to cover payroll and rent and marketing, we have to sell something. Someone has to sell something and someone has to pay you for that thing. As you're focusing on your business and what your average ticket is and what your average sale is, and if you want to drive it higher and improve it, you have to start with where you at now. What are the solutions you're trying to solve inside your business? What are the solutions you're offering to your customer every day right now, and how are you packaging it in a way that makes sense to them? One of the most important concepts in high-ticket sales is, are you solving a high-value problem? Is your problem going to spare someone some inconvenience? Is it a small issue or is it humongous? As a couple examples, I'm going to use DocuSign and I'm going to use an attorney. So DocuSign, I think I pay $100 a month for DocuSign and it allows me to sign contracts. I can also use ChatGPT to create contracts and maybe that's great. For another $100 a month, I could potentially replace an attorney by having ChatGPT draft me a contract and DocuSign to sign it. I'm probably not solving big deals. I'm not going to be buying a company with the help of ChatGPT drafting my contract. I'm not going to be doing something meaningful. I might be drafting a small agreement for a small problem. Maybe it's a few thousand dollars, but it's not gonna be tens of millions of dollars. That is too valuable of a problem to trust to too cheap of a solution. So you pay an expensive attorney, you're working with somebody that's $2,000 an hour. High-ticket sales is solving high-ticket problems. So I would expect to pay my attorney hundreds of thousands of dollars on a deal that's worth tens of millions of dollars. And I would expect to pay DocuSign almost nothing for something that's not that valuable. Take the same prompt to your own business as you're thinking about what problems are we here to solve? For us, we're a plumbing, HVAC, and electric business. So the last example was HVAC. We'll use sewers for this one. We go in and someone has a backed-up drain. Backed-up drains are an unpleasant experience. There's water in their basement. There's potentially damaged walls, damaged carpet, damaged stuff that they were storing down there, and it has sewage all around it. Pretty like unpleasant experience. What a lot of companies do is they go in and solve the immediate problem. There's a lot of pain But they just go and here's the $300 solution, which is the Band-Aid, but it doesn't actually solve the problem. The valuable problem is, hey, drains aren't supposed to back up at all. So we have a high-value problem, which is there was property damage, there was discomfort, there was pain, there was inconvenience, and most people are attacking it with the low-value solution that they will have another problem if that's all that you offer them. As you're thinking about the high-value problem and the high-value solution, the way you want to do this is you want to create a value ladder. So inside home service for HVAC, a value ladder is, hey, here's the reason I came out. And maybe that's the repair, maybe it's the annual tune-up. The next one could be a repair or an upgrade. So hey, I came out here to do this thing and you need this other thing, maybe you want this other thing. And then the highest rung is the big job, the big pain point solve, the big valuable part for you and the customer. And that's the top of the value ladder. So as you're thinking about setting up your offering, you wanna be able to have this value ladder that lets you come in at the bottom and be able to offer a stack of solutions to whatever that customer wants along that value ladder. Now we look at our team. There's 3 different ways to look at this. The first one, are we tracking the data? I'm always amazed at how often I find companies not even knowing their average ticket or their close rate. Well, how are we gonna improve if we don't know where we are today? Our second one is how often are we doing trainings? How good the training is is a part of that too. But hey, are we training at all? Are we training every day? Are we training once a week? Are we training once a month? And then are the trainings quality? Are you bringing in outside professionals? Do you have a curriculum that you've sort of worked with? Are you doing role play or practice? And finally, are you doing ride-alongs? Are you seeing it in the field? Are you watching as your team offers the value ladder to help coach them? To improve. The best operators out there have a pretty sophisticated sales setup. They have a great offering that solves the immediate problems as well as the big valuable problem. They have consistent training to teach their reps to bring people up the value ladder to the profitable big average ticket. They're doing regular one-on-ones. They're regularly training and enhancing their sales model, and they're doing ride-alongs to see reality and then scorecarding. The best way to think about this is there are inputs and outputs. And most of us, when we're looking at measuring our reps' performance, we're only looking at the output. We're looking at the sales number or the closing rate or the average ticket, but we're not looking at all of the things that went into that— the offering, the ride-alongs, the trainings, the scorecarding. All of that is input that you expect to drive a greater outcome, but you have to look at both in order to understand where you are and how to improve it. The way we started this was kind of easy. We sat down and we said, hey, what are our best jobs? What are our most profitable jobs, our biggest tickets? If I could only do 1 or 2 or 3 jobs every single day for the rest of my life, what would those jobs be? Maybe it's replacing water heaters or generators or sewers or furnaces, whatever it is. But we picked those and we called them our core service, and then we made it our mission to drive as much of our revenue through those core services as possible. As you think about building around that, what's the materials that we're going to put out for marketing? How do we talk about this on socials? Are we putting in an email and SMS? Are we training our techs to help support that one thing? Are we paying attention to leads? Are we making sure every opportunity can have the ability to turn into that one thing? That is how you build a higher average ticket, is you get the team fully aligned on the lead, the sales, the training, and just a cycle over and over again. And finally, we want to install some just basic cadences. We want to be reviewing our job tickets. We want to be doing monthly or quarterly ride-alongs with our guys, and we want to be doing it at a minimum one training a week, ideally 2 or 3, because that is where you're going to see performance improve. In closing, if your average ticket is low, if your average sale is low, it's probably not just your techs. What's the offering? Are you solving a valuable enough pain point? How often are you training? How often are you riding along? And is your company set up to succeed around this idea? Thanks for watching. If you like what you heard, make sure you like and sub.