Phil Risher presents five practical strategies to increase estimate generation for home service businesses: (1) a four-part technician incentive program (technician buy-in with referral payments, diagnostic checklist to spot opportunities, scripted talking points for recaps, and an easy QR/form referral process), (2) CSR involvement with incentives and scripted confirmation prompts to create opportunities before technicians arrive, (3) monthly email marketing (themed newsletters and promo emails) to educate customers and create demand, (4) converting email engagement (opens/clicks) into warm outbound calls by sales, and (5) next-day "happy calls" to rehash service visits and send estimates. He gives a benchmark (30–50% of jobs should become estimates) and cites a case where a 42% increase in estimates helped double revenue in 12 months.
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If your technicians are running from job to job and not generating additional estimates, you're leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. We had a company that we helped them increase their estimate count by 42%, which led to doubling their revenue in 12 months. And in this video, I'm going to break down five strategies for you to generate more estimates in your business. This was your typical home service business. They get service and repair calls. The CSR would answer the calls, schedule the technician to go out, the technician will go in and do the work. Then they were on to the next job. The problem is they're doing 300 to $500 repair service jobs and they're not generating those 2,000 to 20,000 dol thousand dollar estimates on top of it. And so they're missing out on all of the juice that comes from running these jobs. By fixing this, we help them double their revenue in 12 months. Before we dive into those five strategies, a good benchmark for you based off of our data is that 30 to 50% of your jobs should turn into estimates. So if you run a hundred jobs, you should be generating 30 to 50 estimates from those jobs. The first strategy is to create an incentive program for your technicians. When I was in the trades 3 million dollar home service business, I was director of business development trying to grow. It was really hard to get our technicians to upsell or generate leads because English wasn't their first language. They were naturally just technicians good at doing the jobs, not salespeople. And it was very hard to come up with a basic process for them to send leads. So we came up with this strategy which has four parts to a great technician incentive program. The first one is get your technicians bought in. So what we would say is, hey, do you want to make money while you sleep instead of just doing a job and going to the next one. Now you can get paid on jobs as you did last week and the month before. How? Every single lead that you generate, you're going to get a percentage when that estimate actually closes. So when you go into a home and you create an opportunity for someone else to come in and sell, you're going to get a percentage of that, whether it's 1%, 2% or a dollar amount. The goal is to get them bought into making more money off of the jobs that they're already doing. Number two, remove the technician blinders. Most technicians go in with blinders. They go in just to do the job that's at hand. No heat. I'm going to fix your heat. And the way that you remove their blinders is by creating a checklist for them to look at. A checklist would look something like this. Let's say it's an H Vac. When you go in you say, hey, I've got a couple quick questions for you just to learn more about your home and how things work. First, do you have any hot or cold rooms in your house that I should be aware of? This is going to help me as I'm going through and doing the maintenance that I'm doing here. 2. What does it feel like in your home on a day to day? Is it super dry? Is it stuffy? Do you have condensation on the windows? What's that looking like? And the third question, what's the water pressure like? Do you have hot water in all the rooms? Is it lasting a long time? What's that look like? Basically we're asking questions that's going to help you do your job better. It's going to build better credibility with the customer. And third, it's going to lead into sales opportunities for you. Which brings us to the third part of a good incentive program. You want to give them talking points off that checklist. So at the end of the service you want to have a recap. Hey homeowner, I went in and I fixed this and I did this, this and this. Now I know that you mentioned about this cold or hot room in your house. I think that we can solve this for you. What I'm going to do is send over, I took some information down and send it over to Phil. He works at our office and I'm going to have him put together some options for you and send it to you. Does that sound good? Yeah, absolutely, that sounds great. Now you're creating opportunities inside of the home so that way your salespeople can sell. And the fourth part to a good incentive program is you have to make it easy for the technician. And here's how you do that on your website. Let's say it's flashconsulting.com, you create another page that says technician referral. And you make this no index. So that way Google can't find this page. You take that page and you put a form on it. The form is all the information that you would want to gather based off of that lead. And you want to take that website and you want to make a QR code. That QR code is going to go in your truck of your technician at the end of the job when they sit in and they're recapping they can scan that QR code, open it up on their iPad, put in the information, and that form is going to go directly over to your salesperson. You have to make it super easy like that, because if there's other texting and calling and all this stuff, it's going to get very difficult to track and it's going to be hard for them to know what to do, which is why you need that QR code in their truck. Now, I know that's a lot of work for your technician. You just want them to go in and give great service and do a good job. So what if we could get to the customer before the technician gets there? And that's by having your CSR on board. The second strategy is a CSR alley. What does this look like? You want your CSR to be on board. How do you get your CSR on board? You give them an incentive as well. If they create an opportunity, then you're going to give them a dollar amount or percentage off of any estimate that they help generate as well. And the way that they create these opportunities is first on the initial call that they have with the customer. They should have a call script or checklist. And they're saying, hey, such and such customer, while we're there, do you want us to take a look at this as well? And they're creating the opportunity. And the other way you do this is on your confirmation calls, you say, hey, I see your home was built years ago. Has anyone ever looked at your hot water heater before? If not while our technicians there, I can have them take a look at it. Or hey, we've been doing some jobs in your neighborhood on hot water heaters and I'm not sure if you had it looked at before, but I just made a note for our technician to take a look as well. You're creating the opportunities before the technician gets there and then just adding it to their job when they get there. Okay, now you're like, wow, the technician, the csr. This sounds like a lot of work. So how can we get to the customer and actually ask them for the upsell? And that's we're gonna talk about in strategy three. Strategy three is email marketing to create demand. And how do we do this? First, we educate custom through our monthly newsletter. Each monthly newsletter should have a theme. That theme should be cross selling a different service. So let's say you're an electrician. You could talk about EV chargers, generators, whole home, surge protectors, heavy ups, whatever it is, you're cross Selling different services every single month. That way, your customers are starting to ask questions. So when someone books a job leading up to their service, you would send emails educating them on different products or services that you offer. And in the notes, you just say, hey, if you're interested in this, ask your technician about it when they're on site. And the last email you could send out is just straight promo offers, which is in the subject line. $500 off a ductless system, $100 off X, Y, and Z. And you're basically just selling directly to them. So that way you can get sales in the door for your business. And by the way, if you feel stuck and you don't have a marketing team that's proactive about helping you grow your business, you can set up a quick call@flashconsulting.com, we get on a call with you, talk about your business. Worst case, you get some strategies to help you grow. Best case, you get unstuck and you get proactive about growth inside of your business. So once you send out these emails, now, it actually leads directly into strategy four, which is taking those emails and turning them into warm leads for your salespeople. So what you want to do is after you send out all these emails, let's say it's your monthly newslet, let's say it's those promos. You can see who opened those emails. So you send someone something that says, get $500 off a duckless system, and you see 100 people clicked on that exact subject line from you. Clearly they're interested in something. So you take your salespeople and you say, hey, call these people. Don't be creepy, but say something like, hey, not sure if you heard or not. We have a promo going on for $500 off. We're actually going to be in your neighborhood next week doing an estimate for one of your neighbors. Would you like us to stop by and give you an estimate? Very great way to turn your emails into sales opportunities to get more estimates for your business. I hope this is making sense, because this is going to grow your business. If you. I promise, when all else fails, the job's done. The CSR gave the alley oop. You sent out some emails. You called some emails. The last piece of this is rehashing those jobs. And that leads us to strategy number five. If you do happy calls, which you should be doing, happy calls are the next day after the service is done, have your CSR manager or salesperson call every single job. Hey, Phil was out there taking care of your no heat. Was he able to get everything resolved while he was there? Yes. Cool. I was looking through your files here. It looks like your hot water heater hasn't been replaced in 10 years. I actually put together a quick estimate for you. I'm going to send that over to you. Is that okay? Okay Or Hey, I noticed in your file when we did our initial checklist, you mentioned about this hot or cold room in your home. I think I have a solution that might work for you because it works with one of your neighbors. Can I shoot it over to you and get your eyes on it? Whatever this looks like, it's taking the jobs and then using those jobs to sell on top of the opportunities that you currently have. If you're doing over a million dollars and you feel stuck, estimate count is one of the best ways to grow your business and increase your revenue. I also break down seven steps to go from 1 million to $5 million business in this video. And if that one's not out yet, you can check this one out.
