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This Month in CB History: When Service is the Driver

April 4, 2014
Can we agree that throughout HVAC history, excellent service has been the coin of the realm? It was true in 1988 and it's true today: you can use service to drive additional business, fairly and to the ultimate benefit of the customer.  

In April 1988, in a special report on Design/Build Marketing, Tim Lewis of Elliott-Lewis Corp. described how the company nearly doubled sales over a two-year period, by doubling its service business.

Here are a few excerpts:

“By focusing on service, we’ve been able to improve our standing in the marketplace, increase our profitability, gain customer acceptance, and enhance our Design/Build capability,” Lewis wrote.

“Your service sales representative should be reporting to you, your sales manager, or someone who is marketing your company. Seventy percent of our D/B business comes from about 2,000 maintenance accounts, because they see us, they know us, and — because we have consistently performed for many years — they trust us.”

"We do virtually no advertising in the commercial or industrial area because we invest heavily in people calling on customers. We have seven representatives: three of them sell maintenance contracts; four of them sell Design/Build and retrofits."

"If we stay with it and build our service departments, we will continue to grow in Design/Build. However, we must discipline not only ourselves, but each and every employee in our organizations."

TO OBTAIN A PDF OF THIS ENTIRE ARTICLE, CONTACT Terry McIver at [email protected]