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    How You Influence Customer Decisions

    April 11, 2019
    You can best fulfill your service to customers by considering yourself a personal "Teachnician," teaching them the HVAC principles they need to understand, in their language

    The moment your customer considers improvements for their air conditioning and heating system, they become dependent on you. You are the professional with the knowledge and experience they need. Let’s take a look at how you can best fulfill your role by considering yourself their personal Teachnician, teaching the HVAC principles they need to understand, in their language, to make a good purchase decision.

    Technician or Teachnician?
    The word teachnician doesn’t roll off the tongue, and Google doesn’t recognize it. The lesson this new word teaches is powerful and can assure your success.

    The highest form of selling is teaching. You multiply your support for your customers when you discover and teach them the information they lack. When you do this, you become a Teachnician.

    Regardless if you’re a maintenance or service tech, a company owner, or a salesperson, you can adapt yourself to the teachnician role as you deal with customers. Because our industry is so technical, of necessity, customers look to you as their trusted source of information to help make good decisions.

    You can immediately change customer attitude and behavior when you teach true and simple principles in the right spirit. Once customers understand, they feel right about their decision. Without good knowledge and with a lack of understanding, they will hesitate.

    This is why service Teachnicians are so successful.  They spare customers the sales lingo and explain the basic principles the customer needs to understand to approve the repair.

    If the customer says no, the Teachnician knows the customer hasn’t been taught enough information to decide, yet. More work is needed to discover what is still misunderstood and provide the necessary knowledge so the customer can make the right decision. 

    A Humble, Yet Powerful Position
    Teachnicians often find themselves in a powerful position as their customers make decisions. Here’s the core of a typical teaching conversation:

    1. “Your system isn’t working because …
    2. Here is what’s causing the problem …
    3. A new one costs X dollars …
    4. When we fix this, your system will work as it should.” 

    Did you notice all four components of the Teachnician’s conversation are teaching statements?

    Ideally, salespeople could assume the position of a Teachnician by developing this humble, yet powerful relationship with their customers. Identify the problem…teach only true principles…state the price…describe the desired outcome.

    Did you notice the absence of selling language, noise, excessive persuasion techniques, and overbearing pressure? The Teachnician simply provides the information a customer needs to feel right.

    The secret to influencing your customer’s decisions is to teach the principles about their problem until the knowledge you give them confirms your recommendation is true. Once your customer has trust and confidence in you, they will respond by authorizing the products and services they need.

    Knowledge versus Noise
    The internet provides gigabytes of noise from hundreds of sources thumping the drum of their specific product. This information is often one-sided and tends to lead unsuspecting customers towards a slanted solution based on their limited view of a single product.

    As a Teachnician, you are the professional who is qualified to draw on ALL industry products and services, mixed with your team’s expertise and knowledge, to solve customer problems. If you’ve completed effective testing and diagnostics, you can provide the real truth needed to solve their issue.  At this moment, your teaching drowns out all the noise and other voices.

    Before you Teach, You Must Know
    Before you can describe a solution to your customer, you must be confident in your diagnostics and be sure your solution will solve the problem. Your customers trust your confidence as you teach them what is needed.

    Unfortunately, more than 80% of service technicians prescribe the same dozen repairs repeatedly. These few repairs define the boundaries of their knowledge and limit them from helping their customers. Their careers are also limited. In other words, they can’t teach, what they don’t know.

    Many technicians and salespeople lack the knowledge to teach their customers true principles to help them make better decisions. Unfortunately, their attitudes and behavior may remain unchanged from year to year. This lack of knowledge also limits your customer’s opportunities.

    Before You Know, You Must Learn
    I teach some people who still see learning as a punishment imposed on them when they were in school. This attitude sentences them to a prison of meager knowledge. The thrill of my career is watching those I teach use new knowledge to break down their prison walls and energize their careers by multiplying their ability to help customers.

    Top HVAC professionals gain and regularly add to their knowledge - they’re hungry for it. They believe there is no end to the knowledge they can gain. They can find the solution for and fix every troubled HVAC system. Each of them has gained the power to discover unseen problems.

    These pros understand the unseen world that eludes the rest of the industry. They measure and comprehend airflow, static pressure, temperature, and system delivered Btu. These are the hidden keys to solving problems inside and outside the equipment.

    These professionals are teachnicians because they have developed the ability to invite customers to see and witness their problems and understand solutions found through testing.

    This teaching process enables their customers to know what is needed. They become fully capable of understanding the problem and have confidence in the prescribed solutions. The choice is obvious because they were taught the truth by a humble, yet powerful teacher. 

    Finding and teaching the truth changes the attitudes and behavior of those you serve. Your ability to discover solutions and teach your customers will close many more sales than traditional selling ever will.  

    Rob “Doc” Falke serves the industry as president of National Comfort Institute, Inc., an HVAC-based training company and membership organization. If you're a soon-to-be teachnician interested in a free test static pressure test procedure to help teach your customers about unseen comfort and efficiency solutions, contact Doc at [email protected] or call him at 800-633-7058. Go to NCI’s website, at nationalcomfortinstitute.com for free information, articles, and downloads.