Coaching Technicians for KPI Results

Coaching Technicians for KPI Results

Tom Piscitelli
Contributing Writer
TRUST® Training and Consulting

Can you imagine baseball without statistics? What would the game commentators talk about? How could players be compared? What would you base their compensation on? How would you know who needed help?

Performance tracking is as important to any business as it is to baseball or any other sport. In contracting, these benchmarks are known as KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators. There are a number of common KPI’s and the most successful contractors spend a great deal of time and effort establishing these benchmarks. They train their team members to produce excellent results, recognize those results, reward excellent performance and coach where improved performance is needed.

The best technicians rise to the challenge of meeting and exceeding their goals and like their names appearing on the top of the white board that publicly shows everyone’s results. Being at the bottom of the list encourages most people to perform better.

The first step is to establish appropriate goals that fit your market and your business goals.  Next is to have a system for gathering the performance data to show the results. Data gathering can be a daunting task if it has to be done manually, with someone going through invoices or call reports after every call. It’s much better to have software that automatically gathers and reports the most important KPI data accurately and in real time.

Here are some common KPI’s for technicians:

  • Revenue per Service Call
  • Revenue per Maintenance Call
  • Percent of Calls That Produce a Sales Lead
  • Close Rate of Technician Sales Leads
  • Percent of Calls with Call-backs

Once this is established, these are the steps to take and followed to insure results:

  1. Document your expectations for technician performance
  2. Train technicians so they can perform the tasks that will produce the results
  3. Measure the results
  4. Reward excellent performance and publicly recognize it
  5. Privately coach where performance needs to be improved
  6. Establish a policy for dealing with non-performance and consistently follow that

Of the above, the coaching for improved performance is the least likely to get done. I will emphasize that without coaching, such as ride along calls, any well-conceived program will fall flat. Very few service managers take the time to coach and in my view it should be their primary responsibility.

Why all of this fuss about setting goals and managing your team members to accomplish them? Consider this dialog between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in the book, Alice in Wonderland. Keep in mind this was written 150 years ago!

Alice to the Cat: “Can you tell me please which road to take.” 

Cat: “That depends a great deal on where you want to go.”

Alice: “I really don’t care.”

Cat: “Then any road will take your there.”

Good Selling.

Tom 

Tom Piscitelli has over 40 years experience in HVAC sales, sales management, marketing and consulting. His articles have been published in trade magazines, he often speaks at industry events, he has produced three HVAC sales training DVD’s and he particularly enjoys bringing cutting edge training approaches to our industry. www.sellingtrust.com

His most recent project has been co-authoring and publishing the book, Proposition Selling: How to Create Extraordinary Success in Business-to-Business Sales. www.propositionselling.com