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As one of our clients recently said to me, “Service is a team sport, not an individual sport!” Never was a truer set of words spoken.
The Service Marketing & Development Programs delivered by Catalyst Global (.net) to machinery businesses across the globe focus on three key areas:
Employee motivation and behaviour / customer experience were both subjects of recent Catalyst Global (.net) Insights articles.
The 3rd focus area, growing service revenues, starts with service technicians, parts people and all customer facing service staff looking left and right during every customer visit / interaction to identify where else we can genuinely help this customer with their safety, productivity, compliance and availability.
Once an opportunity is identified, qualified with the client, and noted in a service report, effective teamwork needs to then kick into gear to ensure:
Follow-up is done and happens promptly,
the client gets a beneficial solution,
and a purchase order is obtained to implement the solution.
This means service technicians are communicating with and supporting parts colleagues. Aftermarket specialists are communicating with and supporting the technicians and parts teams. Service leadership is empowering: coaching and facilitating all team members to ensure the team’s output is greater than the sum of its parts.
During every Catalyst Global (.net) Service Excellence Training program (SET) we insist that each group of 10 attendees are a mixture of service technicians, parts advisors, aftermarket specialists, technical support staff and service managers. This allows each team member to understand the skills of, and appreciate the challenges faced by their colleagues. It also brings each disciplines’ mind to bear on the fundamental skills required to deliver excellent customer care.
There is, of course, one important group of people we also insist on including – the new equipment sales team. Sales is also a team game. Driving service and new equipment revenues requires excellent (not just good) communication and teamwork between sales and service. Our Rules 6 and 7 of Service, taught interactively during every session, stress how essential it is that service techs talk to salespeople before they go to site and again after the installation / service visit. Similarly, the salespeople should always talk to the Service Manager or service technicians before they visit an existing customer.
Smart machinery companies and smart leaders today need to ensure excellent sales / service communication. For smart companies, gone are the days when the service team shake their heads at the sales team, or the sales team complain about the service team. We still need great individual performers, but more importantly we need to build a group of effective team players.
From my time living and working in Germany, I remember the words of the famous footballer (soccer player), Franz “The Kaiser” Beckenbauer. Kaiser Franz was one of the greatest players to ever play the game, leading his country and his clubs to many victories, before turning his hand to football management and then to business as the very successful President of the club where he started his career, FC Bayern Munich.
When frustrated with FC Bayern’s performance, Kaiser Franz said (and I am paraphrasing), “FC Bayern is a team of World Champions. Each is individually brilliant, but … when one of them gets the ball, the others take a step back and cross their fingers!”
Kaiser Franz took that group of individual geniuses and developed them such that they were no longer a team of World Champions, but a World Championship Team, that became one of the most successful in Europe!
Driving service and sales revenues in machinery businesses requires exactly this.
In his Insights article entitled “New Year, New Idea”, published on our website in January 2022, our CEO and Founder, Tony Kenney, officially launched a new Hybrid Sales and Service training program developed to address exactly this need. This 2-day program takes modules from previously separate sales and service excellence programs and brings both the sales and service teams together to build a team focused on the success of both disciplines.
During 2022 we have executed this program across many different clients. The reception and success of the program has been beyond what we could ever have imagined. By workshopping sales and service issues, running an interactive session where each discipline assesses the skills needed by their colleagues to be great, not just good, but great at what they do, we saw sales and service teams proactively engaging, understanding each other’s roles and leaving as a highly motivated team.
Life cannot be all work and no play. We always strongly recommend that our clients include a “fun factor” to accentuate the team building element. A great example of this was the recent 2-day hybrid program run for the Italian operation of the German Baumer hhs Group. At the end of the 2-day program, a mixed group of sales and service staff were taken to a Master Chef style kitchen, split into teams, then raced each other against the clock, to cook various dishes under the watchful and often despairing eye of a top chef. You can see the Baumer hhs Italia team in the picture at the top of this article. The teams had enormous fun working together to solve complex problems, bring the ingredients together to form and cook their dish, then watch in anticipation as a panel of culinary judges chose a winner. They then sat together, with a glass of Italian wine in hand of course, and ate what each other had cooked.
World championship teams understand each other, understand the challenges each team colleague faces in their different disciplines, draw on the strengths of each other, offer assistance up front and drive each other’s success. They work hard but also need time occasionally to let off steam and have fun as a team.
Jonathan Clark
Partner
CATALYST Global (.net)
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