3 Awesome Ways a Checklist Brings More Sales

If you aren’t using a “stoplight” checklist on every call, you’re compromising your customer’s comfort, health, safety, and efficiency. You are also leaving a significant amount of money on the table.

It’s not as simple as printing a checklist and giving it to your techs. They must know the purpose and how to use it properly.

Josh Vinyard, an HVAC tech at Big Mountain Air in Sacramento, CA, is using his checklist to make sure he thoroughly evaluates this HVAC system.  He’ll use it to gain confidence from the customer, bring awareness to issues, and stimulate those issues.

It’s not just for HVAC. A checklist can be used in plumbing, electrical, pest control, and many other trades that do service or maintenance calls.

A checklist does three awesome things for your company, your techs, and the customer regardless of your trade.

3 Awesome Ways a Checklist Brings More Sales

 1) Confidence:

It gives everyone confidence. The process is transparent. Everyone knows what has to be done and what has been done. That gives everyone confidence that the job was done right. There’s more confidence in your company and in your tech – from you, your tech, and the customer. Confidence means more sales.

2) Awareness:

It brings awareness about system issues to everyone. You and your techs know the technical details, but the “stoplight” colors let the customer understand the issues. They will instinctively understand that green is ‘good’, yellow means ‘caution’, and red means ‘bad’. When the customer is aware of the issues and understands the issues, they’ll want to do more to make sure things are right. Awareness means more sales.

3) Accountability:

It creates an “official” history, or record, that stimulates the customer to correct the issues. Everyone in the process will know that there are things that need attention at some point. Your techs are probably telling the customer to “be aware of this”, or warning them “this could happen” if something isn’t done. That’s great, but the customer usually doesn’t remember the details. There is certainly no urgency. Once the good, caution, and bad – green, yellow, and red – items are documented on a checklist it then becomes “official” and part of the record. There’s more stimulation to take care of the issues. Stimulation of the issues means more sales.

If you don’t have a checklist and/or your techs haven’t been trained to use it, it can be dangerous. It will become a seldom-used tool that’s just one more thing they have to do. Some may abuse it and use the checklist to manipulate the customer into buying things that aren’t needed. To avoid this, training is a must.