The State of Service Contract Sales: A Data Review

Free Resource: The Practical Playbook For Service Income Growth

Last week, nClarity ran a survey to help quantify the current state of service contract sales efforts in mechanical service. Let’s walk through what we learned, and how we can solve the biggest challenges facing salesmen today.

Question 1: What’s Your Close Rate?

• The large majority of respondents (75%) put their close rate at 50% or less, with a 1/3rd of those folks putting their close rate at 25% or less.
• The minority (25%) of respondents put their close rate at 75% or less, with one respondent claiming a 90% close rate.

We don’t know exactly what building sector or service model these guys are selling in, but if we take the average across all respondents, we get an average close rate of 49% or less.  

Question 2: How Many First Appointments Do You Get?

• Most respondents (58.3%) reported 3 or less first appointments per week.
• Almost all  the rest (33.3%) reported 5 or less.

Question 3: Who Do You Call On For The First Meeting?

Based on these responses, the most frequent targets for first meetings are (in order):

1. Facility Managers
2. Executive Management
3. Building Engineers

Question 4: What’s The #1 Reason You Lose A Sale?

• We got a plethora of unique responses on this one, as well as a large group (50%) naming competitive pricing as enemy #1. 
• An additional 16.7% of respondents named an undifferentiated value proposition as their main issue.

Here were some of the unique responses we got:

“Undercut by reduced scope of service/price”

“Not enough cost or pain to justify making a change.”

“Prospect is more interested in hiring internal maintenance team”

“Value proposition is not aligned with a compelling reason for the key decision maker to change”

“We didn't earn their trust”

“Client's not ready to do it right.”

“Not understanding the real need for maintenance”

How To Differentiate Your Service Offering With Predictive Maintenance–One Building At A Time

⅔ of the responses to question 4 indicate that an undifferentiated service offering forces salesmen to compete on price, making this singular issue the bane of a salesman’s existence and the primary source of failure.

Even responses like, “Client is not ready to do it right”, and “Not understanding the real need for maintenance” indicate that salesmen are simply not getting through to the client with the true value and impact of a truly differentiated PM program. 

It’s true that there are many customers out there who are not “value buyers”. But many of those guys are simply not aware of the financial impact a comprehensive PM program can have on their business. Predictive Maintenance quantifies and proves that benefit to them.

At nClarity, we’re seeing first hand that Predictive Maintenance technology (real-time, remote diagnostics and predictive service ops analytics tools) can truly differentiate your service offering. Collecting real time machine data can be used to make your invisible, undifferentiated service offering into something tangible and impactful for your client. You WILL close and retain more contracts.

All you need to do is attack one building at a time. 

If you think you’re at risk of losing a contract, nClarity’s technology will win the client over. 

If you have one building in a large portfolio and aim to capture the rest, nClarity’s technology can quickly prove you’re different.

If you have clients concerned with uptime in critical spaces, nClarity’s technology will quickly demonstrate the power of driving uptime with real-time data and predictive analytics.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can use nClarity to stop competing on price and grow your contract base with a truly differentiated service offering, you can schedule a quick 15-minute discovery call with our team today.

Bring a building you might have in mind and we’ll discuss how we can help!