Joe Crisara doesn't believe technicians need to become salespeople. In fact, he thinks it’s just the opposite.
For 48 years, Crisara worked in the trades himself, across plumbing, heating and air conditioning, electrical and garage doors. Now he coaches contractors as the founder of Service MVP, a ServiceTitan partner, under a title he gave himself: America's service sales coach.
His philosophy comes down to a single idea. By the time a technician is standing in someone's kitchen, the job's already won.
"Clients, when they come to a blue-collar professional to get a job done in their home, they already sold themselves," he said.
What happens next determines whether it stays won.
That's the idea behind everything Crisara teaches. The gap most contractors are missing isn't in their sales pitch. It's in how well their crews communicate the value of the work they already do.
Here are eight lessons from Crisara’s years of training to help service techs communicate value.
1. Find the value gap before you try to close it.
When a contractor calls Crisara for sales training, he says what they're really describing is a gap between the price they charge and their ability to show a customer why the work is worth that price.
"What we try to do is bridge the gap so the client sees they got more than they paid for," he said.
That means talking about more than the cost of the repair or replacement, extending into the value the repair will provide for the customer..
2. Talk less. Listen more.
Crisara says the biggest mistake he sees is technicians who talk too much and listen too little. Sometimes, what they miss can mean the difference between selling the job and walking away empty.
"People would learn more if they were a student of the client, not just the system," he said. "Not just what the problem is, but what caused it, and what impact it's having on the actual people in that home or business."
3. Diagnose the person, not just the equipment.
His rule: "People are more important than things."
Don’t just explain the mechanical fix. Focus on the effect that fix will have on the customer.
"It's the impact of the problem on the client, and the impact your solution will have on them, that creates value," he said.
4. Sell trust, not materials.
Crisara said too much of trades training comes from manufacturers focused on equipment and features. But customers who pay more for a contractor, he said, aren't paying for better parts.
They’re paying for the investment in their comfort and safety, and that the contractor will finish on time, do a quality job safely, and stand behind the work if something goes wrong.
"People buy peace of mind," Crisara said.
5. Keep yourself at a 10.
This is the belief Crisara opened with, applied to the moment a technician actually walks in the door.
"When you get to a house, you're already rated a 10 out of 10," he said. "The idea is, how can you keep yourself at a 10 and maybe exceed it to a 12?
“You already got the job. Just don't lose it."
6. Don't count on ride-alongs to scale your coaching.
Crisara said he stopped doing ride-alongs because the math doesn't work. A manager who spends a day with one or two techs could have 20 more who got nothing.
"It was a poor use of time," Crisara said.
He's watching newer tools to try to solve that by putting everyone through coaching at once rather than one truck at a time. In his experience, it takes about three days of company-wide coaching before people start to feel the accountability is real.
That’s impossible with ride-alongs, but not with technology in ServiceTitan.
“The new solutions we have (are) game-changing,” Crisara said. “(With Field Pro) everybody in the company is going to get a ride-along.”
7. Check whether training actually gets used, not just whether it happened.
Companies pour money into training technicians, salespeople and installers. Then they never confirm anyone applies it.
"To do all that training and not monitor whether they're actually using it in the field, it's really financial suicide," Crisara said.
He points to tools such as ServiceTitan’s Field Pro that show managers whether the language and approach they learned in training actually show up on a call.
8. Use AI to check your own communication.
Crisara says he runs situations past an AI tool before coaching his own employees. It regularly catches something he would have missed.
"(AI) reminds us of what we aspire to do when we communicate with other humans," he said, "and it's actually better than we would communicate in most cases."
Training, Crisara said, is about providing information, then watching someone put it into practice.
"That's a reward money can never replace," he said. "You start to see that growth instantly from call to call."
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