Greg Scherbak, Director of Sales at Mattioni Plumbing Heating and Cooling, wanted to ensure his team understood and used best practices on service and sales calls, so he turned to ServiceTitan’s AI-powered sales coaching tool, Sales Pro.
There, Scherbak used Ask Sales Pro, an AI-powered chat interface, a basic question about an interchange between team member and customer, recorded (with permission) on ServiceTitan, the cloud-based software for the trades: “What would be the harshest criticism I could give this salesperson?”
The answer: The first thing he did when he arrived was ask to use the bathroom.
Scherback had a good laugh at that answer. It’s the kind of insight he never would have had into what happens inside customers’ homes before Sales Pro.
That individual anecdote illustrates one of the many benefits of Sales Pro. The AI-powered tool allows a business to monitor, in a positive way, how the business interacts with customers via audio recording, to make each technician better at their job.
What might at first sound intimidating or scary in fact turns into a coaching tool to help everyone.
“Our people have learned that it's not a tool that they need to fear, but a tool that's really going to help them be better at what they do,” said Scherbak, Mattioni’s Director of Sales.
Sales Pro helps contractors capture and learn from in-person interactions. Recordings analyzed by AI provide managers, salespeople and technicians with insights that lead to better performance, increased ticket size, better close rates and more revenue.
That leads to more profit, which benefits all.
Eliminate the fear
At Mattioni, based in Downington, Pa., in Southeast Pennsylvania, Scherbak took an unusual approach to rollout, bringing it to one tech at a time instead of the whole team.
Scherbak said he understood AI can be confusing and even scary, and that a new technology sometimes brings a fear of the unknown.
As he eased technicians and the outside sales team into the process, they learned at their own pace. That helped them understand the benefits, and decreased concerns.
“Over time, once they've all tried it and they've all seen that it's beneficial, it's helpful,” he said. “The oversight they had feared eventually led to them asking us to use it. Instead of coming from the top, it came from them.
“So far it's worked out the way that I was hoping, where everybody felt really good about it.”
At the end of the trial period, every technician wanted to continue using Sales Pro.
“It definitely was eye-opening and changed some minds,” Scherbak said.
Support, not oversight
He also has worked hard to ensure the team does not view it as oversight, but support to help everyone be their best. Scherbak’s focus is on building people up, not tearing them down, and he is adept at using the information he gleans from Sales Pro in the right way.
The bathroom story? A teaching moment.
“What I love,” he said, “is I can listen to a call without having to commute to the call.”
Scherbak wondered if homeowners might push back at being recorded, but found no resistance to the request, which is made up front in the interest of transparency and honesty.
Once that hurdle was cleared, it became a process similar to that of professional athletes who constantly watch themselves on film to improve. Sales Pro lets a team listen and learn from themselves, what was done well and what could be done better. Personal growth even comes from listening to colleagues, to hear what they are doing that leads to success.
“(Sales Pro is) not there for me to listen to every second of every call and to nitpick every little thing,” Scherbak said. “It's really there as a tool for them to listen to their own calls or to listen to the calls of their peers and look at what was done really well or what could have been done better. I think when you're living in the moment, you don't see it the way you see it when you're able to kind of sit back and digest it.”
Big benefits, great discussions
Scherbak greatly appreciates that ServiceTitan provides Titan Intelligence (AI) to assess recordings. The bathroom story was just one of many that he said produced “big benefits,” for the team and for the individual.
In his evaluations of recordings, he’ll listen to a presentation with the entire team and ask AI for insight. That leads to open dialogue and “some great discussions,” Scherbak said.
His suggestion to anyone pondering Sales Pro: Try it. Ease into it, the way Mattioni did, one person at a time, or one department at a time. The benefits will soon be apparent.
“This is vital to have,” Scherbak said. “I think the alternative, if you don't have this, is you're going to have a lot of overhead, you're going to need a lot of managers. This lets you streamline the process. It lets you be in 10 places at once.
“And it lets you manage and coach a higher number of individuals than you could if you had to do ride-alongs and physically spend that time.”
To get started with Sales Pro, book a demo and a ServiceTitan representative will be in touch.
