How does your commercial services business find new prospects through outbound sales? Do you employ dedicated account executives who follow a specific business model to identify your ideal customer profiles? Or do you rarely perform outbound sales and simply rely on customer referrals for new business?
Wherever you are on the commercial services spectrum, there’s now an easier way to find new customers using ServiceTitan’s Convex tool, which goes way beyond just delivering a list of commercial businesses to contact.
Convex also provides crucial insights about the customer’s commercial building, the potential customer's needs, and the key decision-makers, enabling your sales representatives to make informed decisions about whom to contact and what services to offer.
In a recent webinar, David Vroblesky, Principal Product Manager of Convex at ServiceTitan, showcases recent product innovations for Convex, including powerful data and targeting updates designed to fuel smarter prospecting. He also explains how Convex helps uncover high-intent demand signals and how top teams use these insights to reach more customers.
Here are the top takeaways you need to know.
Outbound Sales with Convex
To help commercial services businesses succeed at outbound sales, Convex addresses a few key challenges, Vroblesky says.
Those challenges, according to a recent ServiceTitan survey of 1,000+ specialty contractors, include:
63% of reps do not have clear and structured account ownership
57% spend close to half of their time on non-selling activities
71% of business comes from customer referrals
75% list “increasing close rates” as a top priority
But before you can get to the “increasing close rates” part, commercial companies must do all of the work that happens in advance to identify the opportunities in the first place. Does your team know how to find the right contacts? Do they know which properties to target? Is your business getting the best return on investment from current tools?
By leveraging the power of Convex technology, you can achieve better outcomes with a more structured and proven process, Vroblesky says.
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Relationship Selling in the Modern Era
In today’s digital world of AI, shared and sold data, and mass marketing, it’s hard for commercial services businesses to cut through the noise. Certainly, technology can help, but making outbound sales also depends on establishing relationships with new customers.
“I think you're going to get a greater ROI from your technology if we can allow you to establish true, real relationships through technology,” Vroblesky says. “And it's not about mass marketing or spamming. At the end of the day, people buy from people, and that's where relationships come in.”
TALTEK Commercial Roofing leverages Convex to build relationships
At TALTEK Commercial Roofing, Care Specialist Lauree Sayne leverages Convex to build new customer relationships, identify new opportunities, fuel marketing efforts, and gather building intelligence.
“TALTEK means talent and technology,” Sayne says. “That’s why we use Convex, because we are technology-forward.”
The Tennessee-based TALTEK performs commercial roofing services for customers in 15 states in the Southeast, and Sayne says she’s always looking for new customer prospects. Her best advice? Don’t be afraid of using AI.
“Think of it as your thought partner, and don't think that you're being lazy by using it. You are better servicing your customer faster, better, and more efficiently,” Sayne says.
Sayne offers the following three tips for using the power of Convex and AI to find new leads and start building relationships with new customers.
Tip #1: Convex + LinkedIn + ChatGPT
After identifying a possible commercial client on Convex, Sayne clicks on its LinkedIn profile (right in the Convex platform), and copies and pastes relevant information about the business into ChatGPT. The AI tool already knows all about TALTEK, she says, and she asks ChatGPT to show her how the new prospect might be a good fit and to craft an introductory message.
“Then it'll spit out a nice little connection request message and I can tweak it a little bit before I send that over to them,” Sayne says.
Vroblesky says it’s about using AI to partner with personalized data.
“It's not like a mass marketing email that you're creating, it's this personalized automation,” he explains.
“And it's very personal because ChatGPT recognizes some different key points on their profile that help me be more personal, things that I would not have thought of. It actually helps me think better,” Sayne says.
Tip #2: Use ChatGPT for prospecting emails.
Sayne uses a similar process for crafting prospecting emails to clients. She adds the customer’s website link plus key information from LinkedIn about the specific person she’s trying to contact to ChatGPT, then asks the tool, “How do our core values match the core values of this company?” “Is this a good prospect for TALTEK based on that information?”
ChatGPT provides an answer, which Sayne then uses to craft an introductory email.
Tip #3: Document everything.
Every time Sayne talks to a new customer, she takes notes about everything, including how many kids they have, what pets they have, and other personal interests to start building a relationship with that customer.
“This is all going into our CRM. It's not just for me, but for everybody in the company to see,” Sayne explains. “Our service department can see when I put notes about how their accounts payable process works, etc. So, it helps us be a better company to serve our customers better, faster, and it helps us all to be able to connect and develop that relationship with the customer.
“It doesn't really do us any good to have a tool like Convex to find contacts if we're not developing those relationships,” she adds.
So, how do commercial services businesses use technology to build relationships with customers at scale? That’s where ServiceTitan’s Convex helps businesses reach the next level.
Convex: Find New Prospects, Optimize Outreach, and Win New Business
Convex is a prospecting tool purposely built for the trades, Vroblesky says. While other online tools can get you a list of contact names you know nothing about, Convex digs deeper to find the best contact information available.
“So, people's names, email addresses, phones, and job titles, and then we combine that with where they're located and where they work, the building they're in,” Vroblesky says. “And then, not only do we say what building they work in, but we give you all the metadata associated with that building, like the square footage, the age of the building, the acreage, permits for that building, etc.
“We have the contacts, we have the prospects, but we also have all of these trade-specific property intelligence details,” he adds.
The map view of Convex is the most popular for finding the right prospects. You can apply various filters to search by:
Property Attributes
Contact Attributes
Assets
Permits
Ownership
Your Own Workflow
Custom Fields
You can also use the map view to draw circles around your target areas, or filter by ZIP codes, property types, building types, square footage, ground acreage, and year built.
Once you narrow your prospecting list to a specific number of properties in a specific area, you can then assign these qualified leads to your sales reps and track their status all the way to a closed sale.
Another way Convex helps you find prospects is through its Signals feature.
“This is a feature within Convex that uses intent data of online searching to give you a list of potential companies who are searching for your services,” Vroblesky says.
The Signals feature monitors online actions taken by commercial businesses and their facility managers, such as web searches, article reading, and event registrations, to detect increased research activity to find specific solutions for their mechanical needs.
You can also search millions of records in Convex for specific people, either by name, job function, or management level.
>>Want to see Convex in action? Watch the full webinar on-demand.
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What’s Next for Convex?
One of the most current product enhancements for Convex is AI Leads, which is currently in beta testing, Vroblesky says.
Convex uses the AI Leads model to deliver 100 new leads to your inbox every week. It’s a machine-learning model that uses AI to understand how successful you’ve been with prospecting other types of new clients, and applies that algorithm toward your targeted geographic area to recommend other clients who may be a good fit.
“The goal here is that AI Leads learns from you as a company,” he adds. “We already have this available for beta testing and targets, but it's going to get smarter, it's going to get more personalized.”
AI Search is also in beta testing.
“You can see this is actually a live page that our customers can access today to practice using AI search against all of our content,” Vroblesky says.
Rather than searching by applying filters, you can use AI to search for specific people, specific types of buildings, and more.
Maybe you want to search for all facility managers working at local hospitals near your business or search for permits pulled for that hospital in a specific time period. You just type in whatever information you’re looking for and AI Search produces a list of possible contacts within minutes.
“This is the direction that we're moving,” Vroblesky says. “That’s not to say we won't still have a mouse, clicks, and the ability to add filters, but there'll be another way here that you can use this natural language to search contacts.”
Daily Intent Data is also currently in beta testing. It works similarly to Signals to identify commercial businesses or individuals who are searching online for solutions offered by your trade business. But rather than send you this intent data weekly, Daily Intent Data delivers it on a daily basis.
“This is actually going to give you the name of the person who is searching,” Vroblesky says. “We're going to give you a list of people every day who are searching for specific topics in your area that apply to your trade.”
>>Ready to book a demo of Convex? Earn a $100 gift card just for checking it out.
