Sales Pro: Scaling Virtual Ride-Alongs with AI, Coaching, and Feedback

ServiceTitan Sales Pro, an AI-powered coaching tool for service technicians, records in-person interactions, analyzes them, and offers insight into how to increase ticket sizes, close more deals, and drive more revenue. 

“It’s an amazing tool developed to help be able to see what your people are doing when they're in the home, and make sure the training you're offering them in the office is being extended to the customer experience,” says Rebekah Hatcher, Operations Manager at Aire Serv of Aggieland in College Station, Texas.

The type of information the tool uncovers could previously only be captured via a physical, in-person ride-along. And even that isn’t a perfect method. 

“The tech acts amazing on a ride-along and everything goes perfect,” Hatcher says. “Then, you get a one-star review from a customer because the tech left a bunch of mess at the house or didn't diagnose the unit correctly—whatever the case may be. Pulling calls randomly is really one of the best ways of discovering what techs are actually doing in the home. I'm so excited Sales Pro gives us the opportunity to be able to do that.”

While being recorded is concerning at first to some techs, adoption doesn’t have to be a battle. 

In a recent episode of the Mastering ServiceTitan podcast, Hatcher shares how her team went from resistance to full buy-in on Sales Pro by emphasizing coaching over surveillance. 

Read on for podcast highlights, including: 

• How Air Serv uses call recordings for coaching

• Framing new tools as opportunities, not punishments

• How even the loudest skeptics turn into Sales Pro champions

How Sales Pro Works

Sales Pro records company representatives from the moment they enter a customer’s home. It then provides performance insights on tonality, delivery, objection handling, and best practices to inform coaching. 

“It records the entire process beginning to end,” Hatcher says. “We all know we don't need three hours of listening to a technician turn a wrench, clean out an outdoor unit, and grunt while they work their way across an attic. But the beauty of it is that we don't have to listen to all that.

“During the onboarding process, we can set up what’s really important to us, the things we want to make sure our technicians and salespeople are doing,” Hatcher adds. “On the backend in the admin seats, we’re able to go into the platform and hit the highlights. Then when we’re auditing calls, we can evaluate them within a few minutes.”

When choosing highlights, consider the soft skills that are most important to your company. 

“We went in and I gave them exactly what our 10 steps were and what we were looking for and they trained the backend AI to look exactly for those things,” Hatcher says.

There’s also an Ask Sales Pro feature where you can ask any question, such as “What can we do to better overcome objections?”

“It’s spot on,” Hatcher says. “Sometimes the answers are things we’re already training on, and other times it will spit out an answer I’ve never heard of before. It’s like, ‘Wow, mind blown.’”

How to Get Staff Buy-in

Aire Serv implemented Fleet Pro, which includes AI-assisted dash cams to monitor tech driving, prior to onboarding with Sales Pro. Through that experience, she learned a lot about the best way to introduce Sales Pro to her team. 

“ It helped me to be able to come at Sales Pro not from a ‘Big Brother’s watching you’ standpoint, but rather from, ‘This is a training tool we're putting into place to make you better so you can be as successful as possible. 

“‘What that results in is higher paychecks for you guys. So, if you want to just keep flying under the radar and barely scraping by, then we don't have to do this. But if you want to be the best in the industry, if you want to be the best at your craft, if you want to dominate the KPIs and be the customer service guru, this is what we're gonna do to train you,’” Hatcher says. 

Hatcher notes listening to calls is a practice the company has used for years with its CSR.

“She's only gotten better because of it. She doesn't mind,” Hatcher says. “In fact, she'll pull calls and show them to us, and now our technicians pull calls and show them to us, which is great.”

Aspects Aire Serv listens for on calls include:

• Door greetings

• How techs overcome objections 

• How many options are presented to customers

• If techs and sales reps do a good job explaining recommendations to customers

• Whether techs offer financing

• Whether techs thank the customer and ask for a review

“We don’t have time to sit all day listening to the calls, and so we made sure they knew that’s not what this was about. They really opened their minds to it,” Hatcher says.

But it wasn’t without adjustment pain. One Aire Serv technician accused the company of “trying to create a dystopian society.”

“I asked him to do it for two weeks and if he didn’t feel like he’d benefited at the end of those two weeks, we’d reevaluate,” Hatcher says. “At the end of the two weeks, he was all in. He’s one of the biggest proponents of Sales Pro today. In a quarterly survey, he said that he never wants to run calls without Sales Pro again.”

Aire Serv also eased into using Sales Pro. 

“They had a lot of recording under their belts before we really started to evaluate them, audit them, train them, and correct some of the bad behaviors,” Hatcher says. “We wanted to let their minds be at ease, because I think they were all waiting for us to come in with write-ups and all kinds of other stuff on the crazy stuff they're doing in the customer's home.”

Implementing Sales Pro

Hatcher says when implementing Sales Pro, they started out just focusing on one thing at a time. For example, they listened for objections and how they were handled first. Sales Pro allows them to pull all the objections for a designated time period, and it even compiles them into a bar graph based on objection types. 

“There are a million different variations of reports you can pull. Having the data at a glance is huge. We focused on positive interactions first,” Hatcher says, “I would pull a recording of someone who did a really good job overcoming an objection and play it in the team meeting. The guys knowing they were going to be highlighted in a positive way really helped ease them into us listening to some of the negative ones.”

Hatcher also posts the positive interactions in the training library. The company owner and service manager sometimes posts them in the team WhatsApp channel to give kudos as well. Other areas they’ve focused on include questions at the thermostat and door greetings.

Sometimes the team role plays scenarios based on what they hear in the calls and what the Ask Sales Pro feature recommends for improvement.

As far as letting customers know they’re being recorded, Texas is a one-party state, so they don’t have to. 

“We would respect a customer, of course, if they said they wanted it turned off. But we’ve not had that happen,” Hatcher says.

For two-party states, she recommends telling the customer the recording is to ensure the company provides the best service possible. 

“As far as the device itself goes, we had techs putting it inside their cargo pockets in their pants, and every single time they'd take a step, you'd hear fabric rustling,” Hatcher says. “If they put it in their front pocket with the microphone up, that's a really good way to do it. If they’re working on a unit, they should place it on top of the unit.” 

Aire Serv techs have the option to use their tablet or phone for recording. Most prefer the phone because it’s easier to have on or near them at all times. Each tech is equipped with an external battery pack to charge their device in the field if needed. 

Overall, Hatcher says Sales Pro has elevated tech confidence and been a game-changer. Year over year, the company has seen a 20% increase in conversion rate, 94% increase in average ticket price, and a 3x increase in their membership conversion rate.

“Because of that elevated sense of confidence, we have seen a huge increase in the amount of in-home sales versus calling after the fact or a customer taking time to look over the estimate,” Hatcher says. “That’s been huge for us and really worth every dollar that we spend on Sales Pro.”

You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here. 

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