Growing Your Field Service Revenue Now and Into the Future

It’s never too late to think about growing your field service company. Luckily, business growth can take many forms. As a field service business owner, it may mean adding customers, increasing sales, streamlining your business, or all of the above. In this guide we will examine how your business can benefit from all these to increase your profit so you can take your company to the next level.

Make Your Business More Efficient

If your field service business happens to be on the smaller side, ensuring that it’s as efficient as possible is imperative since your resources are probably going to be limited compared to your larger competitors. First, take a minute to look around and determine what isn’t working. Are you spending too much time on tasks that could be automated? For example, if you’re always late sending out invoices, then you’re not collecting payments as quickly as you could, which means you’re not seeing your revenue. Investing in field service software is one example of how you can streamline your business. From billing and collections, to customer service, and route optimization, field service software will help automate these processes so you can manage your business more effectively.

Billing and Collections

Billing and collections can be tedious, labor-intensive, and it’s probably safe to say, not how you want to spend the majority of your time. Revenue is the lifeline of your business, so if this process isn’t organized and efficient, then you end up billing customers late or, possibly, missing it all together. This affects all aspects of your business, including your employees. If your customers aren’t paying on-time, then you can’t pay them. Automating the billing process helps your company grow in a number of ways:

Reduces Administration – To effectively manage your cash flow, you need to automate and standardize your invoicing process. It saves time and reduces errors compared to manually creating invoices from scratch. 

Minimizes Errors – An efficient invoicing system will calculate costs and quotes automatically and generate invoices based on this data, therefore, reducing the number of staff you need in order to produce quotes. 

Managing Commissions – There’s a lot of variables that go into calculating commissions for your technicians. Billing software makes it easy to determine so you can pay them as they go throughout their day. 

Convenient for Customers – Accepting payments online makes it easier and faster for customers to pay you. 

Customer Transparency – An efficient invoicing system makes it easy to respond to customers when they have questions about their billing.

Route Optimization

Route optimization software helps your business run more efficiently by reducing the number of hours it takes to manually plan your technicians’ routes. Today’s sophisticated technology uses complicated algorithms to determine the most efficient way to get from point A to point B. It also helps your business with the following:

Reduce Mileage 

In the simplest of terms, route management software yields more efficient routing. More efficient routing means less miles driven by your technicians. Less miles driven by your technicians means you use less fuel and lower your fuel costs, which is a significant cost savings tool for your business whether fuel prices are low or high.

Reduces Human Error 

The more you have to manually input data into a system, the more opportunity you have to make mistakes. Route management software automates the process and ensures your addresses are 100% accurate before your technicians start their day.

Improves Customer Service 

Intelligent route optimization tools ensure that the right technician gets to the right customer at the right time. This allows you to tighten service windows given to customers and increases your technicians’ on-time arrival rates prices are low or high.

Customer Experience 

You can’t have a business without customers and ensuring they have a positive experience with your company creates loyalty and increases satisfaction, which should reduce your churn. Every touchpoint counts, from the way they find your company (Google, blog, website), to the interactions they have with your technicians, to how easy you make it for them to access their information and pay their bills. The following is how your business can benefit from creating positive customer experiences:

Listening to Feedback – Making sure you have a way for your customers to provide feedback shows that you’re engaged in your business. It also helps you determine customer satisfaction and where you can improve. 

High Customer Retention – The cost of gaining a new customer is more than keeping your existing ones. Satisfied customers are less likely to leave for your competitors. 

Brand Awareness – Customers are your best advocates for growing your brand. Their recommendations are seen as more reliable by friends and family than advertising. 

Increased Revenue – Happy customers like to share their experiences. Word-of-mouth leads to increased sales, referrals, and repeat business.

Make Your Marketing More Efficient

You want to grow your business, but if you’re a small company, there are only so many hours in the day to do so. As we discussed in the section above, that alone is an important argument for efficiency. In this next section, we’re going to look at how you can gain efficiencies with your marketing efforts through partnerships, local SEO strategies, focusing on your brand, expanding your market, and investing in your people.

Partnerships 

Creating a strategic partnership is one of the best ways to grow your field service business. Working with the right partners can have a tremendous impact on your overall growth and it can relieve some of the burden of marketing your business on your own. Partners don’t always have to be directly related to your business. For example, you can partner with a non-profit organization by sponsoring a charity event or donating a portion of your sales, or co-market with other services such as cleaning or real estate. It will make your brand stand out from the competition. A few advantages to creating a partnership include:

Leveraging Their Reputation – Aligning your services with a company that’s already trusted in the industry creates a strong impression of your business with new and potential customers. 

Cutting Your Costs – With a business partnership, you share the costs of the marketing and sales process. This means you can focus your dollars elsewhere such as training for you or your staff, investing in equipment and technology, or nurturing your customer relationships.

Brand Awareness – The field service industry is highly competitive. With a solid partnership, you’re able to gain exposure and position your services more strategically in the marketplace.

Local SEO

What is local SEO? Local SEO stands for local search engine optimization. It helps businesses promote their products and services to local prospects and customers. Are you wondering if this is something you should be doing to promote your pest control business? According to the Search Engine Journal, the answer is a resounding “Yes”. Take a look at these statistics they’ve compiled:

• 97% of consumers looked online for local businesses in 2017, with 12% looking for a local business online every day.

• 78% of local-based searches on a mobile device end in purchases being made offline.

• 18% of local mobile searches lead to a sale within one day.

Local SEO is important because it improves a business’ exposure in Google from local searches. Without it you could get buried halfway down the page.

Focusing on Your Brand 

Today’s customers are focused on a brand’s character more than ever before. Your brand goes beyond a logo or cute advertisement. According to the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” 

Your brand should be consistent across all aspects of your field service business. This includes, but is not limited to your invoicing, signage, content, sales, and customer service. Branding is a process that takes time—it doesn’t happen overnight. However, when it’s done right, the fruits of your labor will create long lasting relationships with your customers. This will lead to increased sales, referrals, and advocacy for your services. 

Expanding Your Market 

Most business owners want to increase their customer base. Expanding your market reach could be as simple as advertising your services in a neighboring town or expanding your offering of services from residential to commercial. Either way, expansion is a sure-fire way to gain more customers. Use the following tools to get your business more recognition:

Social Media 

Having a presence on social media goes a long way when you’re trying to reach new customers. Every person you’re already connected to has their own connections and can refer you to new customers.

Networking 

Locate industry events to attend in your area or find ways to support your community. When you network, you’re building relationships with other people that will potentially lead you to more customers.

Email Marketing 

If you’re working with a small budget, email is a great way to attract new leads by nurturing your current customer base.

Investing in Your People 

Finally, a key component to growth in any business is its people. Trained technicians are productive technicians. It keeps their industry knowledge up-to-date and their skillset sharp. When you invest in training your team, you are increasing employee satisfaction, improving their performance, and boosting morale. Promoting from within your organization becomes a viable option because trained employees will want to further their career with you. 

Investing in your technicians shows that you care about enhancing their skills within the company. It’s also a great tool for recruiting. Regarding your company brand, potential technicians will be more attracted to your company if they know it gives them the opportunity to be trained. 

In the end, increasing your revenue is important to your field service business. It can be challenging, but these ideas should help you get started on the way to growth success.

Your Partner in Growth

We hope this guide has been helpful. Whether you’re looking to add efficiencies, make things easier for your employees, improve your customer experience, increase sales, or anything in between, FieldRoutes is committed to helping your business reach its full potential. 

The platform automates all aspects of field service operations for enterprise and small business customers that span office management, advanced route optimization, payment processing, digital sales, marketing, and customer acquisition solutions that accelerate growth, streamline operations, increase customer retention, and maximize revenue. Our operations and sales and marketing suites were built with your customers and employees in mind and can help you grow quickly, scale intelligently, and serve customers relentlessly.

Call for a Demo at 972.702.7156

Join the growing number of thriving businesses using FieldRoutes to acquire new customers, improve automation, and crush the competition.