I was talking this week to a maintenance supervisor for one of the major property owning industrial companies and he was pretty fed up. His responsibility is to provide a technical audit of the contractor operating a PPM contract on the 100 or so buildings in the company’s estate.
He had come to the view that the engineers were not looking after the buildings on a regular basis and were getting away with it because they were not supervised. The contractor had cut down on supervisory staff.
One example he quoted was when a tenant of one of the newer buildings complained that it was boiling up. They were getting huge temperature differentials. They had windows that wouldn’t open that made it all the worse. And an independent investigation showed that 75% of the fan coils were either not operating to control or where not operating at all.
My interviewee could not understand it. He had spent most of his career on the other side of the fence working for contractors, where contracts were viewed as business opportunities rather than fixed specifications to be met at the lowest possible cost.
Regardless of how tightly priced, if he found a maintenance contract for £100,000, he would be sorely disappointed if after 18 months he hadn’t got that contract value doubled, he told me.
His business model depends on the commercial and management skills of the supervisor and ignores the engineer and I wonder if this is not part of the problem. The person who is in the best position to spot the problem or business opportunity depending on your perspective is the engineer doing the work.
Yet most engineers don’t like being called salesmen even if they are responsible for the sales process.
How many service engineers are trained to spot these ‘sales’ opportunities and to gather the information necessary to sell the opportunity?
How many service engineers are rewarded for the leads they gather with a small percentage of the profit that flows from it?
How many service engineers have a selling qualification from the Institute of Sales & Marketing Management (ISMM) or have attended a sales course along with all their technical accreditations and qualifications?
I well remember talking with a high performing project sales engineer about the reasons for his success. One, he pointed out, was the work he had put in to developing his relationships with the service engineers on his patch and their skills in developing a ‘nose’ for opportunities.
James Thornhill, Director of Thornhvac
This article first appeared in ACR Today in the October 2009 issue
