Contractormag 1874 Nexstartraining
Contractormag 1874 Nexstartraining
Contractormag 1874 Nexstartraining
Contractormag 1874 Nexstartraining
Contractormag 1874 Nexstartraining

Contractors, are you looking for great employees? Guess what, you already have them

March 24, 2014
Now ask yourself — how important is training to your business success? Like many aspects of business, the biggest challenge is in actually doing it. What if you can’t afford training? What if you don’t have time for your employees to go to training? What if you train an employee and he or she leaves? These concerns pale in comparison to the risk to your business when you have employees who are not trained representing your company to customers.

Consider this reality: To your customer, the employee she is interacting with at any given moment is your company’s brand. Nothing else but the experience that customer is having with your employee will determine if she will be a repeat customer. Not your Yellow Page ad. Not you. Not your years of hard work and experience.

Nexstar Training Manager Keith Mercurio discusses the importance of engaging the customer during every step of the service call.

Now ask yourself — how important is training to your business success?

Like many aspects of business, the biggest challenge is in actually doing it.

  • What if you can’t afford training?
  • What if you don’t have time for your employees to go to training?
  • What if you train an employee and he or she leaves?

These concerns pale in comparison to the risk to your business when you have employees who are not trained representing your company to customers.

These residential service managers are learning how to reinforce sales training with their technicians through Nexstar’s Train the Trainer course, led here by Nexstar Training Manager Keith Mercurio.

Here are four reasons that you should utilize business training.

1. Training drives consistency: One of the most overlooked values of business and sales training is that it teaches your employees to speak the same language. Think about technical training, where your technicians learn to distinguish between different tools, heating systems, installation codes and parts. Business training does the same thing for processes within your business, it establishes a baseline for your company’s language in order to operate efficiently and grow. Critical terms such as average tickets, conversion rates and gross margin, should be language that is understood at all levels of your organization.

2. Leaders are created with training: The number one investment business owners can make to help grow their business is to build leaders. For the most part, leadership is not inherent; it requires personal development through training. With training, your staff will become more proficient and ultimately more effective in their own roles, allowing them to take ownership and pride in their position and become leaders within your organization. 

3. Successful training is planned and cyclical: Think about that point in your year where business slows down and you reach your seasonal slump. Sales are soft, morale drops and efficiency plummets. This would be the perfect time for additional training to sharpen sales and customer service skills. Training during this time will allow you to maximize opportunities during your off-season and prepare to handle the busy season soon to come. You can’t do that unless you have resources already budgeted: time, funds, and personnel. Your business is cyclical, so you should plan for your training to follow the timing of your business. Many of the companies with whom I work schedule training with me years in advance. Make no mistake, if you don’t budget for training, you won’t do it. Training doesn’t just happen it must be planned for in advance and then carried out when the time comes. Training is the fuel on which your employees run and stay engaged. Don’t face another down season without a training plan.

4. Extend training with continual reinforcement: Now that you have a plan for training and actually see it through, you can cross that off your list and move on to the next thing, right? Wrong. Training is a combination of an outside influence to change or create a behavior, and inside influence to support the learned behavior. Training doesn’t stop after the class or course is complete. Just like technical training, business and sales training needs continual reinforcement. Employees need an opportunity to practice what they’ve learned, discuss openly how they are applying it to their daily work, and utilize these new skills to actually improve their performance.

Keep in mind, training isn’t telling. We used to think we had trained someone when we told them “what” to do and how to do it. But we’ve since learned that to create a change, we need to create a belief in the “why” and an understanding of the “how.” In simpler terms, if training feels like school, you’re doing it wrong.

How important is training to business success?

A recent survey by Right Management, part of Manpower Group, indicated 44% of North American workers are unsatisfied with their current job. One way to make sure your employees are in the other 56% is to show them you as an employer are willing to invest their careers through training.

It was my first exposure to professional training that propelled me from a plumbing apprentice to a high producing leader in our business. Up to that point, I had been trained by other plumbers, who were great at teaching what they had learned on the job, both good and bad. Like in our shop, owners and senior managers are often the only staff with access to outside training. Thus, any effort to bring new ideas and processes into the shop is typically viewed only through that employee/employer filter.

The greatest impact of training often comes when it is conducted by a third-party whose only interest is in personal and industry improvement. With professional training, held outside of my shop, my fundamental beliefs on the work we did and how that work could be done was changed. I escaped the confines of the traditional industry views that had been handed down to me and replaced them with a more professional and empowered view of what my future could hold. Imagine what an investment in your people could mean for the future success of your business.

Keith Mercurio is the training manager for Nexstar Network, training members on sales, customer service and motivation in the field. Before joining Nexstar, he worked within a Nexstar member company, first as a plumber, then developing an HVAC sales division that produced $3.7 million within the first two years, while incorporating many of the same techniques he teaches today.

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