The most critical moments of any service call for a technician may be the first 10 to 20 minutes inside the home. First impressions can absolutely sell a customer or sink a deal. And that’s when Scott Johnston shines.
“I’m really good at establishing trust right off the bat. If you’re a people person, you’re going to do well as a technician. And I’m a people person,” Scott said. “I sold a job once using the iPhone translation app in Japanese. I sold a $10,000 job recognizing a flower that only grows in Costa Rica. I’d been there, and I studied botany in college.”
“Most people are expecting a high-school dropout when they get a technician,” Scott continued. “I went to college. I’m former military. I’ve been around the world—I like to think, I’m pretty fun to talk to,” Scott said and laughed. “I exceed what they expect as a technician.”
Scott does not lack for confidence, and it’s understandable why. He’s an electrician for Milestone Electric in Dallas, Texas. In a company full of top-performers, he’s been at the very top of the company’s Scoreboard virtually every year since 2009. According to the company’s official numbers, he concluded 2018 selling $649,796, and his residential-service ticket average was $1,232.04. In his very best year, Scott said he sold over $726,000 with an average ticket of $1,825.
Scott’s journey to Milestone is an interesting one. He first dabbled in electrical work while in high school. He went to college and studied English, while also doing some cabinetry work to pay the bills. Then, 9/11 happened. It moved Scott to serve. He left school and enlisted in the Navy. It felt like the right thing, the honorable thing to do.
Four years later, Scott was back home and looking to begin a career. His first job was selling cars at a Mercedes-Benz dealership. “I sold 20 cars in my first month, which is unheard of. But I got a negative paycheck because they made me pay for my sales training,” Scott explained. “I turned in my badge and keys that day.”
Sales has always been a part of Scott’s life. “What was beneficial was my dad sold insurance. He made me do cold-calling in high school. Of course, that’s one of the hardest types of sales you can do. All of these unique experiences have molded me into who I am,” he said. “It all came together when I went back to what I had always done best, and that’s be an electrician.”
Scott didn’t start with Milestone right away once he reentered the field. It wasn’t until he saw one of the company’s eye-catching vehicles and the professionally dressed technician inside it that he knew where he wanted to work.
“I was doing residential, commercial, industrial, you name it at the time. The company I was working for gave us t-shirts and shorts. I see the nice Milestone truck and the guy driving it was wearing nice, pressed shirt and slacks. I thought to myself, ‘That’s next level right there. That’s where I want to be,’” Scott explained.
Scott landed a job at Milestone, but he wasn’t given a truck right away. Instead, he spent a year doing ride-alongs, learning, and biding his time for an opportunity. “Back then, we were much smaller. I had taken my wireman’s exam, but then [the company] switched to a policy of no more wiremen running trucks. They finally relented and said I could run on Saturday if I borrowed another technician’s truck. Well, I started completing $5,000 jobs every Saturday. They quickly decided it didn’t make sense financially not to have me run full-time,” Scott said and then chuckled.
Make no mistake, Scott knows the value of working for a company like Milestone—both in terms of how it sets him up for success and helps close deals. He knows he will run one to three calls every day. “Of course, I always prefer one,” he said. He’s typically only dispatched to homes built in the 90s and older.
“Working for Milestone is huge. Customers call us because we’re established. We have a reputation for treating people the right way,” Scott said. “Then, once they meet me, and I create a relationship with them, it becomes a no-brainer that they’re going to do work with us. And the recommendations I make get done, too, because I back them up with solid reasoning.”
How does Scott go about building relationships with customers? How does he explain the benefits of inspections? How does he communicate options? And how does he handle the big price objections that come his way? Let’s learn these answers and more in this issue’s “Learning from the Best.”
Before going to a home, do you do any type of prep work on the client or the situation?
No. I look at what the customer is calling us out for. That’s about it.
When you get to the home, do you have a set process you like to follow as you walk to the door?
Milestone, they have training for how to handle every step of a service call. When you pull up to a house, you have 16 seconds to get to the front door. There’s a certain set of instructions we follow on every call, as far as the presentation, which includes putting down the red carpet and putting on shoe covers. That’s all part of it. They even train you on how to face the door and knock on it. I’ve always followed that because somebody put in the footwork to see what works—and it does. Once I get inside the door, and the customer knows my name, and I know theirs, that’s when we try to make magic happen.
Once in the home, are there any certain questions you always ask to try and strike up a conversation and relax the customer?
I definitely don’t bore customers with electrical jargon. To a certain extent, they’ll follow you, but there will be a point when they stop listening, which is probably within five minutes, depending upon how technical you get. I try to talk about things people enjoy talking about—their kids, their pets—it opens people up. Everybody loves talking about themselves. If you get someone talking about something they like, before you know it, they’re going to be asking for your personal number so you can hang out on the weekends.
How long will you warm-up a customer?
It depends. As long as the customer is engaging in conversation, then I will as well. Now, typically, we have about a two-hour window on our calls. But I’ve been in the electrical field so long, there’s very few problems I can’t solve in 30 minutes or less, which gives me an hour and a half to talk with the customer.
When do you start asking questions about the problem?
I start with that. The customer has called you out for a reason. I definitely want to take care of that problem first, before any recommendations are made. While I’m asking about the problem, and how long it’s been going on, or what’s bothering them, I’ll mix that in with normal conversation. Usually, they lead you to their problem right away. Once you get into the house, they’re not expecting to have coffee and pleasant conversation.
How do you transition from that initial problem to conducting an entire safety inspection?
I let them know that I’ve pretty much seen the gist of their electrical system and that we do free electrical inspections while we’re out. And there’s just a few more things I need to see before [completing the job]. Typically, when you present it like that, you don’t get a “no.” Everybody likes something that’s free.
What do you do after completing the inspection?
Typically, once I’ve completed my safety check, I’ll have my apprentice go over the issues we found while I write up a list of recommendations and present it to them. It’s very mechanical how I do it. What’s not is the personalized conversation with each homeowner. Usually, you’re talking about their dog, then we’re sitting them down, and within 30 seconds, I’m saying, “This is what we found.” I almost catch them off guard with, “It’s business time.”
Do you always sit down to discuss your findings?
Ninety percent of the time, I have them sit down at their kitchen table.
When building your tickets, how many options will you give people? And do you guide them to what you think they should do?
It depends on the house. I typically will write five to seven different options. I’m more descriptive in my writing. In college, I majored in English. My writing is pretty solid. I try not to be too complicated; I get to the point. But on the options that I recommend more, they will always have a better description.
When do you mention the club membership?
I plant the seed about our Family Plan either when we start writing down options for repairing the initial problem or sometime throughout the call.
When presenting the price, do you make it a point to show the Family Plan price and a financed price?
We do. Absolutely. When showing the cost, let’s say it’s a $5,040 job. It will say that number. Then, right below it, it will have typically a three-digit financed number, followed by “per month.” It’s just that simple. What I don’t do is write, “$152.56/per month with 9.9% interest…” You’re going to scare people with that. I follow the old KISS motto: Keep it simple, stupid.
How much financing do you do?
I do a lot of financing. It’s probably 50/50.
Do you get pushback from people who act offended that you’re offering financing?
Oh yeah, all the time. That’s even better—less paperwork.
Milestone is still using paper with your inspections, option sheets, and invoices, correct?
They tried moving to tablets with one of our departments, and it was a huge flop. The thing of it is, if you’re on a tablet, and you’re showing someone something, once you switch screens, it’s gone—never for them to look at again. What I find surprising is the number of people who call me six, eight months later. They’ll say, “I’ve saved up this money. We want to get this job done now.” Without that paper, I feel like they don’t have that work in front of them to refer to, and we would lose a lot of work. And when you write a hand-written estimate, that’s personalized for somebody’s house. You bring up generalized options on a tablet, it might as well be an instruction booklet. It’s completely impersonal.
Do you spend much time talking about warranties or guarantees?
I don’t spend much time on it. When I’m building value and explaining to the customer about our company, when we’re doing those initial introductions, I let them know we have a 5-year warranty on pretty much everything we do, and on our breaker panels, we have a lifetime warranty. That’s the only time I mention it.
When you get price objections, how do you handle them?
People are programmed these days that there’s a discount coupon that they can get no matter what. For example, if you go to Kohl’s, you see a retail price and then it’s marked 70% off, which is a scam. When I get price objections, I agree with customers. I say, “Yes, it is expensive.” Then, I go through and give them a detailed scope on the work. I let them know this is everything we need to get done. We’re using the best materials you can get—and nobody can do this job as well as I can. Essentially, what the customer is buying is you, the technician. I sell a lot of jobs because people want me to do it. They will ask me, “Will you be the one to do the work?” I say, “Yes, absolutely.”
It sounds like your success is based on the relationships you build with clients. Is that accurate?
It’s 100 percent the relationship I’ve built. I land more “number-one” options than most electricians. Once you’ve talked to somebody long enough, they know a little bit about you, they like you, they see that you’re excited about your job, and they see you’re a caring technician who wants to do the work. They feed into that. That’s because I do love my job. People know if you want to be there or not. Let’s say you want to buy a car. He shows you one model, and he says, “Yeah, it’s kind of a piece of junk.” Are you going to buy that? Probably not!
At Milestone, I know there’s an emphasis on going the extra mile for customers. Do you have any interesting stories of doing that?
Oh, absolutely. In Frisco, this made national news, they had coyotes attacking joggers. We helped Animal Control, at one house, pin a coyote. A coyote was underneath this lady’s deck. So, we got on one side of the deck and scared it toward this other guy with a net. He snared it. That was pretty intense. The customer ended up ordering us lunch. She was really scared that her poodle was going to be eaten and was very thankful.
Another memorable one, this lady was like 80 years old. She had this old-timey, probably first-generation cuckoo clock. It hadn’t run in 40 years. I had recently bought a cuckoo clock online. I had to take mine apart to fix it. I said, “Ma’am, I can make that clock work again.” She said, “No. I took it to a clockmaker, and he said it couldn’t be done.” At first, she wouldn’t let me touch it. Then, I explained I had just taken mine apart. So, she let me try. I ended up fixing it in about 20 minutes. She started crying. Her father bought her the clock, and, obviously, it had a lot of value to her. Milestone has a picture of that in one of our hallways at the office. All the time, if we go to a senior citizen’s house, we always ask if there’s something heavy they want lifted. That kind of thing. We fix broken gates, tighten door knobs, do that sort of stuff.
What advice do you have for new residential-service technicians?
Do some studying on how to build relationships with people. The reason I say that, in electrical, everybody should be able to fix the same problem. You’re working with the same materials. What’s going to set you apart is your personality and your ability to communicate. Brush up on your social skills. In this business, it pays to be a people person. One more thing—and this is very important—as a technician, it may be your 7,000th service call, but remember that it’s very likely your customer’s first. Be excited. Make sure the customer is having a great time! Be memorable and informative, and you’ll be successful. If you’re not having a good time, neither is your customer, and you will be forgotten.