Stack Electrical sales coaching
How Stack Electrical became leading players in hazardous area electrical installations by mastering their sales and marketing game
Hazardous area electrical specialists, Stack Electrical was founded in 1984. They had enough clients to keep the team busy, but managing director David Stack felt they relied too heavily on a couple of key clients and was keen to expand their reach.
In mid-2022 I ran a workshop with David and his two senior managers. My sales coaching approach is based on six sales fundamentals. The first fundamental is knowing what you do. So, the first thing I did was help Stack Electrical get really clear on who they wanted to work with and how they wanted to help them.
When I started working with the firm, they had too many service areas, several of which were unprofitable. They needed to fine tune their offers and work out where in the market they wanted to play. We looked at what they were best at and what work they enjoyed most, identified ways they were different to their competitors, and looked at how that might translate into selling points. That helped us narrow down their offers, halving their number of services from ten to their most profitable five.
David says, “We specialise in hazardous area electrical installations and maintenance and work mainly in the oil and gas industry. We started out many years ago, doing maintenance for ExxonMobil in Christchurch. Hazardous area electrical isn’t an easy field to work in. You’re talking very smart, intricate systems, so specialist expertise is a must.”
To win at sales you must understand marketing
If you get your marketing right, people will want to buy from you. You won't have to cold call or hard sell. Instead, you’re solving your customers’ problems and coming up with a plan.
Sales are all in the preparation. You can't put together a solid sales strategy without understanding marketing. The right marketing makes sales easier to convert because you know who you’re talking to, and you know how your services meet their needs.
Once you’ve worked out what market you want to play in, your job is to make yourself attractive to those people you want to work with. So, once David had clarity on his target market and his services, we worked on attracting the right people with his marketing.
Putting your shop window in order
I will always encourage you to put your website in order because it’s your digital shop window. A potential customer should be able to make their mind up about your business from your homepage. They need to be able to work out what you do, who you help, and see info that convinces them you know what you’re doing. If you haven't the right content on your homepage to whet their whistle, forget it. They won't bother going any further.
David’s website didn't reflect Stack Electrical’s new focus. He explains, “Our website was out of date because we’d always got our work through word of mouth. Our website was never really something we’d looked at updating because I didn’t realise how important it was.”
David also needed case studies and testimonials. When new clients check you out, they want to see your track record in working with businesses like theirs. David says, “Ian told me to pick our best projects in each service area and talk to our clients about their installations. I asked them what we were like to deal with and how our work was helpful, then we took photos of the installations and wrote the conversations up as case studies for our site.”
Now, by the time a new customer talks to David and his team, Stack Electrical’s website has already established that they know what they're doing. Potential customers have all the proof they need to feel confident Stack Electrical does an excellent job. They’ve seen what sort of projects they’ve worked on and read what their existing clients say about them.
Attracting the people you want to work with
Once Stack Electrical’s website was doing a solid job selling their services, we got David posting on LinkedIn. David says, “Ian came up with a social media plan, detailing what to post and how to follow up with people who like and comment.” Social media is working for Stack Electrical. People see David’s posts, check out their site, and get in touch. They’ve won new business from major oil companies purely because he got active on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn can grow your business. You’ve just got to be smart about it and take your time. Most potential customers will interact with your content. You may not realise it because they’re not engaging or commenting, but they’re watching what you post, and one day they’ll need your help and come calling. When that happens, those sales convert far faster because your potential customer has already decided they want to work with you.
David adds, “It was great getting some support to help me tackle the whole social media thing because it's a minefield. A lot of New Zealanders feel posting on social media is showing off. I openly admit that’s how I felt about it as well, and it took me a while to get over that. But Ian said, ‘Are the people who matter, like your friends, going to think you’re showing off?’ Now I feel more comfortable with social media. I even quite enjoy posting.”
As well as posting on social, David started doing regular e-newsletters. We got him using HubSpot as a CRM and worked out what marketing collateral he’d need. As David got busier, I put him in contact with specialists to help him manage the load, including digital advertising experts and VAs to handle social media posting. All this preparation made his sales conversations far easier. He understands his market, knows what problems his typical customers are having, and he can talk to them in their language.
Mastering the art of the upsell
One of the things I coach businesses on is how to turn that first engagement with a customer into more sales. The first project most clients hire Stack Electrical to do is a hazardous area inspection. David explains, “There are only a handful of hazardous electrical inspectors in New Zealand, and we've got most of them on our team, so we do a lot of inspections around the country.”
Before I worked with them, David and his team used to simply do an inspection, give their client the report, and that was it. Davids explains., “Ian suggested we leverage those inspections as an opportunity for more work. Now our inspectors go out, and while they’re doing the inspection, they explain to our clients that we also do hazardous electrical design, installation, and maintenance, so we can handle the entire process for them.”
“If the inspection shows a business has work to do for their site to become compliant, our inspectors will say, “Would you like me to get a price together for you to get this up to compliance?” We've won a lot of new clients with that approach. Our conversion rate on those proposals is 90 to 95% because we’ve demonstrated there's a real need for the work.”
Building strong, multilayered relationships with customers
I’ve encouraged David and his team to take good care of their customers. It’s important to keep clients happy so you can share stories about your successful projects. As we discussed earlier, those case studies and testimonials help win you new work.
It’s also crucial to build multilayered relationships with your key customers. There’s a phenomenon I call the scourge of the 2IC when a senior leader leaves and their 2IC steps up and appoints new contractors across the board. It’s too late to start building a relationship with that 2IC when they become the person in charge. You need to forge a good relationship with them before then, or risk being sidelined in favour of their favourite suppliers.
I worked with David and his team to identify decision makers and influencers in each of his client’s organisations. Stack Electrical now have relationships with their key clients at all levels and deal with multiple people on each site. David isn’t scared to pick up the phone and talk to his customers. He’s a great role model, encouraging his team to do the same.
Multilayered relationships make doing business easier and make it harder for competitors to drive a wedge between you and your client. However, forming these strong relationships takes effort. You must make the time to go and meet with your clients and ensure the projects you’re working on together are going well. It’s important to check in even when you’re not working on a project for them. And make sure your customers see your marketing because e-newsletters and LinkedIn aren’t just for new business.
Staying connected with clients when they move on
One thing about Stack Electrical’s clients is people who work in oil and gas tend to stay in the industry. David says, “Someone might shift from Mobil to BP or Z. Ian suggested we touch base with people we used to work with and see where they'd gone. He said, ‘Maybe they’re at a new firm that could use your services too.’ Turned out we knew people at most of the companies we wanted to work with. And that was a big eyeopener for us because reconnecting with people we’d worked with wasn’t something we'd ever done before.”
“Now we make an effort to keep in touch with the people we work with. Say someone leaves one oil company and moves to a competitor. In the past, we’d just have said, ‘Good luck, see you later mate.’ Now I'll follow them on LinkedIn, leave it a few months and then check in to say, ‘Hey man, how's the new job going?’ Fostering those relationships has helped us massively. It’s even won us work outside the hazardous electrical field. One client who used to work for an oil company moved to an engineering firm and hired us to go through and replace hundreds of high bay light fittings for them in their workshop. That was a decent job.”
Regular sales coaching gives you momentum
As a result of our work together, Stack Electrical has gone from strength to strength. David says, “Since we started working with Ian, we've got a lot more clients and we’ve doubled our profit. We had so much work I shut down the residential side of the business and moved everyone to industrial, commercial, and hazardous electrical because it’s a more profitable area for us. And at the end of 2023 we opened an Invercargill branch, so we’re in three centres now.”
“I’ve even pulled back on marketing a bit because we’ve got to the point where we've far too much work and I don’t want to annoy people with long wait times. We’re hiring more people, but what we do is so specialised that I can't simply take on a new electrician and send them out. We spend about a year training our staff, so scaling the business takes time.”
Throughout this whole period, I met with David regularly to keep him accountable. I supported him with developing his key messages, worked together on his website updates, reviewed his social media and e-marketing activity, reminded him to do the things he’d agreed to do, and helped him plan the next month’s activities.
Your mindset is everything
David’s success comes down to his mindset. He believes in making his own luck. He’s happy to put in the work and has a realistic perspective on timeframes, saying “I was pretty motivated because I really want to progress the firm.” Businesses that struggle to benefit from sales coaching are often looking for quick fix solutions. There are no short cuts. It takes time to turn the Queen Mary. If your business has declining sales, you must arrest that decline first before you can start to grow sales again.
Mindset is critical to your success. David says, “Ian has changed our attitude towards our business. We thought we were just another bunch of hazardous area electricians. Ian challenged us on that. He said, ‘Believe in what you have here. You’re industry leaders and when you’re talking to a potential new client, that's how you need to think and behave.’ That was a big mindset shift for me and our managers. It changes the whole company when you start to think like that. It lifts the whole culture. We're a lot more professional as a result.”
“Ian’s a guru when it comes to getting new clients and he’s a really nice guy. He's great to sit down with, so easy to work with, and he's really smart. As well as helping me grow our business in the present, he’s helped me think about the direction we want to go in and identify the next space we’ll expand into. And when I’m ready to take that next step in growing our business, I’ll definitely be bringing Ian in again.”
If you want to grow your sales and marketing game, I’m here to help. Check out sales coaching for engineers or contact me directly for a bespoke programme of business mentoring at hello@iancartwright.co.nz.