September 3, 2024
I want to tell you about a phone call I took at 9pm on a Saturday. An air conditioning system had gone out in a residential home. It was over 100 degrees that day. Both homeowners were there. The system was 16 years old. And a sales technician named Phil Filaski was about to walk out the door.
If you’re in the trades, you already know what that call represents. Both decision makers are home, so there’s no “I need to talk to my spouse” objection. The system is old enough that replacement makes more sense than repair. The buyers are motivated because they’re sitting in a sweltering house on a Saturday night. And the chances that any competitor is going to dispatch a tech at that hour are essentially zero.
But here’s the thing about that kind of call: it’s hard to push a technician out the door on a Saturday night. He’s tired. He might have plans. And if he’s married, his wife has an opinion about whether he leaves.
Most of the time, that conversation goes something like this: the boss calls, the tech says “yeah I gotta go, it’s my turn on call” and he buttons up his uniform shirt while his wife sighs and starts looking up competing companies on Glassdoor.
Phil’s conversation went differently.
When his wife asked if he really had to go, his answer had nothing to do with being on call. He said something like: “My average ticket on these calls is $27,000 and my commission is 10 percent. I’ll probably make $2,700 in under two hours.” His wife didn’t sigh. She told him to get his boots on. Apparently the local Louis Vuitton was open the next day.
That’s not a story about Phil being a great salesperson, though he was — Phil sold $19.6 million in HVAC in a single year. That’s a story about what happens when a pay plan is so clear that an employee can explain it to the most important person in his life in two sentences and get complete buy-in.
Think about what the alternative looks like. If Phil had a complicated commission structure with multiple thresholds and add-on spiffs and a quarterly bonus that depended on team performance, what does that conversation sound like? “Well, I make a base plus some percentage depending on the job type, and if we hit our monthly numbers I might get extra, but I’m not totally sure how the Saturday premium works.” His wife is not handing him his boots for that. She is handing him a reason to stay home.
This dynamic plays out constantly in the trades, and most owners never think about it. Your pay plan doesn’t just affect the technician’s motivation in the moment of the sale. It affects their family’s support for the job. It affects whether their spouse sees their work as a career worth sacrificing a Saturday night for, or just a demanding schedule with unpredictable pay.
If your tech cannot explain their earning potential to their spouse in a way that makes it worth going out on that Saturday night call, you are losing jobs you should be winning. Not because of bad salesmanship. Not because of poor training. Because of a pay plan that nobody can explain.
Make the math obvious. Make the reward immediate and meaningful. And never underestimate how far a clear commission structure travels — all the way to the kitchen table, and right back to your bottom line.