Purpose-built for mechanical, commercial HVAC, refrigeration, electrical, and fire & life safety contractors, ServiceTrade is a SaaS platform that helps commercial contractors coordinate office staff and technicians to deliver an amazing customer experience for service and project work.

Commercial contractors manage work orders and project budgets, schedule recurring and emergency work orders, access customer records, and integrate with their accounting platform while giving technicians all the information they need to complete a service in their mobile device. ServiceTrade enables business growth by extending customer relationships and attracting new prospects.

The process before Recapped

Every sales rep had a different process

“It was kind of the wild wild west. The people that did it well were the ones who are the most organized. The biggest thing was, how can we rinse and repeat and train people to have that same level of institutional knowledge? That’s what you need to be able to scale.”
- Jack Gauss, Manager Inside Sales

ServiceTrade was facing the same problem most organizations face - an unrepeatable playbook. 

Previously ServiceTrade used Google Docs and leveraged notes and timelines of opportunities in Salesforce. They relied heavily on reps taking really good notes and their knowledge of sales processes.

Managers were asking questions that should have been available at a surface level. Pipeline meetings and deal management looked like “swiss cheese”, meaning a lot of gaps to fill, and many wasted hours.

ServiceTrade needed a scalable and foundational tool for their sales process and methodology.

The consequences of not having Recapped

Sales cycles were starting to increase. Extra meetings were happening. Deals that were forecasted to close a week or two earlier, were stalling once additional stakeholders got involved.

ServiceTrade had visibility into the next immediate step, but they weren't able to see further than that.  This made it difficult to have organic conversations with buyers around what the evaluation should look like.

They were being thrown curveballs at the finish line, and deals were starting to slip.

‍

Forecasting with Salesforce was not enough

Forecasting was extremely frustrating. Historically, forecasting was driven mostly by Salesforce reports and the anecdotal opinions of sellers. The variety in sales rep tenure made this hard to enforce.

Their forecast accuracy was a mixture of reps that kept Salesforce clean and newer reps filling out spreadsheets while they were ramping.

“It’s only as good as the data that goes in, but it was not a good scalable way of maintaining forecasts.”
- Jack Gauss, Manager Inside Sales

As they conducted regular pipeline reviews, they realized they were spending more time explaining the deals than strategizing them.

‍

The Solution with Recapped

ServiceTrade reduced their sales cycle by 25% in 1 quarter

Within the first full quarter of using Recapped, ServiceTrade was able to reduce their sales cycle by 10 days. They also analyzed the sales cycles of the top 3 power users, and their cycles were reduced even more, by 15 days.

“The engagement scores were through the roof. The way that we built our templates empowers our champions to have all the information at their fingertips. It’s like we’re putting guard rails on their conversation internally.”
- Jack Gauss, Manager Inside Sales

The feedback from reps was overwhelmingly positive, “Recapped is making it easier to have the conversations offline for the prospect. There’s no fishing for information.”

They won’t have to rely fully on their champions to know how to sell their product.

‍

Gaining visibility into the entire sales process

With Recapped, instead of speculating, Jack and his team were able to see the status of a deal within seconds. This enabled the team to focus on strategy and workflow past the immediate step. The ability to quickly investigate workspaces for deals gave them a superpower, supporting them to provide more concise and effective coaching.

”This allowed us to get right down to the nuts and bolts a lot quicker than we used to.”
- Jack Gauss, Manager Inside Sales

As a manager, he’s able to easily guide the reps that are struggling to see the entire picture of the sales process.

Leveraging buyer engagement and momentum to forecast with confidence

Before Recapped, Jack’s early mutual action plans were created through Google Docs, which consisted of a summary page with logos, stakeholders, and a table below with next steps and dates. The chances of prospects working within the document were slim to none.

Consequently, Jack and his reps were typically the only ones updating the information with no measurement of buyer engagement. Putting forth effort into a deal that may or may not close was not a valuable way to spend their time.

With Recapped, purpose-built for managing deals, Jack’s confidence in their deals started improving.

Recapped takes a buyer-centric approach to forecasting that differs from that of many other companies in the space.

“It’s so easy for us to know when people do engage with Recapped. It’s like 'okay, these people are very serious, and they’re probably going to buy'.”
- Jack Gauss, Manager Inside Sales

Recapped tracks every move that buyers make within the workspace, which adds an additional layer of insight. This provides clearer visibility into the level of engagement from clients and allowed them to gut-check reps’ speculation on deals and to concentrate their efforts on deals most likely to close.

“If we got to an engagement score of 65, the likelihood of us winning that deal was very high. It was like our Closed Won engagement score.”
- Jack Gauss, Manager Inside Sales

‍

Ability to embed other tech stacks within Recapped

Updating opportunity fields in CRMs can be a major source of frustration for sales managers and reps. ServiceTrade can now integrate with Salesforce and Recapped bi-directionally, setting a structured path and streamlining the process.

ServiceTrade further strengthens their tech stack by embedding sales collateral and content within Recapped. 

This past year, ServiceTrade invested in Highspot and WorkRamp. WorkRamp, an LMS, is used to train, educate, and onboard. They pull WorkRamp resources into their internal content management system, Highspot. From there, they embed their content and resources into Recapped, which helps to gain insight into what content is accessed during different stages of the deal cycle.

“Highspot is kind of like the baseline, but Recapped on top of it is the winning formula.”
- Jack Gauss, Manager Inside Sales

Selling to a non-technical buyer

ServiceTrade’s prospects and customers are commercial service contractors who are usually out in the field and are less tech-focused than other buyers. However, ServiceTrade was pleasantly surprised when their prospects were able to use Recapped, and remarked on how easy it was to understand. He described Recapped as an “Amazon effect” for them. It provides a central location to house all deal information. It’s clean, organized, and allows everyone to streamline communication.

“Recapped fits into what we’re already selling. The same elevated experience you’ve gotten in the evaluation process is what you’ll get with our software.”
- Jack Gauss, Manager Inside Sales

In his experience, a best practice is introducing Recapped in the first call and every call after that. He consistently updates it right in front of the prospects. The prospects have everything they need in one place and are able to leave comments, complete next steps, access content and documents, and more.

After repeated exposure during each call, their prospects started updating their own next steps because they are accustomed to it as they understand the importance of using their shared workspace.

“As deals get more complex, we know that we can rely on Recapped to help navigate through more technical products.”
- Jack Gauss, Manager Inside Sales

The B2B Buying Journey doesn't have to be hard. Read more about How to Simplify the B2B Buying Journey.

‍

Enforcing methodologies in sales processes

“Coming into 2023, we’ve dubbed it the year of efficiency, and that's why I think Recapped plays a big role in that.”
- Jack Gauss, Manager Inside Sales

ServiceTrade may implement more methodologies like MEDDPICC in the near future. Using our MEDDPICC methodology template within Recapped, he’ll be able to build out another playbook template for mandatory qualifications by his reps.

To recap

Ramping sales reps at ServiceTrade were struggling to see the entire picture of the sales processes, which resulted in inefficient pipeline meetings, inaccurate forecasting, and stalled deals. Jack needed to replicate the sales frameworks from his top reps to his newer reps.

Recapped helps ServiceTrade gain visibility into the entire sales process with more accurate forecasting, so their sales team can focus on deals that are more likely to close. Recapped simplifies and consolidates the buying experience for the seller and buyer resulting in a better buying experience and closing deals faster.

“Recapped is future-proofing our sales cycle.”
- Jack Gauss, Manager Inside Sales

Schedule a consultation to see Recapped in action: https://www.recapped.io/consultation