The year is drawing to a close. 2015 was great for business books and ever hopeful that
you’ll get some down time over the upcoming festive season, I’ve lined up 5 of the best books for field service professionals. So sit down with a glass of eggnog, put your feet up, and grab one of these books – in 2016, your service business will thank you for it.
5 inspiring books for field service professionals
What Great Service Leaders Know and Do: Creating Breakthroughs in Service Firms
If you’re in the service business, you’ll know Heskett, Sasser, and Schlesinger, the pioneers of service industry innovation. Luckily for us, they released “What Great Service Leaders Know and Do” in 2015 to revisit their principles in the light of our new business reality; technology, social media, personalization and big data. In other words, they take all of the new concepts floating around field service and break them down with a service provider focus. It’s not a light read, but if you’re in a leadership position in a service company, it’s your business to read it from front to back.
Robots are coming and they’re stealing your job. Or maybe they’re not, no one seems to be entirely sure. Either way, stay ahead of the game with this excellent book by Martin Ford. It’s a winner of the 2015 FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award and is a New York Times Science Bestseller and is super relevant for those in service industries. A word of warning – if you ARE worried about robots taking over the field service sector, this book won’t exactly put your mind at ease. But on the upside, at least you’ll know what’s coming!
Agile Selling: Get Up to Speed Quickly in Today’s Ever-Changing Sales World
Many of the best business books of 2015 focus on how today’s business world has changed beyond recognition. Agile Selling, by Jill Konrath, is a hugely popular primer, mainly because it provides lots of practical advice on how to keep selling in an overcrowded market. How? By remaining agile and mobile. It’s survival of the most flexible out there, and this is your handbook.
Sell Local, Think Global: 50 Innovative Ways to Make a Chunk of Change and Grow Your Business
Service businesses, whether it’s plumbing, HVAC, maintenance or something else, are local businesses. But that doesn’t mean you need to stay provincial with your sales. This book by blogger Olga Mizrahi collects 50 excellent tips to take the best ideas from global business and apply them locally. It means that the brightest and best global strategies are distilled into advice that even the smallest, most local businesses can use every day.
In this great book, Michael Fertik maintains that if the robots don’t take your job, you’ll be left slugging it out in the “reputation economy”. If your service business is online (and we really, really hope it is!), this book will show you how to manage your social and digital footprint in a world where a single badly managed review or comment can take months to recover from. In the service industry, your reputation has ALWAYS been your most important asset, and this book is perfect if you intend to keep it that way.
Improve your business in 2016 by learning more in 2015
All of these titles are available on Amazon or via your local book retailer. Some are more…entertaining…than others but all will give you a fresh, educated perspective on your service business for 2016. Create some space by downloading a free, no-obligation Synchroteam – you can see how it saves time here – and take some time to improve your business know-how for the coming year!
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