Selling the value of preventive maintenance is not what it used to be. In the old days, a manufacturer could use its expert position to prescribe a maintenance scheme. Today, a combination of emerging technologies and pressure from buyers to do it cheaper/smarter warrant a new way of explaining to customers the value of preventive maintenance.

We often use the words “preventive maintenance,” but we could also use the following terms to talk about this:

  • Planned Maintenance
  • Periodical Maintenance
  • Predictive Maintenance
  • Prescriptive Maintenance

Analyzing a lot of service contracts offered by OEMs we still see most of the maintenance is periodical or counter-based. Just like the maintenance interval for your car—a PM each year or at 15,000 km.

All those periodical or counter-based maintenance jobs are good service revenue for your service organizations. But what happens when customers start challenging you? What if the customer has access to knowledge that amends or contradicts the engineering assumptions that led to the definition of your current maintenance intervals?

1. Recognize That Buyers Want to Reduce Maintenance Costs

In a world where people are more vocal, we see customers expecting things to work and buyers seeking to reduce maintenance costs. These expectations impact the way we sell service contracts.

Selling is more straightforward when you can see a direct relationship between the pain and the gain. Such a link is obvious for installation and break-fix activities. But it is less apparent for preventive maintenance. Try to picture buyers asking these questions:

  • What does PM prevent and what is the risk that remains?
  • What is the rationale of the current maintenance interval?
  • Nothing happened last year. What will happen if we skip or delay a PM?
  • Can you dissect the PM job in activities (show me what you do) and is it really necessary to have all those activities done by an experienced/expensive technician?
  • Can we do pieces of the PM job ourselves?

You get the gist of the conversation and know where it is leading: less cost for your customer at the expense of less PM revenue for your service organization.

What complicates the selling of service, is that in most scenarios the buyer and the customer/user are not the same person. You may convince the user of a piece of equipment to do preventive maintenance, the buyer, on the other hand, has a different set of objectives. Most likely the buyer will push you on a path towards commoditizing and cannibalizing your PM services. All in order to reduce cost.

2. Reframe the Value of Preventive Maintenance

To stay ahead of the game, let’s dissect PM along the lines of value creation for the customer. At a high level you can split a PM into three pieces:

  1. The execution of the maintenance activities
  2. The reporting on those activities
  3. The communication and interpretation of the results

Ask your customers to rate the value of each of those pieces. It’s probable that you will find that the business value of PM is less in the execution and more in the reporting and communication.

Maybe you pride yourself on your uniqueness of execution, whereas the customer might perceive it as a commodity. If also reporting and communication are on par, you may face price erosion.

If your customer needs the PM report for compliance or insurance purposes, the value of the report increases. When you consider that PM is often a play of risk and liability, you can price the value of your brand.

Example: It does make a difference to an insurer if your yearly PM/inspection is performed by a triple A company vs. a middle of the road company. Communication value comes into play when your customer expects you to be a partner rather than a supplier.

  • Supplier – “Just send me the PM report, I’ll read and interpret it myself. When I need assistance, I’ll contact you.”
  • Partner – “Help me interpret the findings and consequences of the PM. How does this impact my business?”

In the latter situation, you can monetize the communication beyond the effort of having a conversation for a couple of hours. PM can thus elevate from an obligatory periodical execution to an instrument of customer satisfaction and cross- and upselling.

3. Repackage Your Preventive Maintenance Offering

In order to retain and expand your PM revenue stream in a context where the buyers move to reduce their spending, do go in discovery mode and (re)define preventive maintenance.

PM is not a singular black box once defined by somebody in engineering with a product focus. Modern PM is a menu of choices (and consequences) for your buyer based on the usage profile of the product, budget, and risk.

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ABOUT Coen Jeukens

Avatar photoCoen Jeukens is vice president of global customer transformation at ServiceMax. He works with customers and prospects to fully unlock the true value and potential of their service organizations. Prior to joining ServiceMax, Coen was the services contract director at Bosch where he implemented an outcome-based business model, with highly impressive results. Coen is also a regular keynote speaker at prominent field service conferences around the globe.