Studies show that more than 60% of salespeople dislike cold calls, so Exigent Mechanical Services in Reston, Virginia, embraced a method to avoid them.
“We try to give (our salespeople) as much information and warmth as you can get on a new prospect,” said Jarret Ryan, Exigent’s Chief Commercial Officer.
Exigent does that by using Convex. Information provided by Convex allows a sales rep to walk into a business with the information he or she needs to address needs and generate business.
“Our people feel comfortable when they walk in the door that they have information that they can use to move that call in a positive direction quickly,” Ryan said.
Convex helps teams plan, target, and engage opportunities to accelerate revenue from the start of the sales process. It can even provide details in a specific geographic area of who in the region is searching for “HVAC upgrade,” or something similar.
Convex also provides the contact person for each business. Convex then maps the opportunities, putting several different commercial properties into one map view.
Convex turns cold calls into warm leads.
“From a time management and efficiency standpoint, selling efficiency is so much higher than it has been in the past,” Ryan said.
He cited a Convex cold-call sprint his team did as an example of that efficiency.
“We had one or two of them with almost a 30% hit rate for an appointment off the cold call sprint,” Ryan said. “I always tell my team, if you make 1-in-12 cold calls actually turn into an opportunity, you're doing well. So that was really impressive to see.”
Mission-critical spaces
Exigent provides integrated mechanical solutions for what Ryan called “mission critical space” – which includes but is not limited to colleges, heavy industrial, hospitals, schools, and government and military facility work.
“Facilities where there is no option to have downtime on mechanical systems,” Ryan said.
Among Exigent’s services are initial design, engineering, energy efficiency, HVAC, building automations, plumbing, and preventative maintenance.
As a business that is also involved in private equity and purchasing businesses, Ryan said Exigent uses Convex as a “a tremendous value tool.” With its integration across all entities, Convex becomes an attractive part of being part of Exigent.
“It shows,” he said, “that we have our act together and we give our people the best tools for them to succeed.”
Ryan has been in the trades since 2001. Prior to Exigent, he worked for a fire and safety entity in Cleveland where he eventually grew to Vice President of Sales. It was there that Ryan was first exposed to Convex, and when he joined Exigent in 2023 he brought the application to his new workplace.
“It’s a key tool for us on our business development side,” he said.
A two-fold strategy
Exigent’s strategy in using Convex is two-fold, he said. First, it helps give salespeople who previously worked as technicians the tools to communicate with the customer and provide solutions. Second, it helps build a recurring service base through developing service-agreement relationships.
“We're generally doing queries on sizes of the buildings, obviously vertical markets that we talked about,” he said. “We also use Signals a lot.”
Signals, also part of Convex, notifies team members when potential customers are searching for products the business offers.
“Our team sees Signals coming in, that it fits the profile, and they'll dig into that, add to the list and pursue,” he said. “It’s twofold. There are campaigns of searching for certain types and certain geographies, and then obviously what I call the reactive, which is seeing something on Signals and then driving further down to try to pursue that opportunity.”
In the aggregate, Exigent finds Convex generates optimal opportunities for sales, revenue, growth and profit.
“It doesn’t replace effort,” Ryan said. “But it surely sets you up for success. Strategies are more well thought out. Convex provides the ability to make impactful calls vs. the traditional spinning your wheels or just parking down the street or sitting there on Google trying to go through 20 layers of searches.
“The information's there at their fingertips, on their mobile app.”
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