HVAC Proposal App: Streamline Commercial & Residential Bidding

How ServiceTitan Facilitates Commercial HVAC Proposals

ServiceTitan offers a wide range of functions to help commercial HVAC contractors streamline their proposal processes. In this section, we’ll look at how our product solves 4 key challenges in the commercial proposal process:

1. Efficiently Getting the Right Techs to the Right Jobs

2. Communicating Between the Field and Office to Deliver Accurate Bids Faster

3. Tracking Open Bids and Managing Follow-Ups to Improve Close Rates

4. Job Costing for Max Profitability on Longer-Term Jobs

1. Efficiently Getting the Right Techs to the Right Jobs

Oftentimes, commercial HVAC work involves more complexity and greater urgency than the residential side of the business. 

For commercial clients, having working HVAC and refrigeration systems is absolutely essential. To avoid potentially huge losses and/or major breakdowns in their operation, they need fast and reliable HVAC maintenance and repair services.

Since commercial HVAC bids usually aren’t created on site, and often require more than one layer of executive approval, getting a tech with the right expertise to the job ASAP is of paramount importance.  

But without top-notch HVAC software to help them, dispatchers often end up assigning the wrong techs to jobs. For example, they might send a tech whose expertise is in heating and cooling—HVAC installations, air conditioner repairs, HVAC maintenance, thermostats, ductwork, etc.—to a job that involves a chiller or walk-in cooler. This dynamic can frequently produce a pattern of delays and reschedulings, resulting in tons of wasted time and potentially a loss of clientele.     

Similarly, dispatchers and CSRs who are largely left to their own devices to assign routes and schedules often aren’t able to execute this efficiently, particularly if they’re unfamiliar with the geographic area. As a result, their techs’ time is wasted—crossing one another’s paths—over the course of the day. 

To address these challenges, ServiceTitan’s dispatch software enables office staff to easily schedule jobs while taking into account both tech expertise and service location. When a specific job type is selected during the call booking process, CSRs can only view and assign technicians with the skills to perform that job. That way, there’s no need to take extra time to figure out which techs have which skill sets, and there’s no chance of assigning the wrong techs to the wrong jobs. 

In addition, contractors can combine or split up jobs for the same customer according to their needs. This often comes up, for example, when a group of restaurant franchises needs to replace their RTUs. 

A color-coded tagging system also makes it easy for ServiceTitan users to organize future jobs according to their characteristics: past reschedules, time and/or equipment required, relative difficulty, and more. Many of our users rely on this feature to ensure that techs are given the right amount of time for each assignment, and that they arrive on site with everything required to get the job done.

2. Communicating Between the Field and Office to Deliver Accurate Bids Faster

Traditionally, the commercial HVAC bidding process has often been cumbersome—a lengthy back-and-forth between office and job site, customer and tech, and various layers of management:

An HVAC tech visits a job site and obtains the notes and photos their employer will need to generate a quote. The tech then sends those notes and photos back to the office via text or email, or drives them back to deliver them by hand. Whatever the case, this information generally isn’t well organized, and is often missing crucial details or images. Organizing and preserving these materials places significant time and energy demands from office staff, taking them away from other vital tasks.    

While all this is going on, commercial HVAC customers—who, as we noted above, are often in a serious hurry to get their jobs completed—must wait around until their estimate comes back. 

With ServiceTitan, commercial HVAC contractors can drastically improve upon this inefficient workflow. While a technician is still on site, office employees can get started on building an estimate. This process is facilitated by a seamless flow of information between the job site and the office. As a tech takes notes and photos, all of the information they contain—measurements, locations, model names, and serial numbers—is automatically uploaded to the platform in real time.   

That way, office staff can begin sourcing equipment and pricing out labor, materials, and more to start creating a bid immediately.

Under ideal conditions—that is, without major supply chain issues—contractors can typically expect turnaround times of three or four days for commercial HVAC bids. But many business owners who’ve adopted ServiceTitan have cut that time in half.

3. Tracking Open Bids and Managing Follow-Ups to Improve Close Rates

Following up on unsold estimates is absolutely crucial for success in the HVAC industry. By assigning the task to a specific employee, some HVAC companies have seen their revenue jump by up to $3 million. 

Industry experts suggest that only about half of all HVAC contractors consistently follow up on unsold estimates.The reason for this costly error is very simple: 

Without an FSM like ServiceTitan, commercial service businesses tend to use a less-than-ideal combination of handwritten notes, Google Docs, Microsoft Word files, and Excel spreadsheets to handle the task—if they do it at all. With such a disorganized approach, follow-ups are hard to track. The result, invariably, leaves a lot of money on the table.  

By providing a suite of high-tech features to automatically keep track of and execute follow-ups on unsold estimates, ServiceTitan makes these obstacles a thing of the past, allowing contractors to significantly improve their close rates and revenue flow. 

With ServiceTitan, techs, managers, CSRs, and business owners can see all of their company’s open bids with just one click, eliminating the need for constant back and forths: Has the bid gone out and when? Has anyone followed up? Is it time to reach out again? 

Facilitating a streamlined workflow, open bid lists in ServiceTitan provide users with a plethora of valuable customer information, which they can rely on to be pristinely accurate and up-to-date:

• Contact information

• Bid creation date

• Next follow-up date

• Technician

• Job type

• And more

For the most part, contractors using ServiceTitan have their commercial HVAC bids delivered by email. This lets them keep tabs on whether their bid was delivered to the right addressee, as well as whether and when the recipient opened it.  

With this data, contractors and employees can follow up immediately after their customer has seen a bid—the perfect moment to close a sale. 

For commercial bids, which can require more than one manager’s sign-off, this can be a game changer. Our HVAC proposal app makes it easy to follow up on open bids efficiently and consistently, giving them the best possible chance to communicate with decision makers at just the right time—when choices about high-value contracts are being made.

4. Job Costing for Max Profitability on Longer-Term Jobs

Without the ability to properly gauge job costing, HVAC contractors often find themselves bidding too high or low—particularly when working on longer-term jobs. They might underestimate the cost of materials, for example, or drastically overshoot what a job’s labor overhead is going to be. Manual job costing frequently introduces additional errors: typos, math mistakes, forgetfulness. 

Whatever the case, the consequences can be extremely expensive, causing business owners to effectively forfeit work to competitors and even lose money on bids that they win. 

Our job costing software helps ensure that contractors using ServiceTitan  don’t run into these and related problems. It draws on all of a subscriber’s data from payroll, vendor invoices, purchase orders, and sold estimates to provide a fully up-to-date picture of profitability that can help contractors manage HVAC project finances and make educated labor decisions. This includes:

• Project budgets that can be broken down as granularly as needed, as a function of materials, equipment, labor, purchase orders, and more. 

• Job margins that are automatically calculated based on labor costs, equipment, materials, and taxes.

• Values for Budget vs. Actual, Expense Detail, and Job Costing that are populated automatically from past transactions, based on invoices, payroll, vendor invoices, purchase orders, sold estimates, etc.

Are you looking to streamline proposals in your commercial HVAC business? Schedule a call for a one-on-one walk-through of these and other features that ServiceTitan offers.

How ServiceTitan Streamlines Residential HVAC Proposals

If, like many HVAC service companies, you do both commercial and residential work, you’ll need an HVAC proposal app that can handle the specific demands of both business units. Let’s take a look at the features we offer for providing home services.

Here we’ll cover how our product solves 3 key challenges of residential HVAC proposals:

1. Maintaining an Accurate and Up-to-Date Pricebook

2. Creating, Presenting, and Following Up on Home Service Proposals

3. Closing Big-Ticket Jobs Faster

1. Maintaining an Accurate and Up-to-Date Pricebook

For residential HVAC contractors who don’t use a high-quality FSM to help manage their pricing and proposal process, potential problems often begin before an estimate is even created. 

If they’re a company that still relies on pen-and-paper pricebooks, HVAC techs often arrive at a customer’s home with a binder containing all of the equipment and materials their employer uses and their associated prices. This approach is cumbersome, often disorganized, and prone to inaccuracy. It can make for an unpolished presentation, and a static, paper-based pricebook often does not reflect real-time costs.

If, between the time the binder was printed and the time the tech is creating an estimate, the cost of materials or equipment has gone up or down, the estimate in question isn’t going to be accurate, leading to the kind of over- or underbidding that can seriously affect the company’s bottom line.  

Standalone HVAC pricebook apps have significant drawbacks, too, requiring frequent imports and exports of data to third-party software platforms that can create costly delays and errors.

In contrast, ServiceTitan offers dynamic, built-in pricebook functionality, allowing real-time price list updates that are automatically accessible from the office and field.

ServiceTitan pricebooks can be set up in three basic ways:

1. Upload an existing HVAC pricebook to keep using a basic pricebook structure that works, with no need to start over from scratch.

2. Build a pricebook from the ground up. For small businesses, this is a sensible strategy, and our software makes it easy.

3. Opt for our Pricebook Pro catalog. A product upgrade, Pricebook Pro features pre-built, continually managed flat-rate pricebooks. 

To make finding services and items as painless and efficient as possible, HVAC pricebooks can be organized in categories. 

Many ServiceTitan users do so as a function of business units and verticals, as shown in the screenshot below. This can save contractors a lot of time, allowing them to skip the process of searching through lengthy catalogs and inventory lists.  

Many of our users, for example, offer electrical and/or plumbing services in addition to HVAC. By creating individual categories for each vertical—or by dividing pricebooks into residential, commercial, and construction categories—they can make their lives dramatically easier.   

For an in-depth look at how ServiceTitan helps HVAC contractors keep prices up to date in real time with easy-to-use line editing, bulk editing, and dynamic pricing automation features, check out our full article on our HVAC Pricebook functionality.

2. Creating, Presenting, and Following Up on Proposals

Because ServiceTitan seamlessly connects the pricebooks on the platform to estimating and proposal features, Good Better Best proposals are easy to build. 

Using our mobile app—via Android and iOS devices (iPhone, iPad)—field service technicians can build proposals while they’re on site. 

They can do this by selecting items and packages from within your pricebook, or draw on fully customizable templates for recurring services and common projects.  

ServiceTitan allows techs to quickly and easily augment proposals with detailed product descriptions and high-quality photos, giving them all the tools they need to educate homeowners on their service options, packages, and equipment for everything from basic repair jobs to HVAC system replacements. 

Once a proposal has been presented, residential HVAC contractors can follow up to close by leveraging the same follow-up function we described above (which can also be accessed by technicians via their mobile dashboard). 

3. Closing More Big-Ticket Jobs on the Spot with Integrated Customer Financing Options

Once a customer has decided on the option that’s best for them, techs can help them get approved for financing via one of our financing partners on their mobile phone or tablet in just a few swipes. 

With access to financing for big-ticket projects at their fingertips, residential HVAC customers have one less reason to say no to a sale. 

By offering financing plans through ServiceTitan, our users have seen an 11% increase in average ticket price and a 17% jump in overall revenue.  

Transform Your HVAC Proposal Processes with ServiceTitan

We began this post by emphasizing that HVAC proposal apps fall into two basic categories: standalone “point solutions”, and holistic HVAC contractor software. 

As we’ve demonstrated, leveraging a holistic solution like ServiceTitan offers HVAC business owners cutting-edge estimating software that seamlessly connects the proposal process to all of the other core elements of an HVAC business.

In addition to the functionality detailed above, ServiceTitan helps HVAC contractors with myriad other business functions, such as:

• Call booking

• Marketing

• Service agreement memberships

• Payroll and timesheets

• Custom Reporting

• And more

Want to see how ServiceTitan works to streamline your HVAC business operations? Schedule a call to get a live, one-on-one walk-through of the features we describe throughout this article.