Need your field technicians to close more HVAC sales? It’s a common dilemma for many HVAC business owners trying to grow their customer base by booking jobs for new HVAC equipment installs and repair work. But without a dedicated sales team to initiate, execute, and follow up on the sales process, HVAC techs often take the lead on informing the customer and closing the deal.
Of course, you want your techs to provide high-quality HVAC services with every customer. But knowing how and when to close a few lucrative installation jobs to boost HVAC sales means both you and your techs get to keep more of that hard-earned cash.
If your HVAC sales need a pick-me-up, it’s probably due to two main reasons:
Technicians are resistant to sales training and prefer not to engage in sales conversations. They’d rather meet the customer’s needs by using their technical know-how to solve the HVAC problem, instead of perfecting a sales pitch.
There’s no well-defined sales process in place—one that effectively enables your team to convert more of the leads you already have to ensure you’re not leaving any money on the table.
Help your service technicians move beyond both pain points—and improve your company's sales process—with ServiceTitan’s HVAC field service management software solution, which empowers techs to increase their average tickets, earn more money, and succeed at selling more jobs.
Increasing HVAC sales doesn’t need to be rocket science. It’s really about educating the customer about their HVAC options and making a real connection.
"Customers aren't looking for a cheesy sales pitch," says Joe Cunningham, an HVAC contractor and founder of the Technical Arts Center in Houston.
They simply want professional-grade help from a trustworthy HVAC service provider, top-notch customer service from a confident and knowledgeable HVAC technician, and multiple options to solve their HVAC problem.
By using a software tool like ServiceTitan, and implementing key improvements to their sales strategy—delegating the right tasks to the right techs, instituting a well-defined framework for sales calls, following up on unsold estimates, and tracking results and leads—many HVAC professionals can increase sales to significantly exceed their old targets and ultimately earn more money.
Ready to learn more? Check out these six ways HVAC service software can boost your HVAC sales process and solve common pain points.
1. Train Your Techs to Become Selling Pros
Boost your team's confidence to sell more jobs by utilizing a business software like ServiceTitan, which equips techs with a mobile app in the field to guide them through the sales process. Armed with complete job and property details, customer histories, as well as a digital pricebook with product photos, descriptions, and pricing, your techs will quickly become selling pros.
Integrated property data gives your HVAC technicians a headstart before they even make it to the customer’s house by providing information on past completed work and key property data like property age and square footage.
At the job site, good-better-best proposal templates allow HVAC technicians to simply drag and drop prebuilt estimates into the three tiers so customers can choose an option that works best for their budget. Estimates automatically factor in the cost of labor, parts, equipment, and installation materials, ensuring accuracy and reducing errors.
For example, techs at Cardinal Plumbing, Heating & Air in Virginia were trained to always present customers with multiple options for each portion of the job estimate.
“They’re required to give the customer a couple of options and educate them,” says owner Nikolai Matveev. “We don’t leave customers in the dark. We want to make sure we’re taking advantage of every call we go to, and that it’s benefiting the customer.”
Presenting the proposal is made easier with ServiceTitan’s presentation mode, which converts the proposal into a polished, customer-friendly interface. With a few taps, the technician simply hands the mobile device to the customer, who can review multiple options, compare value, and read product descriptions—similar to an online shopping experience.
Techs can even add special pricing rules for commercial clients with pre-negotiated rates.
“Once you attach the rate sheet to a specific customer, it only allows those prices to be seen for that customer,” says Vanessa Gonzales, co-owner of Albuquerque Plumbing, Heating and Air, and a ServiceTitan employee. “We don't have to have another person in accounting. We don't need to have another person in commercial to answer these questions for the technicians. It speeds everything up.”
2. Convert Estimates and Book More Jobs, Faster
When an HVAC company responds to a customer's request to repair an air conditioner or test indoor air quality, among other tasks, they need to convert a job estimate as quickly as possible to secure the work. When companies make potential customers wait days, or even weeks, to receive an estimate, the customer typically looks elsewhere.
With ServiceTitan’s Estimate Templates 2.0, your HVAC technicians gain access to a faster, more intuitive solution for building estimate templates. It’s an effective sales tool they can quickly use to present multiple HVAC service options and sell more on every job.
Key features include:
Integration with pricebook: The Estimate Templates’ dynamic fields automatically update as you change your pricebook, eliminating manual work and ensuring pricing stays up to date.
Sell more effectively: Techs can easily select pre-built estimate and proposal templates and add custom good-better-best type labels, saving time and giving customers multiple options.
Instant sign-off: Customers can sign off on an estimate or proposal right from the tech’s mobile device, or quickly receive the estimate via email.
In addition, ServiceTitan’s follow-up tab for unsold estimates helps ensure jobs you’ve bid on don’t fall through the cracks.
Follow-ups should start within 48 hours after delivering the estimate, and not end until you get a yes or no, says Chris Hunter, ServiceTitan Director of Customer Relations, who hosted a webinar on the topic.
“We spend so much money and time and effort to get leads,” Hunter adds. “Leads are hard to get. Be very committed to following up, so you get the job.”
3. Leverage Maintenance Contracts for Year-Round Work
Club memberships, or an annual or monthly preventive maintenance contract, helps the HVAC industry guarantee future billable work in a highly competitive environment.
It’s also a great way to book more time in a customer’s home, build brand loyalty, and give homeowners discounted or exclusive access to your services.
“If you don't have a service agreement or club membership program, it's very hard to schedule and plan for work going forward,” says Chris Hunter, ServiceTitan’s Director of Customer Relations and former owner of Hunter Super Techs. "Every time we sold one club membership, that was four hours of guaranteed future work."
Additional benefits of club membership include:
Monthly maintenance contracts allow techs to regularly check a customer’s HVAC systems and follow up on minor issues before they become expensive problems.
New equipment-based contracts, including those under warranty, ensure scheduled maintenance service to protect the customer's investment and your company’s reputation.
Field service management software helps your techs understand the best way to pitch a service club membership, and gives them mobile technology to make signing up and automating recurring payments quick and easy.
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4. Track Tech Metrics and Reward Top Performers
As an HVAC contractor, you need your field techs, CSRs, and other staff to effectively sell your services to grow your company’s revenue. But if your team lacks motivation to upsell service or—even worse—receives no recognition or performance pay for making a sale, your HVAC service business will lose out on low-hanging revenue.
With ServiceTitan’s field reporting software, including the Technician Scorecard, you can build customized reports and dashboards to track technician performance metrics, such as:
Estimate conversion rate
Average ticket size
Customer satisfaction
Memberships sold
Leads generated
Billable hours
Customer referrals
Club memberships
5-star reviews
Tech-generated leads
Spark some healthy competition by displaying ServiceTitan's Technician Leaderboard metrics in the office to reward top performers and boost sales even further.
When you increase accountability and visibility for every technician and CSR, and also promote some fun competition among your team, it incentivizes employees to go the extra mile, which can enhance the customer experience. Plus, you can use the performance data to inform your bonus structures or or decide when to promote an employee.
5. Use Marketing Pro to Grow Leads — and Revenue
HVAC shops need sales to earn revenue and grow their bottom lines. Marketing serves as the fuel to generate leads and convert them into sales. But without insight into which campaigns or channels drive revenue, investing in marketing feels like flushing money down the drain.
ServiceTitan Marketing Pro, an add-on feature, simplifies marketing efforts by syncing all of your customer data and using automation to optimize and amplify marketing campaigns to increase sales.
ServiceTitan Marketing Pro helps HVAC companies increase sales via:
Email Marketing: Leverage powerful customer data to reach existing customers and generate more opportunities. Target customers via location, home value, or home age, and then automate campaigns with relevant, timely content that resonates.
Direct Mail: Quickly build hyper-targeted postcard campaigns like unsold estimates or annual maintenance, then send postcards to your audience segments. Choose from postcard templates, add your business information, and never make another trip to the post office. Marketing Pro data shows exactly how many calls, booked jobs, and revenue each direct mail send generates.
Reputation Management: Most potential customers conduct Google searches, read online testimonials, seek referrals, and check social media before hiring an HVAC service company. In a highly competitive industry, your HVAC company’s online presence is everything.
Marketing Pro Reputation makes it easy to generate more 5-star reviews by automatically sending a review prompt once the tech closes out the HVAC job. You can monitor and respond to reviews across more than 60 review sites and search engines, including Yelp and Google, from a single ServiceTitan dashboard.
Marketing Pro Reputation also helps manage consistent contact information messaging—including business address and phone number—on business directory listings across multiple webpages. This helps with search engine optimization (SEO), ensuring your HVAC company shows up in a new customer’s Google search. In addition, Marketing Pro offers email marketing and lead-generation tools to support a well-rounded digital marketing strategy.
Ad Performance and Marketing ROI: ServiceTitan’s Marketing Scorecard and digital ads dashboard enable you to quickly monitor and rank your campaigns by revenue, so you know what’s driving service calls, and which ads are wasting marketing dollars. HVAC businesses who use ServiceTitan gain clear ads visibility across all stages of the sales funnel.
Mobile Sales Heat Map: See on a map where your ads are most effective, so you know precisely where to invest your ad dollars, leading to the biggest ROI.
6. Streamline Invoicing and Get Paid Right Away
ServiceTitan's invoicing software automatically populates all project details into the invoice, including parts, hourly rates, project photos, and work order and material changes.
When it comes time to deliver the invoice, your tech can easily send it to the customer via text message or email, and even collect payment before leaving the job.
The invoicing software simplifies processes by automatically syncing with leading accounting software like QuickBooks and Sage Intacct, reducing duplicative entry and minimizing accounting mishaps.
ServiceTitan’s HVAC software connects invoicing with virtually all of your company’s business processes, enabling you to:
Offer digital invoices and estimates with the tap of a button.
Seamlessly export invoices to QuickBooks via a direct integration.
Monitor payments in real-time.
Offer on-the-spot financing from trusted partners.
Accept check and credit card payments in the field.
Track digital marketing campaigns, including email marketing, social media, and eCommerce—from lead to invoice.
To really drive home the value of your work, ServiceTitan’s invoicing software allows you to attach before-and-after photos of the job, and even video, to customer invoices. It’s especially beneficial for commercial jobs or property maintenance contracts, where the owner is often not present.
Heat Up HVAC Service Sales with ServiceTitan
ServiceTitan’s comprehensive software goes beyond optimizing your sales and marketing efforts; it streamlines all aspects of running your service business, from dispatching and scheduling to payroll and lead generation.
Our software solution is the leading HVAC management software for the trades and includes:
Customer portal for easy online booking
On-site quoting, payment processing, job costing, and estimating software
Marketing automation for email marketing and direct mail campaigns
Service agreements, contracts, and inventory management
Digital sales presentations with integrated pricebooks and multiple pricing options
Accounting software integration, including QuickBooks and Sage Intacct
Regular software updates, new features, and functionality improvements
Ready to train your technicians to become expert salespeople and grow your bottom line? Contact our team to schedule a demo today.
ServiceTitan HVAC Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive HVAC business software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and achieve growth. Our award-winning, cloud-based platform is trusted by more than 100,000+ contractors across the country.
