The challenges of shoulder season in the HVAC industry are real and varied.
As ServiceTitan Ads Operations Manager Johnny Wenzel said on a recent Webinar: “It’s a desert in the shoulder season, right?”
But every desert also has brilliance, and so it is with HVAC. The shoulder season may at first seem barren and lifeless, until we search for the … umm … “bright” spots. In HVAC for Wenzel, that comes from his approach.
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That was the main message shared during the ServiceTitan Webinar Battle of the Shoulder Season: What Marketers Need to Make the Phones Ring.
Wenzel joined Renee Lenox, Operations and Marketing Administration for Service Specialties Inc. in Chantilly, Va., and Sarah Ghirardo, Senior Marketing Operations Manager at ServiceTitan, to discuss strategies for the shoulder season (and there are many).
This webinar focused on three targeted efforts to generate business in that time when customers don’t know if they have a problem because they haven’t yet turned on their heating or air conditioning units.
“It’s harder to keep busy when it's slow, so you have to work hard,” Lenox said. “And the slower you are, the harder your team needs to grind and work together to fill the schedule. It's easy to fill the schedule when the phones are ringing off the hook.”
The trio recommended three ways to keep the phones ringing.
1. Leverage memberships.
Eventually most customers will need your company’s service, so selling them a membership (along with providing high-quality service) will ensure they remain loyal. To Lenox, the shoulder season is the time to offer unique incentives to employees who sell memberships—be it through a sales goal or by offering a spiff for each membership sold.
“We spiff $10 for each new membership. And then we have a biannual goal for a total number of memberships,” she said. “And that helps to encourage renewals as well, because you want to make sure your renewal rate stays up.”
Though anyone can sell a membership—including techs—the effort to push membership sales is especially true for customer service reps, who speak with more customers than technicians, Lenox said. Service Specialties, which does $8 million in annual business, also asks CSRs to outbound calls for inspections and new memberships, with a goal of 30 per day, more if the phones are not ringing.
The company shoots for a minimum membership retention rate of 85% while seeking new memberships to ensure growth and stability. Using automated information via ServiceTitan’s MarketingPro has proven beneficial.
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“Anything that I can automate where I can focus on other things is always a plus,” Lenox said. “So we will constantly remind our members that they are due for their inspections, whether it's cooling or heating or plumbing, remind them that their membership's coming up for expiration, and offer them specials monthly through MarketingPro as well to make sure that they realize that being a member is an exclusive group.”
Ghirardo emphasized an integrated company approach that starts with what ServiceTitan can offer and flows through sales, scripting, brochures, handouts and pamphlets. Talking about the goal is vital. A members-only page on the website tells those customers that they matter. In these times, a digital membership card that customers can store in their Apple Wallet can be useful, Lenox said.
She also pushes random and friendly interoffice competitions that her employees enjoy. Perhaps the individual who sells the most membership gets a Visa gift card.
“We're definitely not making money off of our memberships,” Lenox said. “But if you look at your data, you see that your membership customers are the ones that are going to spend the most revenue with you.
“There's a lot of reports that you can run in ServiceTitan to see lifetime spend and things of that nature. We want to capture the customer and lock them in, so to speak, as our customer, and give them good benefits and good value of being a member with us.”
2. Revisit open opportunities.
In January of 2021, Lenox and Service Specialists launched a targeted campaign on open water heater estimates. Within a month, they generated almost $10,000 just on that effort.
“It's completely automated (in MarketingPro),” Lenox said. “It's a set-it-and-forget-it type of campaign. And without any extra work we're generating our own revenue, and that's crucial, especially when you get in the busy seasons and you don't have the time to make the phone calls or send out manual emails. This is doing the work for you.”
Ghirardo lauded that effort.
“I think that's a good example of how any type of automation, whether you use it inside of ServiceTitan or another platform, can really help close some of those deals without too much extra work,” she said.
The good-better-best option offered by ServiceTitan gives customers flexibility when making a decision. If technicians can leave a job with three estimates for other work, they are generating potential business opportunities that could be finalized during shoulder season, Ghirardo said.
Another example from Lenox: If the company knows a customer has a furnace that is 15 years old or more, they send an email with a discounted offer.
“Without entering that info into ServiceTitan, you’re missing those opportunities when you need them most, which is during the shoulder season,” she said.
3. Do the math before marketing.
As Ghirardo said: “You want to make data-driven decisions at all points in time.”
Lenox admits that diving into numbers can be intimidating, but the more a company learns, the better it can target marketing. She emphasized that data be entered in a proper and timely manner year-round.
“I always say garbage in, garbage out,” she said. “Monitoring how things are being booked (is important). Are they being booked correctly? Are you using certain features a certain way in order to get the right KPIs? I think for a long time, we had things that weren't being input right. So we weren't able to make the best decisions because they weren't in the right order for us to know what was working and what wasn't.”
ServiceTitan’s Contractor Playbook shows that the average marketing expense to revenue for growth is 7.8%, but in the shoulder season when branding is important that number can increase to 15%, Ghirardo said. Wenzel offered that a marketing budget of 3 to 7% will maintain customers, but an aggressive budget of 7 to 12% can lead to growth.
“The best answer though is getting some really good tracking in place, find out how profitable your marketing is, and then spend as much as you can profitably spend to grow, and as much as you can scale your operations, as well,” Wenzel said.
Don’t forget to prepare when you’re busy
These three approaches to shoulder season can offset the downturn of a slow time, but Lenox points out proper preparation at other times of the year leads to success in the shoulder season.
“I really think the shoulder season is won during the busy season,” Lenox said. “What I mean by that is focusing on all of the little things during the busy season, such as making sure your technicians are leaving estimates. Even though it's busy, we can't skimp out on leaving those estimates, putting them in correctly, making sure you're selling memberships all year round.
“It's really creating those opportunities when you can and trying to stay top of mind to all of your customers when the slower seasons do roll around.”
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