Who should an HVAC company call first when the phone goes quiet?
Call the people who already know you: agreement customers, past emergency calls, and homeowners who got a replacement quote and never decided. Each of them has already let your company into the house, so a call from you is welcome in a way a stranger's call is not. The work is already sitting in your records. The trouble is that nobody can pull those lists up quickly.
Why start with past customers when the phone goes quiet?
When the weather turns mild in October, plenty of HVAC owners reach for the same fix, which is to spend more on ads and wait for new calls. New customers matter, and ads have their place. The homeowners who already know your company are simply a shorter path to work, because they have met your techs, they have seen your invoice, and they have no reason to doubt you are real.
A quiet week is also the one time of year when your team has room to call people who are not calling you. In July every tech is booked and the office is answering the phone all day. In October the same people can sit down with a list and work through it.
Why are maintenance agreement customers the first list?
Agreement customers have already paid for visits, and many of those visits can be booked into the quiet weeks instead of the rush. A fall tune-up scheduled in October fills a day that would otherwise sit empty, and it keeps the promise you made when the customer signed up.
These are also the customers most likely to say yes to other work. During a tune-up your tech sees the state of the system, and a homeowner who hears about a problem from a tech they already trust is in a good position to decide what to do about it.
Why call homeowners you helped on an emergency?
A homeowner you rescued on a Saturday in August remembers who showed up, at least for a while. That emergency also tells you something about the house. The system that failed once may be older than the owner realized, and the tech who fixed it probably made a note about its age or condition.
Those notes are a list of homeowners who may be thinking about the next step, whether that is a tune-up before winter or a conversation about replacing an aging system. The value of the list depends on whether the notes were written down somewhere the office can find them, or whether they stayed on the back of a work order in a truck.
Why do open replacement quotes belong on the list?
A homeowner who got a replacement quote in the summer and never gave you an answer usually still has the old system. Once the summer heat eased, the pressure went away and the decision slid down the list. That homeowner has not necessarily picked anyone else, and the fall is often when they finally have time to think about it.
Those quotes are part of following up on every inquiry and quote, and they are some of the largest jobs your company has already priced. The article on how long to wait before following up on a quote explains why a quiet homeowner has not said no. The same thinking applies in the slow season for a pool service company, where last year's customers are the first people to call before the next season starts.
What stops an HVAC company from calling these customers?
Usually the lists do not exist in one place. Agreement customers are in a spreadsheet, emergency calls are buried in the job history, and replacement quotes are scattered across email and a folder in the truck. Pulling those together takes an afternoon nobody has, so the quiet week goes by and the calls never get made.
When the owner can pull up each list in a minute, the calls get made in the first quiet week instead of waiting for a slower one that never quite arrives.
What a fix looks like
In an HVAC company that has fixed this, the first mild week of October starts with the office pulling up three lists in a few minutes, each with names, phone numbers, and the tech's notes on the system. The agreement customers due a fall tune-up get booked into the empty days on the board. The homeowner whose replacement quote went quiet in July has had a follow-up reminder on it the whole time, and the family you helped on a Saturday in August has heard from you since, so both of them know the name when the office calls.
The Home Service Guild Marketing Operations System gives HVAC companies follow-up reminders on open quotes, service reminders, and regular notes to past customers, and it connects to Housecall Pro if that is where your job history lives.
Questions owners also ask
Is it pushy to call past customers when business is slow?
No, as long as the call offers something useful, like a tune-up before winter or an answer to a question about an old quote. A customer who has used your company before usually takes the call as a reminder that you are around. It is more likely to feel pushy when it is the first time they have heard from you since the invoice.
What if my company does not have a list of past customers?
You almost certainly have one in pieces, spread across invoices, job history, and your phone's call log. Getting it into one place is the first job, and it pays off every slow season after that. If you use field service software like Jobber or Housecall Pro, much of it is already there.
Should an HVAC company stop advertising in the slow season?
That depends on which ads are bringing in calls, which is hard to judge without tracking them. Some searches keep coming in the fall, like tune-ups and furnace checks, and some ads stop paying for themselves once the weather cools. Knowing which is which lets you decide with real numbers instead of a guess.
Free Facebook and Instagram ads guide
Turn Facebook and Instagram leads into booked jobs.
Eight short chapters, written for home service owners in every trade. Read it on your phone the moment you ask for it.
Send me the free Facebook and Instagram ads guide
