When the off-season hits, your biggest wish is to get more clients. You know that come summertime, your phone will be ringing off the hook with clients—new and old! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could serve some of those clients right now? You can, by selling HVAC preventive maintenance.
Preventive maintenance is the practice of performing routine checks on equipment before the equipment fails. Examples of preventative maintenance include:
- Checking duct system condition
- Checking fuel line connections
- Cleaning and inspecting the evaporator and condenser coils for dirt and other obstructions
- Inspecting fans, bearings, and belts for tightness and wear
- Cleaning or replacing filters
- Replacing any worn pulleys and belts
These are all things that your clients will not think to check or have the know-how to understand. But by checking and replacing these things, you can prevent HVAC equipment failure, which usually happens when your clients begin increasing their usage of their air-conditioning unit during the summer months.
By marketing and selling preventive maintenance to your current clients, you can increase your revenue during the HVAC off-season and enable your business to handle more new clients come the summer months.
How to Market Preventative Maintenance for an HVAC Business
There are many ways to market and sell preventive maintenance to customers. For example, your business can sell HVAC preventive maintenance memberships or service plans, which can guarantee that your business has consistent revenue in the slow months. Such plans are usually an easy sell because most customers agree that HVAC equipment should receive an inspection at least once a year.
When marketing the benefits of your preventive maintenance plan or membership, you can explain to customers how such a plan will:
- Save them money: By servicing their equipment before failure, your customers will not have to pay the high up-front costs. Anyone would rather pay a low bill now than pay a high bill in the middle of the summer when their cool air stops blowing.
- Eliminate surprises: No one likes turning on the AC to find out that it’s blowing hot air!
- Guarantee that their HVAC equipment stays in good condition: HVAC units are expensive to begin with, so your customers will appreciate a service that ensures that their system works consistently and productively.
The service plan that your business creates can include routine checks during the spring and fall months. This will allow your business to continue thriving in both HVAC off-seasons and will allow for success all year. You can also gear up your marketing efforts during the spring and fall, which are the seasons preluding the busiest times for HVAC businesses.
Keep in mind that with the right HVAC sales techniques, you may experience an influx of calls to your business. Be sure that your dispatchers and receptionists have an effective way to answer and manage these calls, such as an HVAC call script.
HVAC Sales and Marketing Techniques and Tips
In order to maximize your marketing efforts, be sure to share your preventive maintenance plan on your business’s social media accounts and website.
If you keep an up-to-date page, Facebook is the perfect place to let your customers know about your preventive maintenance offers. To learn more about the benefits of social media marketing for your HVAC business, read “Social Media Marketing for an HVAC Business.”
Once you have successfully marketed your preventive maintenance plan to your current clients during the HVAC off-season, you will have more availability during your busy months.
Whether this be the summertime, when you receive emergency calls for cooling systems, or the wintertime, when you receive emergency calls for heating systems, your business will receive fewer emergency calls from your current customers, which will leave more time and availability for emergency calls from new clients, which will help grow your business.
How Will Marketing Affect My HVAC Business?
With any form of marketing, you should expect to receive at least some kind of customer response. This will usually come in the form of phone calls, but it can also occur through your social media accounts or website.
Once you’ve spent time and money marketing during your off-season, you don’t want to lose any new leads or contacts. However, if your marketing spawns an unusually high call influx, your business may not be able to answer all the calls. Missing calls in any industry is undesirable, especially in the HVAC industry.
Tip: Learn how to handle overflow calls and website visitors after marketing in “Marketing an HVAC Business in the 2020 Off-Seasons.”
Preparing for Call Overflow
Callers who don’t get into contact with your business are not likely to leave a voicemail. Instead, they usually call your competition.
In order to make sure that your marketing efforts don’t go to waste, make sure that your staff is ready to handle the influx of business. Depending on your business, this could mean hiring an additional receptionist or working with an HVAC answering service.
Hiring additional staff will come with increased payroll costs as well as training, which may become more of a hassle than a benefit if you need your staff to immediately be ready to handle your current and potential customers.
If money and time are of the essence, you may consider hiring a 24/7 call answering service to handle your increased calls. A professional answering service can guarantee that all of your calls will be answered, and it can also help sell additional HVAC services so that none of your potential clients are lost and you are maximizing your sales opportunities. Some answering companies can even work with your HVAC business software and help with HVAC scheduling and dispatching.
Key Points
Once you have marketed preventive maintenance to your current customers, your HVAC business will soon have the benefit of serving current clients in the off-season and new clients in the busy summer and winter months.
Prepare for this by:
- Adding to your staff or working with an answering service to help manage an influx of calls or even help with your HVAC scheduling and dispatching
- Downloading the HVAC incoming call script below to help answer calls quickly and effectively
