HVAC Marketing, “The Secret Sauce”

by: Michael Glover - Filed under: Marketing

Most contractors have a “Driver Personality Profile”. It takes a driver to make a business successful. One of the traits of this profile is a very short attention span. You get bored easily with things. You are not detail oriented and go from the current big thing to the next big thing driving the business.

You are not the person who will make a great HVAC marketing manager, because marketing HVAC is repetition.
• The best customer is an existing customer. You already have name recognition. They trust you. You must repeatedly communicate with and pamper your existing customers to keep them.
• To get a new customer, you have to put your name in front of them dozens of times. This is repetitive and boring. You typically get tired of the same old message before it has time to work.
• To get a new customer you have to establish trust. How do you establish trust before you have an opportunity to demonstrate your technical skills? You guessed it …repetition.

Your competition thanks you for not recognizing and resolving this problem.

The Secret Sauce

As soon as your company can afford an Opportunity Manager, you need to fill this position. This person is in charge of administering and managing the boring tasks and repetition:
• Customer retention
• New customer acquisition.

The opportunity manager is a people person in charge of HVAC Marketing. They love talking to customers and potential customers. They can perform the same functions day after day as long as other people are involved and as long as they can socialize and communicate. The opportunity manager will manage:
• Service agreement customers and renewals.
• Leads generated by your tune-up specialists.
• Leads generated by service technicians
• Track sales results
• Newsletter
• Social media including Face book and Twitter
• Satisfaction surveys

See the “The HVAC Maintenance Department, “Lead Generation Manifesto” for more on the Opportunity Manager.

HVAC Marketing with Postcards

by: admin - Filed under: Marketing

 Your HVAC Marketing goal is to sell single tune-ups, convert those tune-ups to service agreements and generate replacement leads from the single inspection and service agreement tune-ups.  You will renew 80% to 90% of your service agreements every year by delivering great value.  The life cycle retail value for each tune up you sell is $600 to $700 annual or conservatively $6,000.00 to $7,000.00 over the next 10 years. 

Postcards or direct mail can be divided into three major parts.

•             Design

•             The Offer

•             The Mail List

Design

The design of a postcard overcomes some of the initial challenges of direct mail.  The first challenge is getting the mail opened.  Many marketing pieces go to the trash unopened.  With a postcard, there is no opening required.  The recipient can’t help but see the bright colors of the eye catching headline and graphic.

The second challenge of direct mail is getting the piece read.  Professionals advise that the headline must draw the reader into the first sentence.  The first sentence must set the hook and motivate the reader to read on.  Many readers will skip the body and go to the bottom or PS postscript which is your last chance.

Every postcard should have:

•             An uncluttered bold headline.  Design should direct the reader’s eye directly to this headline first.  Example:  “Is your Air Conditioner Leaking Money?”

•             A picture or graphic that supports the headline. Example: Picture of an electric meter.

•             A Clear font and color that draw your eyes to the headline.

•             Any text should have a heading for ease of reading.

•             Stress benefits over features.  Example:  A benefit is saving money and increasing cooling comfort; the feature would be cleaning a condenser.

•             Create urgency to call now.  Example:  This offer expires this week.

•             Don’t let your company logo overshadow the headline or benefits.

•             Don’t leave the next step to chance.  Tell the reader exactly what to do next.  A call to action.  Example:  “Call today” or “Go to www.xxx.com for more information.”

•             Always include your name or company name, e-mail, return address, phone number and website.  Make sure you have a return address so you get undeliverable cards back.

•             If your call to action advises the customer to go to a website, you will need a landing page that will close the sale.

The Offer

Your offer should result in scheduling a tune-up.  You can sell this tune-up at a significant discount or even give it away.  You can offer utility discounts.  The offer must be attractive and a good offer for the HVAC industry.  A benefit too small or too large and unbelievable will not be effective.  What can you profitably offer to land a customer that will spend $6,000 to $10,000 in the next 10 years with you?

Mailing List

You can purchase a list from a list company or you can have a company specializing in a turnkey solution supply the entire project.  You want to match the demographics of your existing service agreement customers.  A good list company can do this for you.  Demographics are things like income level, marital status, location, value of home, etc.  You want to market to potential customers similar to your existing customers in order to get the best results.

You also want to develop an email list if you don’t have one.  This email list will be used for follow-up accessory and replacement sales.  Delivery cost for email is very low.

The Business Details

How much does it cost?

•             Postcard design:  $100 to $200

•             Full color postcards: $ .05 to $ .07 each

•             Mail list and addressing $.05 each

•             Postage:  $.21 to $.28

•             Web site landing page $300.

This is a business and you want to get a good return on your investment.  You can expect a 1% to 2% response rate.  That means 1 or 2 tune-ups sold for every 100 postcards you mail.  This would represent up to $20,000 in sales over the next 10 years.

You will want to do less of the marketing that doesn’t work and more of the marketing that does work, so you are going to track your results.  You can assign a special code or 800 phone number to each postcard campaign and track the results manually or automate the process in Yodle or Infusionsoft.

You should allow one month from the day you pull the trigger to get started to the day you start seeing results.

Call Sammy at: www.Postcardmania.com for a professional turnkey solution.

Book Review for HVAC Marketing “Who Moved My Cheese?”

by: admin - Filed under: Must Read Business Books

Do you think HVAC Marketing is changing?  Who was it that said the only thing that doesn’t change is the fact that everything is changing?

This is one of those books you should keep in stock. A classic since it rolled off the press in 1998. Hand one to any employee especially those in your HVAC Marketing Department, you see struggling with accepting change.

Some of us are just wired to fight change to the death. Personality profiles show technical people are the most adverse to change. HVAC companies are full of technical people. Do us a favor and help us work through the issues.

The book is a business fable about two mice and two little people and their four reactions to change.

Written by: Spence Johnson

“One Minute Manager” Book Review

by: admin - Filed under: Must Read Business Books, Service Agreements

There are a few books that I consider standard operating policy for my company.
When it comes to management style “One Minute Manager” is the only book you need. 

The days of driving employees to perform have long gone.  Today only motivation and leadership works.  I think Mark Twain said something about “things need to be as simple as possible, but not too simple”.  This book has three simple principals that are proven methods.

We should treat our employees how we would like to be treated.

You can read this simple book in less than a day.  It is written in a story telling format that is entertaining.  You should read this book, practice the principals and give a copy to your managers.

Author, Kenneth Blanchard, Ph.D, has sold more than nine million copies of this book.

Managing and Scheduling HVAC Service Agreements

by: docCool - Filed under: Service Agreements

Those who haven’t started or managed a service agreement program may underestimate the complexities involved in scheduling and managing all the elements.  Things can get out of control quickly.

Companies with under a few hundred service agreements can utilize a manual scheduling system.  The addition of a spreadsheet will also help keep track of history and plan future workload.  It’s a good idea to overdo recordkeeping since each service agreement will represent several thousand dollars in service, repair and replacement revenue over the lifetime of the agreement.

A well designed software solution is the best answer, but if you are setting up a new program for the first time, you can get bogged down learning software.  Defer the software option until you have mastered the other requirements.  Program success will result from developing sales skills and delivering exceptional service.  If you have existing software, use it.  If you don’t have software, use a manual system and get the program up and running before spending six months learning new software.

What you need to know:

  • Number of service agreements.  Measure your growth and success.
  • Number of tune-ups, complete/incomplete.  (Two tune-ups per agreement).
  • Number of tune-ups to be performed each month.
  • Earned revenue.  Recognize revenue only for tune-ups performed.
  • Unearned revenue.  (tune-ups not performed)
  • Details of the equipment covered under each service agreement.

Manual System

If you are marketing single tune-ups as your marketing strategy, you want to convert that tune-up to a service agreement.  Don’t use your single tune-up as the first tune-up of the agreement.  The new service agreement will have two tune-ups and the last tune-up is performed at the end of the service agreement.  This allows your superbly trained PTS to renew the agreement during the second tune-up at the time the agreement is expiring.  You don’t want six months left after the last tune-up, at the end of the agreement.  Their is more urgency on the customers part to renew, since the agreement is expiring.  The PTS will renew many more agreements than a phone call or letter.  The PTS gets a bonus or spiff for each renewal.

Log the new service agreement in your spreadsheet and schedule the next two tune-ups paying close attention to the workload for each month.  You want to balance the workload.  You can use a separate tab on your spreadsheet for each month.

Place a copy of the completed agreement form in a 12 pocket, monthly expanding folder.  File the agreement under the month of the next tune-up.  At the beginning of each month pull the service agreements for that month from the expanding folder. Compare the paper agreements with the spreadsheet, schedule and complete the tune-up and place the copy back in the expanding file for the next tune-up.  Update the spreadsheet log.

If the PTS doesn’t renew the agreement, go visit the customer yourself and find out why.  Determine a countermeasure to be implemented to increase renewals.

General Guidelines:

  • Use the street address for service agreements and service files.  Label files “street name”, “street number”, “City”, “State”, “zip code”.  People move, but the equipment normally stays at the same address.  The service agreement is written for each piece of equipment and is not transferred.  Write a new agreement if your customer moves.
  • Write one agreement for each address, listing all the equipment at that address.

When you get ready to purchase software to manage your service replacement business, check back with us for recommendations.