4 HVAC Sales Tips for Competitive Selling (+ Phone Scripts)

Develop your sales strategy

Many HVAC business owners dive head-first into sales without preparation. Some push their technicians and installers to start selling in the field with little to no training.

Avoid this unprofessional approach to sales. It stretches your techs too thin, and inexperienced selling is often aggressive and frustrating to customers.

The most successful HVAC businesses have a careful, detailed sales strategy.

To manage your HVAC sales more effectively, take a few days to develop a sales strategy that outlines your:

• Target market (who you’re selling to)
• Product positioning (how you’ll communicate the value of your HVAC equipment and services)
• Sales targets (concrete goals you’re working towards)

Target market

Have a solid understanding of your target customers and document it. If your HVAC business plan doesn’t outline this already, write out your ideal customer’s age range, average annual income, and the services they usually need.

This information will help you tailor your sales conversations, materials, and the services you offer.

For example, if you’re selling to young new homeowners, you’ll likely want to highlight the energy efficiency and cost-savings your HVAC systems provide.

Product positioning

Plan how you’ll “position” what you offer—that is, how you’ll describe it to your customers—before you create sales materials and train your sales staff.

To figure out the best ways to talk about what you’re selling, assess the unique needs of your area. Are your target customers more concerned with speed of service, energy efficiency, or cost?

For each of your offerings, write out a statement that describes its unique selling point—this should be the benefit that matters most to your target customers.

Bonus tip: Use this product positioning in your HVAC ads and other marketing materials.

Sales targets

Sales targets are specific goals that your sales staff need to achieve within a given time frame.

Setting clear sales targets gives your sales team something to work towards, and it’s how you or your sales manager will measure success.

1. Start by looking at the short- and long-term revenue goals you want to achieve for your business overall.
2. Then, set a target for each individual sales employee, like number of units sold or new contracts signed, that will ensure they meet those goals.

Dave Nichols, a Training Manager at Lennox Industries, suggests you measure an HVAC sales rep’s success by looking at average ticket price, closing rates, and annual sales.

Using those success metrics, here’s what your sales rep targets could look like:

• Sell 12 HVAC systems monthly
• Achieve an average ticket of $10,000
• Sell $64,000 in HVAC systems each month
• Achieve an average closing rate of 75%
• Hit $550,000 in annual sales
• Add $3,000 more revenue by Q3

READ MORE: HVAC business profit margins: 8 ways to improve profitability

Hire comfort advisors

If you have the means to hire, find dedicated sales reps instead of pushing installers and technicians to sell.

While great customer service skills should be in your HVAC technician job description, field techs are usually not experienced in sales.

Put up a job posting for comfort advisors who can sell customers your HVAC solutions while your field team focuses on HVAC work.

Train your team to sell

Create and schedule training sessions that prepare your field techs, installers, and comfort advisors to have effective sales conversations.

In addition to understanding the HVAC services and products you offer, your sales staff should come out of your training program knowing how to:

1. Talk about your products and communicate their value
2. Use consultative sales to solve customer problems with your products
3. Handle common objections from customers
4. Close a sale (get the customer’s approval)

To train your field team and comfort advisors on all of the above, include these sections in your HVAC sales training:

1. Product training

Your techs and installers are already experts in your HVAC solutions. But if you have comfort advisors, you need to get them up to speed.

In your initial training, give your advisors a detailed rundown of all the products and services you offer, plus the product positioning you prepared in your sales strategy.

Then, schedule a “refresher” training session every few months to keep them updated on new products and general knowledge of the HVAC industry.

2. Consultative sales

Consultative sales is a method where the salesperson acts as an advisor, focused on understanding and addressing the specific needs and challenges of the customer.

Instead of pushing a product, consultative selling is about building a relationship and offering tailored solutions.

Train your field team or comfort advisors in these two main components of consultative selling:

• Needs analysis — Asking the right questions to understand customer needs, preferences, and budget constraints.
• Solutioning  — Using your customer’s answers to recommend the best HVAC solution for the customer’s problem.

Use templates for your sales paperwork

Save your sales staff time by preparing templates for your estimates and contracts. As soon as a customer agrees to the sale, it’ll be easy to add their information to a pre-made document and get their signature.

Quote templates

Setting up an HVAC quote template in Jobber takes seconds. Once you’ve added your company contact info, logo, and branding, that will all appear automatically on every quote or proposal.

Customer service phone scripts to improve your HVAC sales

Phone scripts can be a great guide for HVAC technicians and installers to improve their customer service—which helps you and your comfort advisors sell more HVAC work.

Creating scripts for your field techs’ phone calls with customers helps them use the most effective language to gather key information, earn a customer’s trust, and offer additional services.

Before using our phone call scripts, note that these are not for cold calls. The most effective way to sell is by having helpful customer service conversations with existing customers and HVAC leads who have contacted you.

The most important customer phone calls will happen: 

1. After you receive a work request
2. Before a scheduled HVAC repair call
3. After you complete a visit

1. After you receive a work request

Follow up with a customer immediately after they request information or an estimate through your online request form.

Use this sample phone call script to collect information about the customer’s system, book a site visit, and establish that your team is trustworthy.