Why HVAC Customers Cancel Memberships (And the One System That Stops It)
Companies with active service agreement programs retain 60 to 80 percent of customers year over year. Companies without them retain somewhere between...
5 min read
A homeowner's air conditioner stops working on a Tuesday afternoon in July. She picks up her phone, searches for HVAC companies nearby, and submits a contact form to the first result that looks credible. Then she waits. Thirty minutes later, she's already on the phone with someone else.
No one at the first company noticed. The lead sat in an inbox. It looked fine on paper: a real person, a real problem, a real job waiting to be booked. What failed wasn't HVAC lead generation. It was everything that happened in the sixty seconds after that form was submitted.
Key Takeaway: In HVAC, the lead that converts is rarely the first one in; it's the first one followed up on.
This is the gap Ryan Fenn has spent the better part of fifteen years studying. Fenn is the founder of Chirp, a follow-up automation platform built for home service companies. Before he built software, he was chasing his own leads on foot, going door to door selling windshield repair out of a $500 startup budget. What he learned then still holds: getting someone's attention is only half the job. The other half is what you do in the next sixty seconds.
How Fast Is Fast Enough for Speed to Lead HVAC Response?
Responding within the first five minutes is not a best practice. It is the threshold at which the math changes entirely.
The foundational research comes from a 2007 study by Dr. James Oldroyd at MIT, conducted in partnership with InsideSales.com. Analyzing more than 15,000 leads across multiple companies, the study found that the odds of contacting a lead drop 100 times when the first call happens at 30 minutes rather than within five minutes, and the odds of qualifying that lead drop 21 times. A follow-up published in Harvard Business Review in March 2011 (Oldroyd, McElheran, and Elkington) extended the analysis to 2,241 U.S. companies and confirmed the pattern: firms that attempted contact within an hour of receiving a web inquiry were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that waited even one additional hour, and more than 60 times as likely as those that waited 24 hours or longer.
Those numbers describe cross-industry behavior. The same MIT/InsideSales research found the average company takes 42 hours to respond to a web lead, and 23 percent never respond at all. For HVAC, where a homeowner's problem is immediate, physical, and often urgent, the window is almost certainly shorter than that.
Fenn's own version of this played out on a baseball field. His son cracked a car windshield. Fenn searched for glass repair, called the first company that came up, and got voicemail. Seconds later, a text arrived: an apology for missing the call and a promise to follow up shortly. That one message was enough to keep him from dialing the next name on the list. That message cost the company nothing. Not having it would have cost them the job.
The HVAC Missed Calls Most Companies Never Think About
Speed to lead solves the first sixty seconds. What happens after that first contact is a separate problem, and it's the one Fenn says most HVAC companies underinvest in.
A homeowner who doesn't convert on the first call is not necessarily a lost sale. Some buyers commit fast. Others shop deliberately, sometimes for a week or more, before making a decision. Staying present during that window, without becoming the company that overdoes it, is what separates businesses with a real HVAC follow-up strategy from those treating follow-up as an afterthought.
Fenn puts the number of touchpoints needed for consistent conversion somewhere between ten and eighteen, spread across texts, calls, and other channels. That figure surprises most contractors, who typically stop after two or three attempts and assume silence means disinterest. The data suggests otherwise.
He described one Chirp customer who had six months of unworked, open estimates sitting in their system. A single re-engagement message brought in fifty thousand dollars in recovered work. The estimates were not dead. They were simply unattended.
What to Actually Say: Tone Is a Technical Problem
The other piece Fenn returns to consistently is less about timing and more about language. A generic "just checking in" message reads as exactly what it is, forgettable and easy to dismiss. What performs better, in his experience, sounds less like a script and more like a text a homeowner might receive from someone they already trust: plainspoken, specific to what was actually discussed, and written in the register of a real person rather than a software field.
The same logic applies across channels. A follow-up text should read like a text between people. A social post should behave like content someone would actually want to see. Neither should sound like a form letter with the homeowner's name inserted into a merge field. The medium is not the message, but it shapes how the message lands.
This is an area where most contractors don't spend much time, and where small adjustments tend to produce disproportionate results. The words a company chooses in its second and third contacts often determine whether it ever gets to a fourth.
Where the Real HVAC Lead Follow-Up Leak Usually Is
None of this is an argument for spending more on lead generation. It's an argument for looking carefully at what happens after the lead arrives, because that's almost always where the actual leak is.
For contractors already using a connected platform like SmartAC to monitor system health between visits, that visibility creates a natural reason to reach out before an estimate goes cold, rather than waiting until after. The follow-up becomes timely and relevant rather than a nudge into a void.
The math on HVAC lead follow-up is not complicated. It just requires treating it as a system, with the same attention given to dispatch or scheduling, rather than something that gets handled whenever someone has time.
Hear the full conversation with Ryan Fenn, including his perspective on AI voice technology and the one metric he believes every HVAC owner should be tracking, on Beyond the Truck Roll.
Beyond the Truck Roll is brought to you by SmartAC. Each episode, we sit down with industry leaders to unpack the strategies, systems, and mindsets that separate the best HVAC companies from everyone else.
FAQ: HVAC Lead Follow-Up
How fast should I follow up with an HVAC lead?
Within five minutes of the initial inquiry, if at all possible. Research from MIT and InsideSales.com found that the odds of contacting a lead drop 100 times when the first call happens at 30 minutes rather than within five. A 2011 Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 U.S. companies confirmed that firms responding within the first hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify a lead than those that waited even one additional hour. For HVAC, where the homeowner's problem is usually immediate, the window is shorter still.
How many follow-up touches does it take to book an HVAC job?
More than most contractors assume. Ryan Fenn, whose platform Chirp works specifically with home service companies, puts the number at somewhere between ten and eighteen contacts across texts, calls, and other channels before a lead converts. Most HVAC companies stop after two or three attempts. The gap between where follow-up stops and where a decision actually gets made is where a significant share of unbooked revenue tends to sit.
What should I say in a follow-up text to a homeowner?
Write it the way you would text someone you already have a relationship with. Reference the specific job, the system, or the conversation you had, rather than sending a generic check-in. A message that reads as human and specific, "Wanted to follow up on the estimate we sent for your Carrier unit on Thursday," will hold attention far longer than one that reads as automated, even if both arrive at the same time. Avoid anything that sounds like a form letter or a sales pitch.
Editor's note: SmartAC works with HVAC contractors to add sensor-and-cloud monitoring on top of the systems they already install and maintain. The goal isn't to replace the maintenance visit. It's to make sure the period between visits stops being invisible.
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