$1,187,878 Closed by an HVAC Contractor From 407 Appointments

Last updated: October 15, 2026

• $1,187,878 closed by the contractor
• 407 appointments set
• 44 closed agreements
• $6,194 median agreement

Client

Client name withheld (commercial HVAC contractor, founded 1953)

Industry

Commercial HVAC and mechanical service

Market

Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN

Program

Outbound BDR

Program length

8+ years

Who we set appointments with

Maintenance managers, chief operating engineers, purchasing and procurement leads, facility directors and facility managers

Channels

Phone, email, LinkedIn and direct mail

A good name in town, and agreements that rarely come open

This contractor has done commercial mechanical work in greater Cincinnati since 1953. Decades in one market bring referrals. They do not bring a steady flow of new maintenance agreements, because those only change hands at certain moments.

A contract comes up for renewal. The relationship with the incumbent goes sour. A building is sold, or a new tenant moves in with equipment nobody planned for. None of that is visible from the parking lot. A facility whose agreement expires in four months looks the same from outside as one that just renewed.

Finding those moments means asking, quarter after quarter, across hundreds of buildings. That is the work the contractor handed to Abstrakt.

How the program was set up

Four channels work one target list: phone, email, LinkedIn and direct mail. The same team of Abstrakt business development reps runs all four, with the same message. The list was built for the Cincinnati market and narrowed to commercial and industrial buildings with mechanical systems worth maintaining.

Before an appointment is set, the rep confirms the details that make the meeting worth the contractor’s time:

• Who controls the vendor choice, and who signs the agreement
• Conditioned square footage and the equipment on site
• Who handles maintenance today, and what is done in house
• When the current agreement expires
• How vendors get picked

Prospects often guess low on size. One buyer put a site at a little over 15,000 square feet of conditioned space. Across all its buildings, it turned out to be well over 100,000.

Most facilities already have somebody. Those accounts move into a quarterly follow-up, so the contractor is a known name in the quarter when that changes.

Who picked up, and who signed

The person who controls a maintenance agreement is rarely the one a directory lists. At a chemical plant, the maintenance manager knows the equipment, but procurement signs. At a downtown high rise, the chief operating engineer knows every RTU and the cooling tower, while the property manager may work at a brokerage across town. At one manufacturer, the maintenance manager spent the day moving between three buildings.

Reaching the right person is the first job. Reaching them in the months before an agreement comes open, while there is still time to be considered, is the harder one.

The buyers on this program cover a wide spread of the local economy: manufacturing, higher education, nonprofits, a seminary, beverage bottling, senior care, behavioral health, commercial real estate and a restaurant.

Three agreements and how each one opened

The plant that took months, then named the buyer

The early notes on this account read like a wall. A phone that rang out. A call routed to security. Four months of voicemails with no reply. At one point a rep checked the property on satellite images and could not spot a single rooftop unit.

Then the maintenance manager answered by email. They were looking for new HVAC companies, but the site was closed to visitors at the time, so they offered to meet off site or wait.

Months later, that manager did something worth more than a meeting. They named the person who actually decides. That contact confirmed final say on vendors and contracts, said an incumbent held the preventive maintenance work, and said bids and reevaluations were planned for later that year. They wanted to understand the contractor’s capabilities before that started. Abstrakt set the appointment as a phone meeting, since the contact was working from home.

The contractor closed a $350,370 agreement, the largest on the program, from an appointment set months before the bid existed.

The maintenance manager with no voicemail

Seven attempts, and the maintenance manager was never free. In the warehouse. In another building. At lunch, twice. There was no voicemail box to leave a message in. Nearly a year in, a front-desk contact gave the rep a cell number.

It was worth the wait. The company outsourced HVAC maintenance and reviewed pricing and service regularly. It had 100,000 square feet of conditioned space and no preventive maintenance agreement at all. The manager and their team would decide within eight months.

One more detail from the record. The prospect asked if the contractor also did plumbing, and the rep said yes. The rep then called back, apologized, explained that this location offers HVAC service only, and asked whether the prospect still wanted to meet. They did.

The contractor closed that agreement, and it became one of the longest-running relationships on the program.

The building nobody could name a manager for

Two reps got an automated message about high call volume. A front-desk contact hung up. Another had no idea what the caller meant. Nobody on site could say who managed the property.

A rep read the sign on the building, which had a phone number. That number reached a brokerage office. The office could not name the property manager either, but it did have a cell number for the chief operating engineer.

The engineer answered and laid out the building: 380,000 square feet, most maintenance done in house, two buildings on water source heat pumps, other work split between two other contractors, and three RTUs, one of them a tenant’s. The opening was a data center tenant on the eighteenth floor whose preventive maintenance agreement expired at year end, and whose relationship with the incumbent was slipping over communication and response time.

The first agreement the contractor closed there was $15,197. The property shows up in the closed record more than once.

Eight years in figures

Measure	Result	Note
Appointments set by Abstrakt	407	Across phone, email, LinkedIn and direct mail
Agreements closed by the contractor	44	From appointments Abstrakt set
Total closed	$1,187,878	Closed work only; no open bids included
Largest agreement	$350,370	Plant account, set before the bid opened
Second largest agreement	$219,600	One of two large anchor accounts
Median agreement	$6,194	Half the agreements are above this, half below
Program length	8+ years	More than eight years of continuous outbound

The median says the most about this program. Most of these 44 agreements are maintenance work, and roughly half the closed record is marked recurring. Two large agreements sit on top of a broad base of smaller ones. Results depend on the market and the company.

Why the approach fits a service contractor

A maintenance agreement usually gets a fresh look only when it expires, and many buildings keep the same one for years. So the useful work is steady contact over a long stretch, with the details logged each time: who holds the current agreement, when it ends, and whether the facility manager is happy with the response time.

When one of those answers changes, the contractor is already known. Its technicians and estimators handle the meeting, the walkthrough and the price. Abstrakt keeps finding the next building where the incumbent is about to be replaced.

Questions HVAC contractors ask about outbound appointment setting

Does outbound appointment setting work for HVAC maintenance agreements?

It did for this contractor. Over more than eight years, Abstrakt set 407 appointments, and the contractor closed 44 agreements from them. The median agreement was $6,194, and roughly half of the closed record is recurring maintenance work.

Who do you set HVAC service appointments with?

Maintenance managers, chief operating engineers, purchasing and procurement leads, facility directors and facility managers. At a plant, the maintenance manager may know the equipment while procurement signs. At a managed high rise, the chief operating engineer may be on site while the property manager works somewhere else.

How long does it take to reach a facility manager by phone?

Sometimes a long time. One maintenance manager on this program took seven attempts and nearly a year before a front-desk contact gave out a cell number. Another account took months of unreturned voicemails before the maintenance manager replied by email.

What does a large commercial HVAC agreement from outbound look like?

The largest on this program was $350,370. A maintenance manager named the person with final say on vendors, who confirmed an incumbent held the work and that bids were coming. Abstrakt set a phone meeting months before the bid opened.

What should be confirmed before an HVAC service appointment is set?

On this program, the rep confirmed who controls the vendor choice, the conditioned square footage, the equipment on site, who handles maintenance today, when the current agreement expires and how vendors get picked. A building with no agreement in place is a different meeting from one whose agreement ends in a few months, and the contractor walks in knowing which one it is.

About the client

The client is a commercial HVAC and mechanical contractor serving greater Cincinnati, founded in 1953. It has run an Abstrakt Outbound BDR program for more than eight years. Its name is withheld.