With warmer months on the horizon, your HVAC company should be doing everything in its power to reach prospective businesses to help them avoid commercial air-conditioning emergencies. While many small to medium-sized businesses have their own way of getting HVAC leads, some lead generation tactics are more effective than others for long-term success.
With outbound sales development, your HVAC business has the opportunity to find, pitch, and close prospective business. In this blog, we’ll cover the following:
What Is HVAC Sales Lead Generation?
Outbound sales development lead generation (also known as B2B appointment setting) for HVAC companies is when sales development representative (SDR) teams actively reach out and pitch prospective businesses in the sales pipeline. The end goal of pitching leads in the sales pipeline is to schedule a sales meeting between the lead and your internal sales team.
When SDR teams practice HVAC sales lead generation, they often contact leads through cold calling, emailing, and connecting with key decision-makers (KDM) on professional networking platforms like LinkedIn. Actively contacting leads allows SDRs to continue building value on a potential B2B partnership. Even if a lead isn’t ready to schedule a sales appointment yet, at least the SDR can instill top-of-mind awareness and reach back out when they’re toward the end of their buying cycle.
While outbound lead generation is an effective way to generate new business opportunities, it’s not the only way. Many HVAC contractors also implement an inbound marketing strategy to help bring leads to their business. More often than not, inbound marketing is performed as an online marketing strategy, using inbound lead generation tactics like:
- High-quality website design and development
- Search engine optimization (SEO) content
- Organic and paid social media marketing
B2B lead generation is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It requires a thorough understanding of your target market and its buyer personas. While different industries’ lead generation strategy may be different, they have one thing in common—the strategy works best when they implement a variety of business growth tactics.
Best Ways To Get HVAC Leads With Appointment Setting
HVAC leads don’t just appear out of thin air. So, how can you get these prospective businesses into your HVAC sales pipeline? If you want to generate HVAC leads through an outbound appointment setting program, it’s vital that you and your SDR team:
Conduct Market Research
Market research is essential for building an HVAC outbound appointment setting program that yields results. Before your SDR team starts building an HVAC prospect list, they must analyze the current state of the industry and the needs of potential buyers.
Here are some questions to consider when conducting market research:
- Are there any recent advancements to heating and air conditioning units you and your SDRs should be aware of?
- What are HVAC users’ biggest pain points regarding their units?
- Do most commercial businesses rely on in-house technicians or outsource their HVAC services?
- Are most commercial businesses in contracts with HVAC service providers, or do they only contact HVAC businesses when issues arise with their units?
Once you and your SDRs understand the HVAC market you serve, your sales reps have the opportunity to conduct a better pitch and secure more high-quality sales appointments.
Analyze Current HVAC Clients
When it comes to generating HVAC leads, the proof is in the pudding. Analyzing current HVAC clients enables you and your SDR team to understand the buyer personas of potential customers.
Once you understand your current clientele’s buying persona, sales reps can use the right personality and vocabulary in their pitch and assets to pique the interest of potential buyers. Additionally, it allows SDRs to reach HVAC leads through the best platform.
For instance, consider how you get in contact with current HVAC customers. Are they easier to reach over the phone or by email? When you determine the easiest way to get in touch with existing clients, you can use this knowledge to contact HVAC leads, build a B2B relationship with them, and guide them closer to the end of the sales funnel.
When analyzing HVAC clients, discovering the most common key decision-maker for your industry is another thing to consider. What is the most common job title of the decision-makers you work with? C-level executives? Facility managers?
When your SDRs reach out to prospective businesses in the sales pipeline, they can initially ask for these individuals. Even if they aren’t direct decision-makers, at least they can help guide you in the right direction.
Identify Your Ideal HVAC Business Opportunity
To get the best HVAC leads for your company, you must determine your ideal business opportunity. Once you create your picture-perfect dream client, SDRs qualify and chase leads that meet or exceed your expectations.
Every HVAC business has its own idea of what a high-quality lead looks like. However, if you want to see a positive ROI on your HVAC sales lead generation efforts, it’d be ideal to have a minimum sales appointment qualifier of 10,000 square feet of air-conditioned space. This ensures that SDRs only nurture and follow up with leads that would create profitable partnerships for your business.
Nurture High-Quality HVAC Leads
After your SDR team qualifies a business in your HVAC prospect list, they can nurture the relationship with the lead until they’re toward the end of the buyer’s journey.
Lead nurturing is essential for a sustainable HVAC sales lead generation strategy. Since most leads in the sales pipeline aren’t ready to purchase the first call, lead nurturing is vital to build value and establish trust between the KDM and your company.
When nurturing leads in the HVAC sales pipeline, it’s important to know when to follow up and what assets you should give the lead. For instance, if you follow up with a lead too frequently with sales-focused materials, you may scare them off. On the other hand, if your SDRs are too hands-off, you risk missing out on high-quality sales opportunities.
During the lead nurturing process, it’s vital to use a variety of platforms to build brand awareness and establish industry expertise. Since you don’t want SDRs to follow up with HVAC leads too frequently via warm call, it’s essential to include them in a lead nurturing email campaign so they receive relevant content marketing materials. This can include sending blog posts that align with their wants and needs or marketing collateral that guides them down the sales funnel.
Practice a Variety of HVAC Lead Generation Services
As mentioned above, implementing various lead generation practices is crucial for catching the right HVAC leads at the right time. HVAC decision-makers like facility managers often wear many hats since they’re responsible for the overall infrastructure of the commercial space, including the building’s HVAC, roofing, cleaning procedures, and more.
Since facility managers are in charge of so many aspects of the building, they’re typically running around taking care of a variety of business matters, which makes it difficult to reach them over the phone. While a phone call is often the preferred method of communication, it’s not always the most accessible place to reach them. When your SDRs can’t reach them over the phone, have them send out a sales email with your contact information so prospects can reach out when they need a hand with their building’s HVAC units.
While outbound lead generation is an effective way to get HVAC leads, there are additional ways to maximize your business growth efforts. Inbound lead generation for HVAC companies allows intended users to find your business online. When your HVAC company practices online marketing efforts like SEO, the right users can find your business and reach out if they see the value your company offers.
When Should You Consider Outsourcing Outbound Sales Calls for HVAC Lead Generation?
As a growing HVAC company, it can be difficult to dedicate the time and money it takes to build and implement a high-performing sales pipeline. You should consider outsourcing outbound sales calls for HVAC lead generation when:
You Don’t Have the Money or Tools To Find HVAC Prospects
Many small to medium-sized HVAC companies don’t have the financial resources or tools it takes to find high-quality HVAC prospects and convert them into leads. Internal lead generation processes are costly and can negatively impact your company’s bottom line. In addition to the salary of your sales reps, you need to take into account additional expenses like:
- Onboarding
- Ongoing training
- Benefits packages
- Compensation packages
- And more
When you outsource your SDRs, you don’t have to worry about all these additional costs. Additionally, when you outsource, you gain access to a team of high-performing appointment setters for the price of a single internal sales rep.
For an outbound sales development program to be successful, SDR teams must also have various sales tools and technologies to streamline processes and move HVAC leads through the sales funnel. Begin with a CRM platform like Salesforce, because a CRM enables SDR teams to see where each lead is in the sales pipeline. This guarantees they receive the best information for their current stage in the sales cycle.
In addition to a CRM platform, SDR teams need sales tools to help them:
- Automate tedious processes
- Find HVAC prospects
- Effectively communicate
- Organize appointments set
While the sales stack is costly if you practice outbound sales development internally, it also takes a significant amount of time to teach your SDR team how to use each sales software. Outsourcing outbound sales calls ensures that SDRs know how to use the sales stack to your advantage, giving your HVAC company the most bang for your buck.
You’re Not Closing Deals With New HVAC Customers
As a growing HVAC company, your employees have to prioritize what they do best—present customers with high-quality heating and air conditioning services. If you’re not closing deals with new HVAC customers, it may be because your employees don’t have the time to focus on setting high-quality appointments, so they’re accepting any HVAC leads that come their way.
When you outsource SDRs, your internal team members don’t have to worry about prospecting, qualifying, and nurturing sales leads. Since outsourced SDRs prioritize moving leads throughout the sales funnel, all your internal team needs to focus on is crafting the perfect sales presentation to push them closer to signing on the dotted line.
You Don’t Have the Expertise To Help You Grow Your Business
Outbound sales development best practices are changing all the time, and it can be hard to keep up with it all. When you outsource your HVAC sales lead generation efforts, you gain access to a team of SDRs that are consistently trained on the latest best practices of appointment setting.
Outsourcing HVAC lead generation services gives you access to a team of sales and marketing experts who specialize in various roles. An outsourced SDR team often includes the following sales and marketing roles:
- Implementation manager
- Email marketing specialists
- Content creators
- Data and operations analysts
- Sales development representatives
- Sales training specialists
- Quality assurance managers
- Client success managers
- Sales managers
Key Takeaways
Summer is on the horizon, so it’s vital that your company reaches HVAC leads before your competitor does. If you want to effectively pitch your HVAC company’s product and service offerings, it may be in your best interest to invest in an outbound sales development program that yields predictable and sustainable results for the long haul.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, our outsourced sales and marketing experts practice HVAC lead generation services to help growing companies find high-quality leads and set them up with sales appointments that are likely to convert into closed business opportunities.
When you’re ready to generate better HVAC leads and maximize your ROI, contact the sales reps at Abstrakt Marketing Group!
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