Before you buy more leads, count the ones you left open

Stop buying demand you already paid for

Written by Warren Sukernek, a Passionfruit Partner. Sukernek, the principal of HVAC Fractional,  provides marketing strategies that optimize customer bookings and grow revenue to  HVAC operators. With Pip from Passionfruit we can show you exactly where booked work is stalling. 

Heating season is here, and most HVAC operators are about to spend more on ads. But the fastest revenue usually isn't new demand. Your next ten installs may already be in your CRM, sitting in replacement estimates from the last 60 days that nobody followed up on.

This piece is for owners and senior operators of $10M–$50M HVAC and home-services businesses, and it walks through the problem in six parts: 

1. What's really happening in your pipeline (The Signal) 
2. A ten-day sprint to recover those estimates (Operator Play) 
3. How it plays out with real homeowners (In the Wild) 
4. How to measure it (Tools & Tactics)
5. What leadership should be asking (The Boardroom)
6. How AI takes the heavy lifting off your team.

1. The Signal

The cheapest lead is the one you already have

If you run a $20M HVAC company, ask your team how many replacement estimates from the last 60 days still have no clear outcome.

Then ask how many have a named owner and a scheduled next conversation.

The difference deserves your attention before you approve next month's ad budget. Run the illustrative maths: 100 stalled estimates at a 10% win rate and a $12,000 average job is $120,000 in revenue, and roughly $48,000 in gross profit, from demand you've already paid to generate.

An open estimate can mean several things. The homeowner is comparing options. The timing is wrong. Financing is unresolved. Someone else got the job. Or nobody on your team followed up after the first attempt.

Those are different problems. A CRM status that says "open" tells you very little about which one you have.

From my experience in B2B SaaS, where every opportunity is tracked through stages, a deal doesn't just disappear. HVAC has the same high-value purchase consideration, but it rarely runs with the same pipeline discipline and CRM hygiene, and that is exactly where the easy revenue hides.

For operators heading into heating season, the immediate opportunity is to find the households that still need help and give them a useful reason to talk.

The goal is completed work at an acceptable margin. Stop buying demand you already paid for, and start with what's sitting in your pipeline.

2. Operator Play

Run a ten-day estimate recovery sprint

Choose one branch and one job category. Pull estimates issued 15–60 days ago. Start with a group small enough that your team can review every record.

Days 1–2: Find out what is actually open. Remove duplicates, completed jobs and known losses. Check the original concern, proposed work, last conversation and available installation capacity. Separate "not reached" from "not ready." Assign an owner to every remaining estimate. (If this step sounds like two days of spreadsheet work, see Section 6.)

Days 3–5: Reopen the conversation. Have the advisor contact the homeowner with context. "When we met, you were concerned about the furnace making it through another winter. Have you decided what you want to do?" is more useful than "Just checking in on your quote."

Ask what is holding up the decision. Record the answer. Price, timing, scope confusion and a competing proposal each need a different response.

Days 6–8: Resolve the actual obstacle. Clarify the recommendation. Revisit an option. Explain available payment choices accurately. Offer a real installation date when dispatch can support it. Keep automated reminders coordinated with the advisor so the customer does not receive conflicting messages.

Days 9–10: Close the loop. Every record gets an outcome: won, lost with a reason, or deferred with an agreed next date. Stop treating silence as an indefinite pipeline stage.

Do not lead with a blanket discount. You need to learn why the work stalled before deciding whether price is the answer.

At the review, bring booked jobs, completed jobs, realized revenue, gross profit and the labor spent on the sprint. Keep future installations separate from work already completed.

3. In the Wild

Win-back campaigns: homeowners are being reminded. Can your team respond?

This time of year, seasonal maintenance and "is it too late?" content is everywhere (like this article in The Spruce), but more reminders are not evidence of a surge in local demand.

The useful operator question is what happens when that reminder reaches a homeowner who already has your estimate.

Can they reply to the original email and reach the advisor? Can the person answering the phone see the recommendation? Can anyone tell them when the work could actually happen?

A seasonal campaign can bring a customer back into the process. An awkward handoff can lose them again.

In SaaS, new leads get a defined cadence: several touches in the first week, every stage tracked in the CRM, and one named owner. You don't need to copy the cadence, but the explicit ownership and visibility are worth borrowing.

For older estimates, adapt the cadence to the customer's history and preferences. A homeowner who asked you to reconnect in November should receive a different message from someone who never received a clear explanation of the proposal.

Before sending the next heating-season email, have someone on your leadership team walk through the return path using an internal test record. Reply to the estimate. Call the office. Ask about the next step.

You are checking whether the customer can resume a conversation without starting over.

4. Tools & Tactics

Build a scorecard that makes neglect visible

Use your existing CRM or a shared worksheet. You need six fields for each estimate: branch, advisor, estimate date and value, customer's stated obstacle, last meaningful contact, and next action with a due date.

"Email sent" is an activity. "Customer wants an installation after November 5" is information you can act on.

Review these five measures during the sprint:

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Keep the starting group fixed. Otherwise, adding fresh estimates halfway through makes the result hard to interpret.

Some customers would have bought without the sprint. Call the result revenue from the contacted group until you have evidence of incremental lift. If volume permits, stagger outreach across comparable groups and compare outcomes over the same period.

That distinction matters when you decide whether to expand the program.

5. The Boardroom

Who owns the revenue between the lead and the invoice?

Your agency can generate an inquiry. Your call center can book an appointment. Your advisor can produce an estimate.

Marketing is accountable for what happens across all three.

For a business with multiple branches, this is where a company-wide number can conceal very different operating habits. One branch follows up consistently. Another relies on whichever advisor has time. Both appear in the same monthly revenue total.

With the right tools and strategy in place, marketers can tell a complete story of these patterns across the business, and what step to take next. They should ask essential questions like: 

• How much of the open pipeline was still a real opportunity?
• Which customer obstacles came up repeatedly?
• Where did follow-up fail because ownership was unclear?
• Could operations deliver the work at the promised time and margin?

If the main obstacle is an unclear proposal, fix the proposal. If it is installation availability, coordinate the offer with dispatch. If nobody owns the next conversation, assigning another agency will not solve it.

This is part of the marketing leadership job: connecting the money spent to the work booked, completed and retained at a healthy margin.

6. How AI changes this

The same sprint, without the spreadsheet

Running the sprint once is the easy part. Making it standard practice, across hundreds of estimates and several branches while advisors are busy, is where it usually falls apart.

This is where Pip by Passionfruit helps. Pip connects to your CRM, your marketing platforms and your sales and call center data, so the campaign  builds itself:

• Find what's actually open. Pip pulls estimate date, value, branch, advisor and last contact for every record and flags the ones with no next action, so day 1–2 work takes minutes.
• Reach out with context, at scale. Pip uses what's in each record to draft follow-ups that reference the homeowner's actual concern, so Customer A doesn't get the same email as Customer B. As soon as a customer replies, that message goes straight into sales’ inbox to engage.
• See it by branch. Conversations, won jobs and revenue from the contacted group are broken out by branch and advisor, ready for the leadership meeting.
• Connect spend to booked work. Because Pip also sees your ad platforms, you can compare recovered revenue against what you'd spend to generate the same jobs from new demand.

So before approving more lead volume, ask how many open estimates have no next action.

Your next ten installs are probably sitting inside lists you already have. That is a useful place to start next month’s growth conversation.

This article was featured in Operator Signal, a weekly newsletter written for HVAC Operators. To read more, please subscribe.