The HVAC Shop That Found Replace Quotes Closed at 41% and Repair Quotes at 68%

An 8-truck Texas HVAC shop had a blended close rate of 52% and a nagging sense that the number was hiding something. Techs were quoting roughly 180 jobs a month between them. The owner had bonus structures tied to the overall close rate. The bonus math worked. The revenue math did not.

Three techs were pulling down quarterly bonuses. Two others barely missed every quarter. The shop's replacement revenue was down 14% year over year. Service-call revenue was up 9%. The owner could not figure out why, because he was looking at one average.

He pulled three months of quotes and split them by type. Repair quotes closed at 68%. Replacement quotes closed at 41%. The 52% blended number was the weighted average of two completely different sales conversations.

The spreadsheet before the split

The shop ran on ServiceTitan. The reports the owner looked at every Monday showed quoted dollars, closed dollars, and close rate by tech. One number per tech, rolled across every kind of job.

What the report did not separate was repair jobs from replace jobs. In HVAC, those are two businesses. A $640 capacitor and contactor job closes fast because the unit is dead and the homeowner wants AC back by dinner. A $14,200 system replacement closes slowly because it is a four-figure decision and the homeowner wants a second opinion, financing options, and a conversation with a spouse.

Lumping them into a single close rate produced a bonus structure that rewarded techs for running up repair numbers while quietly punishing the one tech on the team who specialized in replacement conversions. He quoted fewer jobs because each replacement walkthrough took 90 minutes. His close rate on those jobs was 58%. The blended math made him look like the worst closer on the roster.

The service call that broke the spreadsheet

A 22-year-old condenser went down in July on a $2M custom home in North Dallas. The tech ran diagnostics, found a failed compressor, and quoted two options. A $3,400 compressor replacement with no warranty on the rest of the unit, or an $18,800 full system replacement with 10-year parts and labor.

The homeowner picked the $3,400 repair. The tech closed the repair that afternoon and logged it as a win. On paper, close rate went up.

Four months later, the same homeowner called a different HVAC company for a full replacement. The compressor repair had died in October. The shop lost a $18,800 job because its bonus structure did not reward replacement conversions, and the tech took the easier close.

Text Sully: close rate on repair quotes vs replace quotes last 90 days by tech?

What the split showed

The owner pulled the trailing 90 days and broke close rate out by quote type.

Repair quotes. 68% average close rate. Spread across five techs of 62% to 74%. A tight 12-point spread. The shop was good at repair.

Replacement quotes. 41% average close rate. Spread of 28% to 58%. A 30-point spread across the same five techs. Three techs closed replacement under 35%. One tech closed replacement at 58%. The bonus structure treated them identically.

ServiceTitan's own guidance, consistent with the Fall 2025 Benchmark Report highlighting a $300B+ deferred-maintenance backlog, has been pointing at Good-Better-Best presentations with financing as the lever. Shops that present three tiers on replacement quotes see close rates 30% higher than shops presenting a single price.

Text Sully: show me techs with over 60% close on repair and under 35% on replace?

The tech who closed replacement at 58%

The tech who anchored the replacement number was 47 years old with 21 years in the trade. He did not sell the hardest. He asked the best questions.

On a ride-along, the owner noticed what was different. The tech did not quote on the first visit. He did a 25-minute system health review, handed the homeowner a printed report, and booked a 48-hour callback to present three options. Every proposal had financing disclosed on page one. Every one included a 10-year parts and labor warranty as the top tier.

The other four techs quoted on the spot, gave one or two options, and waited for the homeowner to decide. Their close rate reflected that. The tech who treated replacement as a two-visit, three-option conversation was closing it at nearly twice the rate of the tech who treated it like a repair.

John Wilson on the Owned and Operated podcast has said full system evaluations boost close rate, and most techs miss the real root cause of a homeowner's problem. He keeps coming back to the point that sales solve almost everything in this industry. The Texas shop's replacement winner was doing exactly that on every home.

Text Sully: average time between quote sent and replacement job closed last 60 days?

What the maintenance plan data added

The owner pulled one more filter. Close rate on replacement quotes where the customer was on an active maintenance plan, versus cold replacement quotes.

Maintenance plan customers closed replacement at 67%. Cold replacement quotes closed at 28%. A customer on a service agreement was 2.4x more likely to buy a replacement from the same shop. This is consistent with industry analysis showing maintenance plans produce far higher replacement capture because the relationship already exists.

The shop's maintenance plan attach rate on service calls was 18%. Peterman Brothers, the Indianapolis HVAC and plumbing shop that grew from $15M in 2018 to $90M in 2022 using ServiceTitan and AI call handling, runs an attach-rate playbook that has pushed their booking rate at peak demand to 67-85%. The lesson was that every service call was a replacement lead in waiting, if the attach happened.

The bonus structure that got rewritten

The owner rebuilt the bonus plan over a single weekend with a spreadsheet and his ops manager. Three changes.

Replacement close rate became its own bonus line, separate from repair close rate. Techs could now earn on replacement performance without their repair numbers masking a weak replacement conversation.

Maintenance plan attach rate on service calls became a second bonus line. Every attach added dollars. Every missed attach showed up on the weekly scorecard.

Time-to-quote on replacement was capped. Same-day quotes on replacement got a different multiplier than quotes delivered the next day. This was not arbitrary. Hatch data shows engagement on follow-ups drops sharply after 48 hours, and contractors are 21x more likely to close when they respond within 5 minutes versus 30 on new leads.

Text Sully: maintenance plan attach rate by tech last 30 days?

The 90-day results

Replacement close rate moved from 41% to 54% across the team over a single quarter. The tech who was closing at 58% pulled his number up to 63% because the bonus now rewarded the slower, two-visit motion he was already running.

Maintenance plan attach rate on service calls moved from 18% to 34%. Future replacement volume grew accordingly.

Blended close rate actually went down from 52% to 50% because the shop was now quoting more large-ticket replacements, which close at a lower rate by nature. Gross margin dollars, the number that actually funds the business, grew 22% over the same quarter the year before.

The owner added three lines to his morning brief. Repair close rate yesterday. Replacement close rate trailing 7 days. Maintenance plan attach rate trailing 7 days.

Text Sully: are there any replace quotes over $10K aging more than 4 days?

What this means for your shop

Repair and replacement are two businesses. Running them on one close rate is the same as running two trucks on one odometer. The average tells you nothing about either.

Split replacement close rate out and measure it on its own. Measure maintenance plan attach separately. Tie bonus dollars to each line independently. The techs who close replacement well are usually not the fastest quoters. They are the ones who slow down enough to make a $15,000 decision feel safe.

Peterman Brothers proved what the top end of this system looks like at scale. Smaller shops can hit the same pattern with a $0 software change and one weekend of rewriting bonus math. Read AI agents for HVAC contractors and HVAC KPIs every owner should track for the broader measurement stack.

The HVAC shops growing through 2027 are the ones whose owners can answer "what is my replace close rate this week" from a text thread. If the answer requires opening ServiceTitan, the answer is not going to come fast enough to matter.

Sources

• Fall 2025 Benchmark Report, ServiceTitan
• HVAC Replacement Guidelines Chapter 9, ServiceTitan Contractor Playbook
• Paying it forward, Peterman Brothers success story, ServiceTitan
• HVAC Estimate Follow-Up Response Rates, Hatch
• Owned and Operated podcast, John Wilson and Jack Carr
• Home Services Call Conversion Benchmarks Report 2025, Invoca