The one-number quote

You wrote one number on the quote. Sent it before the truck left the driveway. The customer said she would think about it. That was three weeks ago.

The Air Conditioning Contractors of America put out a study this year with Farmington Consulting, the Contractor of the Future report. More than a thousand HVAC contractors filled it out. The number that stopped me: shops that put four or more options on a quote closed 52 percent of the time. Shops that put one, two, or three options closed 42 percent. That is a ten-point gap on the same jobs, in the same market, at the same shops. And only one in ten contractors is doing it.

Same jobs, same market. The proposal with four numbers on it wins ten times out of a hundred more than the one with a single number.

For a long time the one-number quote made sense. Writing four options meant sitting at the kitchen table on a Tuesday night. Fifteen minutes of tier math on a job you had not even won yet. Two of those a night, three nights a week, and you had spent an evening pricing air you might never sell. So you put a number on the page and hit send. The math was rational.

What changed is the fifteen minutes. From the notes on the job (the equipment, the age of the system, the size of the house, the parts you saw on the last visit), four options come back in seconds. Standard install. Better unit. Top tier with the ten-year warranty. A middle option that most customers pick. The owner reads them, tweaks a price, sends the page before the truck rolls into the next driveway. The evening at the kitchen table is not the price of a four-option quote anymore. The four-option quote is the price of about a minute.

None of this is a knock on the shops sending one-number quotes. Most of us learned to quote the way we learned to run the business, in between jobs, from someone older who taught us the old rules were the right rules. They were the right rules. The rules changed.

If your quote today has one number on it and the customer is thinking about it, look at nyva.app and see what four looks like.