The HVAC business is relatively simple. Your company’s objective is to find customers, solve their problems, and serve them in a capacity in which they will use you again in the future. Herein lies the question and the challenge: How well are you doing at retaining your customers?

The bottom line is that if there is no sale made or no money coming in, there is no company. One thing that seems to elude contractors at times is their ability to ask for the order. In other words, “close the sale.” Years ago I learned to plan your close in advance and build your sales presentation around it.

Not long ago, according to Jack Beers of Metcalfe Heating & AC (Manassas, Va.), contractors all followed the old adage: “If you do a great job, your customer will tell nine people. Do a poor job, and they’ll tell 22 people.” But today, as more and more customers post online reviews, Beers explained, “The difference now is that if you do a poor job, they’ll tell 22 million people.”

The 43rd Annual ACCA Conference and Indoor Air Expo of the Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA) attracted a record number of people to the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center in San Antonio. Attendees were considerably upbeat about the recovery from the recent recession, which had redefined the way organizations have approached business in the last two years.

Does it make a lot of sense for a commercial HVAC contractor, who specializes in rooftop unit service and replacement, to market his wares on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter? If you had suggested this to Jon Lazarus a few years ago, he might have wanted to find a straitjacket for you. But not now.

Selling is - and has always been - a relationship. Yet in a hot economy, when cash is flowing, improvements are incentivized, and home values warranted re-investment, selling was order taking. We got lazy. True sales skills eroded. Case in point, follow up has become nearly nonexistent.

Social media presents two primary choices: get involved or be left behind. Contractors have heatedly debated that statement, along with many other social media topics, for some time. More often than not, however, the argument circles back to social media relevance. With social media being so new, industry relevance is more a matter of opinion that could be argued from both sides.

This article should really be titled “Miracle Closing Technique for the Estimate-Getting Researcher.” As you will read, it’s really not a miracle at all. It’s more common sense. There are many kinds of customers, but the most classic might be the we’re-getting-estimates customer.

What was, isn’t anymore. Why do I begin this article with a completely undiagrammable sentence? Because most things in business now aren’t following diagrams either.

Have you ever told someone something and then thought that you should be telling yourself the same thing?