Your number in a minute
Same three inputs as the full HVAC calculator — they update live as you type.
Total new leads that hit your CRM in a typical month.
How many minutes it usually takes your team to send the first reply.
What a typical booked job is worth, in dollars.
Revenue left on the table each month
Updates live as you type · 182 lost leads/month
Every after-hours ring is a four-figure job you didn't book
Most HVAC owners don't think about their phone ringing as a sales funnel — but it is. A no-heat call in January, a no-cool call in July, a water-heater swap on a Sunday afternoon: each one is a four-figure ticket, and each one is also the lead most likely to go to whoever picks up first. When the call rolls to voicemail and the callback comes the next morning, the lead has usually already Googled a competitor and booked them.
The fix is unglamorous and it works: a missed-call text-back that fires inside seconds, from a number tied to your business. The lead gets a friendly text asking what they need and offering to book. Most operators recover the majority of those after-hours calls within the first month, and what does not book there is handed to a human on the morning shift instead of disappearing into the inbox.
Five minutes vs one hour — the curve is steep
Inside-sales research has held the same shape for a decade: a lead contacted within five minutes is roughly twenty times more likely to qualify than one contacted at the one-hour mark. Below five minutes the line is essentially flat. Above it, conversion falls off a cliff — and by sixty minutes it is effectively zero. The math is the math whether you sell software or service calls.
For an HVAC shop that means every minute between 'new lead in the CRM' and 'first SMS or email reply' is leaving dollars on the table. Plug your three numbers into the calculator below and you can see exactly how much that minute-by-minute decay costs your business in a typical month — it is the same curve that powers the full /calculator, just on one screen.
The second leak — old quotes that never got a re-touch
The voicemail you missed last summer is not a lost cause. Neither is the quote you sent in October that the homeowner never replied to. These leads already qualified once — they raised their hand, they had a real problem, and they had the budget to fix it. The only reason they went cold is that nobody followed up. A polite, well-timed re-engagement sequence over SMS and email recovers roughly 8–15% of that list on the first pass, which usually pays for the year in the first month.
The mistake most shops make is treating re-engagement as a separate project they will run 'next quarter.' In practice it should be a quiet background process: every lead that ages past thirty days without a reply enters a short, friendly drip, and a weekly Monday report tells the owner how many came back and what they were worth.
What it adds up to in dollars
A typical residential HVAC operator runs about 200–300 new leads a month, takes 30–60 minutes to reply on a good day, and books jobs in the $1,000–$1,500 range. With those three numbers the calculator below lands somewhere between $7,000 and $20,000 in lost revenue per month, and that is just the first-reply leak. Add the dormant-lead leak on top and the real number is higher.
The point of the calculator is not the number itself — it is making the cost visible to a team that has been absorbing it quietly. Once it shows up on a slide at the Monday meeting, nobody argues about whether a faster reply is worth it. The argument becomes how to fund it.
The Warmback playbook
Warmback is built around four habits, in this order: reply to every new lead in under 60 seconds, around the clock; fire a missed-call text-back from a number tied to your business the moment a call rolls over; re-touch every dormant CRM lead on a steady cadence; and ship a short Monday morning summary with the four numbers an owner actually cares about — leads captured, leads recovered, jobs booked, dollars influenced.
None of that is a feature wall — it is the boring end of the funnel, run consistently. Most operators see the first-reply leak close inside a week and the dormant-lead leak start paying back inside a month. Book a call at the bottom of the page if you want a 15-minute walk-through on your own numbers.
Stop paying for the same lead twice.
Book a 15-minute call or run your numbers through the full HVAC calculator.