How to automate baseline sales operations for an HVAC business.

The problem most HVAC businesses share

A typical HVAC business with five to twenty engineers runs its sales operation on a combination of mobile phones, email chains and someone's memory. Enquiries come in through multiple channels — phone, website form, word of mouth — and land with whoever picks up first. Quotes are produced manually, often days after the site survey. Follow-ups happen when someone remembers. Won jobs are tracked in a spreadsheet that is always out of date.

The result is predictable: quotes go out late, follow-ups are inconsistent, jobs fall through the cracks between enquiry and booking, and invoicing happens long after the engineer has moved on to the next job. The business is leaving money on the table not because the work is poor, but because the process around it has no structure.

The good news is that none of this is complicated to fix. It requires three things: a CRM, a proposal system and an invoicing connection. None of them require bespoke software or a development team.

Step one: get enquiries into one place

The first and most important step is centralising enquiries. Every lead that comes in — phone call, website form, email, referral — needs to land in a single system before anything else can work. Without this, you cannot track conversion rates, you cannot automate follow-ups and you cannot measure where your work is coming from.

For most HVAC businesses, Monday.com works well as the CRM backbone.

Website enquiry forms connect directly to Monday.com via Make.com

Step two: automate the proposal

The second bottleneck in most HVAC sales operations is the quote. An engineer does a site survey, takes notes on paper or in a phone, and then either writes the quote themselves or hands notes to someone in the office. The quote goes out two or three days later. By that point, the prospect has often had a conversation with a competitor who quoted the same day.

Speed to proposal correlates directly with win rate in service businesses. The fix is not to rush the engineering assessment — it is to remove the manual steps between the assessment and the document going out.

Here is how it works in practice. The engineer completes the site survey and fills in a simple Google Form or Monday.com form on their phone — proposals are generated and sent automatically

The rate card is the key component. It lives in a Google Sheet that the business owner controls. Service types, labour rates, standard parts costs — all maintained in one place. When rates change, the sheet is updated once and every future proposal reflects the new pricing automatically. No hunting through old quote files, no risk of using last year's rates.

Step three: automate follow-up

The majority of unconverted quotes are not lost — they are forgotten. A prospect receives a quote, intends to respond, gets busy and never follows up. The business assumes it was not the right fit and moves on. In reality, a single follow-up email sent three days after the quote would convert a meaningful percentage of these.

Make.com handles this automatically. When a proposal is sent, a follow-up task is created in Monday.com and an automated email is scheduled for three days later. If the deal is marked Won or Lost before the email sends, the automation cancels it. If there is no response, the email goes out, the prospect is reminded the quote is open and the business owner is notified to call.

This single automation — a three-day follow-up email — typically recovers between ten and fifteen per cent of quotes that would otherwise have gone cold. For a business quoting twenty jobs a month at an average value of three thousand pounds, that is recoverable revenue of six to nine thousand pounds per month from one automated step.

Step four: connect invoicing to job completion

The final gap in most HVAC sales operations is the delay between job completion and invoice. An engineer finishes the work, the job sits in a completed state somewhere, and someone in the office eventually creates the invoice in Xero — often days later, sometimes longer. Cash flow suffers. Clients occasionally query invoices for work they have partially forgotten.

The fix is to connect Monday.com to Xero via Make.com.

What this stack looks like end to end

To summarise the full system:

• Enquiry lands via website form or is logged manually — card created in Monday.com
• Survey is booked and tracked in the pipeline
• Engineer completes survey form — proposal generated and sent automatically via Make.com
• Three-day follow-up email sent automatically if no response
• Deal marked Won — job board updated, engineer assigned
• Job marked complete — draft invoice created in Xero automatically
• Invoice reviewed, sent, payment tracked

The entire process runs on three tools: Monday.com, Make.com and Xero.

How long does it take to build?

For a business starting from scratch — no CRM, no automation — this stack takes two to four weeks to build and test properly. The Monday.com setup takes a day. The Make.com scenarios — proposal generation, follow-up, invoice creation — take another two to three days to build and test with real data. The rate card and PDF template need to be designed and populated. The team needs a walkthrough.

A business that already has Monday.com or Xero partially set up can typically be operational in one to two weeks.

The return on that investment is immediate. Faster proposals, consistent follow-up, same-day invoicing and a pipeline that management can actually see and trust. For most HVAC businesses, the recovered revenue in the first month more than covers the cost of the build.

For more on how we work with field service businesses, see our field services industry page and the CRM and sales automation service.