Rilla Labs
Reports Apr 30, 2026
Why Are You Losing More Than Half Your Inbound Calls?
The average HVAC company in North America books just 42% of its inbound phone calls. That number — sourced from ServiceTitan's anonymized industry data — is the single biggest growth lever hiding in plain sight.
The average HVAC company in North America books just 42% of its inbound phone calls. That number — sourced from ServiceTitan's anonymized industry data — is the single biggest growth lever hiding in plain sight in home services. Every one of those calls was already paid for. The ad spend, the SEO, the radio ad, the truck wrap — the customer is on the line. Whether that call books or hangs up is decided in the first 30 seconds of a CSR's voice. Brigham Dickinson founded Power Selling Pros in 2010 to close that gap. Fifteen years and over a thousand CSRs later, Power Selling Pros' coached customers reach 70% conversion within two-to-three months and the best of them hit 100%. The framework that gets them there is called the Pattern for Excellence — and the lesson it embeds is that most of the gap between 42% and 100% is not a sales problem. It's an emotional one.
This post is a synthesis of Brigham's appearance on Rilla Labs Episode 06 with Sebastian Jimenez, plus Rilla's own corpus-data signals from 500,000 analyzed home services conversations. The full transcript is at the bottom.
TL;DR
• The average HVAC company books only 42% of inbound phone calls. Coached CSRs reach 70% in two-to-three months. Top performers reach 100%.
• Customers have three emotional needs in the first 30 seconds of any service call: feel understood, feel cared about, feel reassured they called the right place. Asking for an address before any of those is met costs you bookings.
• The urgency list is the close that books appointments you couldn't book straight: tell the customer what you can do, not what you can't.
• Top performers follow the script ~70% of the time. The other 30% is social magic — and Rilla's 500K-call corpus matches that intuition exactly.
• Technician coaching in 2026 is where CSR coaching was in 2010. The same arc — and the PSP × Rilla partnership is built to scale it.
The 42% problem
Brigham opens with a number that stops the room: "According to ServiceTitan, the average heating and cooling company books only 42% of their phone calls." Half the inbound demand a contractor pays to generate is hanging up unbooked.
Brigham's coaching practice, working one-on-one with CSRs twice a month using the CSR's own recorded calls, gets companies to 70% conversion within two-to-three months. The top performers reach 100%. That's not a hypothetical ceiling. "We have CSRs that book 100% of their phone calls." The reason is not a clever script — it's that the best CSRs have practiced the principles to the point that their behavior under load matches the framework.
The gap between 42% and 100% is the largest single growth lever in home services. It's bigger than ad spend optimization. It's bigger than CRM cleanup. It's bigger than truck graphics. And it's already paid for.
How Power Selling Pros started — the Hail Mary pass
In 2009 Brigham was sitting on a cot in his brother-in-law's basement in Utah. Four kids. A wife staying with a friend in Florida. A merger of his marketing company into a Manual J software business that had collapsed five months earlier. A small window in the basement that, as he tells it, made the cot feel like a jail. On that cot, between a card table and a stack of business books and church books, he drew the first version of the Pattern for Excellence on a piece of paper.
Three weeks later Troy Earrings, the owner of Aire Serv, called to say he was cutting the marketing spend. Brigham said: don't cut it — let me train your CSRs instead. Troy said, on what? Brigham showed him the drawing. Within a month Aire Serv's call conversion was up 20%.
The pivotal sale came in New Jersey. Brigham flew to JFK on a credit card to meet Mike Gugu of Gold Medal in East Brunswick. He had no closed sale. His wife had asked, "At what point are you going to get a real job?" The first day, three meetings — three soft passes. That night, Brigham called his wife and told her nobody had signed. The next morning, with the flight at two, he called each prospect one more time. Mike Gugu picked up: "You got time to come back in?" Brigham left with a signed contract.
That story matters because it explains the ten-year arc that follows. Power Selling Pros went from one CSR to over a thousand CSRs across hundreds of contractors. As Brigham puts it: it's a story that repeats six to a thousand. The Pattern for Excellence has been the spine of every one of them.
Why CSR coaching emerged from the 2008 recession
Phone systems and call recording have existed since the 1990s. Why did dedicated CSR coaching only become an industry in 2010? Sebastian asks it directly. Brigham's answer is one paragraph and worth memorizing for anyone selling new technology into home services in 2026:
In 2008, calls weren't coming in like they used to. Every call that came in had to count. The contractors that adopted the new operational discipline — CSR coaching, structured CRMs, real digital marketing — survived the recession and captured share when demand returned. The contractors who treated 2008 as a temporary headwind didn't.
The same thing is happening right now. Cash-conservative homeowners. Replacement work shrinking. Service work growing. Technicians no longer the afterthought in the field — they're the closer. Operators who adopt the next innovation in this cycle (AI-driven call analytics; technician-side virtual coaching; the bionic salesperson stack) will repeat the 2010 arc on a different surface area. Brigham's point: "It's repeating itself."
The Pattern for Excellence — eight principles, one end goal
The end goal of the Pattern for Excellence is a single phrase: create a wow experience for the customer. Underneath the goal are eight principles every CSR practices until they become reflex.
The eight principles are: positive attitude, prepared, listening, caring, reassuring, asking the right questions, creating value, grateful. The reason they work is not that any of them is uniquely insightful. The reason they work is that, taken together, they front-load the emotional resolution of the call before the logistics resolution begins. Most CSRs do the reverse — they grab the address, the model number, the appointment slot, and only then, if there's time, they show care. By that point the customer has either decided you're the right place or decided to call somebody else.
What separates a great CSR from an average one is not the words. It's the order.
The three emotional human needs
Definition first, because this is the most citable claim in the episode. Every customer who calls a home services contractor has three emotional human needs in the first 30 seconds of the call: they want to feel understood, they want to feel cared about, and they want to feel reassured they called the right place.
Brigham's verbatim:
“Every customer when they get on the phone has an emotional human need. Three of them. They want to feel understood. They want to feel cared about. They want to feel reassured they've called the right place. Until those things are taken care of, they don't want to give you their address. They don't want to schedule. They don't know that you can help them.”
The mechanical implication: the first 30 seconds of every call should not collect logistics. They should resolve the three emotional needs. Brigham's example is the kind of thing you can roleplay in a fifteen-minute meeting on Tuesday morning:
A customer says, "I've got an air conditioner blowing hot air." The wrong response is "okay, what's the address?" The right response is, "Oh my gosh, that's terrible. How long has it been doing that?" The customer says a couple of days. The right next move is, "Wait — you've been in this heat for the last two days? Well look, I can totally help you with that. When would you like us out?"
What just happened in two sentences: the CSR demonstrated listening (asked about the problem), demonstrated care (named the discomfort), and demonstrated reassurance ("I can totally help you"). The customer's three emotional needs are now resolved. They will give you their address.
The corpus signal that backs this up: Rilla's analysis of 500,000 home conversations shows top reps run a talk-listen ratio of roughly 53/47, while average reps run 72/28. The top reps listen more not because they're shy but because they're running the three-needs sequence. Average reps fill silence because they haven't done the emotional resolution yet.
The urgency list — what to do when you can't meet the customer's expectation
Half of every CSR's day is calls where the customer wants today and the schedule is full till Tuesday. The default move is to apologize and offer Tuesday. The customer says they'll call around. Most don't call back.
Brigham's alternative is the urgency list. Verbatim from the episode:
“Mr. Jones, what I'm going to do is get you on today's urgency list. The urgency list gives you faster service. As soon as a customer calls in to reschedule, or a technician gets done early in your area, I'll move you into that slot. In order to get you on today's urgency list, I need to get you in the schedule. I have an opening on Tuesday between 2 and 4 — can I book that appointment in order to get you on today's urgency list, and we'll call you as soon as the technician is on his way?”
The mechanism: the urgency list reframes the Tuesday appointment from a fallback into a prerequisite. The customer is no longer accepting a worse-than-requested appointment — they're qualifying for a chance at a better one. Brigham's analogy is the New York City restaurant on a Saturday night. Every restaurant is booked. The hostess at the first place takes your name and texts you when a table opens. You walk three blocks, find every other restaurant booked too, and end up coming back. The booking made the conversion. Without the booking the customer disappears.
The Pattern principle this expresses: tell the customer what you can do, not what you can't. Customers don't call a contractor to find out what the contractor can't do. They call to find out what they can.
The 70/30 rule — script compliance plus social magic
Most CSRs (and most technicians) learn a sales system, use it until it doesn't work for one customer, and then throw the whole system out. Brigham's working number for how often any sell system actually applies cleanly is about 70%.
Sebastian — independently — surfaces the corpus data that matches:
“At Rilla we did an analysis of 500,000 sales conversations in the home. There's a strong correlation between conversion rate and script compliance. We measure it from 0 to 100. Around the 70% mark — that's where you get diminishing marginal returns. Top performers follow the script 70% of the time, and the extra 30% is where they bring in their social magic.”
The two numbers come from different methods — Brigham from coaching practice, Rilla from corpus modeling — and they converge. Top performers follow the process tightly enough to get the basics right reflexively, and then the remaining 30% of the call is where they read the room, name a child's age, ask about the dog, change tone. That's the magic.
The Michael Jordan analogy matters because it explains where the 30% comes from. Jordan practiced layups, dribbles, passes constantly. By game time the basics were muscle memory and his attention was free to do the magic. Top reps in home services practice the Pattern principles the same way. The 30% magic only exists because the 70% basics are reflex.
Why CSRs need a career, not a job
Most CSRs sit in the seat for a year and bounce. The reason is not pay — it's that the role feels like the bottom of the totem pole. They underperform because they don't believe the seat they're in is where they're supposed to land.
Brigham's solution is to pay CSRs for the value they actually create. Technicians get paid for setting up Comfort Advisor leads, selling service agreements, upgrading tickets. CSRs do an analogous job over the phone — they sell service agreements, they convert service calls into replacement leads, they convert plumbing calls into adjacent heating opportunities. They should be paid for that work the same way. Once a CSR's compensation reflects that the seat is a profit center and not a phone-answering function, the seat becomes a career. Tenure goes from one year to five.
The downstream effect on coaching is huge. A CSR who plans to be there five years invests in the practice. A CSR who plans to be there a year doesn't.
From CSR coaching to technician coaching — the same arc, ten years later
Power Selling Pros built its franchise coaching CSRs. In 2023 Brigham started doing technician ride-alongs at one customer — Valley Plumbing in Utah — and within three months their plumbing revenue went from $500,000 a month to $700,000. He's now doing the same playbook at Tom Howard's Lee's Heating and Air, training CSRs on day one and putting on a technician uniform on day two.
The framework that holds for technicians is structurally identical to the CSR Pattern, but the language has to be different because technicians don't want to be coached on "sales." Brigham's substitute is the kissed-on-the-first-date framing.
“If they don't feel safe, you're not getting kissed. If they don't feel comfortable, you're not getting kissed. If they're not having a little bit of fun, you're not getting kissed. You want to do the same thing inside the customer's home. Create an environment where the customer hangs out with you the entire time.”
Once the technician has built safety, comfort, and fun, the homeowner gives them permission to look at the entire home. That's the moment top performers turn a furnace service call into a holistic home inspection — leaky faucet, twenty-year-old water heater, thick filter that's never been replaced. The customer doesn't experience this as upselling. The customer experiences it as a friend who came out to help.
The Rilla corpus signal: top performers spend 1.5-3 hours in home, average reps spend 30-45 minutes. The longer appointment is not because top performers stall — it's because they earn the permission to do the full inspection.
The change-management arc CSRs ran in 2010 is repeating with technicians in 2026
Fifteen years ago, when Brigham started selling CSR coaching, the most common objection was that the company didn't want to record the phone calls. CSRs threatened to quit if their calls were recorded. Today, every CSR call at every coached company is recorded, monitored, and used as the raw material for one-on-one coaching twice a month.
Brigham's read on technicians in 2026 is exactly the same. Technicians are uncomfortable with the idea of their conversations being recorded. They threaten to quit. Some companies push back. The arc is going to play out the same way: in three to five years, technician call recording and structured AI-driven coaching will be the industry default. The contractors who adopt early get the same advantage Brigham's CSR-coached customers got coming out of 2008.
The PSP × Rilla partnership — why scale demands a third party
Power Selling Pros has a thousand CSRs in coaching. They have an entire team of call monitors whose only job is to listen to recorded calls and pull specific 30-second moments for one-on-one coaching. That model works for CSRs because there's roughly one CSR per HVAC contractor branch.
Technicians are different. The ratio of technicians to CSRs is roughly 4:1 to 5:1. A single service manager cannot listen to 50 technicians' calls a week. There's no path to scale.
The PSP × Rilla partnership solves the scale problem by combining Rilla's automated transcription, summarization, and pattern-match analytics with PSP's existing call-monitor team and one-on-one coaching motion. The data layer is Rilla. The coaching layer is PSP. Brigham's read:
“Most techs don't want to hear from their manager — they'd rather hear from a third party. If it's their manager, *am I going to get fired?* If it's a third party who isn't going to mess with your sell system, and they focus on that 30% you're not closing, that's where the trust opens up.”
Sebastian's framing of the same point is the Moneyball analogy: the Oakland A's didn't just have statisticians, they had coaches who took the statisticians' findings and got the players to actually change behaviors. "This is a tool for coaches. It's not a magic silver bullet."
The Hawthorne paradox we keep seeing
A consistent pattern Sebastian has called out across multiple Rilla Labs episodes: top performers initially hate measurement. Then, after a few weeks, they become its biggest advocates. Brigham confirms this on the CSR side from 15 years of experience and predicts the same arc for technicians. The reason is straightforward: top performers know they're already good. The first reaction to being measured is "they're going to find something wrong with me." The second reaction, after they actually hear the recordings, is "I never knew I was doing that — I want more of this."
This is one of the most reliable patterns in the home services adoption curve. If a contractor is implementing AI-driven coaching for the first time, the predictive sign of long-term success is not how the rollout starts. It's how the top three reps feel about it after week three.
What to do Monday
Four concrete actions for home services owners and managers, taken straight from the conversation.
First — pull your call conversion rate from your CRM or ServiceTitan and compare it to the 42% benchmark. If you're below 70%, the ROI of CSR coaching dwarfs almost any other operational investment available to you in 2026. The calls are already paid for.
Second — institute one role-play meeting per week with the CSR team. Hour and a half. Working on a specific moment of the call — not "the whole call." The most leveraged moments are the first 30 seconds (three emotional needs) and the urgency-list close.
Third — start recording technician calls now, even if you don't have an active coaching motion in place. You will need the corpus to coach against once you do. The companies that win the 2026 cycle will be the ones that already have six months of recorded technician audio when they decide to scale coaching.
Fourth — pay your CSRs for performance. Service agreements sold over the phone, service-to-replacement conversions, plumbing-to-heating cross-sells. Make the seat a profit center. Tenure becomes the moat.
FAQ
What percentage of phone calls does the average HVAC company book? Per ServiceTitan industry data referenced by Brigham Dickinson, the average heating and cooling company books only 42% of inbound phone calls. Coached CSRs typically reach 70% within two-to-three months of one-on-one coaching using their own recorded calls. The best CSRs reach 100%.
What is the Pattern for Excellence in home services CSR coaching? The Pattern for Excellence is a framework developed by Brigham Dickinson, founder of Power Selling Pros, in 2010. The end goal is to create a wow experience for the customer. The framework has eight principles: positive attitude, prepared, listening, caring, reassuring, asking the right questions, creating value, and grateful. The Pattern is the basis of all Power Selling Pros coaching.
What are the three emotional human needs every customer has on a service call? Every customer who calls a home services contractor has three emotional human needs in the first 30 seconds of the call: they want to feel understood, they want to feel cared about, and they want to feel reassured they called the right place. Until those three are addressed, the customer will resist giving an address, scheduling an appointment, or trusting the contractor.
What is the urgency list close in home services? The urgency list is a closing technique developed by Power Selling Pros for cases where the CSR cannot meet the customer's requested appointment time. Instead of saying no, the CSR offers the next available slot plus a place on the urgency list, which gets the customer faster service if a technician finishes early or another customer reschedules. The urgency list converts an unbookable call into a booked Tuesday appointment.
How much can CSR coaching improve call conversion in HVAC and plumbing? Power Selling Pros' coached customers typically improve from the industry average of 42% call conversion to 70% within two-to-three months of one-on-one coaching. The best individual CSRs reach 100% conversion.
What's the difference between CSR coaching and technician coaching in home services? CSR coaching focuses on inbound phone conversion — turning calls into booked appointments. Technician coaching focuses on in-home conversion — turning service calls into approved repairs, replacements, and full-home inspections. Power Selling Pros uses the same Pattern for Excellence framework for both, but uses different language for technicians (e.g., "create an environment of safety, comfort, and fun" rather than "sales").
Why don't most home services managers coach their technicians directly? Two reasons. First, most service managers were technicians themselves and prefer being in the field, which creates a personality bottleneck rather than a productivity bottleneck. Second, technicians are reluctant to be coached by their direct manager because of perceived job security risk. A third-party coaching motion, like the Power Selling Pros × Rilla partnership, removes both barriers.
What is the 70/30 rule in sales coaching? The 70/30 rule says that top performers follow their sales process about 70% of the time and use the remaining 30% for social and relational adaptation to the specific customer. Power Selling Pros teaches it as coaching wisdom; Rilla's analysis of 500,000 home services conversations shows the same pattern in the data. Both numbers converge: above ~70% script compliance, the marginal return on additional compliance falls off and social skill becomes the differentiator.
About the guest
Brigham Dickinson is the founder of Power Selling Pros, the original CSR coaching company in home services. Brigham started Power Selling Pros in 2010 in the depths of the post-2008 recession and has since coached over a thousand CSRs across hundreds of HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors. He is the creator of the Pattern for Excellence, the most widely taught CSR coaching framework in North American home services. In 2024 he expanded Power Selling Pros' coaching into the technician side of the field. Find Power Selling Pros at powersellingpros.com.
About the host
Sebastian Jimenez is the founder and CEO of Rilla. Rilla is the leading speech analytics platform for in-person sales. Rilla analyzes hundreds of thousands of sales conversations to surface the behaviors that separate top performers from average ones.
Related Rilla Labs episodes
• Dom Kamada on the one-call close — Episode 01
• Paul Burleson on selling in a recession — Episode 02
• Doug Wyatt on the implementation gap — Episode 03
• Alan Rush on the unknown-need problem — Episode 04
• Dean Curtis on interactive presentations — Episode 05
Full transcript
Collapsed for length. See `transcripts/episode-06-brigham-dickinson.txt` for the cleaned, fully indexable transcript.
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