From $0 to $12M: Joel Verley's Blueprint for HVAC Sales & Marketing Success

Joel Verley is the Sales and Marketing Director at Reliable Heating and Air in Knightdale, North Carolina. He built the company’s retail division from scratch, developed an indoor air quality product line with packages ranging from $1,500 to $20,000, and automated the business from review requests to maintenance scheduling. In this episode of HVAC Hotshots, he covers the two-type marketing framework, the IAQ strategy that created a new revenue stream, and why he made more sales after raising his prices.

Joel Verley started selling HVAC units for $4,000 to $5,000. He was working hard, closing jobs, and not making money. Then he raised his prices. His closing rate went up.

Joel is the Sales and Marketing Director at Reliable Heating and Air in Knightdale, North Carolina. He came to the HVAC industry 12 years ago after a period of hardship, found a mentor at his first company who told him to get licensed, and spent the years since building systems that run without him. He grew up through carpentry, construction, and drywall work before HVAC became the career he never planned for and never left.

In this episode of HVAC Hotshots, Joel covers the automation stack that fills his maintenance calendar without CSRs making 150 calls a day, the indoor air quality framework that created a $1,500 to $20,000 product line from a company full of new systems with nothing to replace, and the pricing mindset that flipped the revenue trajectory of his career. Keep reading.

Joel’s operating philosophy: automate what you can automate, delegate what you can delegate, and protect your remaining time for the things only you can do. “You only get 24 hours a day. How you spend them is how effective and efficient you’re going to be.”

Google review automation. Every time a job closes, an automated message goes out to the customer. Not just one message. A campaign. “Hey Miss Susan, I know you had a service call with Tony today. I hope everything went well. If it did, could you please share your review with us? And if it didn’t, here’s my personal number.” Each message in the sequence goes out through a different medium, at a different time of day, text or email, to increase the chances of getting a response.

The responses get handled automatically too. When a review comes in, good or bad, an automated response goes back out with SEO-quality language. “Now you have a complete automation machine that is answering Google reviews with good quality responses. That takes care of itself.”

On bad reviews specifically: Joel does not fear them. “The psychology of people, they’re really not going to leave a bad review unless you really did something crazy.” And when they do, the response is the opportunity. If someone writes that the company was too expensive, the reply explains the value, the overhead, the commitment to the community. “That gives me a platform to talk about pricing. People are going to read your response to it, and that is the game right there.”

Automated scheduling. The old model: a CSR calls 150 members trying to schedule maintenance visits, gets maybe 5 to 10 on the calendar, and spends the rest of the day leaving voicemails and playing phone tag. Joel replaced this with a system that sends members a scheduling link directly to their phone. They click, they pick a time, it books into the CRM automatically. “I’ve been automating my memberships for over seven to eight years. It maxes out the schedule like that.”

After-hours and AI. The evolution of after-hours coverage at a growing HVAC company runs in stages: owner carries the phone, then a dedicated on-call cell for the technician, then a call center that integrates directly with the CRM. “They’re using our CRM. They’re not passing messages. They’re booking the call and calling a technician. It’s just like if it was somebody on our staff doing it.” AI messaging tools like CloseBot are already integrated into Joel’s system for customer communication. AI voice is coming, but not quite there yet. “When it gets there, use it absolutely.”

His own software, macnow.io, sits at the center of the automation stack. Zapier, Housecall Pro or ServiceTitan as the CRM, and CallRail for tracking unique phone numbers across different lead sources are the other core tools. “If you’re marketing blindly without tracking where calls are coming from, you don’t know where to spend your dollars.”

Reliable Heating and Air came to Joel as primarily a new construction company. The clients had new systems. New systems do not need to be replaced. There was nothing obvious to sell to those homeowners in the short term.

Joel’s answer was indoor air quality.

The first step is an IAQ monitor. The device reads nine different metrics inside the home: PM 2.5 (fine particulate matter), VOCs, humidity levels and swings, radon, pressure differential, ventilation quality, and more. Joel sells the monitor as the entry point. The homeowner sees their home’s air quality data for the first time.

“I created more problems.” The monitor reveals issues the homeowner had no idea existed. High particulate matter. Humidity that swings. Radon. Inadequate ventilation. A home that is too tight with no air exchange. “Now they are aware of the problems that they have. And now what we do, we sell them indoor air quality stuff. We fix the problems.”

The packages Joel developed run from $1,500 to $20,000, customized to the home and the homeowner’s goals. Automated IAQ systems that regulate and filter without the homeowner having to think about it. “They don’t want to be itchy with chapped lips. They don’t want crown molding cracking because of humidity swings. They don’t want particulate matter in the air.”

The principle behind this approach applies beyond IAQ: education brings money. “People who are not calling are not calling because they don’t know. Once they know, knowledge brings about a solution.” Teach them what the problem is. Show them the data. Then provide the fix.

Joel draws a clear line between two entirely different types of marketing, and understanding which one you are doing determines what you should be posting, saying, and spending.

Direct marketing is where customers come to you because they have a problem right now. “They’re coming to Google when they have a problem.” This is where you need to show up: Google Ads, Google Local Services Ads, your Google Business Profile, PPC campaigns, and a website optimized well enough that Google shows it to searchers. Reviews are what close the deal when they land on your listing.

This channel produces the highest volume and highest quality leads. Joel has used Home Advisor, Angie’s List, and Thumbtack. He keeps Yelp active with a dedicated person monitoring it. But Google is the floor everything else builds on. SEO for HVAC companies matters because once someone searches, your presence or absence is the difference between a call and a lost opportunity.

Indirect marketing is social media, and the framing matters. “Social media is like a party. You don’t want to be the person at the party trying to sell air conditioners.” Nobody scrolling Instagram is thinking about their HVAC system. But they are being exposed to brands, faces, and companies, and what happens over time is that those brands get imprinted.

“People only go to Google because they don’t know who to call.” Social media is how you become the person they know. Joel gets DMs through Facebook Messenger on a regular basis: “You still do heating and air?” Yes. “Okay, I need someone to come out.” That is a lead that bypassed Google entirely because the brand relationship already existed.

The content strategy he uses is the 3E method: Engage, Entertain, Educate. Mix it the way television mixes programming and commercials. Show your team doing real things. Tell personal stories about team members. Post reviews with real photos, not stock images of a man in a yellow hard hat that “works for everybody’s company.” Every year, Joel hires a professional photographer with a specific shot list: the technician at the door, the customer at the table, the team in the office, the whole sales process documented visually.

The platforms: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest. All of them, simultaneously. Google has begun indexing social media content in search results, which means consistent posting has SEO value beyond brand awareness.

For paid social, maintenance promotions work. Repair ads mostly do not, because by the time a homeowner sees a repair ad, they have already called someone. “If it was cold this morning, they woke up, went to Google, and found a company.” Social ads drive preventive behavior. Facebook Ads for HVAC companies perform best when the offer is about maintenance, not emergency repair.

Measurement has to happen across all of it. CallRail or unique phone numbers per channel, Google Analytics, and a central dashboard that shows what is working and what is not. “You have to measure your results. Otherwise you’re just marketing blindly.”

The written process. Joel is direct: the sales process has to be written down. “It can’t be freestyled.” Every step of the consultation, every question that needs to be asked, every point in the interaction where the tech needs to handle a specific situation. Written, documented, and followed.

Role play. The most important practice and the most avoided one. “It’s very awkward to sit here with a colleague and have them play Mrs. Smith and go through the sales process.” Joel builds it into weekly sales meetings regardless. The goal is to make the process automatic enough that the technician stops thinking about what to say and starts being present with the customer. “Once you can turn this off and just be yourself, that’s when your personality comes through. That’s what people connect with.”

Breaking objections early. Joel’s approach to objection handling starts at the beginning of the sales call, not the end. “There’s a reason why you ask the questions asked in the beginning: so you can bring them up at the end.” When a homeowner says the price is too high at the close, the response is: “Earlier you mentioned…” and the connection is made back to something they shared during discovery. The objection gets resolved with the customer’s own words.

The pricing mindset. This is the piece that most early-stage operators get completely backwards.

Joel spent years selling HVAC systems for $4,000 to $5,000. He was working constantly and not making real money. Then he raised his prices. His closing rate improved. “People don’t take you seriously if you’re so low. They’re scared. They’re thinking: you’re cutting corners.”

“You sell based on the overhead you want, not the overhead you have right now.” If the goal is to grow the company, the pricing has to reflect the company you are building, not the lean two-person operation you are running today. The extra margin is what funds the trucks, the training, the insurance, the team.

The line that encapsulates the whole philosophy: “If you lose a sale to a company that sold it for higher than you, that should keep you up at night.” Not losing to someone cheaper. Losing to someone who charged more and still won.

The relationship framing closes this section. “This ain’t transactional. This is a relationship. You’re going to deal with this for the next 15 to 20 years.” The customer who understands that is not the customer looking for the lowest quote. They are looking for the right company. Be that company and price accordingly.

Reliable Heating and Air’s next move is a branch location approximately 100 miles away in the Wilmington market on the coast. The strategy is already de-risked: multi-family clients with properties there have been waiting for coverage. The work exists before the branch opens.

The model is built around shared resources. “You don’t need another me. You don’t need another CFO. You don’t need another operations head. You don’t need another call center.” The infrastructure that runs the Knightdale location, the CRM, the call center, the marketing, the management layer, runs the second location too. The overhead gets shared. The margins improve with each location added.

The people come from within. “Give somebody who’s already trained, who knows the processes, who knows the systems, a GM role. Somebody’s got to be the GM. There you go. Here’s your location.” Growth creates the opportunity to promote the operators who are already invested in the business.

The creativity principle is what connects everything. Joel built a $1,500 to $20,000 product line by taking existing knowledge, packaging it intentionally, naming it, training his team on how to explain and sell it, and presenting it as a complete solution. “It’s just some pieces that I put together. All true. Did my research, brought it out, put it all together, put a name on it.”

The principle generalizes. “You have creativity. If you can package these items together and make this come along with your install, you’ve created something different. You created a line item for it. You know how to explain it. You taught it to your guys.” That is how a new construction company with no systems to replace starts generating five-figure indoor air quality packages. You ask questions that surface problems. You have solutions that fix them.

“Sales is the key. Nothing moves without a sale.”

Joel Verley’s approach to building a high-revenue HVAC operation is not a single tactic. It is a set of interlocking systems: automate what runs without you so your time goes toward what requires you, educate the market on problems they did not know they had and then solve them, position your brand on social media long before a homeowner needs you so that when they do, they call you instead of searching, and price at the level of the company you are building toward, not the company you are running right now.

The IAQ monitor is the clearest example of all of it at once. Sell awareness first. The data creates the need. The need creates the sale. The package creates the relationship. The relationship creates the recurring revenue.

[Watch the full episode on HVAC Hotshots.] To apply any of this to your own business, book a free TradeOps strategy call. Subscribe to HVAC Hotshots wherever you listen to podcasts.

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