By Gal Gazit, Plumbing & Heating Growth
Every heating firm serves two very different customers, and almost all of their marketing is built for only one of them. This is what it takes to be found by the other, the customer who spends three weeks comparing firms before ever picking up the phone.
Two customers ring a heating engineer in any given month, and on paper the calls look almost identical: a phone number, an address, a job to quote. The maths behind them is not remotely the same.
The first is a boiler that has died on a Friday night, an engineer needed within two hours, and an invoice somewhere around eighty pounds. Treated as a one-off transaction that is where it ends, and a great many firms treat it exactly that way. Treated properly it is the start of a service and maintenance relationship, and it is often the reason the same household rings that firm first three years later when they decide to replace the whole system. The Friday night call is worth considerably more than the invoice attached to it, provided the firm treats it as a beginning rather than an ending.
The second call comes from someone who has already spent three weeks deciding they need a new boiler or a heat pump, comparing firms and quietly working out what they are prepared to pay before they ever pick up the phone. That call is worth somewhere between £3,500 and £12,000, more again now that the Boiler Upgrade Scheme offers £7,500 towards a heat pump, rising to £9,000 for eligible homes off the gas grid, available across England and Wales until March 2027.
The mistake is rarely in answering the first call, it is in only ever answering it. Most firms budget, staff and market for the emergency and leave the research to look after itself, and the website reflects that, built years ago to answer one question, who can fix my boiler today, and never once asked to answer any other.
Why the researching customer cannot find you
A homeowner three weeks into researching a boiler replacement searches for install pricing, a plain English explanation of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, photographs of finished installations, and reviews that read less like a star rating and more like proof. The difference between a review that says “great service, highly recommend” and one that says “replaced our fifteen year old system with an A rated combi, talked us through the grant, no pressure” is the difference between invisible and found.
Most heating firms only have the first kind. The researching customer moves quietly on to a firm with the second, usually without the original firm ever knowing they existed. The same gap shows up in the service income that ought to come off the emergency call, because a firm that never asks the Friday night customer for a review naming the actual job has turned a relationship into a transaction by default rather than by decision.
What AI search is starting to change
That gap is becoming more expensive to ignore, because the same homeowner is increasingly starting their research inside ChatGPT or Google’s AI results rather than a list of blue links, asking which local heating firm to use and getting a single recommendation back. That recommendation is assembled from the same three ingredients the human researcher used: the Google Business Profile, the reviews, and the content on the firm’s website. A firm invisible to a person doing that research is invisible to the AI doing it on their behalf, and the two problems now compound each other.
Being nearby and being open was enough when the question was who can come today, and it is a good deal thinner when the question is who should I trust with nine thousand pounds.
“Who should I trust with nine thousand pounds?”
What it looked like when one firm fixed it
Flow Plus Plumbing, a family run firm in north London, rebuilt its Google Business Profile around installation work earlier this year, replaced generic reviews with ones that named the actual job, and rewrote its website for the customer doing the research rather than the one in a panic. The first fortnight told the story.
- +183% rise in Google Business Profile clicks
- +202% rise in impressions
- 4 qualified installation enquiries landed, all of them installation work rather than breakdowns
Nothing about the firm itself changed in that fortnight beyond how legible it was to somebody who had not met it yet.
The half of the problem that belongs in this blog rather than mine
Getting found solves the first half of the problem. What happens in the minutes after the enquiry lands is the second half, and it is where a lot of that hard won visibility quietly leaks away.
A Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 companies, published in 2011 and still the most cited work on the subject, found that firms responding within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify a lead than those who waited longer, and Dr James Oldroyd’s related work found the gap sharpens further at the extremes, five minutes against thirty. That research was carried out on business to business sales rather than homeowners buying a boiler, so the multiples are not a promise about heating. The direction is the part worth keeping, and it matches what firm owners describe anyway: a homeowner who has spent three weeks comparing three firms is rarely sitting patiently by the phone to see which one gets back first.
What happens after that is the ground Aaron covers in The Quote Handbook: whether the quote that follows is priced on the value of the job rather than a guess at the time it will take, and whether there is a system behind it solid enough to survive the firm getting busier.
Getting found and being ready for what happens once the phone rings are two different jobs, run by two different disciplines. A firm that only fixes the first one has simply built itself a faster route to a quote it is not ready to win.
Gal Gazit
Gal is the founder of Plumbing & Heating Growth, which helps UK plumbing and heating firms win more boiler and heat pump installation work. He works with family-run trade businesses on the commercial side of the job: being found by the researching customer through Google, reviews and AI search, and keeping enquiries alive once they arrive.