HVAC inside sales commission: credit the booker, pay by job type, and fix 31 memberships that hid renewals. September payouts projected at $718 and $250.
An HVAC inside sales commission plan sounds simple until you try to answer one question: when a phone rep books a repair call and a technician closes it in the home, who gets the credit? One HVAC company running ServiceTitan hit that question head-on during its first month of automated bonuses, and the answers it landed on are worth borrowing.
The company pays two inside sales reps on a monthly plan. Their September review projected $718 for one rep and $250 for the other, built from membership sales, repair quote closures, and an 85% inbound booking-rate gate. Both reps cleared that gate. Everything looked healthy until the owner started checking the numbers line by line.
The Problem: A Report That Said 31 New Memberships and Zero Renewals
The first red flag was the membership count. The report showed 31 new memberships for one rep in September and zero renewals. That ratio never happens in real life. The owner pulled a few names and confirmed that at least three of the "new" sales were expired memberships the rep had renewed. Those renewals had been keyed in as brand-new sales, which inflated the very metric the plan pays on.
The second red flag was recalls. The plan deducts for install callbacks, and the owner expected to see at least seven in the review period, with at least four in August alone. The report showed far fewer. Two things were hiding them: the report filtered by business unit, so a callback that got moved to the Service unit disappeared from the install count, and some callbacks had never been linked back to the original job through the Recall For field.
A third issue was quieter. Technician-generated leads were being discussed as a possible payout, but nobody could say yet whether a lead counted when the tech who found it also sold it. Paying twice for the same sale is how a bonus plan quietly eats margin.
None of this was a software failure. It was a definitions failure. Nobody had written down what counts as a new membership, which job type belongs to a phone rep, or which technician owns a recall on a two-person install. Software can only pay on the definitions you give it.
HVAC Inside Sales Commission Starts With Job Types, Not Percentages
Most owners start a pay plan conversation with a rate: 3%, 5%, a flat $25. This company started with job types, because in ServiceTitan the job type is what tells the plan whose number should move. Three rules came out of the review.
- Repair quote closures count only Repair IS jobs. The "IS" job types are reserved for inside sales. A generic Repair job does not qualify, even if the rep touched it.
- Credit follows Booked By, not Sold By. The inside sales rep gets the closure credit through the Booked By field, while the technician stays the Sold By on the job. That keeps the technician's service revenue intact and gives the phone rep a separate, clean metric.
- Installation IS is for follow-up quotes only. When someone converts an Estimate IS into a booked job, they should use Installation, not Installation IS. The owner admitted this had been mixed up on a few jobs, and the fix was as simple as a reminder and a short training.
With those rules in place, the repair closure numbers started to make sense. One rep had three booked Repair IS jobs in September and six so far in October. The other had none, which matched reality: repair selling is mostly delegated to the first rep. A plan that rewards the person actually doing the work is easier to defend than one that splits credit evenly to keep everyone happy.
If you want a wider look at how other companies structure phone-team pay, the case study on a CSR bonus structure built around memberships and booking tiers shows a similar approach in plumbing.
Fixing Membership Counts Without Punishing Anyone
The renewal problem got the simplest fix. The rep needed to use the Renew Membership option for anything that was an expired plan coming back, and the owner needed to define the rule in plain words: an expired membership that is renewed is a renewal, not a new sale. The office will verify the September entries, correct the ones that were mislabeled, and then pay on the corrected numbers.
That detail matters for trust. Reps will accept a lower payout when the reason is a written rule they can read. They will not accept a lower payout because a report "looked off." If you want to see how a similar membership payout gap got caught early, read about how a capped spiff exposed a $440 payroll gap.
Booked revenue followed the same logic. The plan pays an award when a rep clears $50,000 in booked revenue for the month. One rep had about $8,000, so no award was expected, and that was fine. A threshold that nobody hits for the first month is information, not failure. It tells you whether the target fits your call volume before you commit to it.
Recall Deductions Should Follow Every Installer on the Job
The recall fix changed the plan logic itself. On a shared installation, a callback should count against every technician assigned to the original job, not just the one whose name was on the invoice. The reporting team agreed to remove the business-unit filter and attribute recalls to all assigned technicians, then re-pull the data.
Here is the part that surprises people: the callback's completion date decides which pay period it lands in, even if the original job finished months earlier. A recall that closes in September counts against September. That keeps the incentive honest, because the quality problem is charged to the period when it showed up, and it removes the temptation to hide a recall by delaying the paperwork.
Callback tracking is only as good as the link back to the original job. If a callback is coded as a generic Recall Callback or as a new Installation, it never connects. The owner's action item was to train the office to use the Recall For link every time. For a deeper look at tying pay to quality, see how an HVAC company tied pay to a 3% callback quality bar.
Tech-Generated Leads: Track Them, Do Not Pay Them Yet
The company decided to track technician-generated leads in two separate visibility metrics: leads a technician generated and also sold, and leads a technician generated that someone else sold. Neither pays a bonus. Both show up on the dashboard.
This is a smart middle step. Paying on a metric before you trust the data is how you end up paying twice or paying on the wrong person. Tracking first lets you see the volume, spot the coding errors, and decide on a payout rate with real numbers behind it. The 3% sales-revenue payout on the inside sales plan was handled the same way: it stays parked until the updated booking process is actually in use.
The service-revenue side got a similar cleanup. Completed service revenue now pulls only from the HVAC Service business unit, and sales revenue pulls only from the HVAC Sales business unit. An earlier figure had been inflated because both units were being blended together.
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What the Company Changed, in Plain Terms
By the end of the call, the owner had a short list of changes, and none of them required a new pay rate:
- Count only Repair IS jobs for repair quote closures, credited by Booked By.
- Use Installation, not Installation IS, when converting an Estimate IS into a booked job.
- Enter renewals through Renew Membership so September's 31 "new" sales can be corrected.
- Drop the business-unit filter from recall logic and charge recalls to every assigned installer.
- Track tech-generated leads in two visibility metrics with no payout.
- Review September plans together, then pay them out in the same week.
The measurable result so far is a verified starting point. The September projection of $718 and $250 now rests on definitions the owner can explain, the membership count is being corrected from a number that could not have been true, and at least seven install recalls that were invisible now have a path into the plan. The next test is October, when the corrected rules have a full month to prove themselves.
This is also why monthly review matters. A plan that pays out the same week you review it gives you a tight loop: catch the error, fix the rule, and watch the next period run clean. If you are building a phone-team plan from scratch, our guide to HVAC commission pay covers the fundamentals, and the ShareWillow product features page shows how plans pull data from ServiceTitan automatically.
How to Build an HVAC Inside Sales Commission Plan That Holds Up
If you are starting from a blank page, here is the order that worked for this company:
- Write the definitions first. New membership, renewal, booked job, closed repair, recall. One sentence each.
- Map each metric to a job type or field. Booked By for phone credit, Sold By for technician credit.
- Pick one or two metrics per rep. Membership sales and repair quote closures were enough for a first month.
- Add a quality gate. The 85% inbound booking rate keeps reps from cherry-picking easy calls.
- Review before you pay. Look at the first month's report line by line with the people it affects.
FAQ
How do you pay inside sales reps in an HVAC company?
Most companies mix a base wage with a monthly bonus tied to a small set of metrics: memberships sold, repair quotes closed, and a booking-rate gate. Credit should follow a specific field, such as Booked By, so the plan never has to guess who earned what.
Should a phone rep get credit when a technician closes the sale?
Yes, if the rep booked the opportunity under an inside sales job type. Give the rep credit for the closure and leave the technician as the seller of record, so each person is measured on the work they actually did.
What is a fair booking rate gate for inside sales?
This company used 85% of inbound calls booked, and both reps cleared it in September. Start with a gate close to your current average, confirm the call data is complete, and raise it only after you trust the numbers.
Related reading
- HVAC Membership Sales Commission: The Capped Spiff That Caught a $440 Payroll Gap
- CSR Bonus Structure: How a Plumbing Company Built One Around Memberships, Booking Tiers, and Call Categorization
- Same Bonus, Any Callback Rate: How an HVAC Company Tied Pay to a 3% Quality Bar
- HVAC Commission Pay: How to Design a Plan That Drives Profit (Not Problems)
Conclusion
Credit the booker, define every metric in one sentence, and review the first month before you pay.
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"I was able to leverage the knowledge of the ShareWillow team to learn how other companies were designing their bonus plans. The template was extremely helpful."
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Owner, First Rate Movers
