The App That Wants HVAC Reps to Close the Deal Before They Leave Your Driveway
Sales Builder Pro turns the messy kitchen-table HVAC quote into a five-minute, signed, financed proposal. A look at how a small Ohio software company built a business inside one stubborn trade.
A homeowner's furnace dies in January. A technician shows up, walks the basement, and then comes the part everyone hates: the quote. For decades that meant a hand-scribbled figure on a carbon pad, a promise to "email something over," and a good chance the job wanders off to whoever calls back first. Intelligent Mobile Support, a software company in Solon, Ohio, built its entire business on the idea that this moment - the one at the kitchen table - is where deals are won and lost, and that it deserves better than a clipboard.
The company's product is Sales Builder Pro, a tablet app for residential HVAC contractors and other in-home trades. Its pitch is almost aggressively practical: a rep can walk in, size the job, present good-better-best options with real pricing, attach a financing plan, and collect a signature - all before leaving the house. The marketing number is five minutes for a full, professional proposal. The underlying bet is older than any app: people buy when the offer is in front of them, not three days later.
01 / The ProblemThe quote is where HVAC deals leak
Selling a furnace or an air conditioner in someone's home is a strange kind of retail. The salesperson is standing in a basement, not a showroom. The price is large - often several thousand dollars - and unplanned. The customer is anxious, comparing to a neighbor's story, and half-expecting to be upsold. Every extra day between the visit and the decision is a chance for the deal to cool off, for a competitor to undercut, or for the homeowner to simply live with the problem a little longer.
Traditional tools made this worse. A paper estimate is slow and error-prone. A spreadsheet lives on an office computer, not in the field. Financing, when it exists at all, is a separate phone call that happens after the moment has passed. Sales Builder Pro's answer is to collapse those steps into one on-site flow, with the contractor's own equipment catalog, pricing, and branding already loaded in.
02 / The TrickFinancing built into the pitch
The most consequential design choice in the product is not the proposal engine - it is where the financing lives. In home services, the deal-killer is rarely the equipment. It is the number. "I can't put $8,000 on a card" ends a lot of conversations. By integrating lender options directly into the proposal, Sales Builder Pro puts the monthly payment right next to the sticker price. The question shifts from "can I afford this furnace" to "can I afford $140 a month," which is a very different conversation to have while it is 40 degrees inside.
The company has stacked several financing relationships behind that feature, including Service 1st Financial, Hearth, and PowerPay, framing some of it as "home comfort as a service." It is a small feature on the screen and a large lever on close rates.
03 / The StrategyBe the layer, not the war
The obvious way to build software for contractors is to try to become their whole system - scheduling, dispatch, invoicing, the works. That market is crowded and well-funded, dominated by field-service platforms like ServiceTitan and FieldEdge. Intelligent Mobile Support made a quieter choice: it does not fight the office software. It plugs into it.
The integrations are two-way. A rep can select a customer in ServiceTitan, and it schedules a job in Sales Builder Pro; when the sales call is done, up to three proposal options flow back into ServiceTitan as estimates. The FieldEdge integration imports customer data so nobody re-types an address into two systems. This is unglamorous plumbing, but it is exactly what makes a specialized tool adoptable: it slots into the stack a contractor already runs instead of asking them to rip it out.
04 / The Product LineMore than one app
Sales Builder Pro has grown a family of modules, and the list reads like a map of every place an HVAC deal used to leak time:
What's in the box
- Deal Manager - track pending proposals, get remote approvals, and collaborate across the office and the field.
- eSign Toolkit - send proposals for e-signature by text or email, with a branded shopping-cart checkout and real-time activity tracking.
- Install Manager Pro - carry accurate proposal detail through to the install crew to cut part runs and callbacks.
- Ductless Design Tools - size and quote mini-split systems on the first visit, no second trip.
- Pro Branding - make every proposal look like the contractor's own polished marketing.
The ductless tooling is worth pausing on. Mini-split jobs usually require design math that sends a rep back for a second appointment - and second appointments are where deals go to die. Putting those calculations in the app is the kind of feature only a company living inside the trade would think to build. It is a small moat, but a real one.
Where the visit time goes
Illustrative comparison of a paper-and-follow-up quote versus a single-visit app close.
05 / The CustomersFrom one-truck shops to Ace Hardware
The user base runs the range of the trade. On one end are independent HVAC shops - the owner-operators whose testimonials mention accuracy and speed. On the other end are large operators: Ace Hardware Home Services uses it, with a VP crediting the Pro Branding tools as a marketing upgrade. The people inside the app are comfort consultants and sales reps, sales managers watching a pipeline, and install managers who inherit the job after the signature.
The company says the product was shaped by input from hundreds of contractors, which shows in the feature list - it is less a founder's vision of HVAC and more an accumulation of specific complaints, solved one at a time.
06 / The BusinessSmall, focused, and durable
Intelligent Mobile Support is not a hypergrowth story, and it does not pretend to be. Founded in 2009 by John Steidley, it stayed lean - roughly a dozen people - and raised modestly, with public data pointing to around $750,000 in outside funding backed by regional investors including North Coast Angel Fund, JumpStart, Rev1 Ventures, Ohio TechAngels, and Pittsburgh Equity Partners. The revenue model is straightforward B2B SaaS: subscription seats plus add-on modules for financing, e-signature, and integrations, with financing partners layered behind the product.
That is the whole shape of the company, and it is a deliberate one. It picked a workflow people hate, in a trade most software founders ignore, and built the tool that fixes it. There are a thousand trades like HVAC. Most of them are still waiting for their version of this.
07 / Where It FitsThe market around it
In the broader home-services software map, Sales Builder Pro sits in the in-home sales and proposal layer - a slice distinct from the office platforms that run scheduling and dispatch. Its competition is partly other sales tools, including ServiceTitan's own Sales Pro and presentation apps like Ingage or Rilla, and partly the incumbent that never goes away: the paper quote and the PDF template. Its edge is specificity. It is not a general proposal builder that happens to work for HVAC; it is HVAC software that happens to build proposals, down to the ductless math and the equipment catalogs.
For a contractor, the practical value is measurable in the two numbers owners actually track: close rate and margin. Close faster, on the first visit, with financing that answers the price objection - and protect the margin by carrying accurate numbers all the way to the install crew. That is the argument, and for a small company in Solon, Ohio, it has been enough to build a business on.