Pest Control Sales: How to Turn Calls, Forms and Doors Into Recurring Customers

Pest control sales starts with answering every call and reaching web leads within minutes. Quote simple jobs on the phone, book an inspection for the rest, and sell a recurring plan instead of a one-time spray. Then follow up on every quote that didn’t close, score your calls, train your CSRs and offer add-ons to the customers you already have.

I’m mostly a digital guy. My agency does pest control SEO, so my part is usually over by the time someone at your office picks up the phone. What happens next is up to your team, which is why I ask the best salespeople in the industry how they sell when they come on Pest Control Legends.

Answer every call, and every form within minutes

Missed calls cost you twice

Answering the phone is the simplest thing companies miss, and one of the biggest. Depending on whose data you look at, many companies pick up only 50 to 60% of their calls. Even Invoca’s numbers, which are kinder, have home services companies missing 27% of inbound calls. We can do the SEO and the Google Ads as well as anyone, and if nobody picks up, none of it works.

Every call that goes to voicemail is a lead you already paid for. With Local Services Ads you lose more than the job. Google’s page on how LSA ads are ranked lists your responsiveness to customer inquiries as a factor and says “missed calls may negatively affect your responsiveness.” My Local Services Ads guide covers the rest.

In Zip Code Kings, my partner Jake Sheldon puts unanswered phones at the top of the mistakes he sees. If you’re the only one who can pick up and you’re in the middle of a service, the jobs in those missed calls could cover a CSR’s pay.

Pull your missed calls by hour of the day from your call tracking. If they bunch up while you’re on a route or after 5 p.m., that’s where you need a CSR, an answering service or a teammate’s cell on the forwarding list.

Kyle Turner, who built Pro Active Pest Control to more than 140 employees, calls his own office most days, both as a current customer and as a new lead. Call yours tomorrow from a number nobody there will recognize.

Reach web leads in minutes

Put your phone number in a button at the top right of your site, written out so desktop visitors can dial it from their phones, and a short form in the first or second section of every page. That’s how I’d lay out any pest control website, and it only pays off if someone gets back to each form fast.

Kyle told me a lot of Pro Active’s Yelp leads go to his company and 4 others at once, and his answer is to be the hungriest. Reply as fast as possible and give them something real, like a price or a time on the schedule. Set up an automatic text that goes out the moment a form comes in, saying who you are and that you’re about to call, then call within a few minutes, so they know whose number is ringing. More on shared leads is in my post on pest control leads.

A simple flow for pest control sales calls

A good inbound call follows the same steps every time.

Answer with the company name and your own.
Get their name, phone number and address early, so you can call back if the line drops and confirm they’re in your area.
Ask what they’re seeing, where in the house and for how long.
Explain what the first service includes and how the recurring plan works after it.
Give the price plainly.
Ask for the booking with two choices, then stop talking.
Take payment details and send a confirmation text.

Some companies do all of it in one call. Pest Control Technology reported in 2021 that Green Pest Solutions aims to close the sale, schedule the first visit and take payment in a single call, usually in under 10 minutes.

For step 6, Breton Bess of Insight Pest Solutions gives the service and the price, then asks whether tomorrow morning or evening works better. Rookies ask the same question, he told me, but when the customer pauses to think, they can’t stand the silence and jump back in with more selling. Owners have to watch this more than anyone, he said, because they know every product name and egg cycle, and unloading all of it leaves customers feeling dumb.

“If we could wave a magic wand and just get rid of all the bugs for the customer, the customer would not care.”

Quote on the phone or book an inspection?

Price general pest on the phone. The same PCT article describes companies quoting exterior perimeter work by phone using their software, mapping sites and customer data, while bed bug, wildlife and termite work usually gets an inspection first. A fast quote also gives the homeowner less time to call around.

When a job needs an inspection, book it on that first call, as soon as you can get there. Then bring the customer along. Chaz Estrada worked as a termite inspector in Southern California before he joined Nisus Corporation, and his best tool wasn’t a closing line.

“If I could get a customer to join me on an inspection, that was a sale every time. Didn’t matter what I was selling.”

He wanted homeowners to hear how he thought through their problem, so they’d trust him over whatever they’d read online. If other companies were coming out to quote, he offered to cancel those appointments for the homeowner.

Sell the recurring plan, not a one-time spray

Make the recurring plan your default and a one-time service the exception. Kyle told me Pro Active only sold recurring service plans for its first 5 or 6 years. A day on a termite job might pay well, but it’s a day you didn’t sign customers who’d pay you every month for years. Pro Active added termite, rodent proofing and bird work only once it had a solid base.

On the phone, explain why one treatment doesn’t last. Pests keep moving in from outside, so the plan keeps a barrier up, and customers can call between visits if something shows up. Say what’s included and what your guarantee covers, then price the plan first.

Breton credits more than his reps for growing one branch from zero to $5.5M in 3 years. Great service and a dialed-in call center kept customers around, and with bad attrition, he said, you’d have to sell a lot more to end up at the same number.

How to handle price objections

Don’t cut the price the moment someone hesitates. Most homeowners have no idea what pest control costs, according to Lenny Gray. One summer he had 5 groups of reps each pitch a different offer to see which got more homeowners to ask the price.

“It didn’t matter which one of the five, it mattered what the energy of the rep was and the excitement that the rep had about what they were going to be able to offer.”

Restate what the plan includes and what happens if bugs come back, and ask what they’re comparing it to. If you have a lower first-service price for customers who sign up for the year, now’s the time to offer it.

Breton borrows an idea about certainty from a sales guy he listens to. If the homeowner is more certain their current company is doing fine than you are that they need you, you won’t make the sale. When someone tells him their service has been great, he looks up at the cobwebs in the eaves and the wasp nest that’s been there a year.

The stalls you’ll hear most, like “I need to talk to my spouse” and “I need to think about it,” each need a practiced answer. PCM’s guide to door-to-door pest control objections has rebuttals for the common ones, and they work on the phone too.

Follow up on every quote that didn’t close

A lot of door-to-door reps never ask for contact information when a homeowner says no. Josh Schiffman of Sage Pest Control always did. In his first pest control summer, plenty of homeowners loved their technician and had no reason to switch, so he asked to be on deck if anything ever changed. He kept those names on paper, color-coded by the month each one needed a call. In March, before his team started knocking, he sold 74 of those callbacks.

“If they say no, get a contact, store it up. That’s information. Check back with them. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t take much time.”

Put every open quote in a pipeline with a stage and, when it’s lost, the reason why. PCM’s article on pest control sales pipeline stages covers setting one up. Text and call the same day, again the next day, then a week later, then once a month, and again before that customer’s busy season. Chaz told me a no today can become a yes on some random Tuesday 6 months later.

Call scoring and CSR training

Natura Pest Control turned its sales process into a 100-point scorecard. Eric Bassett, Natura’s co-owner, told me managers listen to calls and grade them like a test, across 4 categories with 5 parts each, every part scored 1 to 5. A 100 usually means a fantastic customer experience, while a D or below means the rep is hurting it.

The scores feed weekly meetings where each person names their wins, where they can improve and a plan built on behaviors. Eric treats close rate as a lag measure. Asking the right questions on a call is the lead measure that moves it. A rep who closes well but falls behind on callbacks might commit to calling every lead back before going home.

“If you don’t have that in place, you have no information. And when you don’t have any information, you have no direction.”

For your CSRs, write the call flow down, role-play the common objections and listen to recordings together, especially calls that didn’t book. Setting up recording and sorting real leads from spam is covered in my call tracking guide.

Door-to-door pest control sales

Lenny, who built Rove Pest Control on door-to-door, would plug a team into one zip code with a target, fill it, then move to the next. He’d start with the next-door neighbors of every current customer, and mention the neighbor only when it’s true. He also thinks almost every technician just wants to be a technician, since a real sales conversation takes 15 to 20 minutes and a tech has a next stop.

His sales flow has six steps:

The initial approach, the first 20 to 30 seconds at the door
Qualify, using the 5 qualifiers he found by reverse engineering his own sales
Build value in 2 minutes or less, around their house, kids, dogs or bugs
Close
Overcome concerns, then close again
Solidify the sale so the account gets serviced and stays

Josh learned to pitch as himself during his first summer selling alarms door to door. The script he’d been taught felt unnatural, and the first day he sold his own way, he made 2 sales. Breton wrote a 60-page manual for his reps and would rather hire someone with no sales experience who’s coachable.

Door-to-door isn’t the only way to grow, though. Kyle knocked doors for his first 6 months at Pro Active, and the company sent a team out for one more summer to open Arizona. The rest came from Google, Yelp and reviews. My guide to pest control marketing shows where knocking fits with the rest.

Sell add-ons to the customers you already have

Your customer list is the cheapest place to sell. Breton spends much of his time on systems to sell mosquito and termite service to his pest control customers. With 1,000 customers, he said, getting 2% of them on termite work grows the business right away, and customers who buy more tend to stay longer.

At Antimite, Chaz’s first company, the list of existing customers was called the “loser list,” and he loved it. On slow days he called them to offer the free inspection that came with their service, and even when he found nothing to sell, he could tell them something about their house. Later, when pest control companies told him their customers wouldn’t buy insulation or heat, he’d go sell a job in front of them.

“Now you know how much money you’re not making by not offering this stuff. And that’s really it. There’s no trick to sales.”

A customer who has had the same tech for 3 years already trusts him, so all you have to do is offer. Time it to the season, with mosquito before summer, rodents when it cools off and termite inspections when swarmers show up. If a tech doesn’t want to sell, Chaz suggests passing the lead to a teammate who does and working out a commission. PCM’s guide to upselling and cross-selling has more scenarios.

Questions pest control owners ask

Should my technicians sell?

Mostly no. Lenny would keep techs out of selling, and Breton keeps sales and service separate. Have techs flag a problem they see and hand it to someone who sells, with a commission if it closes.

Should I give prices over the phone?

For general pest service, yes, using the property’s size and what the caller describes. Termite, bed bug and wildlife jobs usually need an inspection first, so book it on that call.

How fast should I call back a web lead?

Within minutes. Send an automatic text right away, then call. After a few hours, a lead that also contacted other companies is usually gone.