Keeping the Board Full: Marketing That Works When Demand Slows

Jen Alonso, Director of Sales & Marketing at Lowry Overhead Doors, runs a Utah garage door company with roughly 20 trucks covering territory from one end of the state to the other. Since May, the estimates sold by her office, sales, and marketing team have climbed from 2,000–3,000 a month to 15,000–16,000. This session, introduced by host Josh Lu and led by ServiceTitan's Brittany Burgess, walks through how Lowry got there using the five AI adoption barriers contractors named in a survey of 1,000 trades businesses. Along the way it covers virtual agents, Dispatch Pro, Atlas in Marketing Pro, and FieldPro voice summaries, all running on the Max package.

Getting Buy-In and Keeping Every Workflow Inside ServiceTitan

The survey's five barriers structure the conversation:

• Lack of training and skilled staff

• Integration challenges

• Difficulty understanding how to use AI tools

• Lack of clear ROI and use cases

• Implementation challenges

Lowry's answer to the first barrier starts with how leadership talks about the technology. Alonso's message to staff begins on day one: "AI is not smarter than you. Artificial intelligence feels like a misnomer. It's just faster."

When someone on the team pushes back, the company's standing response is "Try it." The team talks through what specifically bothers the person, then commits to a window: "Give it three to six months, and if it's still a problem and we're not seeing the ROI on our time, and we're not seeing an increase in revenue, then we can try something different, and we can fail at that point."

Lowry also taught its tools a shared voice. Marketing, the CEO, and the sales director all used the same ChatGPT account so it would learn how the company writes, and the habit carried over to Atlas and the virtual agent.

On integration, the executive team made a pact when they started on the platform in 2021: "If it's not in ServiceTitan, it didn't happen. Everything has to be in ServiceTitan." The first question for any new marketing vendor is how it integrates with ServiceTitan. The Max upgrade followed the same logic. Lowry was already on several Pro products, wanted Dispatch Pro, and wanted to bring its existing GPS fleet provider into the platform.

Where the ROI Showed Up After the Move to Max

Lowry didn't chase one headline metric. She says "the ROI I see for me is time." Close rate is up 31%, which she ties to automated follow-ups plus more hours for getting estimates out and picking up the phone. Average ticket rose too, because a CSR who isn't rushing through a stack of bids is more likely to add the keyless entry upgrade.

Lowry tracks one KPI closely: jobs booked or estimates sold by the office, sales, and marketing team, excluding anything created by technicians. Techs often leave partial estimates when a job needs a specialty part or specialty pricing, and the office finishes them. Faster estimates and live follow-up calls, on top of the automated texts and emails, account for the jump from 2,000–3,000 a month to 15,000–16,000.

The freed-up time also changed hiring. Each CSR at Lowry has a "side hustle," a focus area they own. When one CSR position opened, the role was rebuilt around more estimates, finding new clients, and cold calling, because follow-ups and text-message babysitting are now handled by automation and the virtual agent.

For teams that aren't convinced, she suggests collecting ROI numbers once the tools are running and showing each person what it saves them personally. She's also candid about the workload: going Max without Dispatch Pro or Marketing Pro means learning both. And the tools aren't flawless. Early on, an AI-generated invoice summary went out to a customer with the line, "We're so sorry your garage is a toilet. Happy we could fix it."

Building Virtual Agents by Business Unit and Tone

Dory, Lowry's first virtual agent, launched in December. Her booking rate in the first 30 days was about 10%, and it now sits consistently around 70%. The need was concrete: the Lowry showroom is open to the public, so CSRs are often helping walk-ins when the phone rings. Dory also answers inbound texts and follows up within ServiceTitan's quiet hours, so she won't message anyone at 4 a.m.

Lowry has since split its agents by audience:

• Dory: residential calls and texts

• Bruce: in development for commercial customers and contractors, trained on how Lowry's lead estimator talks to them

• Darla: Costco Home Services members, routed by the business unit marked on the customer account

Tone drove the Bruce decision. Commercial callers wanted something more direct and serious, and in voice A/B tests, contractors seemed to respond better to slower, deeper male voices than to an upbeat female one. The Costco split was about control, since Dory's rules tell her not to discuss Costco at all.

Guardrails are edited like any other document. Lowry requires the agent to announce that she's an AI. When Dory once introduced herself using an assistant manager's name, the team wrote a short Google Doc and uploaded it to her knowledge base, a job that takes under five minutes. The instruction read: "Dory, whatever you do, don't ever pretend to be someone else again. Your name is Dory. You are always Dory."

Handoffs aren't perfect either. Darla briefly took over a regular customer's conversation because the customer mentioned shopping at Costco.

Dispatch Pro, Atlas, and Field Pro in Daily Operations

Lowry's technicians run through five counties on a service radius of roughly 75 miles, with mountains in between, so routing is a real constraint. She keeps in mind that "AI just has rules, and all we have to do is set the rules." To learn Dispatch Pro's behavior, she took over as dispatcher for two weeks. Watching it work was uncomfortable: "It is terrifying to watch your whole beautiful schedule exist and then just fall to the bottom of the board in the unassigned."

After she shut the computer off one Friday night, the board was arranged geographically the way she would have done it by Sunday evening. When she manually dragged and dropped jobs, "the more I did that, the smarter it got naturally." Revenue per tech is up 12% in the last month. Lowry ran one dispatcher for every five techs at one point, and she now believes one dispatcher can cover 20.

In Marketing Pro, Atlas can analyze unsold estimates, overdue invoices, and cross-sell opportunities and recommend a campaign. During a smoky Utah summer, Alonso skipped the automated suggestions and simply told it, "Atlas, I'm exhausted, I'm hot, I'm tired, my state's on fire. Give me a campaign. Give me something to do."

Because Lowry had fallen behind on SMS opt-ins, Atlas kept the campaign transactional: a public safety text reminding customers to pull the red emergency release cord on their opener if power goes out. The audience and message took about 15 minutes to build, and she used Atlas to generate an image with the release cord highlighted.

Field Pro closes the gap between the office and the field. Techs get voice summaries before each call, including customer history and revenue with the company, and they can listen while driving. Alonso's CSRs had tried bold text, colors, and bullet points to get techs to read job notes. On an escalated call where a customer and tech disagreed on a part name, the team read the AI summary, spotted the mismatch, rebooked, and collected on the day's job. The whole thing took five minutes, and they sold another product.

Key Topics

Join us as we discuss:

• [2:02] What drove Lowry to adopt ServiceTitan’s virtual agents and getting their team onboard 

• [12:18] Calculating clear ROI for AI tools and ServiceTitan’s MAX package

• [21:17] Why distinctive virtual agents for different customer bases are important

• [32:06] How Atlas and Marketing Pro helped Lowry with marketing copy and messaging

• [40:39] Practical tips for contractors thinking about implementing AI in their workflows

Check out these resources mentioned during the podcast:

• Pantheon 2026

• ServiceTitan Max Package

• ServiceTitan Virtual Agents

You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here.

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