Case study · 90-day engagement
A Boston window replacement company had been a 6-truck operation for 14 years. Their average ticket was $14,000 — full-house replacements driven by Boston winters and Mass Save energy rebates. Their website said "Get a free quote." Customers preferred to compare 4 companies before they trusted anyone with $14,000. The competitor with the best calculator usually won.
The challenge
The owner came in through a referral. He had been running ads for years and the same problem kept showing up: customers were getting 4 quotes, picking the cheapest, and he was losing 70% of opportunities he met in person. The bot scored the website at 64 and flagged "no quote-time differentiation" as the conversion gap.
We pulled his data:
The fix was a calculator. The customer who knows their savings number commits faster. The customer who is given an estimate without context commits to nothing.
The plan
Built /savings-calculator with 5 inputs: home square footage, current heating fuel (gas/oil/electric), age of current windows, average winter temp setting, and zip code. Output: estimated annual heating savings ($800-2,400 range), Mass Save rebate eligible ($600-1,500), and ROI period (8-14 years). Email gate for the full report. 4.2% of homepage visitors used the calculator. 38% of calculator users requested an in-home quote.
Built city-specific landing pages for the 12 highest-volume Boston-area zip codes: Cambridge, Newton, Brookline, Somerville, etc. Each page covered Mass Save rebate eligibility for that specific town (some towns have additional municipal rebates) and showed before-and-after photos from completed jobs in that zip code. Started ranking page-1 within 6 weeks for 9 of the 12 city/window-replacement queries.
After a quote request, customers got a 4-email sequence: day 0 (quote scheduled, here's what to expect), day 2 (Mass Save rebate breakdown for your zip code), day 4 (sample energy-savings report from a similar Cambridge home), day 7 (3 questions to ask any window company before signing). Show-up rate jumped from 54% to 86%. Customers walked into the appointment educated and ready to buy.
Restructured ads around financing intent: "0% financing window replacement Boston," "window financing Mass Save rebate," "window replacement payment plan Cambridge." Customers who searched financing-related queries converted at 9.4% (vs 1.6% on baseline). Same daily ad budget produced 3.6× more quote requests.
AI tools we used
We do not pretend the work happens by hand. Three of our internal tools are the reason this engagement moved as fast as it did. Each of them replaces what used to be days of human time.
Custom AI we built that grades every search term on commercial intent, urgency, and local match in under a second. Replaces a half-day human audit.
Takes one bad search term and proposes the related variants we should also negate before they show up. Found 87 negatives nobody had thought of.
Crawls the site and fires every conversion event in a sandbox so you can see what is actually being recorded vs what should be. Caught the duplicate form fire in 4 minutes.
The execution
| Week | What we shipped | What moved |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Calculator UX wireframes approved, savings formulas verified with energy auditor | Owner signs off on rebate copy |
| Week 3 | Calculator live with email-gated report, first calculator usage day 4 | 11 quote requests in week 3 from calculator alone |
| Week 4 | 12 city-specific Mass Save landing pages live | First city-page rankings within 14 days |
| Week 5 | 4-email pre-appointment sequence connected to quote-request form | Show-up rate jumps from 54% to 78% same week |
| Week 8 | Financing-intent Google Ads restructure complete, conversion 9.4% | Quote requests hit 56/mo |
| Week 12 | Final review | Run rate stable at 78 quote requests/mo, retainer continues |
The numbers
The calculator changed the entire customer mindset:
26 closed jobs/mo × $14k average ticket = $364k/mo in revenue, up from roughly $70k/mo prior. The 90-day engagement at $799/mo cost $2,397. The owner now turns away mid-summer leads to focus on margin-positive winter installs.
Customers were always going to get 3-4 quotes. Mark made me the only one giving them numbers. Once they had their estimated savings, they stopped asking what I would charge and started asking when I could start. The calculator did the selling.
Keep reading
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