Pull-Through Revenue: The $2.3M Walking Out of Your Service Agreements

The Metric Almost Nobody Tracks

Most contractors think about service agreements the same way: recurring revenue, predictable visits, steady margin. Set them up. Bill them annually. Collect.

That's maybe 20% of what a service agreement is actually worth.

The rest — the majority of the economic value — sits in the work a tech finds on a maintenance visit that turns into repair, replacement, or an upgrade later. That's pull-through revenue. And across the 2,242-contractor Level benchmarking dataset, the gap between median and top-quartile contractors on pull-through is the single biggest lever on service-division profitability.

The median contractor generates 8.7% pull-through — meaning for every $100 of SA revenue, they capture roughly $8.70 in follow-on project and repair work. Top quartile runs 29.6%+. The best operators in the dataset are over 40%.

On a $1M SA book, that's the difference between $87K and $400K in additional revenue from customers you've already earned, during visits you're already making. Same visits. Same techs. Same trucks. Different outcome — because someone trained the techs, built the follow-up workflow, and actually tracked the recommendations.

This post is about that gap. What it's worth, why most contractors miss it, and the specific workflows that close it.

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The $25M Pull-Through Example (and the $2.3M Leak Underneath)

The cleanest example I've worked on: a commercial mechanical contractor with a $30M-ish service division and a multi-million-dollar SA book. On paper, they were in the top 10% of contractors I'd seen for pull-through — roughly $25.2M in follow-on project work generated from maintenance visits over a 24-month stretch. Ratio-to-SA well above the top-quartile benchmark.

So the punchline of the engagement wasn't pull-through. It was what came next.

When we ran the audit on the quote side — every project quote generated out of a maintenance visit — the gap was stunning:

Two findings that only become visible when you stop looking at the FSM dispatch board and start looking at the economics:

1. The most valuable SAs were the ones churning. Expired agreements averaged nearly 2× the annual value of active ones. The largest, most complex, highest-margin customers — the kind a mechanical contractor makes 40–50% of their profit on — were the ones walking away, quietly, with no renewal workflow in place. Nobody called. The SA simply ran out.
2. $2.3M of quoted pull-through work was expiring every year, invisible in any dashboard. Techs were finding the work. Project quotes were being generated. And then nothing happened. No systematic follow-up at 7 days. No escalation at 14. No owner-level view of expired pull-through quotes by dollar value.

This was a contractor doing everything right on the operational side. Strong dispatch. High visit completion. Happy techs. And they were leaking roughly $4.5M of annual economic value — between the unreviewed expired SAs and the un-followed-up pull-through quotes — out of a service division they thought was running well.

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Why Pull-Through Is Really a Workflow Problem

Most posts about pull-through revenue stop at "train your techs to find work." That's the start, not the finish. Across the dataset, the contractors who actually capture top-quartile pull-through have four things running simultaneously.

1. Tech-Level Identification (the one everyone talks about)

Techs on a maintenance visit need to be trained to identify more than just the checklist. They're looking at equipment age, code compliance gaps, efficiency issues, and upgrade opportunities. The ones doing this well document everything — photos, notes, rough cost ranges.

The benchmark I see in the top quartile: a tech generates between 0.7 and 1.4 pull-through recommendations per maintenance visit on average. The median contractor is well under 0.3.

2. Per-Tech Pull-Through Attribution

If you don't know which techs generate pull-through and which don't, you can't manage the gap. Across the dataset, pull-through contribution is wildly uneven at the tech level — I routinely see top performers generating 5–8× the pull-through of bottom performers on the same crew. Not because of skill. Because of training, habit, and incentives.

The contractors in the top quartile all do two things: they attribute pull-through to the originating tech, and they compensate for it (spiff, commission, recognition). The median contractor does neither.

3. Real Quote Follow-Up Sequences (not reminders in the FSM)

A tech recommendation that sits in the FSM queue isn't revenue. The revenue happens when a sales/service manager calls the customer within 48 hours, presents the quote, answers objections, and closes. Across the dataset, median quote conversion is 73.9% — for decided quotes. The quotes that never get decided are the entire problem.

Top-quartile contractors run a 7-day rule: every open pull-through quote over $5K gets a personal follow-up call within a week. The median contractor has no trigger — the quote just sits and ages out. The 7-day follow-up rule →

4. SA Renewal Prosecution

This is where most contractors lose the most money and see the least. SAs don't renew themselves. Or more precisely — the easy ones do, and the complex ones don't. The $35K residential SA auto-renews. The $69K commercial multi-site contract with a changing building manager and last year's service complaint? That one needs a human working it 60 days before expiration.

Most contractors don't have a 60–90 day pre-expiration renewal workflow. The SA runs out. The customer doesn't sign the renewal because nobody showed up with it. Another contractor wins it next year. The renewal rate benchmark data shows the gap — top operators renew 90%+; bottom quartile renews under 60%.

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What the Numbers Actually Look Like

Here's the pull-through distribution from 386 contractors in Level's dataset with meaningful SA books:

The spread — from 3% to 30%+ at the 25th/75th split — is larger than almost any other operating ratio I track. And unlike gross margin, which is constrained by pricing power and trade, pull-through ratio is entirely inside your control. Same customers. Same book. Same trade. The only difference is the workflow.

On a $5M service contractor with a $1.2M SA book:

The difference between median and top quartile on a $1.2M SA book is $250K in incremental revenue per year, with gross margins typically in the 45–55% range — call it $120K of pure incremental gross profit. None of which requires new customers, new marketing, or new trucks.

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Why Your FSM Won't Close This Gap

Every field service platform — BuildOps, ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, FieldEdge, the rest — can technically track tech recommendations. The feature exists. Almost no contractor has it fully configured.

More importantly: even when it's on, the FSM doesn't prosecute the workflow. It captures the recommendation. It doesn't:

• Route the recommendation to a quote
• Trigger a 48-hour follow-up assignment
• Escalate quotes aging past 7 days to a manager
• Flag pull-through attribution in tech comp reports
• Surface expired SAs 60/90/120 days before they lapse

Those are financial/operations workflows on top of the FSM. They're not features your FSM vendor is going to build. The gap between what your FSM captures and what actually drives revenue is a category problem, not a product problem.

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The Audit That Usually Uncovers This

When we audit a contractor's pull-through economics at Level, we run the same four queries against the FSM data and the accounting system:

1. Pull-through ratio trailing 12 months, total and by tech.
2. Expired SA cohort — every agreement that lapsed in the last 24 months, with annual value, tenure, and reason for non-renewal (documented or inferred).
3. Aging pull-through quotes — every quote generated from a maintenance visit that's been open more than 7 days, by dollar value and age.
4. Pull-through conversion rate — of quotes generated, what percentage are won? Bottom to top is a 30-point swing.

Nine times out of ten, the aggregate finding is between $150K–$500K of annual recoverable revenue on contractors $3–10M in size, and $1M+ at $20M+ contractors. The work exists. The workflow to capture it doesn't.

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What to Do This Month

If you haven't audited your pull-through in the last 12 months:

1. Pull the ratio. Total non-SA service/project revenue on SA customers ÷ total SA revenue. If you're under 10%, you're below median.
2. Segment by tech. Flag the bottom quartile of techs by pull-through dollars per visit. That's where your training ROI is highest.
3. List every quote open more than 7 days. Sort by dollar value. Assign a human to follow up on the top 10 this week.
4. Pull the expired SA list for the trailing 24 months. Sort by ACV. Start with the top 5.
5. Build a 90-day pre-expiration workflow on every commercial SA above a threshold ($25K ACV is a fine starting line).

If you have a meaningful SA book (50+ agreements) and you don't have pull-through dialed in, the recoverable upside is almost always larger than whatever else you're debating this quarter. It's the single highest-leverage thing to fix in most contractor service divisions.

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The Bottom Line

Pull-through is the metric that separates good service-division contractors from great ones. The median contractor captures $8.70 of pull-through for every $100 of SA revenue. The top quartile captures $30 or more — same visits, same customers, same techs. The difference is a four-part workflow most FSMs don't run by default.

And quietly underneath all of that: the most valuable agreements are the ones churning. If you're not running a 60–90 day SA renewal workflow on your commercial book, the best customers you have are the ones most likely to walk.

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Q: What's a realistic pull-through ratio to target? A: Median is 8.7%. Top quartile is 29.6%. A contractor starting from median should aim for 15–20% in year one (doable with tech training and a basic follow-up workflow) and 25%+ by year two (requires per-tech attribution and comp). Top-10% (40%+) is a multi-year cultural build — it's where the top contractor SA programs all eventually land.

Q: How do I train techs to identify pull-through without making them feel like salespeople? A: Frame it as "inspect, recommend, document" — not "upsell." A good tech on a maintenance visit is already looking at equipment age, code gaps, and efficiency issues. The training is about documenting what they see, not selling it. The selling happens later, by a service manager or rep, on a follow-up call. Separating identification from closing is the key move most contractors miss.

Q: What's a reasonable pull-through spiff/commission? A: Most contractors in the top quartile pay techs 2–5% of pull-through revenue they originate, either as a straight spiff or rolled into a quarterly bonus. The number isn't the point — the visibility is. Techs who see their pull-through dollars on a weekly leaderboard generate 2–3× more pull-through than techs who don't. See the full add-on sales benchmarks analysis for per-trade comp norms.

Q: How often should we review the expired SA list? A: Monthly at minimum for commercial accounts. Quarterly for residential. The metric that matters most is renewal with price increase — not just renewal rate. A 95% renewal rate at flat pricing is still a 3–5% annual decline in real dollars as labor and parts inflate. Top operators run 88–92% renewal at +4–7% annual price increase, which is where real economics live.

Q: Can Level audit this for us? A: Yes. We connect to your FSM and accounting system, pull the full pull-through + SA cohort data, and benchmark it against the Level Index. The first audit is free — most contractors find $150K–$500K of recoverable revenue in the first 30 days. See pricing →.

Q: Where can I see the benchmark data in full? A: Pull-through and SA margin benchmarks with quartile breakouts are on the Level Index contractor page. For the deeper dives — SA renewal rates, pull-through by trade, and the power-law distribution inside SA books — the service agreements category has five data-backed posts.