A campaign so effective they had to shut it off
In July 2025, BRD Pest Solutions ran a text campaign to upsell mosquito control to existing pest control customers. Within weeks it had generated more than $650,000 in new revenue, booked more than 1,300 sales calls, and closed 786 deals entirely over text.
Then they turned it off. Not because it stopped working. Because they ran out of mosquito product and could not hire technicians fast enough to keep up.
I ran inside sales at BRD across its seven offices before I started Plaibook, so this one is personal. This is what happened when a mid-sized pest control company pointed automated text outreach at 30,000 existing customers, and what they learned about the gap between generating demand and fulfilling it.
Who BRD Pest Solutions is
BRD is a regional pest control company with seven offices and roughly 35,000 customers. They offer the standard residential and commercial services, and for years they had offered mosquito control as an add-on. On paper it was a natural upsell. Customers already trusted BRD with their pest problems. Mosquito treatment was the obvious next step.
Adoption was low anyway. Most customers did not know mosquito control existed. The ones who did often did not see the value until they were standing in the backyard getting eaten alive in June, by which point the sales team had moved on to the next thing.
BRD knew it was sitting on revenue. The question was how to reach 35,000 people and have a real conversation about mosquito control with each of them.
Why the usual outreach was not working
BRD had tried the standard approaches. Bulk email promoting mosquito control. Outbound phone campaigns where reps worked through customer lists. Seasonal promotions timed to spring.
The results were always modest. Email open rates were low, and even the customers who opened rarely clicked. Phone campaigns were better in theory, but the math did not work. You cannot call 30,000 customers with a five-person sales team. Even at 80 dials a day per rep, it takes months to get through the list, and by then mosquito season is half over.
Timing was the other problem. Pest control sales spike early in the season and taper as summer goes on. A phone campaign that starts in May and is still dialing in August is fighting the calendar. The customers who would have said yes in May have found another provider or decided to live with the mosquitoes.
BRD needed to reach the whole customer base at once, with a personal message, and carry on a real back-and-forth with each one.
The approach: 30,000 conversations at once
In July 2025, BRD loaded 30,000 existing customers into Plaibook for a text upsell campaign. The goal was simple: text each customer, offer mosquito control, and handle the conversation from there. Interested? Book them. Questions? Answer them. Objections? Work through them. Not interested? Be polite and move on.
BRD described what they wanted in plain English. The tone. The offer. How to handle common objections. What to do when someone says "not right now" versus "never text me again." Plaibook then ran the conversations: texting customers, answering questions, working through objections, and booking appointments around each customer's schedule.
Of the 30,000 customers contacted, roughly 28,000 conversations started. That is 28,000 individual text threads where a customer got a message and a reply was ready. Each one was a two-way conversation, not a broadcast.
For perspective: if BRD had tried this with the sales team, each rep would have been juggling hundreds of simultaneous threads, trying to remember where each one left off, what the objection was, and whether the customer preferred mornings or afternoons. At 28,000 conversations, hiring does not solve it. People cannot work that way. The software handled all of it at once, and each customer got replies specific to their situation, their questions, and their schedule.
Finding the right tone
One of the first decisions was how aggressive the texting should be. This is a real tradeoff, and BRD tested it with data rather than guessing. Three settings:
Aggressive
Push hard for the close. Follow up persistently. Be direct about the offer. Result: 15.5% close rate, 17% negative sentiment. Nearly one in five customers came away annoyed.
Balanced
Clear about the offer, respectful of boundaries. Follow up, but do not badger. Result: 7.6% close rate, 10% negative sentiment.
Gentle
Mention the offer, answer questions if asked, do not push. Result: 5.2% close rate, 6.3% negative sentiment. Very few upset customers, far fewer sales.
BRD chose balanced. The reasoning was practical: these were existing relationships. A 15.5% close rate sounds great until you realize 17% of your entire customer base is irritated with you. These are not cold leads. These are people who already pay you every month. Burning that goodwill for a few extra points of conversion was not worth it, and I think that was the right call.
The balanced result also told BRD something about the market. At 7.6% across 28,000 conversations, there was a large pool of customers who wanted mosquito control and had never been asked the right way at the right time. They did not need pressure. They needed to be reached.
What the conversations looked like
The real test of any automated sales tool is not the average case. It is the edge cases. The customer who pushes back. The one who is annoyed. The one who is interested but has a real objection. BRD saw all of these, and how they were handled is what made the campaign work.
The budget objection
A common scenario: the customer replies that they want mosquito control but cannot afford another service right now. Instead of dropping the conversation or pushing for a hard close, the reply offered a deferred payment option. It acknowledged the budget concern, presented a way to start now and spread the cost, and booked the appointment. The customer went from "I can't afford it" to "okay, let's do it" in a handful of messages.
This is the kind of conversation that falls apart in a bulk email or a phone tree. It requires understanding what the customer actually said, having a relevant answer, and delivering it like a conversation instead of a script.
The annoyed customer
Another scenario that came up repeatedly: customers who were genuinely annoyed to get a sales text. Some were blunt about it. In those cases the reply did not escalate or fire back with another pitch. It apologized, acknowledged the frustration, and backed off.
Here is the interesting part. In several cases, a softer message went out days later, something like: "Hey, just wanted to make sure your regular service is going well. Let us know if there's anything we can help with." A few of those customers, annoyed on Tuesday, circled back and booked mosquito treatments. Annoyed on Tuesday does not mean lost by Friday.
No human rep has the bandwidth to follow up with an annoyed customer three days later with a gentle check-in. They have moved on to the next call. Software does not forget and does not hold a grudge.
The results
The numbers from BRD's campaign, with context:
- 28,000 conversations started out of 30,000 customers contacted
- 786 deals closed entirely over text. No phone call, no visit, just SMS.
- 1,360 sales calls booked for customers who wanted to talk to a person before committing
- $650,000+ in new revenue from one campaign
- More than a 5x return on what the campaign cost
The day-to-day change was the dramatic part. Before the campaign, BRD scheduled about 61 mosquito appointments a week. After launch, that jumped to 1,072 a week, a 17.5x increase in weekly appointment volume.
On the annual numbers: in 2024, BRD booked 3,596 mosquito appointments for the whole year. In 2025, 10,614. A 195% year-over-year increase. The mosquito business nearly tripled in one year.
"When we started using Plaibook we saw our daily revenue skyrocket 10X and our outbound close rate was elevated to 75%."Taylor Christensen, Marketing Director, BRD Pest Solutions
The 786 direct closes deserve a closer look. These customers went from a text message to agreeing to a new recurring service and booking an appointment without ever picking up the phone. For a services business that is unusual. People usually want to talk to someone before committing to a recurring charge. That hundreds of customers were comfortable closing over text says something about the quality of the conversations. They felt real enough to trust.
The 1,360 booked calls are arguably worth more. These were not cold calls where a rep explains who they are and why they are calling. These were warm handoffs. The customer had already shown interest over text, had basic questions answered, and wanted a person before pulling the trigger. Those calls close at a much higher rate and take less time, because most of the selling already happened in the thread.
Do the math. A typical outbound rep connects with 20-30 customers a day by phone, most of whom were never interested. Wasted minutes. With the initial outreach and qualification handled over text, BRD's phone reps only talked to people who had raised their hand. They were not dialing into dead air and voicemail. They were confirming details and closing with people who wanted to buy. Across a five-person team, that is a very different day.
What went wrong
This campaign was not all good news. When you 17.5x weekly appointment volume in a matter of weeks, things break. At BRD, several things broke.
They ran out of product
BRD had stocked mosquito chemicals for historical demand. Historical demand was 61 appointments a week. At more than 1,000 a week, inventory was gone in days. They had to pause the campaign and scramble to restock, and supplier lead times meant they could not snap their fingers and get more.
They could not hire fast enough
More appointments means more technicians in the field. The existing crew could handle the old volume. It could not handle 17 times the old volume. Recruiting, hiring, and training technicians takes weeks at minimum. You cannot generate demand Monday and have new techs trained and routed by Friday. BRD ended up with more booked revenue than it could physically service, which meant pushing appointments out further than customers expected and risking the goodwill the campaign had just built.
CRM reconciliation was messy
When you close 786 deals over text and book 1,360 calls through software, all of that has to flow back into the CRM cleanly. Customer records updated. New service lines added to existing accounts. Appointments synced with routing. At BRD's scale, the reconciliation was messy. Some records did not sync. Some appointments double-booked. The data existed, but getting it into the right system in the right shape took manual cleanup nobody had planned for.
That one has since been fixed on our side: Plaibook now books directly onto the right route in FieldRoutes, sends the contract, and collects payment inside the thread, so there is no separate reconciliation step. The integrations page covers what that connection does today. The other two problems, product and people, are yours to plan for.
None of these were product failures. They were operations lessons. The campaign worked too well, too fast, and the business was not ready for the volume. That is a good problem to have. It is still a problem. The second time around, the checklist is obvious: pre-stock far more inventory, have a hiring pipeline ready to activate, and pace the sends so the routes fill instead of overflow.
The lesson for other pest control companies: before you turn on a campaign like this, make sure operations can absorb the demand. Build capacity before you build pipeline. The worst outcome is not a campaign that underperforms. It is a campaign that overperforms and damages customer trust because you cannot deliver what you sold.
The takeaway: your customer list is the cheapest revenue you have
It is tempting to frame this as "AI is magic." It is not. What happened at BRD was math.
BRD had 35,000 customers. Some percentage of them wanted mosquito control. That percentage was always there. The demand existed before the campaign. What BRD lacked was a way to reach all 35,000 people with a personal, two-way conversation at the moment they might say yes. Email could not do it. Phone could not scale it. The demand sat there, year after year.
The campaign surfaced it. It took customers already in BRD's database, already paying for pest control, and started a real text conversation with each of them, one where the customer could ask questions, push back, and get straight answers.
The $650,000 did not come from new customers. It came from existing ones. BRD did not spend a dollar on new leads or run a single ad. Every dollar came from people who already trusted them enough to let a tech onto the property every month.
That is worth sitting with. The industry spends enormous sums acquiring customers through digital ads, door-to-door, and referral programs, and acquisition costs keep climbing. Meanwhile the most profitable revenue is usually the customers you already have. Upselling an existing customer costs a fraction of acquiring a new one, and multi-service customers cancel at much lower rates.
Most pest control companies are where BRD was before this campaign. Thousands of customers who could be buying more. Mosquito. Termite inspections. Wildlife exclusion. The revenue is in the customer database, waiting for someone to ask. If you want the practical version, how to pick the list, when to send, and how to pace it, we wrote up upselling mosquito and termite by text.
The question is not whether your customers want more services. Some do. The question is whether you can find out which ones, at a scale that matters, without burning out your sales team or annoying the customers who are not interested.
BRD found its answer. 786 closed deals. 1,360 booked calls. $650K in new revenue. A campaign so effective they had to turn it off. The full numbers are in the BRD case study.
The software part is incidental. The real story is what happens when you finally talk to your customers.