The Lumina Sales blog
Updates, ideas, and practical notes from Lumina Sales on building and selling AI software.
Follow via RSSPublished rates put a human answering service at $3.45 to $5.00 a minute, or $7 to $11.50 a call. The infrastructure behind an AI receptionist runs under 15 cents a minute. Here is the full comparison, where the answering service still wins, and what to say when your prospect already pays for one.
Electrical shops have more work than they can staff, which makes the pitch "stop leaking calls" instead of "get more leads." Here is which electrical businesses to target, what the build has to do differently, what you should refuse to automate, and how to price it.
AI agents can complete a purchase inside a chat window. They cannot book your client's 2pm. Here is what the shipped commerce protocols actually cover, why hotels are the first service vertical, and what to sell into the trades while the rest of it is still a waitlist.
A call that sounds perfect and books nothing is the failure you are hunting, and the only place it shows up is the action log. Here are the nine test calls to run before a client build goes live, what to check after each one, and the registration clock that can add two weeks whatever your testing says.
The staffing-shortage pitch is out of date and vets know it. Visits are down, clients are price sensitive, and schedules have gaps. Here is the demand-capture playbook for small animal practice, including the VCPR line your build cannot cross.
One hundred live voice minutes is about forty demo conversations, or twenty if every call runs the full five minutes. Here is how the meter works, how to plan a month of demos against it, and why the single published demo limit matters more than the minutes.
Personal injury firms buy AI intake faster than most trades, because one missed call is a lost case. But a phone agent at a law firm is not a receptionist. Here are the intake rules, the bar rules, the pricing, and the builds you should refuse.
Pest control is recurring by design, seasonal in bursts, and staffed by technicians who cannot answer the phone from a crawlspace. Here is the pitch that works, the federal and state lines an agent must not cross, and the pricing that clears.
Google started testing Gemini calls to businesses on September 24, and Meta expanded outbound Muse calls a week earlier. A share of the calls hitting your clients' front desks are now placed by software. Here is what that changes in the systems you sell, and where the trend is smaller than it sounds.
Med spas lose a consultation every time the phone rings out, and the caller is already dialing the clinic two miles away. Here is how to sell an AI receptionist into aesthetics: who to pitch, what the demo has to prove, the four objections, and the HIPAA answer you should not wing.
Every Lumina Sales demo runs on a vertical pack: the services, price bands, objections and booking language of one trade. Here is what a pack contains, how it changes a demo, and what it does not do for you.
A voice AI agent costs roughly $0.08 to $0.18 a minute in raw usage on the major platforms, and speech-to-speech models cost several times more. We did the math for a typical local service client and found the minutes are the cheap part.
