The Lumina Sales blog
Updates, ideas, and practical notes from Lumina Sales on building and selling AI software.
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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.
Hiring a developer looks like the serious choice and is usually the expensive way to learn what you should have built. Here is the arithmetic, using published developer wages and the telephony and model prices that arrive either way.
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.
Most AI buildouts do not slip because the work is hard. They slip because nobody asked the client for an EIN in week one. Here are the six inputs a build needs, the two that sit behind review queues you do not control, and the intake email to send the day they sign.
Silence after a good AI demo is usually the buyer finishing the decision without you, not rejecting you. Here is the 24-hour recap that gets forwarded, the four touches that each carry new information, and the one email that turns a quiet pipeline into real answers.
A complete buildout costs your agency $500 a month wholesale. Sell it at $1,500 and you keep $1,000 on every client. Here is the full margin math at each tier, what quietly eats it, and the kind of client the numbers never work on.
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.
On voice quality alone, most callers can no longer tell an AI receptionist from a person. What gives it away on a live call is timing, interruptions, and questions it was never set up to answer. Here is what the research says and how to handle the objection honestly.
Most AI retainers die quietly in month three, when the owner cannot point at anything that changed. Here is what actually causes churn in a one to ten person AI agency, why your price is the biggest retention lever, and the monthly routine that keeps accounts past the first anniversary.
Plumbing owners already know they are losing jobs on the phone, and they already know they cannot hire their way out of it. Here is the full playbook: who to target, how to open the call, what your demo has to survive, what to charge, and the four kinds of plumbing shop you should walk away from.
