Correla was at InstallerSHOW 2026 to showcase both Aireo and Towsty, but the most useful part of the three days happened in conversation rather than on the stand itself. Talking to installers, two things came up again and again: how hard it still is to find good customers, and how much manual work goes into surveys and heat loss calculations before a job even starts.
Those two problems, lead generation and survey work, are what this piece is about.
At the Installer Show, one theme came through clearly: installers are not short of work in theory, but they are often short of the right work.
Many teams told us that lead generation remains a real challenge. It is not just about getting more enquiries. It is about getting enquiries that are serious, local, relevant, and worth the time it takes to follow up. Poor-quality leads create wasted admin, slow response times, and unnecessary site visits, especially for smaller teams where every hour matters.
The same challenge appeared when we spoke about surveys and heat loss calculations. Installers want to do the job properly, but the day-to-day process can still feel too manual, too fragmented, and too dependent on workarounds. Information is often collected across different tools, notes, spreadsheets, photos, floor plans, and software platforms before it becomes a usable design or customer proposal.
What stood out was not a lack of care or technical ability. It was the amount of friction sitting between a good customer enquiry and a confident, compliant recommendation.
For us, that feedback reinforced two priorities: helping installers spend less time qualifying poor-fit opportunities, and making the survey-to-design journey easier to complete without adding more admin. Better tools should not just generate outputs. They should help installers move from first conversation to confident next step with less duplication, clearer information, and fewer manual handovers.
Homeowners buy outcomes rather than heat pumps. Nobody wakes up wanting one specifically. They want to be greener, cut their running costs, feel more comfortable at home, or get some security from rising energy prices. That matters for lead generation, because messaging built around the technology rather than the outcome tends to fall flat before a conversation even starts. Lead with the outcome, and the technology becomes a means to an end rather than the whole pitch.
It also matters once that conversation happens. Overload a homeowner with technical detail and they switch off. Give them too little and they stop trusting what they're being told. The installers who get this right tend to find a middle ground, giving enough information to build confidence without turning the conversation into an engineering lecture.
Social proof does more here than any brochure or spec sheet. Schemes like 'Visit a Heat Pump', which let prospective customers speak to people already living with the technology, or installers sharing completed jobs across different property types, build the kind of confidence a technical explanation can't. Seeing how a system works in someone's day-to-day life changes the conversation entirely.
Most people don't plan a heating upgrade either. They think about it when the boiler breaks. That moment, standing with an engineer and asking what happens now, matters more than anything a manufacturer says from a distance. The installer in the home is the trusted advisor at the point it counts, which puts a lot of weight on their confidence and knowledge.
That's part of why training keeps coming up as a priority across the industry. There aren't enough qualified installers to meet demand, and confidence in the technology still varies. Initiatives like Nesta's 'Start at Home', where installers fit heat pumps in their own homes as part of training, build that confidence through lived experience rather than theory. And that confidence is what shows up in the room when a customer is deciding whether to trust the advice they're getting.
A few underlying barriers sit alongside the trust piece. Comfort is one that rarely gets a mention. Heat pumps don't behave like boilers, and that's often framed as a downside, but running one continuously, rather than cycling it on and off, tends to be the most efficient approach and gives a steadier, more consistent temperature throughout the home. It's a genuine benefit that gets lost behind running costs and carbon savings.
Perceived disruption is another. A lot of consumer hesitation comes from assuming installation means weeks of upheaval. The installers who address this head on, being upfront about timelines and what a typical install day actually looks like, tend to see that hesitation drop away quickly.
And then there's cost. The comparison homeowners make, roughly £15,000 for a heat pump against £3,000 for a boiler, keeps coming up as a barrier. But install costs aren't fixed. Better software and more streamlined surveying, design and installation should reduce engineer hours, and with it, the overall cost to the customer. That's a process problem as much as a technology one, and one the industry has more control over than the £15k figure suggests.
None of this is abstract for Correla. Aireo exists to take time and guesswork out of surveying, heat loss calculations and system design, and Towsty exists to help homeowners get to a straight answer earlier, before the process feels like a leap of faith. If installers are telling us surveys are still manual and lead gen is still a struggle, that's not background noise. It's a direct signal for where the products need to keep improving.
The conversations at InstallerSHOW didn't change our direction, but they sharpened why we're building what we're building, and they've given us a clearer picture of where the real friction still sits for the people doing this work every day.