Want some more ways to get your phone ringing? Here are four quick tips to make this happen. I know it works because I used to do it myself ― and now it’s working for my clients who are getting more calls in these recessionary times.

1. Send a letter to your customers with an intriguing headline. There’s no better audience to speak to than people who already know you and like you because you’ve already served them well. This greatly increases the chances that whatever you write about will get read.

You’re going to need a big bold headline, and that goes at the top of the page. Some examples:

“Is your Honey Do List getting bigger and is the couch getting lumpier?”

“Want to get your [hot water] for free?”

“Let me show you how to cut your [heating] bills in half!”

“Be safe and warm all winter while you stuff your piggy bank with money.”

“Can you really get by another [hot summer] with your old [air conditioner]?”

Modify the products I listed in the headlines above by inserting the services and products from your company. Just be sure to grab their attention!

2. Use the Internet better and your website to catch their attention. I wrote about this in a prior blog. But, I want to make sure you’re doing everything right now you can to attract and captivate a prospective customer who is out there searching the Internet. This requires that you learn how to make them find you both for free and by using smart ways to pay for traffic. This is usually done best with professional SEO (search engine optimization) people.

You can’t afford to have them miss you when they’re searching.

3. Energize the Outbound CSR. What an Outbound CSR is a customer service rep who has been trained to not just wait to answer the phone but call existing customers your technicians have been out to see for work that was not performed ― to see if there’s a desire to go ahead and do the work now. Customers get busy and they forget.

4. Offer discounts on major install work out of season from System Engineers (Sales People). Every year during our slow seasons, I and my System Engineers would go through our recent proposals and figure out what a reasonable and fair discount would be to offer all our clients for work not done during our busy season.

One caution is to explain to the customer why they’re getting it cheaper so they don’t think you were trying to take advantage of them. I used to say:

“I’m able to offer a 5 percent discount if you’d like to do the work I proposed because I’m slowing down and my labor is cheaper. But, I can only offer this discounted price if you want to do the work in the next 30 days.”

They felt like they won and I was loving the extra dollars as well.