Let’s face it: things may be slowing down for you and your company. What’s important now is to develop the ability to make the phone ring. Here’s what I’m teaching my clients to do right now, and it’s paying off for them during 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.

2. Use the Internet better and your website to catch their attention. You want to make sure the prospective customer out there searching the Internet can find you. 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.

3. Energize the Outbound CSR. An Outbound CSR is one who has been trained to not just wait to answer the phone but call existing customers who have been seen by Techs about work that was not performed at the time of the call. This is another technique creating calls for my clients right now and if you get disciplined it can do the same for you.

4. Offer discounts on major install work out of season from System Engineer. System Engineers are what I call Sales People. Every year during our slow seasons, my System Engineers and I 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.

5. Make money with the sales you have today and send techs and installers home or to training. If you only have so many calls, you’ll need to make sure your best people are maximizing that opportunity and the rest have to go home. The only exception for me is when I wanted to accomplish training or cross-training of trades.