Keeping the Board Full: Marketing That Works When Demand Slows

As summer's call volume tapers into fall's slower shoulder season, filling the board takes more than hope — it takes a plan. On a recent Mastering ServiceTitan webinar-turned-podcast, Paul Belessis, Growth Marketing Manager at ServiceTitan, sat down with Kelsey Knutsen, Marketing Director at Crisafulli Bros, and Andrea Reagan, CMO at Above & Beyond Service Company, to walk through five proven tactics for keeping revenue steady when demand naturally dips.

The conversation covers reviving unsold estimates with Marketing Pro automations, using A/B testing to find offers that actually convert, building hyper-targeted direct mail campaigns from ServiceTitan data, and tailoring AI voice and SMS agents so they still sound like your brand. Both marketers pull real numbers from their own operations, from conversion rate jumps to direct mail budget breakdowns, so there's plenty here to steal for your own fall campaigns.

Reviving Unsold Estimates with Marketing Pro Automations

Every estimate a technician doesn't close is still a lead sitting in your database. Knutsen's team treats unsold estimates as one of the biggest untapped opportunities heading into shoulder season, and Marketing Pro automations are how they keep the follow-up consistent without pulling staff off the phones.

"There's a ton of opportunity in unsold estimates. It is great if a technician can sell a job in the home, but we wanna make sure that we are following up on those estimates."

Rather than sending one generic follow-up, her team personalizes the message based on a few variables:

• Whether the estimate was for a sales opportunity or aged equipment

• The service line involved

• Whether it was a sales estimate or a service estimate

Those campaigns go out through SMS and email, and Crisafulli Bros pairs them with a ServiceTitan alert that fires the moment a customer opens the message — putting the ISR on the phone in under two minutes while the lead is still warm.

Reagan's team runs a similar play but with a human layer built in first: a dedicated follow-up coordinator handles outbound calls before automation kicks in, specifically to diagnose why an estimate went cold rather than jumping straight to a discount.

Finding the Right Offer Through A/B Testing

Neither marketer defaults to slashing prices when the board thins out. Both start with value-add offers and let the data decide whether a discount is actually needed.

Reagan's team has leaned hard into financing over straight discounts this season: "You should be offering financing 100% of the time. Whether 40 to 60% of people are gonna take it, like you should be offering it."

Knutsen echoed the same instinct against defaulting to discounts: "You don't wanna just start with a discount. Just because you're slow doesn't mean you should be offering discounts right off the bat."

Her team validates that through structured A/B testing — running two offers side by side (say, $250 off a tankless water heater versus payments as low as $89/month) and tracking which one wins, sometimes down to the zip code level. Once an offer proves out, Crisafulli Bros documents it in a weekly internal newsletter and posts it on an in-house bulletin board so every CSR and tech is quoting the same numbers. Above & Beyond centralizes theirs in a content portal and quizzes technicians during sales training — a step Reagan takes seriously after a costly early miss: "When I first came in, we had a forty-nine dollars get off, and they did not know. That's a problem."

Hyper-Targeted Direct Mail Using ServiceTitan Data

Direct mail is still working for both companies, but only because they're using ServiceTitan data to narrow who receives it. Knutsen pulls audience segments — high pollen zip codes paired with older HVAC systems, for example — to match a specific offer to a specific household need rather than blasting the whole database.

"I see customers use it a ton, and we'll get calls off of the tracking number. If we have a QR code, we'll see it scanned, you know, two months down the line."

Reagan layers her targeting by equipment age, prioritizing customers with systems ten-plus years old before moving to newer installs, then further segmenting by home value. Her prospecting campaigns aren't single mailers — they're sequenced drops:

• A jumbo postcard introducing the brand

• A magnet mailer designed to stay on the fridge for months

• A second jumbo postcard reinforcing the offer

Both marketers also feed this same audience data back into paid search and display through Marketing Pro's Ads Optimizer, tying spend to actual booked job value in ServiceTitan rather than just cost per lead.

Speed-to-Lead: Tailoring AI Voice and SMS Agents

The back half of the conversation turns to what happens after the demand is created — because a great campaign is wasted if the phone rings and nobody answers fast enough. Reagan admits she was skeptical of AI-driven SMS follow-up at first, worried it would flatten the brand's personality. That changed once she saw how much control she had over tone and cadence.

Her team now varies messaging based on lead source:

• Aggregator leads (Angie, Thumbtack, eLocal) get frequent, persistent outreach since they're harder to convert

• Website form fills get a slower, more brand-forward nurture sequence

• Campaign-specific leads (like generator promos) get messaging tailored to that exact need

"At first, we were seeing a 28% conversion rate, which we thought was just low, and then when we started really tailoring those messages, we were up to the 70s at that point."

One operational note worth flagging: "Speed-to-lead is going to reach out to that person" even on pay-per-lead sources, so contractors running near capacity should turn that lever off to avoid paying for leads they can't service. On the scheduling side, Knutsen's team pairs Scheduling Pro with Marketing Pro to auto-follow-up on abandoned online bookings and missed calls — routing customers straight back to a booking link instead of letting them fall through.

Join us as we discuss:

• [5:32] Implementing a shoulder season strategy and attacking unsold estimates

• [11:56] Centralizing your internal communication and incentivizing technicians

• [20:24] A/B testing, direct mail, financing, and social media marketing

• [35:27] Winning your neighborhood and knowing when to throttle your marketing spend

• [38:31] Tailoring AI agents to echo your brand’s voice and culture

Check out these resources mentioned during the podcast:

Marketing Pro

Dispatch Pro

Field Pro

Atlas

ServiceTitan Max

You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here.

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