u/Holiday-Blood-6508

Most of us here are technical guys, panel installers, system designers, the people who actually do the work. So this might feel out of left field.

If you're hurting on customer flow right now, the answer might not be more ads. It might be sitting in your CRM already.

My company was crushed by new state legislation that killed its dealer and outside-rep network. Had to bring sales fully in-house mid-year. We were bleeding money trying to figure out how to fill the pipeline.

What we did have were a few thousand old leads from previous campaigns. People who reached out, got a quote, never closed, and just sat there. We decided to run a reactivation campaign over SMS with a real offer. $3,500 off a battery system plus six months zero-interest financing. But the cost of the tools for that was around $400 per month, which was not an option for us, so I built my own AI agent for this and integrated it into our CRM.

So we started by just texting everyone, qualifying them through normal conversation, and booking appointments straight into the calendar.

45 days later. 2,819 leads contacted. 648 responded. 186 appointments booked. At his average $24k deal size that's roughly $4.4 million in pipeline. Zero new lead spend.

The reason I'm posting this here, in a sub full of installers and technical people, is that most of us think about the business side last. We're focused on the panels, the inverters, the production numbers. The marketing and sales side gets outsourced or ignored until it breaks.

If your business is hurting right now, before you spend on new lead acquisition, look at what's already in your system. Talk to your CRM person. Run a list of everyone who got a quote in the last 18 months and never bought. There might be a campaign sitting there that gets you through the next quarter.

I run a roofing and solar company in the US. Most of my leads come in over text - at a certain point manually tracking and replying to all of it became too much, plus I wanted to start running outbound campaigns to land more jobs.

The customisation goes deeper than I thought when I started building my tool. You can pretty much shape every part of how the agent talks - name, role, age, gender, full backstory. If the sliders feel too restrictive, you can just override the personality with your own prompt and run with that.

I added six sliders for tone: humour, creativity, formality, enthusiasm, empathy, and persuasiveness. Each one has its own range, deadpan all the way up to extreme. So you can build an agent that's witty and casual, or formal and assertive, depending on what fits the business.

The part I think actually matters most is the advanced stuff. spelling errors, slang, emoji frequency, punctuation, and response length. That's what keeps it from sounding like a chatbot. Most platforms ignore this, and their texts read robotic from the first message.

Also, it has a memory hub, which is where you load everything the agent should know. two layers - general memory for the whole workspace and knowledge bases per campaign. text, URLs, PDFs, and Excel files. It pulls the right info before responding.

Before anything goes live, you can run it through the playground. Message it like a customer, see how it handles objections, scheduling, and qualifying. saved me a lot of headaches when I was figuring out how my own agents should sound in real conversations.

Now it's alive and works really well for my business, but I feel there is still something to add here, so I appreciate any suggestions