How can a snow storm grow your telecom business???

I hope the title of today's blog is making you scratch your head and say to yourself "What in the world is she talking about?"  Well I have a little story to tell. 

About six weeks ago Atlanta got hit with a snow storm.  For days local meteorologist were telling us it was coming and it would be big.  Normally I laugh at these reports because I remember the year they told us a horrible ice storm was coming.  Every school district and many business closed down to get prepared for this big storm.  PS - no ice, no storm, it turned out to be a sunny day.  So as many were buying snow shovels and sleds, companies were trying to figure out their "game plan" for the coming storm I was scheduling meetings.  Really the ONLY preparation my company did to get ready for the storm was have all of our employees take their VoIP phones home. 

Well I am sure you all remember the storm came and it was real.  Atlanta shut down for almost 5 days.  It wasn't the snow that paralyzed the city, it was the ice.  The DOT told people to only leave their homes if it was absolutely necessary.  Coming into work at MicroCorp was not absolutely necessary.  The good thing was everyone had their VoIP phones.  The first day I had everyone put  an 'Out of Office" messages on their Outlook letting our Agents know we were working but not in the office.   As a Master Agent it is imperative we support all our Agents needs.   Because of our VoIP phones our Agents and Carriers could call us as they normally would.   We did not miss an order.  We did not miss a quote request. We did not miss a conference call.  Even though we were all housebound due to this big storm our business was not affected in any way.  Not many business can say that. 

So how can a snowstorm grow your telecom business?????????  Ask your customers how their businesses were affected by the many snowstorms that plagued us over the past 3 months?  If any of them lost business because their customer's could not call them or if any of them missed orders or if any of them were less efficient because people could not communicate - you need to start talking to them about VoIP and hosted solutions.