Marketing & Sales Insight for the Lawn & Landscape Industry

Fall is here, my friends. I hope your year is going even better than you and your team anticipated.

One of our fall traditions here at Landscape Leadership is attending HubSpot's annual Inbound conference in Boston, the largest marketing and sales conference on the planet.

From keynotes to breakout sessions, a common theme at Inbound this year was the idea of "creating experiences" for customers.

HubSpot's CEO, Brian Halligan, spoke extensively about this in his keynote, highlighting many successful startups of the past decade that have crushed their old guard competitors by improving the buying experience for their customers.

Casper (mattresses), Peloton (stationary bikes), Chewy (pet food and products), Carvana (cars) were just a few examples cited by Halligan.

The lawn and landscape industry can learn a lot from these successful companies who are disrupting their unique industries.

In the last two videos in this series we explored how using personalized video in your landscaping or lawn care sales process can actually help you sell more work in less time.

Today, I am going to walk you through these steps and also show you examples so you can understand what I mean. And the live action version of Ted, the old school salesman from our Green Ways comic book, is also going to make a few appearances. Stay tuned.

In my last video, I brought one of our Green Ways comic book characters to life. Ted is one of the characters that regularly appears in these stories. The live-action version of Ted gave us a glimpse into the old school ways of selling lawn care and landscaping work.

He slings out a lot of proposals and then he calls and calls, emails and emails, and waits and waits, often to just give up on prospects.

The problem is this old school way of selling lawn care, landscaping work really isn't that old school. It's kind of the current state of the green industry right now. There are a lot of salespeople wasting a ton of time and not closing deals as often as they want to. Does this sound familiar? 

Are you tired of reaching out to prospects or trying to up-sell customers and just being ignored? Are you sick of spending so much time preparing proposals, leaving phone messages, and sending emails?

Are you still using these same, old tricks to try to sell lawn care or landscaping work? Or does this sound like a few busy people on your sales team who boast a lot of activity but poor results?

Want to learn a new trick? One that will increase your closing percentage and help you sell more work in less time (and with less aggravation)? Then today's video is just for you. 

Here's an innovative idea. It's called using personalized video in your landscaping and lawn care sales process. Stay tuned.

(Thinking to myself)...Hmmmm....we really need more of this lawn care or landscaping work on the books...

(Lightbulb moment!)....I know! I'll send out an email blast.

Have you gotten bad results with email marketing for your lawn care landscaping company?

Maybe you've been thinking that you want to use email marketing to generate more lawn care landscaping leads, but you're not quite sure if it actually works.

Well, today, I'm going to share seven reasons these campaigns commonly fail. Stay tuned.

You and your team may think that your lawn care or landscaping company is the best around, but your prospective customer may be a little bit skeptical and may not take your word for it.

The great things that your happy customers say about your company carry way more weight than what you could ever say.

So when it comes to getting great five-star Google reviews, are you really leveraging them on your landscaping and lawn care website or other marketing collateral? Today I'm going to show you how to do just that.

I've gotta say...I really love working with lawn care companies.

Maybe it's due to the fact that for eight years, I treated thousands of lawns.

Maybe it was due to the fact that this type of work seemed to be the easiest service for me to sell at my 7-year stint as a salesperson at a full-service lawn and landscape company. 

Or possibly it was the thrill I felt figuring out new ways to market lawn care services to add thousands of new lawn care customers each year. 

Whatever the case, it's a rush. But, I get as equally frustrated when I see lawn care companies trying to do their best but failing or getting lackluster results.

Over the years, lawn care and landscaping companies have asked us a LOT of questions about various advertising mediums.

But the one that seems to come up the most often (with skepticism and criticism) is Google Ads (also referred to as PPC, Pay Per Click, or Google Adwords.

Do you find yourself at one of these places?

• You're contemplating using Google Ads for lawn care or landscaping leads

• You did your own Pay Per Click in the past but weren't that impressed

• You hired a marketing agency to place PPC ads for lawn care or landscaping lead generation

• You've grown your business without this advertising medium but are always looking for ways to land new customers

Well, I am assuming most (if not all) of you fit into one of those categories. If so, I've got something special for you. Over the past month, I've taken this complicated (and most often very boring) topic and created a series of videos for you. 

In my last article I suggested you limit your production capacity at least until you reach the profit margins you desire.

In this article I'll give you some tips on how to manage your capacity. But, first, a caveat to this discussion...

The stronger your positioning the easier it will be to manage your company's capacity for work, and thus reap the benefits that come along with this strategy.

On the flip side, a full service one-stop-shop trying to be all things to all people will have a difficult time managing production capacity in a logical and strategic way as compared to a company with a crystal clear identity.

Purchase our entire collection of Green Ways comics on Amazon

We've already burned through the first month in a new year, my friends. Wow...

At Landscape Leadership 2018 was one of our best years yet. I can say that based both on the financial goals we achieved as well as the meaningful impact we had on the green industry companies we work with.

I hope you had similar success in 2018.

In this article I want to share the single strategic initiative that I believe led to our success last year.