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.

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.

“Yeah, we tried postcards and mailers and they didn’t work. Oh, and we spent all this money to put ads in this magazine and that was a bust too.”

I get it. I managed an annual marketing budget of over $300,000 for many years for a full-service lawn and landscape company and tried all sorts of mailers and ads. Unfortunately, it’s a lot of trial and error.

But, I may be able to spare you some frustration. After all, if you’re dropping tens of thousands of dollars each year on lawn care and landscaping mailers or advertisements, you should be able to achieve and measure success, right?

Purchase our entire collection of Green Ways comics on Amazon

This comic makes me cringe. Being a landscape designer in the past, I know Ted’s pain well; as I’m sure you do.

You and your sales people shouldn’t have to waste so much time pursuing bad fit prospects or those who ultimately won’t do business with you.

I know this is a huge frustration for many of you. But it doesn’t have to be.

To avoid this you will need to implement a framework your entire team can use to effectively qualify new leads that come in the door.

With formal guidelines in place you can then train staff and hold them accountable to your qualifying standards.

If qualifying is left solely to the discretion of your sales people you’ll end up with handfuls of bad fit clients and frustrated team members.

I’ve seen first hand how this plays out. On one extreme you may have a rainmaker – usually the owner of the company – who will chase anything and everything. The other extreme is where the Design Diva resides, who is only interested in the unique projects that appeal to him/her and his/her overblown ego.

Qualify prospects using the BANT(+P) framework