Your landscape sales are at the heart of your business’s profitability. To make your business an excellent “sales machine”, we have some of the best sales tips gathered from experts for you.
Table of Contents
1. Understand your customer
While this might sound obvious to anyone working in sales, connecting with your customers and having a mutual, positive understanding of their needs is of utmost importance. Always start by asking for your customer’s thoughts first.
You need your customers to do 80% of the talking, but also don’t want to lose control of the conversation. The best way to do that is to waste less time during your landscape sales process by asking the right questions.
For example, how is the property going to be used, what is the scope of the work and their budget, what are your customer’s expectations, what is their top priority, etc. Use these questions to expand your creativity and unique ideas. This will be the start of a mutually beneficial, positive relationship and make them more likely to do business with you.
2. Prepare winning landscaping proposals
A carefully well-crafted proposal is the key to winning landscape sales and acts as your best-selling card. Your proposal should make your customer go wow!
Think about it from the customer’s perspective, when they have to compare two different proposals from similar landscaping companies. Chances are, they’ll choose the more impressive one that shows a great landscape design with hand-drawn quality, stunning visuals, clear labels, plant photographs, attractive colors, 3D renderings, etc.
We have an article that’ll help you write the winning proposal for your business every single time.
3. Be picky while choosing jobs
Are you closing landscape sales but not winning any real profit? Saying “no” to lousy jobs that yield little or no profit is the first step to correcting your situation. Increasing landscape sales is all about finding ways to save time and we’ve found that pre-qualifying leads can be an excellent way to do just that.
In other words, weed out the customers that aren’t going to be a good fit for your company. Understanding whether a job is going to be profitable or not will require you to devise a system that helps you accurately calculate your break-even point for any job, even before you accept the work.
Explain your process, as this will give you an opportunity to set the sale in advance and set the tone right. When the client understands the next steps better, it helps close the deal faster. This is also a time to address any unforeseeable changes that may arise in the job and cost the customer more. Doing this will protect you and your business if there is something out of your hands.
Develop a criteria list for your business that defines the type of projects you will take up, who you will work for (the buyer persona), the size of the project, schedule requirements, etc. This will give you an edge as you accept only the projects that play to your company’s strengths and will also save you time in the long run.
4. Build on relationships, not on price
An important landscape sales strategy is to avoid the trap of selling on price. The industry is competitive and one can easily get caught up on prices. Once you’ve decided your price is fair, don’t back down.
Don’t cave to the competition. It’s easy to lowball yourself and lower your prices when you are losing out on some jobs. Instead, get a grip on your profitability and remove the inefficiencies in the processes to cut down prices where needed and not undercut them because you’ll be making smart decisions. But even with competitive pricing, you may not be the least expensive option, and that’s completely okay.
You want to land jobs because of the relationships and the premium value service you bring to those. Be forthright in quoting the right price and be able to justify it. What do you bring to the table that your competition does not? Know the answer and don’t be afraid to share it.
5. Always follow up!
Following up is not just critical to your landscape sales success, but also for you and your company’s reputation. Your follow-up process should be structured and in a timely manner, be it e-mails, thank you cards, phone calls, or site visits.
It shows care for your customers and can make all the difference by giving your customer that one reason to choose you over others. Follow the 24-hour rule for this. As a landscape salesperson or a company owner, if you meet a customer today, you should make contact with them again by tomorrow. This way you get to keep the connection fresh and stay current in their mind.
Yes, try to get them the proposal fast, but more importantly, keep them in the loop.
Pro tip: If you lose a bid, find out why! We all wish to do perfectly in each aspect of your business, but that seldom happens. Whenever possible, ask your customers what made them choose someone else. Understanding the holes in your process and cataloging the reasons will certainly help you improve your landscape sales and your bidding process.
This won’t ensure you win every single job, but will certainly help cut down the number of lost bids.
6. Measure your landscape sales success
If you measure it right, you can manage and improve your sales. The way to do that is to hold yourself accountable to some sales indicators.
Initially, you can start by measuring the win-loss ratio. Far too many contractors and business owners settle for a low ratio. Identify your ratio and compare it with other high-achieving landscape companies in your neighborhood.
The other ways to measure the sales are: getting more sales of the right kind, having higher net profit margins, month-on-month revenue growth, and higher closing ratios. Look for opportunities to improve in all these areas.
7. Implement a sales automation software
Among the many tips we’ve heard from companies, this is by far the most effective. A landscaping software has many tools that boost your sales fast, help streamline processes, remove inefficiencies, save time and ultimately win more jobs.
What landscaping software does is automate all the tedious, manual tasks and free up many work hours during the day. This will help your team estimate accurately and refine the overall sales process by shortening the entire sales cycle.
It’s not just about selling more, but also selling consistently. You will need to frequently revise your landscape sales strategy over the years and see what works best for your business. All the above tips have a common thread and will help you boost your landscape sales and take your business to the next level.
We, at Attentive.ai, have built an awesome sales automation system to help you nail your landscape sales. To understand how this works, you can directly talk to us. To understand how it works, have a look:
Do you have any awesome landscape sales tips that we missed? Let us know in the comments below.
