Jack Jostes [00:00:00]:
It's normal for landscape companies to have numerous people involved. The issue that I'm seeing is that those people, and sometimes there's numerous people, aren't all on the same page. The important thing is to communicate with your customer the timeline. We've got to have a next step appointment with that client. Your chance of closing the sale is going to go way up. When you get a lead, from the time it comes through your website and when do you talk to them? How long does it take to get the client an estimate? The client has done an enormous amount of research online, vetting you and your competitors before they make the decision to, like, fill out the form on that website or pick up the phone and call you. It's kind of like the office manager is the opening act for the next band, which is this person. And if that person is setting up somebody else, we want to be introducing them, so that way, we're transitioning and building a relationship with the company through the various people involved.
Jack Jostes [00:00:53]:
We're in a tough market for closing new tree and landscape sales in this market with so much inflation going on. So today I want to share with you five sales management tips to close more sales now without necessarily increasing your investment in marketing.
01:21 - Aligning Your Sales Team
Jack Jostes [00:01:21]:
This is based on some sales consulting I've done recently with numerous clients, and my first tip is to bring your team together. I've met with numerous sales teams where I get the office manager answering the phone, the person who's doing maybe an initial phone call or an initial on-site visit, the landscape designer. It's normal for landscape companies to have numerous people involved in selling and designing a project for a client. Or if you run a tree care company, to have somebody answering the phone and somebody else going out and doing the estimate. But the issue that I'm seeing is that those people, and sometimes there's numerous people, aren't all on the same page.
Jack Jostes [00:02:01]:
Often they don't really know the next step in the sales process. They're not sure what the other person's doing or what an acceptable timeframe is. And this can create miscommunication between employees and then also with customers. And when there's one thing communicated from the person who answers the phone, like, oh, yeah, we'll be coming out within the next couple days to do your estimate, when it could be, I'm gonna get to this weeks for some people. That creates a lack of trust with that potential customer and leads to them wanting to maybe get a quote from landscape or tree company B and C. Whereas if all the people, the person answering the phone, the person doing the estimate, the person sending the email. If everyone's on the same page about what happens next, what are the rough price ranges and what are the actual timelines? Now we're doing what we said we were going to do. So we want to have our marketing, sales, and operations aligned around doing what we say we're going to do.
Jack Jostes [00:03:04]:
But if people don't understand what we do here and what the other person does, it creates a lot of problems. An easy way to do this is bring all of these people together in a meeting, get around a big table, get a big ass whiteboard or a giant piece of paper, and literally draw out or put on, you know, sticky notes. I've done this with sticky notes on a whiteboard with everyone. Okay? From the time that somebody fills out the form, who is calling them, and when and what timeframe is that measured? Are you measuring how long it's taking? Because if you're taking days to get back and the customer hasn't heard from you, they're gonna contact another company, and they're not gonna sit around and wait days to hear back from you. So getting clear on what is an acceptable time frame, what is an ideal timeframe for responding to new leads, and then who's calling them? And all of those different things, outlining that and putting names on it so everyone knows who on the team is handling what.
04:01 - Setting Clear Timelines for Customers
Jack Jostes [00:04:01]:
And that brings me to my second tip, which is to communicate a timeline for next steps. I was working with a tree company, and I was looking at their leads. I was looking one by one, we import all their leads into a spreadsheet, and I was like, hey, tell me about this lead. Tell me about this lead. And how long are you taking to go and do an estimate? And it turns out they're so understaffed right now, and this is normal. I don't want to make light of the situation, but rather just to acknowledge that business is hard, and you have people on vacation or people who are sick or you're understaffed or whatever's going on. The important thing is to communicate with your customer the timeline. So when the phone rings and the office manager is answering, what is he or she telling the potential customer about the timeline for next steps? Because in this case, with this tree company, it was up to 14 days. And I can tell you that I actually contacted a tree company, and I've hired them for numerous projects. They happen to be one of my clients, and that's cool.
Jack Jostes [00:05:13]:
I understand there are certain times of the year where you are booked out pretty far, and they did a good job of communicating that to me, sending me an email letting me know reminding me when they were coming. I'm not shopping around. I'm going to hire my client because I have that trust with them. But if I were a new customer looking for tree removal or for tree care, and I didn't hear from you after that initial call and a week had gone by, I would probably call another tree company. So communicate the timeline for next steps and back to my first point. Make sure everyone on the team, the person answering the phone, the person sending the email, is aware of that timeline for next steps.
05:54 - Next Steps and Revisions Meetings
Jack Jostes [00:05:54]:
My third tip is to add a next steps and revisions meeting to your sales process. Now this may not make sense if you're doing lawn care or lawn maintenance or tree care necessarily, but if you're in a business model that has a design component where you're meeting with clients, you're walking their property, you're listening to their dreams and ideas, and then you're coming to them with a design.
Jack Jostes [00:06:19]:
First, ideally, you're presenting that design to them either in person or over Zoom. And naturally they're going to want to like, think about it. They're going to want to be like, wow, I've never imagined my yard looking like this. And I want to walk through it and think about it. We've got to have a next step appointment with that client. Because what can happen is if they walk the property, they forget about it. Life happens. Their kid gets sick.
Jack Jostes [00:06:42]:
I had to go to a funeral recently. That derailed a lot of decisions in my life. Right? So things get off track. Whereas if you get an appointment with the client to hear their feedback and to edit the design with them, and maybe you need to remove things and let them know, hey, we can remove these things to reduce the budget. Or if you want to add those things, it'll increase the budget and gauge that in the meeting, your chance of closing the sale is going to go way up. So add a next steps and revisions conversation as an appointment. Put it in the calendar, meaning at the end of that design sales presentation, get the next appointment in the calendar. Send the client a calendar invite. So they've got it on their calendar, they've got an email, they know when it is, and your sales will massively increase.
07:34 - Speed from Lead to Estimate
Jack Jostes [00:07:34]:
My next sales management tip is to measure your speed from lead to estimate. So when you get a lead, from the time it comes through your website and when do you talk to them. How long does it take to get the client an estimate? And again, is the client aware of that? And could this be faster? Can you be faster? Because a lot of times, let's say it's an emergency tree removal, something fell in my yard. I'm going to need to get that taken care of right away. Or if I'm finally ready to invest in landscape design, or if I need lawn care or whatever. Whatever it is, or I need sprinkler repair. There's urgency around it.
Jack Jostes [00:08:15]:
The client has done an enormous amount of research online vetting you and your competitors before they make the decision to, like, fill out the form on that website or pick up the phone and call you. And so at that point, we need to be fast. And this is something that, again, if you measure how long does it take and maybe bonus your team on the speed, this is a behavior that you can incentivize if it's faster. As a story one time I was out hunting with a client. We got up to a mountain peak, and he's like, hey, I just got three new leads through my website. I'm like, right on. Because I built the website, we've been working together. And then I was like, well, we're hunting for the next few days.
Jack Jostes [00:09:00]:
Who's going to get back to them and when? And he's like, well, I guess I'll have to get back to them when I get back. And that could be several days, or if we got an elk, it could be longer, depending on whatever work we need to do. So this again, where if you shave off that initial phone call, getting back to the lead, and maybe you pay people, I don't know the compensation, how it works with your team, but I can tell you that if I ran a tree or a landscape company, I would pay more to my team to incentivize the speed. So getting back to them quickly increases the chance of the whole company closing that sale. And it could still be like, hey, thanks, the next step is an onsite consultation with your property. Our next opening is next Thursday. Okay, great.
Jack Jostes [00:09:47]:
Now it's in the calendar. You get it in the calendar. A lot of times once that customer has that appointment in the calendar with whoever their service provider might be, they give up the search. But if they're in that gray area of, like, I don't know when they're gonna get back to me or if they're going to get back to me, they're gonna keep searching and contacting competitors.
10:08 - Calendar Invites and Follow-Up Emails
Jack Jostes [00:10:08]:
My fifth tip is to send calendar invitations and follow up emails to each and every customer. So after they call in or after you call them, after getting a lead through your website contact form, and you schedule whatever next step is happening, whether it's a phone call with a designer on your team or whether it's an onsite consultation, get the email address of that customer and send them a calendar invite. And the way that you title this calendar invite is really important. I would put their last name, like: The Jostes Family and Bob's Landscape Company Design Meeting, in the calendar if that's the title of the meeting.
Jack Jostes [00:10:52]:
So you can title and brand these milestones. Is it an on-site consultation? Is it a design meeting? What are you calling it? Putting your brand name in the calendar invite along with the family's name is gonna show up on their calendar. So if it's a week or two from now, they're like, oh, yeah, I'm meeting with Bob's Landscape Design. And in the description of that calendar invite, you can have links to things like check out our portfolio, check out our reviews, read more about our process. So that way, before that meeting, you're giving the client things for your brand and for your company to look at and review. So they actually remember that they're meeting with your company. Because remember, they might have contacted numerous landscape companies. Some of them, frankly, aren't even going to reply at all.
Jack Jostes [00:11:42]:
And now you're the one who's good enough to have gotten the appointment, and we want to seal the deal. And that's where follow up emails are very important, especially if you have an office manager or somebody answering the phone or responding to these leads from the website and they're setting an appointment for someone else on the team. Send an email introduction. The subject line might. It might read something like: Jostes Family + Bob's Landscape Design… Introducing Barry. Hey, Jack, I'm introducing you to Barry.
Jack Jostes [00:12:15]:
He's our Senior Landscape Designer that'll be running your landscape design meeting. Here's the date, time. Here's the address. Here's Bob's phone number and. Or was it Bob? I can't remember the name of the designer. See! Anyways, we got to put it in there so that way the client knows who they're meeting with and we're positioning that next person as, like, a rock star. It's kind of like the office manager is the opening act for the next band, which is this person. And if that person's setting up somebody else, we want to be introducing them.
Jack Jostes [00:12:49]:
So that way we're transitioning and building a relationship with the company through the various people involved. And then in that email you can also ideally have what we call a milestone video and I'm going to put a link in the show notes. We did a whole episode on this, but essentially a milestone video in that email can help prepare them for this meeting. Hey, we're going to walk through your garden. We're going to hear your ideas. We're going to talk with you about your budget range and we invite you to check out the pricing guide on our website so you have an initial idea of how much things cost. And the next step after that meeting will be a design presentation meeting where we'll meet over Zoom and show you your design. In the meantime, check out our reviews at Bobsgardendesign.com/reviews, whatever.
Jack Jostes [00:13:37]:
So we're helping them again. We're telling them what we're going to do and we're educating them because a lot of people have not bought landscape or tree services before. And by helping them understand how it works, how do they arrive at pricing for this and what are the ranges is going to build trust along the way so they finally choose you.
14:01 - Website Reviews & Closing Remarks
Jack Jostes [00:14:01]:
My name is Jack Jostes, and you've been listening to The Landscapers Guide to Modern Sales and Marketing Podcast. I hope you enjoyed these Five Sales Management Tips. Pick one of them and go implement it next week! Send me an email jack@ramblinjackson.com. Let me know which one are you going to use? How is it working for you? Oh, and one last thing: your email signature. Evaluate the email signatures of your whole company and create a standard. It should include their first name, last name, their job title, your company name in text, your logo and your website. What this will do is if people search their email history, they can find your emails. As a quick story, I've had this happen numerous times where I had a medical operation and I needed to get a report to send to a lab. So I called the office and someone named Shay emailed me something. And Shay's email had no mention of the doctor's office name.
Jack Jostes [00:14:59]:
It had no mention of the medical procedure that I had. It had nothing in there. It was just like, here you go, contact me with any questions. And then a couple weeks went by and I needed to find that, and I couldn't find it in my email history. I searched my email for the name of the doctor's office, for the name of the operation. Everything I could think of and none of that was in this person's email signature. I hired an electrician recently and they sent me a quote but I couldn't find it because it didn't have their business name. I couldn't search for that.
Jack Jostes [00:15:33]:
I couldn't find the person's name, so I'm searching for that. Having your first and last name, position, title, company name, phone number, website link, and logo is going to make it easier for people to search their email to find whatever it is you're trying to send to them. It's going to help them understand who you are and why you're sending it. And if you want them to call you, having your phone number in there is going to make it really easy for them instead of having to search online and maybe they find the wrong phone number. So I hope you enjoyed these Five Sales Management Tips. These are going to help you close more sales. Measure what you're already doing. Plug the holes in the buckets if you have them in your sales process.
Jack Jostes [00:16:15]:
Pull the weeds out where there are weeds and look. It's also a time to invest in getting more of the right leads. We're in a competitive market, which means we need to be really careful with our marketing budget and we need to up the game for our website and marketing. And I'd like to record a review of your website, meaning me and my team, we're going to look at your website, we're going to Google you and we'll give you some feedback of things you're doing well and we'll share, based on what we've seen on over a thousand landscape company websites, what's working to generate more of the right leads. So if you'd like for us to make a website review video for you, click the link in our bio or our show notes. Just go to ramblinjackson.com you can get it right on the homepage and we'll send you a video with some feedback. My name's Jack Jostes and thanks for listening to The Landscapers Guide Podcast.
Jack Jostes [00:17:08]:
We'll talk with you next week.
Show Notes:
Watch the Full Episode + See the Transcript: landscapersguide.com/podcast/
Tell Us Where to Send Your Beef Jerky: landscapersguide.com/toolbox
Get a FREE Website Review: ramblinjackson.com
Listen to the Podcast on “Milestone Videos” Here: landscapersguide.com/milestone-videos-the-secret-to-saving-time-and-improving-client-communication/