What's the close rate at your landscape company, and how does it compare to your competition? What's your marketing budget, and how does it compare to snow and landscape industry standards? Which marketing is working the best for snow and landscape companies in 2022? To find out, we surveyed over 160 snow and Landscape companies, and in today's episode, I'm excited to share some of the highlights of the 2022 Landscaper’s Sales Survey, plus tips for increasing your close rate, how to improve your sales and marketing, and questions that you can ask with your sales, marketing, and operations leaders in your company to have a productive conversation that'll help you prepare for next year.
Hey, everyone, it's Jack Jostes, and welcome to the Landscaper's Guide. This show is all about serving the snow and landscape industry with sales, marketing, and leadership ideas. I'm super grateful to you, everyone who's watching and listening. We've doubled our listenership over the last year in doing this podcast and video show, and we have a lot of really great clients, and people are always coming to my events and my private clients are asking me about, "Jack, what's a good close rate?" And I couldn't find great information out there.
There's a lot of really good surveys in the industry that are generally about employee count and maybe they touch on sales and marketing, but they didn't have the detail that I wanted to create some benchmarks. So I realized I needed to create my own survey. I wrote an initial draft of questions, which I then workshopped with some of my top wild frontier clients in my Landscape Executive Mastermind. And they helped me whittle them down and refine them and ask the best questions that they were curious about so we could then share this information with you.
You can get the fully branded infographic at landscapersguide.com/survey and see our show notes for a quick link to that. Some of the highlights included 28% of landscapers spend less than $5,000 on marketing annually, and 23% are spending five to 15,000. The average close rate for residential projects is 59%, and for commercial projects, it's 53%. Landscapers have the most marketing success with social media, search engine optimization, and vehicle wraps. And some of the biggest challenges landscapers are facing today are recruiting quality employees, poor sales processes, and employee retention.
And what I've found with my work with clients is that a poor sales process has a big impact on the employees. Think about it. If you have a poor sales process where you're only closing one out of 20 sales, could you imagine being the person or the people who are going through all that effort to hear no 19 out of 20 times? It's a morale killer and it's expensive, right? So improving your sales process helps you sell to the right customers. And having the right customers creates a profit, and you'll be able to pay your people more and keep them focused on things that are productive and enjoyable.
We also surveyed our clients in the questions about their region, which services they offered, and their revenue brackets. And I'm glad that we did because we found some differences, especially based on revenue. The biggest challenge for companies making below $6 million in revenue was sales process. And the biggest challenge for companies making above $6 million was recruiting quality employees. So we broke the infographic down into really cool graphs based on region, based on size, all these different things, and we presented it at the 2022 Landscaper's Summit, and we got to interview some audience members about their takes on it and things.
So I'd love to send you that full video where I go way into detail with this and this cool branded graphic. So check it out at landscapersguide.com/survey. And you can use this to improve your sales and marketing. That's why I want to give you this information. And some of it could just be peace of mind of knowing the information and how you compare to it, but I did think of three ways that you could use this. Okay. First of all, download the full graph at landscapersguide.com/survey. Watch the 2022 landscapers sales results keynote replay.
And here's the thing to actually take action is meet with your sales, marketing, and operations people. Get the operations person in there. If you have a CFO, bring them in. One time I had a meeting with an $18 million company and the light bulbs went off with their CFO of like, "Wow, we have all these clients that we're selling to who are profit killers. There's our profit problem. It was partly a sales and marketing problem." So get the leaders of your company together and a few questions you can ask them, send them a report, have them watch the replay. What key takeaways did you have from this? How do you feel about our close rate? And if you track this, does it vary between different people at your company, and why are they all following the same sales process?
Or is everyone doing it their own way and it's inconsistent and not very repeatable? And then, which marketing is working best for your company this year that you should continue next year? What should you cut? And then what do you need next year? So I hope you use this information to have a productive conversation with your sales, marketing, and operations people, and ultimately, have a really great year. I'd also love to know what questions you think we should ask next year. We will be doing this again and give us some feedback.
After you get the report, just send me a quick email, reply to it and let me know what did you think. Also, if you'd like to review this with somebody from our team, you can reach out for a 15-minute marketing brainstorm call with the Landscaper's Guide team. So we'd be more than happy to review this with you, ask you some of those questions, see how you stack up to these things. And lastly, I want to give a big thanks to Jessica Winkler, Liv McCoy, Robert Quinn Rozicki, and our client, Scott Callenius, from Forever Green Landscape Services. Scott helped us run our booth at NALP's ELEVATE Conference where we got over 50 people to fill out the survey.
So that was a really cool experience to hang out with one of our clients, talk directly with people, listen to them, and just thank you, Scott. Thanks for doing that. All right, everyone, grab the full report at landscapersguide.com/survey. My name's Jack Jostes and I look forward to talking with you next week on the Landscaper's Guide.