Have you ever almost made a sale, but then lost it because of price? Chances are your potential client just didn't understand the value of what you do differently from your competition who happens to maybe charge a little bit less.
But... only 20% of the marketplace is entirely motivated by price.
Which means that... if you can become more effective at helping your potential customers understand why they should buy from you, you will close sales. And that's what today's episode is all about today. I'm going to share with you some of my favorite tips from this book, we just read called Copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards. Now you might be thinking Jack, I'm not a copywriter, but if you are sending proposals to clients, if you're creating estimates and sending them via email, you are doing copywriting. And I promise that you can get better at it to close more sales.
My name's Jack Jostes and welcome to the Landscaper's Guide To Modern Sales and Marketing. This show is all about helping lawn and landscape contractors grow their sales, increase their profits by getting more of the right customers, and in today's episode, we're going to dive into some actionable tactics that can help you close more sales when you're sending them via email.
At Ramblin Jackson, we help lawn and landscape contractors, design websites, write their branding content and do search engine optimization. So writing is a big part of what we do here. And I believe that copywriting is a skill that we can all learn and develop. And I love hearing that in this book, Copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards and not affiliated with Jim or, or ClickFunnels or anything like that. I'm just a big fan wanting to share this book with you. We recently did a book club here at Ramblin Jackson, where we all read the book and shared some of our favorite copywriting tips.
Now, one of my favorite takeaways from the book and I had a ton of notes because this book is really good and it's a really easy read and it makes copywriting really approachable is that according to Jim Edwards, there are 10 reasons that people will buy. And one of them is to make more money. One is to save money. One is to save time. One is to avoid effort and the other is to escape mental or physical pain. Now, those are just the first five, but they are so good that I had to share them with you. Now you're going to have to get the book to see the other five, that's on page 16.
You can order the book online at copywritingsecrets.com. Buying this book online, by the way, is really fun. And you should pay attention to all the landing pages and videos and cool things that they do to sell this book. But the reason I share those five is because so often landscaping companies, when we're working with them and we ask them, well, why should people buy from you? Instead of other people, they say, well, we do quality work. We've been in business for 25 years and we're family owned.
Who cares? Everyone says that. And bro… doing quality work is baseline.
You've got to do quality work or you're going to go out of business. And a lot of people say that they do quality work. So you saying that you do quality work, doesn't differentiate you and that you're family owned and you've been in business for 25 years... I know a lot of family owned companies that have been around for 20 years that do garbage work, right? It doesn't mean anything to your potential customer. So you've got to narrow it down into the things that your clients want, which again are to either make money, save money, save time, avoid effort or escape mental or physical pain. So the one question that we came up with at the Ramblin Jackson book club, as the question to ask, before you call any writing "done", whether it's sending an email to a client, writing a script, etc. is adding the "which means that" to your statement.
Right? What does it mean for me, the customer? So hopefully this was helpful to you. I encourage you to check out this book and have whoever's on your team, whether it's your designers, your project manager, whoever is selling and sending and writing estimates, you've got to become more effective at copywriting. And I promise that this is a really enjoyable book that can make it really easy.
I'm curious, which of those five reasons do you think motivates your clients the most? And now I want you to take a look at your proposal template, whatever you're modifying and sending to people and the email that you send along with it and ask yourself the, 'which means that' question when you read through there, is it clear to somebody who's never done landscaping, who wouldn't know the materials and technical things that you do from an emotional standpoint, are you answering one of those top five reasons that people would want to buy from you? And if not, how could you make it clear instead of sending an email that simply says "Nice to meet you. Attached is your estimate."
How could you expand that into any of the things that the client said to you that they wanted from their new landscape? So hopefully this was helpful to you. Check out the book, Copywriting Secrets by Jim Edwards and for more book recommendations, check out our podcast page landscapersguide.com/podcast, where I have a whole tab where I've reviewed and recommended other books. Thanks so much for checking out today's episode.