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A pool isn’t just a pool anymore. It’s a key component of an entire outdoor living space, or what Michael Shawn Kelly, owner of Mirror Lake Designs in Spring, Texas, calls the garden lifestyle.

As a result, selling pools and spas today is all about showing homeowners how they can integrate a swimming or soaking feature not only into their backyards but also into their daily lives.

Most homeowners aren’t going to tackle more than one or two major outdoor living projects in their lives, says Joshua Gillow, landscape designer at MasterPLAN Landscape Design & Installation, a company that manages outdoor living projects from start to finish in the Brodheadsville, Pennsylvania area.

That’s why, he says, “we believe strongly in planting seeds wherever we can and then we wait for them to grow up to be projects.

People might not need an outdoor project now, but someday they may, so we want them to know where to come when they’re ready.”

Honesty counts.

Referrals are a great way to get new business, but to get those, contractors must keep their clients happy.

Doing so when tackling a major outdoor project isn’t always easy, but the time and attention that customer service takes – particularly during the initial design phase – pays off in the end.

When Kelly first meets with clients, they focus on listing the “stuff,” including pools and spas, they want. “But once they finish going through their list of things, I try to get them to change the direction of their thinking,” he says.

How do customers want to live outside? What events do they want to have? What time of year and day will they be outside the most? “Once they start talking and dreaming a bit, I’ll take those dreams and massage them into the site they have and their budget.”

Kelly estimates that 25-30 percent of the time, the jobs his company does include a pool. Yet sometimes, even when customers come to him saying they want a pool, he talks them out of it.

“We’ll let people go through their wish list and talk about how they want to live, and we’ll tell them, ‘Everything you want to do is not really fulfilled by a pool. You’re about to sink all this money into a swimming pool, but you’ll get more use out of your money with a patio, gazebo, plantings, fountains,’” he says.

“A great swimming pool is a fantastic use of the money. A bad pool, bad placement or bad design is a huge waste,” Kelly says. It’s a pool that homeowners aren’t actually going to use.

Mirror Lake Designs isn’t the only company that approaches pool and spa sales this way, either.

“When we work with a client, we partner from beginning to end. It’s not ‘them’ and ‘us,’ it’s ‘we,’” Gillow says. “All options are available, so I am honest with clients, telling them the pros and cons so they can make a decision on their own.”

Sometimes the pros of a pool or spa outweigh the cons. Sometimes they don’t. “I’ll be honest with them,” Gillow says. “Don’t spend $8,000 to $12,000 on a hot tub if you won’t use it.”

Gillow says about 30 to 40 percent of his company’s projects have a pool, spa or combination of the two.

Similar to Kelly’s approach, Gillow has created a process called “Eight Steps to the Perfect Backyard,” which begins by asking clients to explore ideas on their own and work through a questionnaire focused on identifying their goals.

“They rely on us to make a design that is holistic, that shows all the pieces they like in its entirety,” Gillow says.

“We design three-dimensional, full-color models so clients can see the entire project before we begin. Once they see the big picture, they can see why that material was selected, why the pool is a certain shape, all of those things.”

Share the numbers.

While they are perfecting their clients’ backyard designs, pool and spa contractors are faced with the challenge of staying within a client’s budget requirements.

Giving clients a sense of all of the expenses involved – particularly related to drainage systems, cleanup, and other costs they might not expect – is preferable to the anger that comes midway through a project if homeowners learn costs are going to exceed what was originally quoted.

An accurate budget is even more important, and challenging, when working with a backyard that is not particularly spacious or flat, for instance.

Derek Bagin, construction supervisor at B&B Pool and Spa in Chestnut Ridge, New York says pools can be built in most yards, even those with steep slopes, if customers are willing to spend more. Yet some issues, such as towns that don’t give variances for pools, can’t be overcome no matter the size of the budget.

Regardless of the situation, “we never hide price,” Kelly says. “When customers come to the office, I’ll leave the drawn-out plan and total price next to it. When they get over the shock, I sit down and start talking, and they’re ready to listen to me to figure out why it costs so much. I never shy away about the money.”

Addressing project timeframes upfront is also key, Bagin says. “Sometimes clients want everything in the world and want it done in two weeks. It’s just not possible.”

The typical pool project takes six to eight weeks, according to Bagin, plus additional time for hardscaping and landscaping. “So it usually takes 10 to 12 weeks minimum,” he says, and some high-end projects take as long as a year.

“People have no idea what they’re getting into with a swimming pool,” Kelly adds. “You have to do a lot of hand-holding and prep your clients for what’s about to happen.”

That’s because the mess of pool installation, from the mud tracked across the driveway and yard to the massive hole dug for the pool, can be hard for clients to handle.

For that reason, Kelly says they have an employee – he calls her the “people person” – who interacts regularly with clients to keep them happy and assure them that any problems will be addressed immediately.

“We send flowers or a bottle of wine to people when we’re working on the yard,” Kelly adds.

“It makes them feel good and lets them know we understand how hard the installation process is. That works on anything, but especially pools, because it looks like a bomb went off in your yard.”

If everything is done correctly – from initial design through cleanup – the temporary chaos will be worth it for both contractor and client.

Kelly says he often overhears clients talking at the holiday party Mirror Lake Designs throws each year about how they never expected to spend as much as they did on their outdoor spaces.

“But then they say it’s the best money they ever spent,” he says. “When they say that, you know you’re doing things right.”

The author is a freelance writer based in Illinois.