Tune up your sales machine

Summer has arrived and you’ve made it through the challenges that spring brings to the landscape industry. This is a great time to pause, reflect and review your progress toward meeting your budgeted sales goals for the year. Here are some diagnostic questions to ask yourself, your sales team or your sales manager to determine where to tune up your sales machine:

1. Are you keeping in touch with your key clients? It’s been proven that your most profitable sales come from your existing clients. Finding new clients is time-consuming and costly. Now is a great time to schedule a walk-through with your top property managers or with the design/build clients that you recently completed a project. Look for enhancement opportunities or discuss the timing for phase two of a design/build project.

2. Are you staying focused on dealing with your ideal clients? If you haven’t already, you need to identify your ideal client. This is the client or type of project that aligns well with your expertise and capabilities and is most profitable. Once you have identified your ideal client, tune up your pre-qualifying process so you’re not running after dead-end leads that take up your valuable time.

3. What does your pipeline look like? What projects are you likely to close soon? What new potential projects are in the pipeline? You need that information to determine your productive capacity for the fall. How are new leads looking? How does the quality and number of new leads compare to previous years? This may tell you if there is a slowdown coming that you need to prepare for. If so, this is the time to start building a contingency plan.

4. Are your salespeople and account managers meeting their goals? This is the time to do mid-year reviews. Ask your sales team to prepare projections for fall sales and report to you. If they are missing sales or revenue targets, help them develop an action plan to get back on track. Take the time to go out on sales calls with your sales team and suggest ways to improve their sales and closing techniques.

5. Are you asking for referrals and getting testimonials from your clients? Referrals are great leads that have a high likelihood of turning into profitable sales. When we get busy, we forget to ask for referrals. The best time to ask though is in mid-season when your clients are most pleased with your work and the landscapes look their best. Testimonials are great for marketing to new prospects. They come from your client base and are an unbiased advertisement for your work. The testimonials should be included throughout your website.

6. Are you meeting gross margin goals? If not, this could be the result of lack of productivity in the field, or due to your estimates not generating the gross profit you desire. Material and labor costs are still going up — maybe not as fast as they have been the last two years — but still going up. Does your pricing system cover those increased labor and material costs, or do you need to institute a price increase for all new estimates going out the door? Check your HAWS (Hourly Average Wages) to make sure that the labor rate you are charging covers your increased labor costs.

7. Is your marketing plan working? Marketing is absolutely essential for landscape companies. It can help you attract new customers, build brand awareness, increase sales and stay competitive in a crowded market. If you’re not currently investing in marketing, now is the time to start. Whether you choose to handle it in-house or hire a professional marketing agency, the investment will be well worth it in the long run.

8. Is your website up to date? Is it easy to move through your website, or is it clunky and slow? Websites are crucial to generating new prospects. Potential clients used to have several face-to-face interviews with landscape contractors to decide who they will hire. Now, the vast majority of potential clients do their research by first visiting your website. If your website lacks a “wow” factor and is difficult to navigate, prospects may give up and go elsewhere. Hire a marketing expert who specializes in websites to review your site and make recommendations. It’s worth the investment.

If you are not meeting your budgeted revenue and profit goals through the first half of the year, all is not lost. There is still time to get back on track and turn your season around by asking the eight questions outlined above.