Is this happening to you?
It’s now April and the busy spring season is staring us straight in the face.
Spring fever is spreading like wildfire. Along with it, property owners are ready to make their lawns and landscapes look their very best.
And in order for you to win your fair share of highly profitable work in 2024, you need to know the answers to the three questions every prospect is asking.
See… when you get a phone call, email inquiry, text message, or contact through a social media app about a landscaping project, you need to know what’s really going on in the head of that prospect.
In most cases the person who is contacting you has had a conversation going on in their head for some time about their lawn or landscape. And so, when your phone rings or your email inbox dings, the person is already interested in doing the job.
You don’t have to be some silver tongue devil to sell landscaping jobs in the spring of the year. Nope.
You only have to give the answers to three questions. That’s it!
QUESTION #1: How much does it cost?
QUESTION #2: Who do I make the check out to?
QUESTION #3: What happens if something goes wrong while you are working on my property?
If you’re skeptical about these three questions, just stick with me here for a minute and let me explain the details.
I know that buyers can be very price sensitive. And I know landscapers need to be very careful about how they price their work. If you underestimate the cost to do a project, it’s a painful financial mistake that could haunt you for weeks months or years (depending on the size of the job).
And so many of us are hesitant to give a price without making a return trip to our office, doing research on materials cost, doing a landscape design or creating a scope of work.
And all of those things are 100% necessary if you are going to give someone a precise price quote. That is, if you are issuing a contract, you need to give someone a precise, exact, binding quote.
BUT there are a number of job opportunities each week that do not need a precise estimate until you have had a discussion about money! Let me explain…
Prospects don’t want to spend more money than they have to. You nor I want to spend more money than we have to when we’re buying anything. But we often make purchase decisions based on convenience, speed, quality, prestige or uniqueness.
When you are face to face with a client or prospect why not give this a try.
You simply look the prospect straight in the eye and say:
“I can do this job for you. But since this is a unique project and I’ve never done one exactly like this before, it will require me to spend several hours with design and research to come up with an exact price.
If you’re anxious to get going this spring we have two ways to get started immediately.
Our first option is that we establish some list of job components. We decide approximately how much you are comfortable with spending on this project, and then you provide a $100 deposit and I will go do the research and return with an exact price within 48 hours.
Or I can provide you a daily billing rate and we can have our crew get started approximately 5 days from now or 20 days from now and the rate is $2,000 per day and I think we’re going to spend between 3 and 6 days here, so that’s $6,000-$12,000.
You can put down a deposit for one day and I can put you on my calendar immediately, and while we are working on the details, drawings, and job specifications, you will have the comfort of knowing that we will be able to start within 2 weeks. Which would you prefer to do?”
In other words you answer the first two questions, “How much is it going to cost?” and “Who do I make the check out to?”. And if you can give someone a price faster than the other guy, provide solid answers and confidence for success, and demonstrate the capacity to serve, you can win the job without having to do a precise estimate up front.
In the words of one of my clients who has been successful selling around $2 million of landscaping services a year for the last couple of decades, he named his process “offering a projected scheduled budget“.
Let’s talk a range of figures with our prospects and then let’s get a deposit to get the design process started and an initial commitment.
Don’t load yourself up with a ton of “free estimates”. That can absolutely create endless work hours for you this spring!
Give somebody a price based on your daily rate that is going to cover your overhead, equipment, labor, and profit. Then shut up and let the customer or prospect answer. This process will help get people off the street shopping company after company and get them to go ahead and engage with your company quickly!
And listen, you’ve also got to answer the third question in order for this to work. The third question is “What happens if something goes wrong while you are working on my property?”
What can the customer expect to happen if something doesn’t go their way? And so you must tell them what they can expect if you need to replace plants that died, or come back and re-treat the lawn, or make repairs. This means that you will provide them a Powerful Guarantee that if anything goes wrong you will be there to fix it. If you provide your guarantee in writing instead of simply saying it, it becomes dramatically more believable.
So remember these three questions:
#1: How much does it cost?
#2: Who do I make the check out to?
#3: What happens if something goes wrong while you are working on my property?
If you answer these questions in a professional and fast manner, you will find that you’re going to have to do a whole lot less estimating.
You’re going to get more yeses faster, and you will fill your schedule up with high paying jobs because you are fast. This is called MONEY FINDS SPEED.
Customers spend their money with those companies that help them get what they want fast and easy. And we like to call this SPEED FINDS MONEY.
The faster you can get someone the information that they need, the faster they can make a decision. And in many cases, that decision is going to be YES.
Happy landscaping!
Here’s to your success.
Tony Bass, founder
Super Lawn Technologies
866-923-0027
PS – you can enhance this fast sales process further by incorporating the use of your website. READ MORE HERE
