Beyond the sale

A lot of times, it’s not the wins we remember — it’s the losses. That can be especially true for a green industry company in terms of sales.

So, what can we learn from these rejections? And how do we turn them into learning opportunities for the entire team?

Four panelists at Lawn & Landscape’s Business Builders Summit touched on just that during their “Business Development 101” panel, which featured Peter Lucadano, CEO of RedTree Landscape Systems; Kelly Slater, CEO of Pleasant Landscapes; Rob Palmer, founder of Lawn Squad; and Tim Gardiner, president of Meridian Landscaping.

A smart sales strategy

To start out — nothing kills a sale like a hard sell. Slater suggests whether it’s a prospective new client, or a long-term client you’re aiming to sell enhancements to, the best sales advice is to just shut up and listen.

“We teach our sales team during the onboarding process that when you step on a property, you aren’t there to identify a sale — you’re there to solve a problem. The solution is the sale,” Slater says. “Don’t walk onto a property thinking how much you’re going to sell. Go in and figure out how you’re going to solve that problem.”

Lucadano adds that sometimes, the client won’t be telling you outright what they need but it’s up to you, or a sales professional, to read the tea leaves and figure it out.

“Listen for the whispers and you’ll hear the screams,” Lucadano says. “Expand their way of thinking and educate them…Happy clients buy enhancements.”

As your relationship with the client proceeds, Lucadano says a great way to nurture it is by staying communicative and showing them progress. This is especially important when it inevitably becomes time to raise prices, he adds.

“A good relationship with that client makes those conversations go a lot better,” Lucadano says. “We’re in the results business. It’s a great time to remind them of what we’ve done and review our performance. Some before and after photos or videos always help.”

And while some may think a dedicated sales staff would be needed to do this effectively, Gardiner says he disagrees.

“We actually don’t even have a sales team. Our branch managers and myself kind of just sell,” he says. “One of the challenges, especially in the commercial marketplace, is its cost, cost, cost…we change that conversation from a cost to a return.”

Turn a no into a yes

But even when you go in and do everything right — sometimes a “no” still happens.

Palmer says that it’s OK and part of his overall sales strategy.

“We have a sales philosophy to ‘go for the no,’” Palmer explains. “Every no is just one step closer to a yes.”

Palmer says sales is a lot like baseball. “If you’re batting 300, you’re a good batter. We’d tend to think batting 30% isn’t good — but it’s good.”

Palmer also suggests companies invest in a CRM to have accurate data that can help better drive the sales process.

“It helps define the process and the journey we’re taking that customer through,” he says. “It helps us understand what the KPIs are and we use those KPIs to inform ourselves. We can see if a business developer is losing people between Stage 3 and Stage 4 — we can begin to understand what the gaps in learning are or change his approach. We use a lot of data to guide our performance.”

Palmer adds he doesn’t sweat any rejection because he knows business always comes around again and he’s confident his team can secure it the next time.

The other panelists agree with that mentality.

“We don’t take no for an answer — we take no for now,” Slater says. “It might be no for two months or no for two years.”

Gardiner suggests always following up with customers or property managers who go in another direction.

“Did you lose it because of price or did you lose it because of service?” Gardiner says. “If you came in and said $20,000 but someone else came in for $16,000, but will they be having a lot more headaches with that $4,000 savings?

“We go back in after a few months and ask if they’re happy,” he adds. “I feel like I get rejection every day. Every sales cycle we go through, whether we win or lose, we always get a debrief. You always learn more from your losses than you do your wins. Losing is part of the process.”

Lucadano says a leader, or any member of the business, should get familiar with failure and rejection and learn to embrace it.

“You have to be a positive person,” Lucadano says. “You have to have the ability to deal with failure and have that resiliency to know that failure is often just as much a part of the job as success.”

That’s when Lucadano says it can be a learning lesson for everyone.

“We try to bookend failure with the forensic,” Lucadano says. “We really believe in giving our leaders freedom to fail, but we have to be able to talk about that afterwards. We don’t embarrass them or chide them in front of their peers — but use that experience to learn from it.”

Learning lessons

Win or lose — the panelists have some suggestions for making the sale easier to come by.

Slater says her company has found major success with connecting with prospective customers on their commutes.

“Radio advertising has also been absolutely huge for us. We went there for help wanted ads at first, and then in 2021 we thought it worked so well to find workers — let’s find some sales that way,” she says. “It really came down to the radio personalities. I did a lot of research in the beginning to really nail down where we were going to target them. For us, it’s the morning and afternoon drive-time. We pay a little extra to have those ads done by those radio personalities.”

Another learning tool Slater implements is giving her team the freedom to make decision on their own and handle some fires before she gets involved.

“I don’t answer the phone until the third phone call,” Slater says. “That gives them two phone calls to try and figure it out on their own first.”

But something she says everyone needs to be on the same page about is financing and budgets — that’s why Pleasant Landscapes does continuing education on the subject matter.

“We try to teach at a very entry-level way of how budgets work and where the money goes,” Slater says. “I take 100 pennies on the table, and I take our P&L and I break out those pennies into what the percentages are. So, you have overhead, direct labor and all the different costs. At the very end is what is left in profit…seeing the employees watch this happen and watching them see these pennies slide away — they get it. They want to know how to keep more pennies at the end. They actually come up with some really great ideas to increase sales and reduce costs.”

The author is senior editor with Lawn & Landscape.