The target market for Mary Liljequist’s landscape designs has changed in the 13 years she has owned her firm, Earthly Delights. Today, Raleigh, North Carolina, is a center for information technology, which introduces a different type of client base.
They’re typically younger and they want details. “They need to know how much a landscape design and improve their property value,” Liljequist says, relating that this adds a different dimension to selling her creativity and service.
Liljequist’s target clients want to measure the success of a prospective landscape job before they even consider a project, let alone break ground. So this means Liljequist needs numbers: information on the value of landscaping, statistics to present her clients.
“I’m nothing if not a good researcher,” says Liljequist, who worked for more than a decade in the pharmaceutical industry before switching careers to landscape architecture. She has been fine-tuning presentations to include not just portfolio pieces of her completed projects, but information on how landscape design adds value.
Another bit of value-focused information Liljequist says designers should address up front is the budget. “I learned early on that you have to ask what the budget is,” she says. “A lot of people have unrealistic expectations.”
While Liljequist’s focus has always been on the creative, and that will continue, she says this new audience for her designs is changing her business development approach to include a cost-benefit piece. She says, “I have had to step back and re-examine the way I do things, and recognize that when working with young, technical types, they really need to have that data in front of them.”