
Are you missing out on sales opportunities?
If you’re like most landscape business owners, the answer is probably yes. Even if you have an excellent renewal rate, you might not be tapping into the full revenue potential of your existing customers.
Securing renewals and adding new clients to your CRM are excellent signs of growth, but how much time do you spend re-evaluating customer relationships? Skipping this step of the sales process could end up costing more than you realize.
And the solution is much simpler than you think. Here are three strategies for staying on top of your customer relationships—and uncovering hidden sales opportunities in this process.
Conduct regular site audits
One of the best ways to stay informed is to have your account managers or operations managers visit sites regularly—about once a month or more, depending on the size of the account.
During these site audits, managers can identify potential enhancement opportunities and communicate them to the client. This kind of proactive, consistent monitoring is a great way to keep customers happy since you’re finding and addressing issues as they occur. It can also help strengthen your relationship by encouraging clients to see you as a long-term partner, not just a seasonal service provider.
Capitalize on your crews in the field
When it comes to staying connected to what’s happening on a site, your crews are your greatest resource. By encouraging them to act as “boots on the ground,” you can equip them to handle issues and share ideas in a way that’s profitable for your business.
Turn problems or concerns that arise into enhancement opportunities. By training crew members to report issues, and account managers to evaluate them creatively, you can improve your customers’ experience and increase revenue earned from a single job.
For construction projects, it’s vital that crew leaders record and communicate any requests from the client for additional work. Without a formal change order, your company ends up absorbing costs that weren’t accounted for during the initial bidding process.
Reinforcing the importance of passing along every request—no matter how small—will not only help prevent you from losing money on a job, it could also bring in additional profits.
Implement a digital system of record
Conducting site audits and capitalizing on crews in the field isn’t always easy—especially with a paper-based system. Implementing a business management software with end-to-end functionality, however, makes identifying and taking advantage of sales opportunities much easier.
Transitioning to a digital system of record prevents written notes from getting lost or forgotten. The best solutions allow job notes and change orders to be easily submitted from the field via mobile device, and account managers can instantly access all data related to the customer, the property, or the job in a single place.
Additionally, a fully-integrated business management solution allows you to track an opportunity through every stage of the process—from the moment it’s identified to its eventual progression into a bid and a project once the estimate is ‘won.’
The cost of missed upsell opportunities
In our experience, landscape companies miss out on at least 15% of possible revenue growth because processes aren’t in place to manage enhancements or change orders. To give a sense of the magnitude of this loss, for a $3 million company, these overlooked opportunities translate into $450,000 in lost revenue.
Thankfully, this isn’t a difficult issue to address. By prioritizing consistent site audits, training your crews to identify opportunities and submit change orders, and implementing a digital system of record, you can take advantage of one of your greatest untapped revenue sources.
Interested in learning more about software that can help provide visibility into every area of your business? Download our free ultimate buyer's guide to get started.
