In sales you always do your best with the information that you have available. When it comes to selling a landscaping job and giving the customer an approximate timeline for when the job will be completed, you can only work with what you’ve been given by the rest of your team. You put your trust in them that they’ll get the work done in the time table they’ve provided.

However, in the instances where the ball is dropped and the timeline gets pushed back, the customer’s frustrations wind up falling back on you. When a job doesn’t get completed on time, you’re left to deal with an angry customer who feels as though they’ve been lied to. They don’t realize you’ve done your best. Now you have to do what you can to keep them happy so they don’t abandon your company and cause you to lose your hard-earned commission.

Been there before? It can make selling landscape work difficult as you’re constantly worried that work orders will get lost, shuffled around, or moved. Plus, you can't be completely confident that the rest of the team is following through after you sell a job. You know that operations is trying their best but mistakes happen, and without a way to keep all of the sales and operation processes united, it's like chaos is always lurking around the corner. 

If your landscape operations team is still working with a whiteboard and paper work orders then it’s no doubt why you aren’t confidently selling jobs. 

If this all sounds familiar, implementing landscape business scheduling software can completely change your world, allowing you to make confident sales and to keep your customers happy. Just imagine a work day where you’re no longer tied up fielding angry customer phone calls about work orders that went mysteriously missing, or being neglected in the schedule. You’ll be free to sell more jobs and in turn be more profitable.

How Landscape Scheduling Software Builds Confidence

One of the ways that landscape scheduling software can help build confidence is by ensuring that you always have up-to-date and accurate data by which you can create estimates and proposals. With software, information and data entry is occurring in real time which means you never have to question whether you have the latest timeline or not. That makes it a lot easier to sell jobs with confidence. 

Uncertainty is no longer an issue with landscape scheduling software. That’s because figuring out timelines no longer requires looking at a schedule board or flipping through paper sheets to get the answer. With landscape software, everyone is seeing the most up-to-date data, even in the field. Landscape scheduling app technology means you don’t even have to be in the office to know the latest information. It’s at your fingertips anywhere and everywhere. 

Green industry software also makes your job much more efficient. No longer are you calling your operations manager every time you try to create an estimate to ask: “When would you get this job done?” How often have you done that and wondered whether you got accurate information? Or how often do you get the response “I’m not really sure.” 

Instead, with landscape scheduling software, you would go to the type of work being performed and come up with the required hours and number of crew members. The system will then calculate, based on what’s been sold, an accurate start date that fits in the schedule. This information can be relayed to the client right away.

You can assuredly tell them: “If we were to sell this job today, here’s the approximate timeline we’re looking at going forward.” That kind of up-to-the-minute information and confidence can sell a job on the spot.

But confidence with the timeline is not the only benefit of utilizing software. Being confident with your latest profit margins and numbers is also key, and software can help there as well. Landscape Scheduling Software is more effective than QuickBooks because it is part of a greater system in which everything is linked. You can feel certain that you’re bidding with the most accurate numbers available and therefore contributing to the company’s profitability.

How Landscape Scheduling Software Creates Happy Customers

Landscape business scheduling software can also help prevent jobs from getting lost after they’re sold. One of the frustrations of selling a job is when it gets lost in the shuffle because of utilizing old-school paper methods. That’s an easy way to get your client frustrated with your services. But using landscape business software that incorporates estimating tools can take a sold job and instantly turn it into a work order. That means no lost paperwork, no hunting for jobs on whiteboards, and no excuses.

Once a job is sold, it goes into a scheduling operation and the process immediately gets underway. A notification can be sent to the purchasing person so that they know immediately when the job is going to be and when they need to get materials. Things keep moving forward and you can feel confident moving on to the next sale.

All of this definitely keeps the customer happy. You’ve not only estimated an accurate start date and an accurate bid price, but the whole process has continually moved forward. That keeps the customer enthusiastic about the project and eager to work with your company. 

When things go wrong and a project reaches a standstill, customers can quickly lose confidence in your company and turn to you with their complaints. You know it could be something as simple as lost paperwork holding things up and you’re often just as frustrated as the client. But clerical errors and other hold-ups can easily be prevented with landscape operations software. 

As the process continues to move along, you’ll also find that the invoicing stage is simplified with landscape business software. The client is paying their bills quickly as opposed to having the lag of waiting for bills to go out. And if your pay structure is one that compensates after billing or payment of a job, that means that you, as the salesperson, are getting your commission check sooner, too. It’s a win-win all around.

Landscape Scheduling Software Helps in Every Step

Starting with that initial call from the customer inquiring about your services to getting your estimate out the door, there’s no question that landscape business software can help you sell the job with more confidence. And even once the job has been sold and passed along (now out of your hands) you can still be sure it will be moving forward. That’s important since you’re still the point person for the client even after it’s become an official work order.

With jobs moving forward more efficiently and effectively you’ll be getting paid sooner all the while also keeping the client happy (which can equate to more referrals!). There’s no doubt that landscape scheduling software can help you in each and every step of your sales process, leading to greater success all around. 

If you’d like to find out how landscape scheduling software can improve sales, request a free demo of Asset or call us at 800-475-0311 so we can answer your questions.