Technology has made our lives faster and more efficient in so many areas. From banking to airline check-ins or even making purchases, technology allows us to perform tasks at a faster rate than ever before.

Of course, when it comes to your landscaping business, there are many great benefits to technology but in terms of speed, an important one is your response time. With the use of various tools you can respond to customers faster than ever.

 That’s important considering most customers say that the single most important attribute of good customer service is a fast response time. In many cases, it can be the driving factor that helps turn a lead into an actual sale.

We’ve rounded up a series of landscaping sales tips focused on improving response time. If you’re interested in being more efficient when it comes to selling landscaping services, incorporating some of these tools and platforms into your sales process can make a big difference.

Utilizing Email Templates

In this world of instant gratification, response time is everything. A recent survey found that more than 80 percent of customers expect a company to respond to them within 24 hours. Of course, creating custom emails from scratch when you already have so many other tasks filling your day can be time consuming. Fortunately, email templates can dramatically reduce the amount of time needed to answer an email. This will allow you to respond to more emails and reduce your average response time.

It also works for prospecting. Say you meet a bunch of potential clients at a trade show and you want to get in touch with them right away. You can even add email automation software to develop a series of timed follow-ups that will be sent out—it’s only a matter of adding contact’s name and email address.

You can have the majority of the email written for various situations and just drop in some specific details to really customize it to your specific recipient.

Keep Mobile Technology at your Fingertips

When it comes to selling landscaping services, having technology at your fingertips with the use of a mobile device is also incredibly beneficial in terms of keeping the process moving along. A tablet, for instance, will allow you to easily view content that is valuable to your prospect. You instantly bring up a catalog of plant pictures or a portfolio with examples of similar work you’ve installed in the past and it keeps the sale moving swiftly in the right direction.

Having everything right at your fingertips and accessible immediately is a lot more efficient than having to say “I’ll need to go back to the office and get that.” By that point, you’ve risked losing the prospect’s interest.

Use Proposal Templates

Speaking of keeping the sales process moving steadily forward, after your prospect has expressed interest in a proposal, you obviously want to get that out quickly as well. In the past, writing landscape business proposals may have been a menial task and taken a while for you to produce them. But with the use of a proposal template, the process is incredibly simplified.

You’ll be able to pull up standardized language that you’ve already created for each and every proposal, only updating certain items in order to customize it for the job specifics. With a template, the process is simplified since you already have data at your fingertips that just needs to be dropped into place. This is hugely important when it comes to your timeline. After all, nothing is more frustrating for clients than not hearing back from you, particularly when they’ve expressed interest in your services. By getting your proposals out the door quickly, you can increase the probability of finalizing the sale.

Entice Prospects with Video

Selling landscaping services often means being innovative and giving prospects a reason to pick you over all the other companies out there. A great way to achieve that goal is to make personal connections. With video messaging platforms on the rise, people are getting more and more used to face-to-face contact. It’s clear that people like to feel a human connection to their correspondence. Besides actual face time, the next best thing is video.

Video has been a vastly underutilized tool but it can be quite powerful. If you’re on a potential jobsite and providing some recommendations to a client, it’s a lot more impactful to show them what you mean than just telling them. For instance, saying “there is something wrong with the shrubs in this plant” is a lot less powerful than taking a short video and showing the prospect exactly what you mean and why you’re making the recommendation that you are making. It could be as quick as a 30-second video but the prospect is going to see tremendous value in that.

There are a lot of tools out there that can help you embed video into an email or even send it via text message.

Be a Better Resource

Another way that you can focus on being more effective in selling landscaping services is by becoming a better educational resource to your prospects. When potential clients come to your website does it look like everyone else’s? If your website is more of just an “virtual brochure” than it is a valuable resource, then it’s not going to do much work for you.

The best way that you can be a better resource to your prospects is to provide valuable content. Go a step beyond what everyone else is doing and create a meaningful website that earns you real leads. Let your customers view you as a resource by providing articles and content that help solve their problems.

For instance, perhaps you have a residential client who knows that they want a fire feature but they can’t decide between a fire pit and an outdoor fireplace. Your website could have a gallery dedicated to fire pits vs. fireplaces so that they can visually see the differences. You might also have an article that actually details out the differences, including cost. Your customers will see this as incredibly valuable and when it comes time to choose a company for the work, you’ll be at the top of their list.

It applies to commercial properties as well. Say you have a commercial client that is thinking about adding color enhancements to their entryway. Your portfolio of images or your video testimonials from commercial clients who have utilized you for enhancements can go a long way in making the selection process easier for your commercial prospect.

Use Landscape Business Software to Access Data Quickly

In general, when clients and prospects want information, they want it right away. One way to be able to answer questions or provide information quickly is to have easy and efficient access to it. With landscape business software, you can pull up information instantaneously on a mobile device or laptop. You can even search accounts by specific criteria and get answers quickly.

Landscape business software can also help your account managers stay on top of their accounts by allowing them to set reminders and follow up in a timely manner about potential upsells.

Perhaps a particular client wasn’t interested in your enhancement services this year but they mentioned that next year they would be. Your account manager can make a specific note on when to follow up with them when that task becomes due. Those types of opportunities can really add up to be profitable but they often slip through the cracks. But with the right landscape sales software, you’ll prevent that from happening.

Provide a Customer Portal

Another resourceful tool that makes your landscape company stand out as one that values its customers’ time is a customer portal. Since customers want their questions answered and their problems solved quickly, a customer portal can make your business accessible around the clock.

Customers can get answers to questions or quickly view their account information. They can also pay a bill. It really simplifies the process of working with you and helps your clients see you as easy to reach at all times.

Reduce Friction to Make More Sales

You’re probably noticing a common thread amongst all of these landscaping sales tips and it’s that all of them keep things moving smoothly. Technology allows you to reduce friction and keep the sale process moving forward. When that happens, you greatly increase your chance that the sale will close.

That’s because people want things simple—and they want things fast. When you overcomplicate or draw out the process, you increase the likelihood that your prospect will get annoyed and move on to someone else who is easier and more efficient to work with.

Ultimately, anything that you can do to speed up the sales process and make your company the more clear-cut answer will help. This includes having tools to entice the prospect (videos, resources, images), being highly responsive when they contact you, having multiple ways they can contact you, getting the proposal in their hands quickly, and essentially just making it all simple for them. Anytime that you can do these things, you’ll absolutely close more deals—and that can make a big difference when it comes to your bottom line.

If you want to find out more about how landscape business software can help you be even more efficient and improve your response time, let’s explore and see what Asset can do for you.

Watch This Video to Learn How Landscaping Software Can Improve Response Time & Increase Sales

Image sources: Outback Landscape