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Do you feel as though despite your best efforts, you’re failing to get more landscaping customers or the wrong new ones? You might even feel as though you’ve dumped too much money into ineffective advertising time after time. Though you might be getting some return, it may not be what you had in mind when you began investing in landscaping marketing materials or efforts.

If you’re having some of these feelings, you’re not alone. Many landscape companies have told us that they’ve struggled in trying to figure out marketing for their landscaping business. Whether you’re a B2B or a B2C company, your goal is the same—getting more of the right landscaping customers. That’s why you want a marketing approach that really works.

At Include Software, we love sharing knowledge that we’ve learned if it can help landscape companies in any way. After all, this is the industry that we truly value.

You have the freedom to choose how you wish to structure your landscaping sales commission rates and salaries. Of course, you want to choose a model that will work best for your company (and its profitability) while also motivating your landscaping salespeople to perform their best.

There’s obviously a lot at stake to set this up right. After all, you want to inspire your salespeople to work hard and sell more work while also attracting new, highly-motivated salespeople to your company. But you don’t want to overpay—or make payment errors—that could hurt your bottom line or disenfranchise your salespeople if they found out they somehow were compensated incorrectly.

How many times have you heard someone use the expression change is hard? It gets thrown around all of the time in business—admittedly for good reason. Change really is hard, the main reason for which is because it requires work.

While change is always hard to some degree, the truth is, it’s hardest when it will result in long-term benefits rather than short-term ones. It’s more difficult for business owners to make changes when the reward will not be immediate because it means muddling through some tough times first. It’s also particularly hard when business is booming and the need for change seems almost unnecessary—at least for the time being. There is an inclination to want to put off changes rather than focus on them today.

A key to securing ongoing and steady revenue for your landscaping company is developing an easy transition from design/build jobs into maintenance contracts. If you’re not converting the vast majority of your design/build contracts into landscape maintenance agreements, then you’re missing an incredibly valuable opportunity to boost your profitability and line up ongoing sales.

Do you feel as though your underperforming employees are dragging your landscape company down? If you do, you’re not alone. A survey performed by a leading staffing agency found that underperforming employees are a major concern in businesses across the country.

In the survey, respondents reported the managers at their companies spent an average of 17 percent of their time on underperforming employees. That’s nearly one day out of every week.

The problem is, managing underperforming employees is not only time consuming, it can also lead to a decline in morale among other employees. They may feel neglected or may even be influenced by the negative attitude of one or more of your underperformers.

When it comes to growing the revenue of your landscaping company, you’d like to see a goal-crushing sales team jump in and make things happen.

Of course, you may be tired of hiring the wrong people. You’ve been there before. You’ve hired a salesperson for landscaping and assumed they were going to do a great job only to find it didn’t work out. It shouldn’t be this hard to find a good fit. You’re likely tired of a high churn rate in your sales department and tired of spending money on candidates that didn’t ultimately work out.

You may want to know how to hire a salesperson that will truly be successful within your company.

One-on-one meetings are a critical form of communication within your landscape company. And it’s no secret that open and ongoing communication is one of the keys to successful management. Even so, it is safe to say that one-on-one meetings are drastically underutilized within the landscape industry.

Jim Cali, executive coach, consultant, speaker, and peer group facilitator with McFarlin Stanford, a management consulting firm based in Dallas, says that he is a big believer in one-on-ones mostly because “they work.”

At Include Software, we’ve worked with hundreds of landscape companies and often end up discussing their business needs. Occasionally, we hear a lot of companies are looking at updating or improving their websites.

This is a smart business move. After all, your website is one of your most important marketing tools. Even if a client finds you somewhere else (like a Facebook ad or even via word-of-mouth), they’re still going to head to your website to check you out.

While you may be great at designing a landscape or a property maintenance program, chances are, you might not know much about website design. You may know it’s important to put together something that will stand out, but you may not be sure how to get started.

Chances are, you started your business because you’re passionate about landscaping. Not because you are passionate about accounting. While you know that staying on top of the financials, and making better decisions is key to your profitability, it may be a struggle to do so.

After all, very few landscape company owners have a strong business background. You know a lot about your trade and about producing and maintaining spectacular landscapes but you may not know a whole lot about maintaining financial reports.

Because of that, you may be worried that you’re not turning enough profit for your business. You want to be able to track numbers more easily and make better decisions based on priorities—and on data. But you may not even know where to start.

You already know that your landscape sales team is at the heart of your profitability. How they perform can either positively or negatively impact your business. But what can you do to make improvements? How can you ensure that your team is constantly getting better and not repeating bad habits or following ineffective methodologies?

The fact that you’re concerned about these issues is already a step in the right direction. A lot of landscaping companies get stuck in sales rut when they don’t take the time to analyze how their team is doing and what kind of additional support they may need to succeed. After all, you have some accountability in the grand scheme of things—and that is to support your people and give them the tools and skills they need to be the best at growing your company.

We’ve rounded up 7 great landscape sales tips that you can take advantage of in order to improve your landscape sales team. Incorporating these concepts could make a huge difference in your overall success.