Landscape professionals are always asking me “What is the best incentive?”
While that answer depends on the company situation, the best overall incentive is to empower your employees with “trust” in the form of more information.
One of the best ways to do that is with Open Book Management.
In March, I wrote that the common industry expression “100 days of hell” should be changed to “100 days to sell.”
It’s more upbeat and helps your team stay optimistic in tough times.
Here are two quick tips to keep you sane and selling in the 100 days of sales.
BrightView, our industry’s largest landscape firm, recently posted poor quarterly results. At the same time their CEO left, with no replacement announced.Did the CEO suddenly decide to leave or was he fired? Either way, the company has performed poorly. This begs the question: Is BrightView’s poor performance due to poor strategy or poor execution? Here is my view, with some lessons & cautionary tales for you.
As I work with landscape business leaders across the continent, I see people who are either “proactive and strategic”, or “reactive and highly tactical”. However, the proactive ones will have a more-profitable and more-fulfilling year. We can put these leaders into 3 categories. 1. In the weeds: Those who are deep in the details, putting out fires, reactive in their day to day duties. They are sucked into client and employee issues; and doing “the work” themselves.
Every year I am blessed to go to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, a 13 stage celebration of food and music.
I look forward to seeing the big names and the up-and-coming acts.
This year I was excited to see The Steve Miller Band. I have loved them ever since 6th grade.
I was lucky to catch a Q&A with Steve Miller right before he went onstage.
Since we are in the middle of 100 Days to Sell, I want to share a timely sales tip. This tip will increase your design-sales conversion and improve your margins.
Last week I shared two things that Mariani does uniquely well.
Here is the third thing they do uniquely well: Selling “premium specialty services” which helps to keep their clients “sticking” around.
Below are 3 examples, plus I explain “what it means for you.”
It’s a brilliant strategy, and one that you can copy.
(Note: Today’s the last day to get the super early bird discount for the Summer Growth Summit.)
Mariani’s Premium Specialty Services.
It’s not enough to do a great job serving your clients with commoditized landscape services.
It helps to find opportunities for additional services that go above and beyond your competition.
Mariani does this well.
For anyone who watches the show, Shark Tank, you have learned how the Sharks love companies with a unique, hard-to-copy product. It’s even more important for the Sharks that this uniqueness is translated into strong sales and profits.In prep for my Summer Growth Summit, I asked the marketing director at Mariani Landscape, Andrew Gross: What does Mariani do uniquely well? He shared with me 3 eye-opening answers.Over the next two weeks I am going to share those responses with you, in two parts. Here is Part 1.Note, I have included my own assessment on “What it means to you.”
In order to succeed in this economy, someone needs to be in charge of building your sales team: Hiring, Motivating, Steering and Managing. You need a Professional Sales Manager to do all this. The funny thing about Sales Management: You can’t study it at school, there are not many books about it, and a great many sales managers are really salespeople pretending they enjoy managing. For those of you who are dedicated to this mysterious trade, here are few practical updated tips from my Sales Symposium, that I held last year: 7 Tips To Improve Your Sales Team’s Performance:
There is an expression in our industry, The 100 Days of Hell. While it is humorous, it sets the wrong tone.I like the following upbeat expression better: 100 Days To Sell. Spring is here and many of you across the country have already been selling into this year’s goals. But you can always get better. Answering the phone and returning calls promptly puts you ahead of 90% of your would-be competitors. The following ten tips above will help you get ahead of everyone else. 10 Sales Knowledge Bombs to help you up your sales game.
