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When building a successful business, it’s imperative to know your numbers. Even if you have an amazing sales team, you can’t always close and convert sales on the first call, which is why it’s important to always have a process for both online sales and calls.
Below is a list of the key points in your sales pipeline to ensure that your landscaping business can convert interested prospects into sales.
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How to Implement Online Booking
If you’re expecting to be flooded with online bookings, you need to ensure that your website has quality content. Providing educational content and answering client questions will increase your business's chances of getting good leads.
Moreover, generating qualified content will build trust between you and your customers, leading to a healthy relationship. Here are a couple of ways to ensure your online booking is performing at top-notch.
Qualifying Questions
If you’ve ever tried to fill out an online form but were driven away by too many questions, you can imagine how this is one of the fastest ways to kill your conversion rate. Be sure to trim all unnecessary questions from your forms and leave only the most essential for your goals.
Important qualifying questions for your landscaping business might be related to your target audience(s). You'll likely have different services, lead nurturing emails, and sales processes for residential vs. commercial customers. You may offer direct bookings for some of these services, but others may require a site visit and custom quote.
Sorting Your Audiences
You can use qualifying questions to sort your customers into the appropriate area of your website or form or to a certain sequence of follow-up emails and text messages. You may even use the information filled out on an online booking form to designate a territory sales representative.
Any client information captured through your online booking forms should be funneled into your client relationship management (CRM) and email marketing tools to further drive engagement with the potential customer.
Staff/Team Calendars
For those services that you want to offer direct online booking for, using a tool that can sync with your staff calendars ensure that you're never double booked!
If you're offering online bookings for in-person estimates, you may just need an individual staff member's calendar synced. But if you're offering online booking for a landscape maintenance service package, you may have a local team whose calendar you want to provide based on a city or zip code qualifying question.
This type of software may seem a bit too technical, but it can save your team a tremendous amount of time and is an advanced service that consumers are used to experiencing with other industries.
When to Use Sales Calls
Cold calling potential clients is never very successful. That's why using a mix of inbound and outbound marketing efforts can save your landscaping business time. Reserve sales calls for potential customers who've already engaged with your business through your owned and paid media channels.
Establish a sales sequence, or playbook, to help guide your team and your customers to the desired outcomes. Some steps should be automated, such as emails or text messages, while others should be initiated by a salesperson, such as phone calls or social media interactions. Here are some examples:
Custom Quotes
Once a customer requests or schedules a custom quote through your website, whether you've used an online informational form or an online booking tool, be sure you have a sales representative follow up right away.
The salesperson may be conducting an estimate in person, and this call can serve as an introduction as well as a confirmation of that appointment. There's also a chance here for the salesperson to clarify any questions they may have about the job.
Form Abandonment Follow Up
When a person fills out a form on your website, you already know that they have some kind of interest in your products or services. As such, it’s worth the effort to try and get them back.
There are a few automated ways to do that, such as automated emails and text messages or retargeting ads. However, your landscaping business may also want to implement lead scoring to determine if a highly-engaged prospect deserves the more personalized touch of a sales call.
Missed Calls Follow Up
If you’re using a call tracking system for your marketing campaigns, you should be able to determine if a lead called you from seeing an online ad or a radio or TV commercial. And you'll get a list of any calls that were missed because they came in outside of business hours or for any other reason.
This is a perfect chance for your staff to route this caller's information to the appropriate sales rep so they can follow up with the missed call promptly.
Abandoned Calls Follow Up
Another feature of a call tracking software is notifying you of abandoned calls that can also be routed to a sales rep to follow up on.
Pro tip: if you have a significant number of abandoned calls, you may need to evaluate your phone system. Are customers potentially getting a busy signal, or are they frustrated with your hold time? The data can help you make small but important tweaks to your business.
Close More Deals Today!
Sales conversions take persistence, but ensuring your marketing efforts and sales process are aligned can improve the outcomes. Need some help aligning your marketing plan and sales initiatives? We’ve got your back! Contact us at Dirty Marketing Group for more information.
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