Landscapers can utilize their sales funnel to help determine how effective their marketing efforts are. Unfortunately, not many landscapers are thinking of the journey a prospective customer is taking to go from an early-stage lead to a signed client. That leaves them questioning whether their marketing is actually working and where they are losing possible clients along the way.
When you spend time getting leads through social media marketing or by putting other marketing strategies into practice such as a website, blog, or email campaign, you need to follow up with a funnel approach to measure success. How does someone go from a lead through your website such as downloading a how-to checklist for spring cleaning to signing a contract?
Most often, the answer is landscapers just don’t know. If the prospective customer isn’t calling them and asking for service right away, they aren’t being nurtured.
Let’s look through a sales funnel and see what is happening at each stage, and why it’s important to your landscaping business.
Inquiries From Prospective Clients – Are They Real?
Every person who comes to your website, fills out a form, or calls your office is not necessarily a lead. They may simply just be inquiring about information or services not looking to purchase. They may also simply not be solid leads.
In the early stages, it’s important to screen leads as best you can. It will then rule out unqualified leads that may slip through the sales funnel and take up much of your time when they have no interest or intent to purchase service from you. For example, people may find your content appealing from other regions you aren’t located in. They would automatically be disqualified as a lead and you wouldn’t want them pushed forward in risk of throwing off your metrics.
At the inquiry stage, it’s a perfect time to see how your marketing efforts are working. Are you actually hitting the target markets you set out or the target services you tried to offer? For example, if your aim is for high-end clients, but you keep getting calls from people who can’t afford your service or think the price is too high, you may be targeting the wrong audience.
At this stage, what you are trying to do is weed out the bad leads and move forward with the rest. It is at this stage where you start to realize how many inquiries you need per week in order to meet your leads, and eventually sales targets.
The Actual Lead – Nurture Grounds for Potential Customers
The group that has moved into your actual leads column are potential customers who have true intent to buy your service and have shown signs of interest in your company. Many landscapers will rush to pick up the phone and call these leads right away to try and make a sale. But, it’s important to understand where they came from, and what their interest actually is.
For example, someone who filled out a form on your website to download a checklist might not be ready to buy yet. These types of prospects would be best suited for an email campaign that sends more content to them over time. Eventually, you would ask them to book a call with you to talk about services.
A lead you met at a trade show, however, would be more qualified to call right away if they expressed interest in your services or a quote. The important thing to take away is that not all leads are the same. Some are at different stages of buying and need to be worked longer. The idea of just picking up the phone and calling as soon as you get a phone number may not work well, and that is something to track.
In DynaScape’s Manage360’s Landscape Sales and Estimating Tool, you can track your leads to see where they are in your sales funnel. You can determine if they have already been contacted or was sent a follow-up email with more information. Tracking leads will allow you to see where drop-offs in your sales pipeline are happening and if there is a particular spot in that pipeline that is not working as well as others. If you aren’t tracking the journey of the lead, it’s possible to miss one in your funnel, or a glaring fault in your sales process.
Proposal of Services – Leaning on Your Sales Funnel
By the time your prospective customer reaches the proposal stage, one of two things happen: they become a customer or they don’t. The journey to becoming a customer doesn’t happen in one conversation, which is why it’s important to track your sales funnels and calls from the beginning.
By this point if you have set up a sales funnel, you know the interest your prospective customer has shown and you have moved them through the inquiry and lead stage to the point of asking them to buy your service. This is where a strong sales funnel pays off. If you have a strong inquiry and lead stage, you are more likely to get good responses at the proposal stage.
For example, if they downloaded content from your website and continue to receive emails from you as part of an email campaign before they call your office, you know they have a higher intent to buy.
That’s why tracking the entire sales funnel is so important. Salespeople can go into DynaScape’s Manage360 Landscape Business Software and see the communication between your business and the prospective customer. Each touchpoint is a chance to make a sale. If you have sent multiple emails and they called but didn’t buy, perhaps there is a hole in your sales process or a salesperson needs more training. You won’t know if you don’t track.
Managing Your Sales Funnel and Pipeline
Once the prospect becomes a customer, their journey is over. But, along the way there are many touchpoints and areas they can drop off. Your sales funnel and pipeline are important parts of your business and the best landscaping businesses are monitoring their funnel from top to bottom.
In that sales funnel could be thousands of dollars in revenue and the landscaping business that tracks it the best can scale quickly to million-dollar landscaping companies. In Manage360, you can track your close rate down to the salesperson, so you know exactly:
- How many inquiries you need
- How many of those inquiries turn into leads
- How many leads turn into proposals
- How many proposals turn into signed contracts
If you know you close 20% of your leads, that tells you how much effort you need to put into marketing and sales training in order to increase your business by any significant amount.
Set up the entire sales process in Manage360 and track your leads through the entire sales funnel. Find out exactly where leads are dropping off and where you need to do better in your efforts. You might find that you don’t even need to increase your close rate, but rather find you have improved the quality of your leads in general.
To see how DynaScape’s Manage360 can help with your sales funnel, book a demo today.