[00:00:01] Welcome to the Grow Show Powered by Steel. On the Grow show, we share ideas, tips, tactics, and insights to help you grow your landscaping business. Based on our team's 40 years of experience running a landscaping company and working with other owners and their teams to do the same, new episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays. Standing in for our host, Marty Grunder, today is me, Emily Lindley.
[00:00:24] Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of the Grow Show, Powered by Steel. I'm Emily Lindley, the content and events manager at the Grow Group, and I also serve as marketing manager for Grutter Landscaping Company. Today I wanted to get on and share an episode about something that I think makes a great winter project for landscaping companies, and it's also something that can help you stand out from your competition. So in my role at the Grow Group, I handle messaging and programming for our events as well as marketing our events. You. You've seen a lot of my work out there. If you're seeing this podcast, if you get our great idea, I oversee kind of what topics we cover week to week. And this week I'm jumping on with a topic of my own based on my role at Grunder Landscaping Company as marketing manager. So in that role, I oversee our marketing efforts and a lot of communication that goes out to clients. I might draft something for the sales team to use. I set up anything that's going to be automated and then also work on drafting any mass communications that we do and oversee our social media website, et cetera. So that's a little bit about me in case we haven't had the pleasure of meeting at one of our events. But today I really wanted to talk about something that's very important for landscaping companies to think about and something that I'll be talking about more during a session at GROW 2025 in Columbus, Ohio, February 24 through 26. In a breakout session, there is communicating with your clients and your prospects in a way that helps you stand apart from the crowd. So we, we know at Grunder Landscaping that one of the key differentiators, one of the big reasons why people choose to do business with us over our competition is our communication. We have a high expectation we put on ourselves for what we're going to communicate with clients. And our clients also expect to be kept in the loop on what's going on with their project, to be aware of what's going on week to week with their maintenance, and to be kept up to date on anything that might impact their property. So they're really trusting us. But I think it's important to talk about how a lot of the times when you start out with a prospect, there may be coming in a little bit distrustful. Maybe they've had bad experiences with contractors in the past. Marty always says during his sales training that many, many people are looking for reasons that you show them that you are not who you say you are. Right. So they're coming in, they're already looking for where are the holes in the armor, where are the holes in their system, what are they saying they're doing? And they're going to fall flat. And is that proving that they're not doing quality work? Right. That's the assumption is if you're, if you miss this, how are you going to pay attention to something else? So what we really try to put a focus on at Grunder Landscaping is automating communication where we can, where it's simple to. If you want to learn more about how we automate that communication, I'll go over it at Grow in that breakout session. But there's also one of our weekly great ideas that went out in January that's going to also detail a little bit more of what we were able to automate and how we did it. So you can head over to our
[email protected] to read that. But automating what we can to take that burden off of the sales and production teams knowing that we can't automate everything. Some things are going to have to be one on one. It's going to be manual work for our sales team to reach out to the client because they are the ones who maintain that relationship. Or it's going to be onto the production team to communicate to the sales team who will then communicate to the client. So we, we know we can't automate everything, but let's automate what we can take some things off of our to do list where it's possible to.
[00:03:46] Number two, we're thinking through that client journey and where it's important for them to be getting that communication. So where are ways that we can maybe enhance the experience with things that are low effort, frankly, they're not a heavy lift. We look for the low hanging fruit first. Right. We're gonna start out with what's easy to implement, what's easy for our team to use, what's already part of our process that maybe we can just make a little bit better. And one of those things that we've actually been a very long time is our sales team introduction email. So that's what I wanted to Spend today's episode talking to you about maybe giving you an idea for a project you could set up. Again, this makes a great winter project. You can set all these up in between snow events, have them ready to go when spring starts, and when your team is busy setting up those initial sales visits. So what these are, they are an intro email. We create a template for them and I, I write the email in the template and then the sales team sets it up in outlook for, for it to go out. And then they can use that template when they set the initial visit, when they set that appointment on the calendars. So it'll then go out to the client. And what it is, is it really introduces the sales team. So we have a version of it that's for maintenance work. We have a version of it that's for design build. So there's two versions, and then we have alternating blocks in there for each salesperson. So each salesperson has a custom one that we've written for them, introducing them. And really our goal is to help our clients know who they're meeting, who's. Especially for our residential clients, they're going to want to know, like, kind of whose face to look for when they're showing up to their house. Obviously, they're going to be in uniform as well, but it gives everybody a sense of ease. If you already know who you're looking for, you know who the person showing up is, and the person who shows up is who you're expecting to see at your house. But this is also great for commercial clients because it shows, you know, we're organized and, and we want to set our sales team up to have a good relationship, to set them up to be the trusted expert as soon as they show up on a property. So this is one of the ways that we do that. So how it starts is just talking through kind of our program, what to expect with, thanking them for thinking of us for a quote, for whether it's landscape maintenance or design build, and then talking through the background of our sales team. So the salesperson will have a block here that talks about, you know, their education, their experience in the industry, if they have a specialty. Some of our salespeople do have specialties, some things that they focus on more than others or that they're really, really great at. We'll highlight that in here as well. We'll also talk about their history with the company. How long have they been with Grunder Landscaping? Where were they before? What does their horticulture knowledge look like? Anything that might be relevant and might help kind of build them up as an expert before they even get on site. And then we also talk a little bit about their personal life too. Right. We might include that they have two kids. Or in one of our salespeople's case, Kent. We have. I have his right in front of me right now. We say Kent cares for his menagerie of animals at home, which includes two dogs, chickens, ducks, and a Canadian goose named Oscar. So giving a little bit of personality, I think is always great here as well. And then we include a photo of the salesperson along with a photo of a property that they're responsible for. So there might be a maintenance property if they're a maintenance salesperson, or it could be a project that they've designed. If they're design, build, then we lean into kind of what we're promising as a company. Right. So what can you expect if you choose to work with us company wide? So these are kind of our bare minimum. This is what we're promising. When you do business with us, we have five bullet points. If you're implementing this yourself, they should be custom to you. What we talk about here is our production team and how talented and experienced and knowledgeable they are. Because that's really, really important to us. It's part of our unique value proposition. It's part of why people choose to do business with us. Also just the attitudes that we're expecting you, you to see in our team, whether it's our salespeople or our crews, we're expecting them to be friendly and courteous when they're on your property. Tidiness, efficiency, those are things that are, again, table stakes for us. That's bare minimum, what we're holding our teams to. And then also just knowing that again, our team is thoroughly vetted. And then also that we're going to be prepared. We're going to listen when you're talking, we're going to be prepared when we come to meet you. And we're going to make sure that we're sharing notes internally so that you're not dealing with having to communicate to us twice because the salesperson didn't talk to the production person. That's not something that we want to happen. We also end with we're here if you need us. You can call the office at any time. We share the contact information and the direct line for the salesperson that they're scheduled to meet with. And this whole email is set to be coming from Marty, who is founder and CEO of Grunder Landscaping Company and then also from Seth, so the President and COO of Grinder Landscaping Company. It's co signed by both of them so that it's really set up to be introducing the salesperson from the perspective of the leadership of the company to the potential client. So like I said, these are set up in outlook as a template. All salespeople have a specific template set up for them that they can send out when they're setting appointments. And it's something that it's just an easy extra step while they're setting it up that really can help give them credibility when they get on site, help set them up for a great first meeting and making sure that that they're able to to make progress on that first meeting whether they close the sale or not, that we're making a good first impression, which is so, so important, as you all know. I hope I've given you an idea of something you could work on this winter. If you have questions about it, we're always here to answer them. You can email
[email protected] and then again, if you want to learn more about what we're doing to automate our communications or refine our communications to our clients, I encourage you to sign up and join us at GROW 2025 in Columbus, Ohio. February 24th through 26th, we will be touring Hidden Creek Landscaping as part of that event. There's another company that's just fantastic at the way that they manage their communication, their design process and their interactions with their clients. Whether they're residential, commercial, design, build or maintenance, they've really got this down and I'm so excited for everybody to learn from them. So I hope to see you in Columbus this February and we'll talk to you next week.
[00:09:44] Thank you for listening to this episode of the Grow Show. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And head to growgroupinc.com for more information and resources to grow your landscaping business. A special thanks to the folks at Steele whose support makes this podcast possible and whose reliable handheld power equipment makes our jobs easier daily. We'll talk to you next week.
