The following are actual emails between me and a prospective customer over the last week. All personally identifiable information has been removed.

We live in city name and are planning on having built in our back yard a patio with built-in grill and fire pit.

Could you consult for us over here and do an estimate?

Thanks,

*name*

The city where they live is about an hour or more from our office, which for our market is quite a ways away. My reply:

Thanks for your note and your interest. I want to make sure I understand your request - are you looking for a design and estimate to construct the project, or for us to consult on the construction of the project?

Assuming it’s the former, we’d be happy to. Ordinarily, for more local projects we’ll sometimes do a design on spec, but because of the distance (and subsequent time) involved, we’d need to request a design fee. For something of this nature, we’d charge $500 for the design - and should you hire us to build that design, that $500 would be credited toward the installation.

If that sounds reasonable to you, either reply to this email and include your phone number and address, or give me a call at phone number.

I look forward to hearing from you.

To which he replied:

Thanks for the quick reply.

We can understand and do agree with your need to be reimbursed for your time, travel, and knowledge. However, $500 seems like a lot to us for your services. We have no reason to believe that you would not produce a good design and do excellent work. However, we all have different tastes and what if our tastes didn’t match your design?

We’d might risk $250 for your help initially. Could you do it for that?

I went on to explain in more detail than I should have about why the cost was what it was, that a project of this type is likely going to start at $10,000 and go north from there, and that no, I couldn’t do the consult/design for that much. Haven’t heard from him since.

If that client was suffering sticker shock over a $500 design fee that he’d get credit on if he hired us, he certainly wasn’t going to be ready to drop $10,000 or more on the actual project - which is why I gave that ballpark price in the first place. All told it probably saved me 10+ hours in driving, meetings and table time.

Times are tight right now, without a doubt. But it still doesn’t mean chasing down every single lead is a good idea. Some fish are just too scrawny to try to catch.

Check the forums for some discussions about prequalifying clients and pricing landscape design work.

Running a landscaping business today can be a high-wire act.  With the economy looking grim, the Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warning of an economic “contraction” over the next several months and new housing starts in the toilet compared to last year (which wasn’t a great year, either), we have a tough road ahead of us this season.

And with the coming of age of customer review sites like Insider Pages, Judy’s Book, Angie’s List and even Yahoo, you have to treat even the dead wood leads with kid gloves for fear they might write a bad review about your company and cost you valuable business.  Every little edge you can give yourself over your competition counts.

Here’s something I tried last year that worked really well, and killed two customer service birds with one stone.  I don’t know what size and type of business you own, but for my business, I don’t have clerical staff to answer the phones and schedule appointments when I’m not in the office.  And during the season, I can’t answer some of my calls.  Who am I kidding?  I don’t answer a lot of my calls.  I rely on voicemail to serve as my first or sometimes second point of contact with prospective clients.  I try to make my message as clear and cheerful as I can, but more importantly, I promise a call back within 24 hours.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?  It isn’t always.  Like that day when the skidsteer breaks down on a job site, one of your employees calls in sick forcing you to do more grunt work than you’d planned that day, and then a supplier isn’t ready with the materials they said they’d have ready, forcing you to source them somewhere else.  Today.  Because the project is half done and waiting for this one piece before it can move forward.

What if on that day, a big client called at 7:30am and heard your 24 hour turnaround promise.  You didn’t hear his message until 10pm that night.  If you happen to get engaged with something the next morning and forget, you’ve already lost some credibility with that client, and your odds of closing the sale have probably dropped by 10%.

Last season I found myself unusually on-edge about client calls because of that promise, but because of it I turned around most phone calls within a few hours of receiving them.  Even the ones we received on Saturdays and Sundays.  By making that promise I was putting our reputation and financial success on the line, and I wasn’t about to throw that away before I even spoke with the client.  And an unintended side benefit was that it set an expectation for our prospective clients; if we met that expectation by returning their call timely, we’d already taken one small step in assuring that client that their business was safe with us.

This can work for larger companies, too.  Have all those people whose jobs include client contact to make a promise to their customers about when they’ll hear back from them, whether it be about a repair issue, new business, etc.

And then keep that promise.

If you live in the part of the United States or Canada where there’s snow, right around now the snow’s just about melted, and soon you’ll be breaking ground on your first projects of the 2008 season. Today I was cleaning my office, getting the desk down to bare wood, because I know in a few weeks my world will be thrown helter-skelter, and if I don’t start with a clean desk in April, by July I’ll need to rent a mini-excavator just to find the top of the desk again.

I was also outside cleaning my truck. My ‘93 Chevy Work Truck. We had a little sun today, and I swear that truck is like a dog in those rays, soaking up every last bit of light that shines it’s way. It was at least 10 degrees warmer inside the cab when I climbed in to give it a good wash. Inside, washing the dash and floor I felt like I was hanging out with an old friend, a friend you don’t even need to talk with you’ve known each other for so long. You just know what the other one’s thinking:

Getting ready for another season, eh Jeff?

Yup. Hafta get you cleaned up to make a good impression on our clients. You know what they say about first impressions.

That reminds me. You might want to have the driver side exhaust manifold checked. I think I’m getting a little noisy. Don’t want me belching my way up a client’s driveway.

True enough. You think you’ve got another season in you?

Sure. You?

Absolutely. Let’s go make some money.

Good luck this season. Go out and make some money.

Working in a part of the country where winters serve to define the ending of a landscaping season and the beginning of the next landscaping season, I think we have some advantages. For example, you have the time to take a fine-toothed comb to your financial data to see where you made and lost money and adjust your approach for the following year. The same is true for your marketing spends. And you have time to repair those pieces of equipment you MacGyvered together just to make it through the season.

However, one disadvantage I face each spring is that my sales skills are pretty rusty come spring. Having spent the last 3-4 months sequestered in an office, pounding on a keyboard, squinting at a monitor and having little interpersonal contact, I come off as a bit of a dork on my first 3-4 client meetings in spring. I used to just chalk it up to early season rust and forgave myself those poor performances. But with the economy the way it’s been the last few years in my area, I really can’t afford to just shrug my shoulders when I bomb on my first few sales calls.

So this year I’m trying something new. I’m contacting old or existing clients where there may have been some interest in some other work, either the next spring or some future year. It’s not for me to apply big pressure; it’s just to get in front of clients again so I can knock off the rust. The meetings will be of less consequence and they’ll be with clients that already like our work, so their opinions of us shouldn’t be swayed if I stumble over prices or explanations.

My hope is that by the time I’ve finished those meetings I’ll be close to mid-season form, ready to charm the socks off all the prospective clients that call.

I’ve finally gotten on board with Craig’s List.  It took me awhile and several tries, but thanks to some tutorial help from discussions here and here and a private message or two, I figured out how to navigate to my neck of the woods on the site and make a relevant post.  My feet are wet, and so far the water’s fine.

My first post in the freebie section resulted in quite a few responses from people looking for free fill.  With the cost of everything going up, who couldn’t use a few places where people want your excavation spoils?

One of the things I found, however, is that you have to be explicit in your freebie requirements.  In that regard, a freebie giveaway like fill dirt is the same as if you were looking for lawn seeding customers; you don’t want to spend time fielding inquiries from people well outside your market or unqualified people inside your market.  So learn from some of the mistakes I made.  When you post your offering (freebie or otherwise) be sure to:

• Define the geographic area.  List every municipality you’re willing to travel to.  Otherwise you’ll either be spending time deleting worthless leads (and pissing them off) or politely eating productive time responding to worthless leads.
• Define the parameters of your offering.  In my case, I was getting emails from people 40 miles away looking for 2-3 wheelbarrows of good, black dirt.  They don’t make that kind of dirt here, and even if they did, I’m not trucking a skidsteer bucket’s worth over 40 miles for anybody.
• Ask for contact info.  State up front that you need their name, address and phone number.  You’ll probably still get people who’ll respond by asking for your contact info instead of providing their own, but hopefully this will be minimized.

After the first 50 emails I got regarding free fill, I turned into the soup nazi for “free fill dirt” email.  No address or phone number?  No fill for you!  You’ll want to be much more forgiving if you’re looking for paying customers, but you get the idea.  Just like leads that come via your website, you want to move those electronic leads to telephone and face-to-face leads as quickly as possible.  If they aren’t ready to talk on the phone or meet in person, there’s no way they’re ready to invest their money.