Your account managers are incredibly valuable. They have the ability to boost sales and profitability with clients as well as increase their loyalty by selling enhancements.
“It’s all about relationships in our business,” says Ken Thomas, principal with Envisor Consulting. “Your account management team is the face of your company, so it’s important for them to grow their relationship skills and continue to learn about the techniques of selling enhancements”
Thomas, along with Ben Gandy, another principal with Envirsor Consulting, will cover present best practices on selling enhancements while building lasting client relationships during their session “Maximizing Revenue and Loyalty: Mastering Landscape Enhancement Upselling Strategies ” on Tuesday, Nov. 5, at 9 a.m. at ELEVATE.
Attendees will learn how enhancements impact a company’s success, as well as how a property manager makes buying decisions.
“We’re going to talk about how to identify unique enhancement opportunities,” Thomas says. “We’re going to talk about how to qualify and present enhancements to our clients and how to work effectively with a production team once we actually sell our enhancements.”
Thomas says the session will also provide attendees with a chance to interact with other peers who are trying to learn and grow in the same way they are.
“Enhancements are important because they increase profitability in the company and they protect and grow relationships with your clients,” Thomas says. “They build client loyalty.”
Types of Enhancements to Sell
Thomas says account managers should look at enhancements in three buckets. The first bucket is safety and security, and this type of enhancement helps protect the customer and their guests or tenants. This could be tree work, removing trip hazards or things that block sight lines.
“It’s important for us to use our expertise to help protect our clients,” Thomas says.
The next bucket is functional enhancements. These should be addressed as they don’t get any cheaper to fix over time. They may even be causing additional damage or creating additional expenses in terms of watering inefficiency or drainage areas may be undercutting the building.
“Those are enhancements that really deal with issues that have grown over time like drainage issues, irrigation issues, tree problems that may need to be addressed,” Thomas says.
The third bucket is aesthetics enhancements that the improve curb appeal of the property.
“Landscapes are dynamic,” Thomas says. “When they’re first installed, they’re at their peak optimal condition, and as the landscapes grow and age, they begin to decline. Help your clients understand that there has to be a certain amount of updating and investment in your landscape on a day-to-day, year-to-year basis, or that declining landscape is going to begin to impact the value of the property.”
Thomas says account managers should first address the issues that are causing the most problems and are taking away from the client’s personal goals.
He adds that when you understand a client’s overall vision for their property, you can help them make the best decisions for the landscape today and in the future. Account managers can also help sell it up the ladder and get it in the budget for later years.
One of the topics Thomas will cover in the session is the buying and budgeting cycles of property management groups.
“Depending on when we’re getting involved with this client, they may or may not have any funds set aside for improvements on their properties,” Thomas says.
While clients can find the money to take on safety enhancements, you need to get in front of your clients prior to their budgeting cycle to present future enhancement opportunities so they have time to send those ideas up the ladder to the decision-makers.
He says account managers should also emphasize their expertise to the client.
“We know that landscaping is an expensive piece of your operating budget,” Thomas says. “We’re going to be really respectful of that, but at the same time, we want to be proactive in presenting solutions to problems that we think will only get worse or that may cause problems in the future.”
The Art of Selling Enhancements
Thomas says there are three levels to the client relationship. When taking on a new account, you are at the vendor level. The second level is the win-win level. You can get to the win-win level by learning your client. Understand what their needs are and make suggestions that can help them improve their property and spend their landscape dollars the most effectively.
“It’s not really a matter of us nickel and diming a client,” Thomas says. “It’s really being a partner who’s helping our clients to make better decisions that hopefully will save them money down the road.”
He says level three is when you have become the client’s trusted advisor.
Thomas says as account managers build their relationships with clients, they need to understand and ask the right questions.
“Our goal is to present you with reasonable landscape solutions to problems that you have on your property; whether you see them or not, we do see them, so it’s our job to proactively present solutions to safety problems, functional problems or aesthetic problems,” Thomas says.
He says that if a client keeps saying no to functional and aesthetic suggestions, it’s okay to stop offering these, but you should always offer safety and security enhancements because they leave your client and your business exposed and unprotected.
“There is a fine line and a balance between understanding who’s going to invest in the future and who’s not, and then what’s our responsibility to present safety issues and security issues to our clients,” Thomas says.
Thomas says an enhancement credit is one incentive that account managers can use with their clients. For instance, if a client hires you for a year, you can provide them with a $5,000 enhancement credit to fix certain problems on the property. This helps build a level of trust.
“The way we look at winning a new account, if we can keep an account 10 years, that’s a 100% retention,” Thomas says. “We can keep it nine years; that’s a 90% retention. If we sell a $50,000 a year account and keep it 10 years, that’s over half a million dollars of annuity coming into the company. If we got to give a little bit in year one to entice that customer in, then we all win in the long run.”
Thomas says that enhancement work can either be a pro or a con when it comes to building a client relationship. The idea is that it should serve as the icing on the cake by being a one-stop shop for the customer by proactively providing solutions.
The cons are if it takes longer to get the job done than expected, there’s poor communication with the customer or a mistake is made during the enhancement, these can jeopardize the relationship with the client.
One of the ways to mitigate these issues is to have a dedicated enhancements crew.
“We typically find that somewhere around the $500,000 a year mark, you can actually dedicate at least two full-time people to go out and produce work outside of maintenance every week,” Thomas says. “It’s really a matter of volume before companies can afford to dedicate a crew to enhancements.”
Ready to equip your account managers with the skills to upsell? Register for ELEVATE and we’ll see you in Charlotte, North Carolina!
