In the age of instant gratification, the longer it takes you to get a bid out to a client, the more likely it is they’ve already gone with someone who was faster.
The problem is whether you’re a lawn care or a landscape company, the estimating portion of sales can be a time-consuming process where an employee must go out and measure a property in person or has to quantify, count and measure every detail on a job.
This is where various types of technology can come in to assist, allowing you to maximize your team members’ time and improve your overall close rates.
Speed Up Lawn Care Quotes and Customer Sign-Ups
For lawn care companies, speed is everything, especially in the spring. For many companies, their salespeople can only get to eight to 15 properties a day during the peak months.
“We would give a quote to a homeowner three days after they request an estimate, and they would call us up and say, ‘Hey, we already signed up with TruGreen. They gave us a quote within a couple hours, and we just really wanted to get started, so we decided to go with them,’” says Joel Northrup, founder and CEO of Deep Lawn.
With Deep Lawn’s technology, a customer can visit a lawn care website, search their address, and it will automatically generate a real-time estimate and measurement of their property. Office staff answering the phone can also use Deep Lawn to enter a lead’s address while on the call and provide the pricing to them in a text or an email so they can sign up right away.
“What typically was either a couple day process or maybe 30 minutes to prepare that quote online in your system is now a 30-second deal,” Northrup says. “So that also can dramatically reduce the friction and the time it takes to get quotes in the hands of customers and help you actually answer more calls and get more quotes out.”
Northrup says implementing Deep Lawn lets one salesperson do the same amount of work it would have taken 10-15 salespeople 15 years ago. He estimates it saves 20 to 30 minutes estimating each property.
“Technology is definitely a tool in the toolbox, but it does not replace human relationships and actually speaking to someone,” Northrup says. “We never tell people, ‘Oh, get rid of all your salespeople and just rely on the technology.’ It should be a tool in the toolbox of your salespeople, and they should use that time that they’re saving from measuring the property or figuring out pricing, to explain how you guys are different and how your company stands out.”
Northrup notes that homeowners particularly enjoy being able to access pricing on their own time.
“Using Deep Lawn, your leads will go up dramatically because we reduce the friction to get a price, and homeowners love that,” Northrup says. “A lot of homeowners, if they go to a website today and they don’t have pricing, they will just leave the website, and they’ll find another company. They’ll go to a company that does give pricing. So your leads will go up, and then we find the close rates do go up, especially when in combination with your sales teams reaching out to people. So your close rates will go up as well as leads.”
Reduce the Time Spent on Landscape Takeoffs
On the landscaping side of the business, quantifying the materials and measurements for a proposal can be a necessary but mind-numbing time sink for one of your salaried employees. Tommy Lather, founder of Takeoff Monkey, says they offer a turnkey solution with takeoffs.
“You send us the drawings,” Lather says. “Tell us what scopes of work you need, any special instructions, and we completely take care of that whole thing end to end for you. You end up with a comprehensive materials list. We’ll point out little discrepancies we find in the notes, details, specs, but we basically hand you the job from an estimating perspective on a silver platter for you to put numbers to.”
Takeoff Monkey is able to get takeoff plans back to a contractor in about two business days.
“Obviously, if you’re in-house, you could sit down and spend a day or several hours doing it yourself,” Lather says. “But using us, when you have a backlog of 10, 20, 30 jobs, we can get you pretty well ahead and leave you plenty of time for those little bids that might pop up and need your attention right away.”
Lather says with Takeoff Monkey, a landscape company can turn a one or two person estimating shop into a bid machine that cranks out a volume of bids that you would expect from an eight to 12-person office.
“I’ve always said that the takeoff accounts for 50% to 80% of the amount of time that you would spend putting a bid together,” Lather says. “That obviously varies from job to job and scope to scope. But on average, at a minimum, I would say we can double your output and make your estimator’s time twice as productive.”
Lather adds that their customers are seeing an increased overall close rate and clients appreciate seeing the takeoff as a visual scope card.
“What we’re hearing from our clients is that their clients love having it in a neat, tidy format, and they especially love being able to turn around changes really quickly, split out bids, add scope, remove scope, isolate specific things,” Lather says. “That’s been a huge help in helping our clients win more work.”
Improve Estimating Accuracy Without Slowing Down
While speed is important, it’s equally crucial to ensure your estimate is accurate so it can protect your margins. Some companies may lean on their estimator’s experience to help, but not all have that luxury.
“If you have a new estimator who has only been in your company for a couple of months, I guarantee you that their estimates are not as accurate as you would want them to be,” says Eli Zevin, general manager of Aspire. “And without a technology or a tool to show them what historicals have looked like in similar situations, it’s going to be really hard for them to estimate accurately.”
Zevin says that Aspire’s PropertyIntel product is excellent for helping a salesperson gather the details that they need to create the proposal in terms of what the measurements and takeoffs are right away. Meanwhile, their newly introduced smart estimating provides estimators with live feedback on how that type of estimate performed in past iterations.
“Maybe last time this estimator put this together, they underbid the hours, or they overpriced some of the materials, or underpriced some of the materials,” Zevin says. “So smart estimating gives you that data in real time as you’re building the estimate.”
Zevin anticipates that with their smart estimating tool, contractors’ more experienced estimators will have to spend less of their time looking over the shoulder of rookie estimators.
“I hear anecdotally from customers regularly about really helping to improve that close rate, especially for their newer employees with some of this functionality, who really can leverage the technology to provide more accurate and quicker estimates and proposals that certainly helps with close rates,” Zevin says.
Zevin adds that any time you’re looking to increase the speed of your sales process, you should interview everyone who is involved and understand what they’re doing at every step.
“The best way to speed something up is to simplify it, and to have an expectation that everything should happen as quickly as possible,” Zevin says. “Meaning, don’t wait a day for the handoff from one team to the next or for any step. The bar for every step of the process should be seconds or minutes, not hours or days.”
