On Friday, June 7, ambitious landscape professionals from all across the country gathered in Cincinnati for a one-day sales bootcamp led by Marty. Together we explored the importance of defining and religiously pursuing your ideal client, how to develop—and follow!—a sales process that delivers results for you and your sales team, ways to overcome prospect objections, and all the other challenges we face when it comes to sales in the green industry.
One issue that came up again and again was the gap that sometimes grows between a sales team, with its single-minded focus on getting work, and the production team, who then have to actually deliver on what the former promised. When the two teams don’t approach their work as a partnership, you have a recipe for disaster.
To avoid this, start by having regular conversations with each other. Attend each other’s meetings to understand the different demands you’re each working under. When problems arise, look for solutions together—discuss how much lead time production needs for jobs, ensure your proposals accurately budget enough hours for jobs, consider if there are jobs you can push out to a later date when scheduling conflicts arise, and above all have empathy for each other:
