How to Stand Out From The Competition - PART 1 (Lawn Care and Landscape Business)

Hey everyone, it's Mike over@landscapebusinesscourse.com and I got some emails from the listeners of the podcast and the YouTube channel as far as what they want to learn about. And one of the big things is how to differentiate ourselves from our competition. And so when I look at that, I think of it as three different areas. Before the sale, during the sale and after the sale, and how you can differentiate your business from all your competition during at those three junctions of a customer's experience with your company. So I'm going to go over the first one with you right now. As far as how do you differentiate yourself before the sale? A lot of times this means getting new leads, getting people to pick up the phone and call you and ask you for an estimate, ask you to come do work for them. So if you do have a question though, by all means in the comments below, ask me that question and I'll see if I can make a video about that. So please don't hesitate to leave me a comment. As far as what you would like to know about landscaping, lawn care and running your business. So I'm going to talk about three different areas that you can improve on to differentiate yourself before the sale. So getting new leads and getting people into your marketing funnel and to pick up the phone and contact you. So the three different areas from a high level view are your website, your uniforms, in your truck, your truck's in your uniforms, your branding, and then the third one is your team, your team members and their level of professionalism out in the community. And we'll talk more about that. Number one is your website. So a few things, how you can differentiate yourself from your competition is your website should be fast. A lot of times people overlook the speed of their website a lot. The reason for that is because they want it to look nice. They want to have lots of video and pictures and things like that. And as you'll.

Recommend that you do, use more video content, more pictures than a bunch of text, make it interesting, make it look nice, make a good design. But I go a lot more over the I lean a little bit more towards the function of a website over just the form. So the design is important. Yes, you want it to look nice and you want it to look professional. Yes, you want it to have lots of color and be vibrant and stand out. On the other hand, Google is not necessarily scanning your design. They're looking for traffic, they're looking for SEO, they're looking for links, looking for a big one that people overlook is speed. So I highly recommend you make sure your website is fast and that there's not a bunch of things clogging it up. One way you can test that is just go to Google and put in test my site Google and there's a website. You can paste your URL for your website in there and it'll test your website. It takes like maybe two minutes. It runs a scan on your website and they'll tell you the things that are slowing it down, how long it takes for an average page to load and it'll give you step by step things of what you should do. Things like you can optimize your pictures for the web so they're not big, massive files that take a long time to slow down the web page. There's things like certain types of CS and code that you can change. There's JavaScript, certain things that will slow down the page and make it a lot more cumbersome to load for Google. And the thing about not only is it good for customer experience and differentiating yourself from the customer, the speed part, but, but Google looks very highly, very favorably at speed. So when it comes to your website, making sure that's fast to load is important. Mobile making sure it's mobile friendly. So obviously it's easy to make a website a lot of times for desktop, but more and more web traffic is coming from mobile. So make sure it looks good on a phone and it's not just a big because if you take a desktop computer, the size in which that screen is and then you try to shrink that down to an iPhone or an Android device smartphone, and when they see it, they have to zoom in and pinch in order to see closer to your web page. If it's not mobile friendly and optimized where it's a different design and it's not optimized for that smaller screen, a lot of times people will click off of it or it'll take a long, long time to load on that mobile device because it's trying to get so much data and into that small screen. So make sure you're mobile friendly. As we progress, more and more things are going to go towards mobile and you want to make sure that you are able to reach those customers and the site is functional, looks good and is fast for mobile. So another thing you want to do on your website is make sure you have a contact form and clear calls to action. So contact form should be clear and concise. I wouldn't suggest having 20,000 things they have to fill in to submit that contact form. You don't need to know a billion things about. You don't need to know about types of services and days they prefer and size of lawn, what their budget is or what type of services they want to have. Like do you want longer? All we do is we have a name, email and a comment section. And in the comment section they need to put their address. The comments allow them to say if there's certain things they want. For instance, just mowing or is it landscaping. But they can make it as long or short as they want without having. And they can submit it without having to submit a whole bunch of other contact information, a whole bunch of address stuff and zip code and state, and it goes on and on. And so people, what you want to do is get that, make it easy for people to submit that contact form and make it, if they're in a rush, that you can, they can quickly submit it. So name, if you need a name, email, possibly a phone number, we don't require it. You can make a separate tab, separate field on your contact form, but not require it. So they can still submit without putting that phone number in. Because as long as you have the email, since they're submitting it via online, they're probably going to be the type of person that wants that interaction to be via email anyways. So I would suggest minimizing as many fields as you can on that contact form by having that contact form on the front page above the fold. So when someone goes there on desktop or mobile, they're going to see it above without having to scroll down. That contact form can be there and if it's small enough, it looks just fine as far as design is concerned. Again, you can always check out our website for some ideas on what I'm talking about. Augustalongerservices.com but on that contact form you want to be able to make it easy to get estimates. Right. Another way you can do is have web chat. So we have it and there's plenty of plugins where in the bottom right of your screen at the top, wherever you can actually have your office log in and it'll show when you're online and people can do live chat with your people when they're online. And so that's pretty cool. Just making it easier, more interaction. You just want many options for the customer at your website to get in contact with you, whether it be phone, texting, social media, web chat, contact form, just make it as easy as possible. Whichever medium is best for them, allow them to use it. So another thing on Your website to differentiate yourself from the competition is have reviews and have videos. So I said be more picture and video centric, but you want the videos and the reviews to really complement what you're all about. So instead of having a long list of services like every other landscaping company, try to have videos about each one where someone can click through those and see more information and make it a little more visual. So that's your website. That's the number one way that you can differentiate yourself before the sale. Because people, the modern day business card is your website. And before, even if people hear about you from, they're referred to you from a family or a friend, they are still going to go and vet you and search your website and see if there's reviews and try to get some sort of validation before they pick up the phone or contact you for an estimate. So you want to make sure it's professional and make sure it includes all of those elements. Number two thing that you can do to differentiate yourself from the competition and stand out before the sale and get more leads is your trucks and your uniforms and how that works in your branding. So if you listen to the podcast, you hear me talk a lot about sales versus branding. When it comes to your uniforms for your guys, you want them to be clean, obviously, and you want them to stand out and you want them to be uniform. You don't want some of your guys to have some types of sweaters and some have big jackets and some have different colored jeans and different color car hearts and it's all kind of all scattered. You want it to be very uniform where when people see your guys, they know instantly with just seeing the color combination, they can already tell it's you and it's your team out there working. So number one, should be clean and professional in like uniform, but it should also stand out somewhat. So I wouldn't recommend just going with a generic gray, like gray shirt with a little tiny logo and jeans. It just, so it just blends in too much. I'd look for a color that's gonna compliment something like us. So in our market, no one else has yellow shirts like this. So that's why we went with it. On the front it has the Augusta, it has their name, and on the back we have our logo, our logo and our tagline, your personal greenskeeper. But just from seeing this yellow shirt and our brown Carhartt pants from afar, people know it's us. So we stand out. So I look for something, some way for you to stand out, even if it's a hat. I've seen companies that have cowboy hats, and that's part of their theme, their branding. And so people know when they see someone with a cowboy hat, it's from that business. So your uniform should be clean, professional and uniform, but also stand out from your competition. So another way, your trucks, your branding, from a graphic standpoint, you can have your. Like, I really look at trucks and your trailers and your team members as mobile billboards. If your guys are walking out on jobs and they're out in the neighborhoods and people are driving by, they are a billboard. If your truck is parked out there and your trailer is parked out there, they're billboards. Look at them as advertising and ways to differentiate yourself from your competition. So the graphics on your truck, your trailer, if you have an enclosed trailer, like I suggest for mowing, you can have a massive billboard. You can put a lot of information on there and make it and really differentiate yourself. And every time someone drives by a job, it's no question who is taking care of that landscaping. And if you're doing great work, there's no shame in showing to everyone around that you are the person responsible for creating that landscape, for maintaining that landscape. So if you're proud of your work and you have great quality, you should have no problem putting your. Your company name in big, bold letters all over your truck, your trailer, and really making it stand out. We have our logos from all four angles of the truck and trailer. So from the back of the trailer on our enclosed trailers, you see our big logo on the sides of the enclosed trailer where it's 14ft wide, 7ft tall. That's the really big one. On the sides of the truck, we have our phone number, email address, and our logo. And then we also just recently added, we're in the front of the truck and the back window of the cab of the truck. We have our logo as well. So we're really trying to get all angles. If you're going to pay for a truck to go down the street, you might as well spend a few dollars to put massive advertising on that truck and trailer. And you'll be amazed when you do that, how often people will say, oh, I see your trucks all over the place. And you might have less trucks than your competition. This has happened to us. We have less trucks than our competition, but people will see us so much and recognize our truck so fast because they see the branding so evident on the trucks, yet they'll miss our competition because they have a big white truck with a little logo on Just the sides and so you don't see them from the front, the back. The trailers aren't big enough. So, like, just make sure you have graphics on your truck and it stands out.

Last thing. The third thing that you can do to stand out from the competition, stand out in your marketplace before the sale, is your team members. A lot of times people would think about this as more as something during the sale or. Or while you're on the job. But I really look at it as a way to get people into your marketing funnel and create leads by having a team that is trained correctly. So there's three different areas of training that I think you need to train your team on. And so your employees, your staff. The three different areas. The three different areas are train them in what they're actually doing. If they're landscapers and out in the field, make sure they're trained in tree trimming and. And landscape design, things like that. If they're in the office, make sure they're trained on how to use the systems and the phone and the website. I can make a whole other video on that and we will in the future about how to train your office manager and then your landscaping crews. But that's number one, train them what they actually physically got to do in their job. Number two is train them to sell. Number three is train them to communicate with the client. So number one, train them what to do. And like I said, I'm going to make more videos on this in the future, but make sure they're competent in what they're doing. You can't expect your team members, whether it be in the office or out in the field, to be confident with the customer or even with each other or potential clients that are walking by their neighbors and things like that. You can't expect them to be confident if you haven't trained them on what they're doing. So make sure that you do train them on exactly what they're doing. And then number two is train them to sell, train themselves. So even our guys that are mowing out in the field, they're trained to sell as far as if someone's interested in. They're the front line of our force, of our business. They're the front line, the people that are out in the community and have the most contact. So when people want to do business with us, a lot of times they'll come right up to the guys and just ask for an estimate. And the guys obviously are deferring that to the office. However you want to train them to sell you want to make sure they give a business card collection customer information and send that to the office. So for us, if one of our crew members is mowing a lawn and someone comes by, is walking down the street and asks them for an estimate, obviously they're not an estimate or they can't go do that right away. But what they can do is, well, they will refer it to the office, but then they'll also get their contact information and send that to the office. The office can actively instantly get back with that person, that new lead, and they're also going to give them a business card. So train your people how to sell, even if they're out in the field. Make sure everyone in your organization knows how to sell and what the system is for getting someone from not being a client to a potential client and closing the sale. What's the process look like? What did they need to do? Whether in the office, out in the field, if they are an estimator, if they're a crew manager, how does it all play into getting more sales and be very focused about that? Training your people. Number three is training your people to communicate. You got to train people how to communicate. A lot of times most businesses and most enterprises don't train their people on how to communicate with customers, communicate with each other and communicate effectively as a team internally and then externally to the market outside. So if you can do that, if you can train your people how to communicate, be professional and do all of that, you really differentiate yourself from everyone else. Because like I said, if someone comes up to one of our mowing crew, they're going to instantly realize that we've trained them on, on communication and how to sell and be professional. Whereas if they do that with other door competition, they're probably not going to find that. So those are the three different ways. Your website, your logos on your uniforms and your trucks. And then number three is your team members invest in those three things. Perfect. Those three things. And I promise you, if you do those tips, that you are going to differentiate yourself from 90% of the landscaping companies out there. So be great, make sure that you implement all of those things that are those three tips and I promise you good success on the other side. Thanks so much. Again, this is Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com.