This One Question Will Dramatically Increase Your Close Rate and Sales Volume When Selling To Commercial Lawn Care Customers
If you are not asking this one question when you’re trying to sell new commercial lawn care customers, you are leaving a huge amount of money on the table, and you’re making a massive mistake.
The question is basically this. When you go to a property and you try to sell that property, or when you are invited to bid on a property and you don’t win, there’s a piece of data that you need to document in both cases. That is, “When does this property come up for bid?”
That’s critical.
Then you need a contact management system, or a CRM system, or a spreadsheet, or a tickler file, or something, that reminds you of every property that’s coming up for bid and when, because you need to then go back.
There’s a million reasons why you won’t win work in the commercial space. There’s a million reasons. You can’t possibly know what they are. Meaning, you could bid a property, but all they were looking to do is double-check the price that their vendor is currently charging them. Or, you bid a property you didn’t win, and you don’t have the faintest idea why, because everything was perfect. Little did you know that the guy has his brother-in-law doing it. Or, he really wanted his brother-in-law to do it, but he had to get three bids.
There’s a bazillion scenarios here. In those two examples, a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, the brother-in-law might be out of the picture, or the purchasing manager, or the district manager, or the property manager that denied you that property might be gone, and there’s a new one. You need to know, for every property that you lose, when does it come up to bid, when does the contract expire.
Then for every property that you try to get, and you say, “Hey, I’d love to have an opportunity to bid on your property,” and they say, “Yeah, no, no thank you, I’m not interested,” or, “We don’t need you right now,” whatever the story is, “When will it be that you will be putting this property back up to bid?”
That’s an easy question, because it’s easy for them to put you off and get rid of you. You want to bid on the property, and they say, “You know what, we just don’t need you right now. No thank you, I’m not interested,” you ask the question, “Well, when do you think the property will be going back up to bid?” They say, “You know what, it was I think last April when we last signed up our new vendor.” It gives them a chance to get rid of you and put this off in their life, where they don’t have to deal with you. It’s an easy answer for them. There’s not one that most people are not willing to give you.
You want to then get that date documented and follow up on that date, or I’d recommend well before of that date. Well before that date, start following up. On a side note, when you document this, you want to document their email address, their contact information, their mailing address, and the name of this person and this person’s title. If that person leaves, you need to know the title that they had, so that you can find the person that replaced them.
In summary, the question is, “When will this property come back on the market to bid?”, or, “When will you be taking bids again?”, or, “When do you think this property might be put out to bid?” That’s the question you have to document every single time. Then you’re wasting your time documenting it if you don’t bother to follow up. You’ve got to follow up. You’ve got to follow up over, and over, and over again.
