Do you know your ideal client?

 
At The Grow Group, we teach that a company's ideal client is:

• Enjoyable to work with: Your team enjoys doing this type of work, and the client respects and values that work.
• Sustainable: There is enough of these types of clients for us to build a business around.
• Profitable: We can make money while doing this work.

I’ll give you an example from the landscaping side: I’d love to be able to say that we only do $500,000+ design-build projects. Those projects are enjoyable, and they’re usually profitable; but they’re not sustainable for us. We can’t build a business on just doing those projects in our market — there aren’t enough of them. We also have to do landscape maintenance, snow removal, and smaller design-build projects to have a viable, sustainable business.

Making a list of who fits and who doesn’t fit your ideal client profile can be a helpful exercise in better defining your ideal client moving forward. And then once you have this defined, use the profile you’ve created to set your sales direction and tactics. Dig deeper into the characteristics of your ideal clients:

Property type

Are the properties you want to service residential or commercial? Are they single family homes, HOAs, business parks, grocery stores, healthcare facilities, warehouses?

Make a list of the types of properties you’d ideally like to service based on your team’s capabilities and what you enjoy doing. We like to look at the properties we’ve historically been most successful in taking care of at Grunder Landscaping Co. (GLC), and then look for other properties like those.

Property location

We all know how important route density is to being profitable in snow, and how much easier routes are to manage when the properties are close together. Where are the properties you currently service? Are there neighboring properties that are similar that you could warm call to earn their business this winter, too?

Expand your horizons

I realize this isn’t rocket science, but it is so important for a company’s success. Hopefully this is something you’re already doing as you’re forming and executing your sales strategy for 2024 and 2025. Because once you know exactly what you’re looking for, then it’s just up to you and your sales team to execute the plan. A few tactics we’re relying on at GLC right now to do just that are:

• Joining and being active members in area chambers of commerce.
• Attending business events and introducing ourselves to new people.
• Identifying properties we’d like to take care of, and then doing some digging on LinkedIn to see if someone we already know could introduce us to the decision maker.
• Revisiting landscape maintenance contracts we have that don’t already include snow removal to see if we could get their snow removal business.

There may be other prospects that come to us organically that may not fit within our ideal client triangle, and that’s OK. We can decide based on the specifications of each job if we want to accept the work or refer them to someone else. Having your ideal client defined gives you a roadmap to use when making these decisions and helps your sales team get on the same page so you can be successful.

Marty Grunder is founder of Grunder Landscaping Co. and The Grow Group coaching firm.