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Getting Started: How To Break Into Your Market

Are you having a hard time getting started in your lawn care business and breaking into your local market?

Watch this video and learn how to get lawn care, landscape, tree care, irrigation (and any type of) business in the area you serve.

This is one of the more important questions that I’ve probably ever answered because, I believe it’s on a lot of people’s minds and, I believe it is a huge misconception.

The question is from Andrew. He wants to know how to break into a market that is controlled by industry veterans. They have been in the lawn care business for 5 or 10 years. He’s just getting started and the veterans have all the jobs and their customers aren’t willing to switch. Andrew goes on to say that from a money standpoint he has a small budget so, it makes it even more difficult to break into this market.

The way it is right now, and I think this is an important mindset, no matter what business you start, it is going to be in an industry that is insanely competitive. It is a rare business idea that there are not a lot of people already serving that market. In fact, if there’s not many people in that business or serving that market, it’s probably a red flag.

First and foremost, forget the idea that you’re going to find this thing that is not going to have a lot of competition. The alternative is that you invent something new, which tends to be in technology right now. In technology, yes, you could invent a new concept. The problem there is that you need an insane amount of money to educate the market, to get traction, and to get people to buy into what this thing. That’s usually not a good game to play either, unless you can go raise a ridiculous amount of money.

Let’s just take it off the table and just say, no matter what you’re going to do, it’s going to be ridiculously competitive. Once you get that in your mind, you no longer have to have that conversation. Now, you can focus on how to solve the problem. You’re the new guy coming into a market that’s crowded. A crowded market is a good sign.

Now, think about it from this standpoint. Think about all of those retail stores, restaurants, and service providers that you use personally in life. Think about how difficult it is to get a return phone call or to have someone follow up with you. Think about how difficult it is to get somebody to actually send you the estimate when they say they will. Think about how difficult it is to get good service, a quality product or solution. Think about the employees that come to your home to provide a service. How many of them seem knowledgeable and actually like their job as opposed to going through the motions to earn his 12 dollars an hour? That’s the typical experience. There are some great companies out there that don’t deliver that experience at all, but if you think about it, this is the experience you receive from a lot of companies.

The idea that in your market place, you’re coming into a market with tons of veterans, and all these veterans happen to be on top of their game…there’s no chance. The reality is that the majority of your market is under-serving the market. The majority of your market is filled with competitors that are less than awesome, and so, it gives you a tremendous opportunity. Marketing is the right way to think about this. I would add to this though, that when you think about marketing, my marketing education gave me more than a sales and marketing education, it gave me a mindset education.

The mindset education is this, think about everything from your client’s perspective. As an example, if you’ve identified that you want to be in this certain neighborhood, imagine their world and life as it is for them. Think about their wants and needs. What would be their ideal outcome of working with somebody like you? That really shifts everything. When you start to think about things from that standpoint, then you start to be able to figure out how to break into the market.

Now, I will say that in the very beginning of getting started, what I’ve observed in most businesses, they usually are a little bit of a slow start. You have to figure out what language to use, what the opportunity is, what the core market is, and what your niche is. Then, you can capitalize on that. But, it takes a little while to figure that out. You’re looking for that crack. Yes, you are coming into a big market. And yes, you are coming into a market with tons of competitors and seasoned competitors, but there’s a crack.

There are a lot of things that are happening. You’ve got guys that have made it and now they’re comfortable. You’ve got guys that have been in business for 20 years, but they got there slowly over time by of word of mouth, not because they were great. Then, you truly have some great competitors. So, where are your cracks? Assuming that maybe 20% of your competitors are great, that leaves you 80% of the market. Excellent service is key.

Now, if from day one, you provide ridiculously good service, making your clients feel cared for, wanted and valued, it doesn’t immediately mean that you will have great success. It’s an investment that will yield results over time. If you only have four clients, you’ve only got four clients to preach your message. When you have 500 clients, now you’ve got 500 clients talking about you.

That’s an example of how it takes a little time to reap the reward of providing great service. You can’t necessarily feel the benefits of it day one. It’s something you stick with and it yields results over time. That’s a core element, I believe, of eventually breaking into your market. So many of your competitors, as I said, have become complacent at customer service and that leaves you this huge opportunity. Focus on that area.

Number two, from a marketing standpoint, you’ve got to be seen. That means, if you’re serving a big market, you don’t spend all your money from a marketing standpoint, to try to be seen throughout the entire market. Rather, you focus on one neighborhood or small section of town. Yes, you hope to get work all over town, but you concentrate your small pile of marketing dollars on one small area. You want to be seen all the time. You knock on doors, put out fliers, send out postcards, and do whatever you can to be seen in that area. That means your trucks need to be painted and must stand out. You need to look the part. You need your potential clients to feel they see you all the time.

You also need to be different. If you want to break into a crowded market, you can’t look like everybody else. It’s very rare that you see a company that stands out. Customer service will make you stand out, but it’s a slow road to travel. Look at Zappos. In the beginning, when they ran out of money, all they had left was this idea the idea that they wanted to become the best customer service company out there for selling shoes. That became their angle and that became the thing that spread word of mouth. They had a client base to do that with. You don’t have that yet if you’re just starting out and you don’t have many clients.

Service alone won’t propel you to be a great company. That’s why you have to  use marketing. You need to be different. You have to look different, appear different, act different, talk different, and everything needs to be different. Just think about what you see out there in the market place and who stands out, and what they’re doing that makes them stand. If everybody’s truck is white, then yours should be pink. If everybody puts their employees in a brown uniform, then you should be in a blue uniform, a pink uniform, a light green, a neon yellow, I don’t care, but different. If everybody sends a marketing piece that looks one way, yours should look different. If everybody puts a door hanger of a certain type that says a certain thing, your should be the opposite. Think about different because different matters.

You also need to take away clients’ risk. It’s all about risk reversal. If you want me to do business with you, and you’re an unknown commodity, what is it that you can say and do that will get me to give you a try. I don’t have a freaking idea who you are, I’ve never heard of you, I’ve never seen you, but you want me to give you a try. You’re a little more risky than True Green or some of the other bigger names, because they’re a known company. With you, you could be just like all the other guys that have been a bad experience. They eventually quit showing up, they never close my gates, they always blew grass under my garage door, they whatever. They gave me the low price and they were only worth keeping for one season and then I had to go re-shop it.

You want to make sure that you take the risk away from your prospect. You’ve got to consider their fears, frustrations, and all the things they hate about companies like you. Then you reverse that and do what’s called risk reversal in marketing. You use testimonials, marketing copy, and guarantees to overcome their fears.

For example, I think it’s Benjamin Franklin Plumbing that uses the guarantee that if they’re late, they pay you. I might be getting the company wrong, but I think it’s them. Well, it’s genius. What did they do? They took the most common complaint about plumbers, they are late or give you a huge window of wait time, and made it part of their guarantee. That is now what they are known for, and that one thing just so happens to be the biggest frustration of most consumers that use plumbing.

Think about it from that standpoint. I’ll give you another one. Wow, One Day Painting I believe is the name. It’s the guy that founded 1800 Got Junk. Great company. I don’t know if you’ve ever been through a situation where you have had your home painted. My home, to paint it, was a multi-week project. In fact, I just had the downstairs portion of my house painted and it took two weeks just to paint that. It’s a fairly big house with a lot of rooms and we used different colors in each room. On top of that, when you consider the rounded edges where two colors meet, it adds more time and difficulty because of the attention to detail that it requires. There’s a lot of little challenging things. It was a hard job.

We had to live through the smell, having rooms taped off, and the guys coming in and out of our house. The guys were awesome. But, I really used them because I like them. It was not a great experience but, we knew the contractor. If it weren’t for that, we would have used somebody that could do this faster.

Think about it. If the common experience for the consumer is a feeling of dread, frustration, and inconvenience because of how long it takes to complete the job and the lingering paint smell, think about how powerful their name and marketing is.

Everything about that company communicates that they are going to solve my biggest concern and frustration.

One company guarantees that they’ll be on time for plumbing or they’ll pay for every minute they’re late. The other one says that they will paint your entire house, not matter how big, in one day. They both answered the biggest problems in their market. That’s great customer service. Then they also address my point of being seen. Both of these companies have painted their trucks and included their guarantees on their trucks. They’re also different. They’ve completely differentiated themselves from everybody else in the market.

Using guarantees, they are capturing testimonials. Think about it. If you go in, you answer the biggest objection, the biggest frustration, and then you capture testimonials from clients talking about how great it was to get their house painted in a day. How incredible it was that, my gosh, the plumber was on time. He’s always been on time for the last five years I’ve used him. Then he was actually late for four minutes one time and he paid me for the four minutes. I didn’t even care about the four minutes, but he paid me anyway. Think about the power of that testimonial.

You have tons of these and you take all of that to this really competitive market where half of the guys you’re competing with are lackadaisical and apathetic because they’ve been doing this for so long. Really, they’re bored with their businesses and you’ve got all this energy. You enter the market and you do all these things. I think you could be extremely successful.

I guess my last point is a point I made earlier. Think from the perspective of the buyer. Think about what they want, what they’re going through, and what challenges they are having. Think about what they don’t know that they need. For example, you might be in a market where a lot of guys are using the same people over and over again. The reason they’re using the same people over and over again is because nobody has told them there’s something better.

If you drive around an F-150 pickup truck all the time because you can buy it for 30,000 bucks, and you’re thinking, for that price it’s the best truck you can get. Then, one day somebody comes to you and says, “Hey, you can buy a Ford Raptor, that’s normally 60,000 bucks for 30.” You never knew that before. Wouldn’t you suddenly say, “Screw the F-150! I’m not buying that. I’m buying the upgraded Raptor from now on.” Until you found out you could buy a 60,000 Raptor for 30 grand, the F-150 was satisfactory. It was good enough and you were happy with it. One day when somebody tells you, “Hey there’s a new world you don’t know about. There’s this new thing you can get. There’s a new way of doing things.” Suddenly then you’re looking and you have a need. Before that, you just assumed that’s how it was.

That’s how it is for a lot of your clients. They’ve tried other companies, done business a certain way and that’s just what the lawn care market does and how lawn care guys do it. If you’re different, they don’t know you’re different. You’ve got to tell them your different and you’ve got to show them you’re different. When they find out there’s something better, there’s another way, they will give you a try. But, you’ve got to do all those other things I talked about.

When I started my lawn care company, I guess about eight years ago, I was a nobody. People have been mowing their yards forever. The market fully existed and was insanely competitive even before we started up in 2005. Nothing has changed, it was that way in 2005, and I started as a nobody. Now I have, I guess, the biggest residential lawn care company around my market. I just did what I talked about.

Now, I didn’t do it in the first couple years because I didn’t know better. My business wasn’t growing fast enough and it wasn’t very profitable. I had to start searching for ways to do it differently. Everything I just told you is what I did.

If you follow that model, do some research and reading, and thinking like the buyer, you will totally break into your market. One day, you’ll wake up, after a whole lot of struggle and frustration and pain because, keep in mind, that’s where learning and breakthroughs come from, and realize you have created an extremely successful business. It happens over time. The key is you have to make the right moves every day. You must be doing the right things to end up with that type of business. It is 100% totally possible, no question. No market in the United States, Canada, Australia, or anywhere that you cannot break into. Be confident of that, and do the things that make you different than everybody else. In five years, your business will be really interesting. Good luck.

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How To Market Your Lawn Care Business Without Money

Interview from 2009. Patrick Dougher of Doer Success TV interviews Jonathan Pototschnik about how to market and grow your lawn care and landscape business when you don’t have any money.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Tip To Make Selling To Commercial Customers Easier

How To Make Selling To Commercial Customers Much Easier…

Watch this video to learn the 1 simple trick…

This one concept will greatly simplify selling commercial work to large companies.

This tip will make marketing and selling to commercial clients so much easier. I am constantly asked questions about selling to commercial clients. There’s a huge intimidation factor. It almost feels, to many, like this giant unknown. How in the world do I do this? How in the world do I approach it? I’m going to give you one single concept in this video. It’s a mindset concept, but it’s critical to your success in selling and marketing.

The reason why I feel that I can actually answer this question is, for years, I was a partner in a commercial cleaning company. The only thing we did was sell to commercial clients. Not little commercial clients. Massive corporations. That was our focus. That was our niche. Some were public companies, some were privately owned, and some were owned by holding companies.

The point is that we had to get through all the layers of management to sell. That’s quite intimidating. Our clients all had properties all over the United States. Many had basically a footprint in almost every state within the United States. Again, huge companies.

Also, in the landscape business, I’ve had experience in selling to commercial properties. In this business, I’ve had to sell to smaller properties, property managers, HOAs, condominiums, bigger companies,  and things of that sort.

Let me give you the key that makes it all so much easier. When you drive through your local market and you see the mall, and you see apartment complexes, and HOAs, and you see the big, multi-tenant buildings, and the multi-story buildings, and you look at that, at some point you decide that you want your lawn care company to land that property and all the maintenance needs surrounding it.

You’re picturing that outdoor building. Somewhere within that property is a guy that’s in charge. Let’s give him a name. Let’s say his name’s Larry. Or, the same could be true, you’re selling to Starbucks. Starbucks is this massive, somewhat faceless corporation that’s all over the world. There’s a Larry somewhere in Starbucks. There’s a Larry somewhere in this big six-story building.

Larry is not that different from you. Larry’s married. He’s got a wife. He’s been married for a number of years. He’s got two cars. He has a mortgage payment. He probably has a mortgage on at least one of his cars. He’s got a couple kids. One of his kids plays sports. Maybe one plays a musical instrument.

They really want to take a big vacation this year. They’ve got a mother-in-law that is ill that they’re helping to care for. He’s got some brothers and sisters that live in other states that they don’t see very often. He goes to church. He’s usually really busy on Sundays, and Saturdays are all about doing chores around the house, and doing the family thing, and going to all the kids’ sporting events. Then Monday through Friday, it’s back at the grind.

Then, Monday through Friday, when he’s at work, he’s got stresses. He’s got a boss. He’s got all these employees that cause him some headaches. He’s got things that are falling through the cracks. He’s feeling ridiculous pressure, because everybody’s giving him too much work. Everybody wants one more thing. He’s got to sit through one more Monday meeting. He’s got to answer one more stupid question from the boss that he halfway feels might be slightly incompetent.

You can just imagine what goes on in Larry’s life. It’s just like everybody else. There’s all this junk going on. He wants his life to be simpler, better, easier. He wants his work life to be better. He wants to get all kinds of nightmares out of his job. If he could get them out of his job, things would be better.

I’m painting a long, detailed picture, but you’ve got to think about your client this way. If you focus on dealing with Larry and not Starbucks, or the HOA, or the six story building, it’s so much easier to imagine selling to this person.

It’s so much easier to imagine putting together a 12-month marketing campaign where you’re mailing things to him and following up with phone calls to him. It’s so much easier to take a personal approach in both your conversation and in your marketing when you’re talking to Larry. Larry’s not that much different than you, or maybe not that much different than some of your friends that are very close friends. When you picture it that way, you can get in the door so much easier. You can make your marketing work.

For example, if you’re sending a marketing piece to Starbucks, how do you write that? A lot of people write it as, “Hey Starbucks, we’re great. We’re wonderful. We’ll guarantee your satisfaction. You’ll love us. Do business with us here at Total Landscape. We’ll solve all of your needs.” That’s boring. That’s corporation-to-corporation speak.

If your marketing is personal … and imagine that you find out who Larry is, and you find out that his son loves baseball, and Larry played baseball all the way through high school … what if you initially send Larry a FedEx letter? It’s something personal, something that you wrote directly to him. It has your name on it. It’s Jonathan, in my case, writing a letter to Larry about how we can make his life better. It’s written in a personal tone, not a corporate-speak, business-speak tone.

Then, you follow up with a phone call. Of course you get his voicemail, so you leave a nice message. Then next month, you follow up with a lumpy package, maybe a box. Inside that box, there’s a baseball, and it’s got a signature from somebody that is a popular baseball player, maybe in the local minor league market. Then later, you can send him a ticket or two to the local minor league game. I’m might be giving you a bigger example than what you’re willing to spend money on, but it’s that kind of a concept.

What are you doing here? You’re now marketing to Larry. I’m doing something personal. We’re connecting on a personal level. Corporations don’t matter. The corporate level doesn’t matter. We’re connecting as people with common interests. That’s how I get Larry’s attention, because the other 20 guys that are trying to get his attention are using all this business-corporate speak.

In our commercial cleaning company, we grew that company 100 percent with relationships. We took guys to baseball games. We gave them football tickets to games in their local market. We flew them out to trade shows. It was very common to have trade shows in Vegas, so we’d fly some of our clients out to Vegas. We’d buy them dinner. We’d take them to shows. We sponsored their kids’ baseball games. We did a million different things, because it was all relationship-based stuff. The conversations all started, and we worked all conversations to get in the door. We tried to turn those into personal relationships.

Sometimes they didn’t turn into personal relationships. Sometimes we got the business because we had a personal relationship with somebody else who highly recommended us to their coworker that managed another property. Maybe we never developed a great personal relationship with them, but the core personal relationships through these companies are what got us in the door. Your core relationships with your property management company, or the person at the property management company, are going to spread you through the property management company, or at least give you the opportunity to bid a lot of work.

The key to everything is to think in terms of a person. When you’re writing a marketing piece, you are imagining a person and what their life is like, and what their day looks like, and what their weekend looks like. You’re writing something from you to that person. You’re imagining them. Imagine your closest friend, if you were sitting down writing them a letter, and trying to get them to use your service. How would you talk to them? It’s totally different than how you would talk to Starbucks. This completely and dramatically changes your marketing.

Then, the same is true with the person selling. When you walk in the door and you’re trying to meet with someone, it’s far less intimidating when you’re thinking about that one person and not the company. Yes, Larry works at this big, giant company, Starbucks, but honestly, Larry’s life isn’t exactly as exciting as it may seem. Larry goes home and has all the exact same problems that everybody else has. Yes, he works at this giant company, and maybe he’s the big purchasing manager or the facilities manager, or maybe he’s got a C-level title. Who knows what the case is. But, at the end of the day, he’s a guy. He just happens to have done the work to be running the business. He’s still a guy with all the same stresses and concerns.

When you think about it that way, dealing with him is so much less intimidating. The idea of asking for the opportunity to talk to them, the idea of mailing something to them, the idea of following up with them is much less intimidating. You’re just following up with some guy. He’s not super special. He’s just some guy.

Think about everything from that direction. I think in your mind, it will simplify this task of breaking into the commercial market. It will simplify getting commercial accounts. Then, it will guide the way you speak, and talk, and present, and act. The relationship of it all is how you grow this business. That’s why it’s an investment. You don’t suddenly start a commercial business, and tomorrow have 10 million dollars in commercial work. You make an investment in people, an investment in relationships. It starts out slow, and if you work those and invest, in time, the whole thing blows up into this big company.

The very, very, very best sales guys have a network of relationships that they have spent an incredible amount of time developing that they can go back to. That’s why, in the commercial business, when you’re hiring commercial sales guys, you have to get the guy that has the relationships. You go get him. He’ll cost you a lot of money, but he will grow you far faster than the guy that’s just starting out, that’s never done it, that doesn’t know anybody, because he has no network. He has no relationships. You have to build that. This is how you build it. Good luck.

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How To Sell Lawn Care Service Door To Door (Tips & Advice)

Transcript

Jonathan:         This question is from Scott, and Scott says that he has been door knocking and handing out business cards, and it has not been working, and he’s wondering if he’s saying the right thing, and asking for advice.

So I would start with, look at this from the home owner’s perspective. So you’ve got to really put yourself in their shoes to really figure this out. So I can’t tell you exactly what to do, but I can give you the clues to figure it out. So you have to first look at it from their perspective and imagine a couple scenarios. 1) They were eating dinner. 2) They were helping their kids do their homework. They were watching a television show. Maybe they were even expecting the FedEx guy to drop off something important that they were really excited about, and when they came to the door it was you, not the FedEx guy. There’s a million scenarios where you’re interrupting them and immediately the tension level goes up because you’re there to sell them something. You’re there to bother them. You’re interrupting. Maybe they were having a fight before they answered the door. Now, some of these things are things to keep in mind so that you don’t take it person when they’re a little rude to you or send you on your way, and it doesn’t feel like a very pleasant experience. But at the same time, you have to immediately overcome this.

So, from their perspective, when they open the door and see you, what do they see and experience? What is the subconscious feeling and thought they have in the first 10 seconds. You’ve got to make sure you get that correct. How do you look? How are you dressed? How do you speak? Do you smile? How do you present yourself? What are the very first words out of your mouth? Think of a marketing piece and a headline. If you get something out of your mailbox and that headline doesn’t immediately tell you what’s in it for and why you’ve got to have this now, well then, why would you possibly read that marketing piece? You wouldn’t. You’d throw it in the trash. When they open the door, what’s the very first thing you say? It’s like your headline. What did you immediately communicate that is in it for them? Why should they pay any attention to you, give you the time of day, and not just shut the door? So you’ve got to really think about the presentation and the experience. And once you figure it out, you do the same thing over and over and over again.

What does your business card look like? First of all, business card isn’t exciting to me. What can you give them that when they close the door they set it on the counter and when they look back at it, it reminds them why them must do business with you, or why you’re doing something, giving, delivering something that they they need? How do you keep that thing you just gave them from going into the trash. Did you use a magnet that maybe they throw it up on their refrigerator for a later time? Did you give them a gift? Did you give them something that has value that they’d want to even keep? A business card, ah, that’s just … There’s no value there. It’s not a gift of anything. There’s no value why they’d want to save it. So what can you give them that they would not want to throw away, or they’d want to save because they think they’ll use it or they’ll need it at some point. So you’re also working to make sure that thing you hand them doesn’t go in the trash as soon as they close the door. Because maybe they’re not ready for you now. Maybe they’ll be ready in four months, and so you want them to save that thing.

Other considerations would be how you’re communicating what’s in it for them. So for example, if you knock on the door and say, “Hey, I work in your area. I want to grow my business. I need some more business. I’ll mow your lawn. It would be good for me.” You wouldn’t say it that way, but you get the idea. What are you communicating? It’s all about you. If they open the door and you say, “I would like to mow your lawn for free for a year. In fact, if you’ll look across the street at those five homes across the street, notice how awesome the lawns look? I will mow your lawn for free for one year. No catch. You don’t have to pay me a dime, no tip, nothing.” Clearly that’s absurd, but what’s the difference in the two examples? The first example it’s what’s in it for you, you being the guy trying to sell. The second example, it’s all about them. That would be the dream come true situation. They open the door and you’re super professional, incredibly nice. They just immediately get this incredible first impression. You’ve immediately conveyed trust. And then you say, “You know what? Because you’re such a great person, I’m going to take care of your property for free for a year, no catch.” Well, of course, who wouldn’t want that?

So your job is to figure out the middle ground between the first and second examples I gave and give them something as close to that second example. Clearly you can’t give away lawn mowing for free for a year. But what can you do to gain their trust, maybe give them something of value that they would want to use you, try you. And so you have a far better chance when you knock on the door of winning their business if you somehow do those types of things. You immediately reposition the experience from “I want something from you,” to “I have something I would like to give you that will be a huge benefit to you and you will absolutely want it.” You being the home owner. How do you immediately convey trust? What do you leave behind that won’t end up in the trash? So what can you do? When you’re knocking on doors, I think you put yourself out there a bit. Your expense is your time, and that’s it. So I think you have some money on the table to give away.

What could you do? Could you give them something? What could you give them? Because the better the bonus, the more compelling the offer, whether it’s something you mail on a direct mail piece, where you’re advertising a bonus, an incentive, versus knocking on their door. Even when you’re knocking on the door, you still need to give a bonus incentive to make them take action now. For example, you knock on the door and you say, “I take …” You don’t start with this, but you immediately communicate the benefit for them and introduce yourself, convey trust, and then you mention, “I take care of three of your neighbors on this street, and I just wanted to knock on your door and let you know that …” Well, this is not the way to do this, so I didn’t think this through ahead of time, but the idea being, “I wanted to knock on your door and let you know I take care of three of your neighbors. I noticed that your sprinkler head was leaking, and I just wanted to let you know. And also, by the way, we’re running a special right now where for any client that signs up for service with us, we’re giving away a free iPad, or iPhone, or iTouch.” Or whatever, something, iPod. You get the idea.

Now clearly the value of something like an iPad that you would give away for mowing their lawn is too great. But what is it that you could give them as a bonus? That’s the same concept. And I’m not saying you have to give that thing away, but what is it you could give away? Because that’s a lot more compelling that just saying, “I would like to take care of your lawn because I take care of your neighbors.” Well, why should I take action right this minute? Whereas, if you say, “If you sign up tonight, and by the way, the proof of the quality of my work is the three neighbors across the street that I now take care of. If you sign up tonight, we’re running a special and I will give you a free iPad.” Again, you’re not going to use an iPad, but it communicates immediate value to them, and they don’t want to lose out on that. So what is it that you could give them of value. And it could be something so much smaller. Obviously, it would be something so much smaller than that. But if you want to win a lot more business, then you’ve got to think about it in that way. Think about all those different things. And there’s more, but if you start working on those things and you perfect it, when you find what works, you keep saying and doing the same thing over and over again, you’ll find that you have success.

I would end with this. If you’re knocking on doors, trying to sell lawn mowing, for example. At the end of the year, most home owners are not interested. They’ll just wait till next year to make a decision. They don’t want to deal with it now. If you’re knocking on the door to sell lawn care in spring when the grass is just about to start growing, or better said, has just started growing, a lot of people need it. In fact, everybody needs lawn care at that moment in time. Your chance of success goes way up. So make sure you’re doing your door knocking at the right time of year, selling the right type of service that they need, right now. It’s all about right now. Whatever you’re selling, it can’t be a scenario where they might need it in three weeks. They’ve got to need it now. So whatever time of year you’re knocking on doors, be selling the thing they need today. That’s the best chance of getting them to take action today.

So, good luck.