The Only Way To Guarantee That You Only Spend Your Time Talking To Qualified Landscaping Leads

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Depending on where you are on your business journey, your most valuable assets will vary. When starting out you probably won't have a lot of cash so you will have to safeguard whatever funds you have in order to keep the business going.

Once you get to a point where leads are coming in, projects are coming in, and cash is no longer an issue for the business; your most valuable asset will shift from money to time. It is at this point that you want to start qualifying leads before speaking to them – not when you're struggling to get leads. Now spending an hour writing up an estimate for a lead that would have never closed is throwing money in the trash, and as a business owner, you simply can't have that.

In the training below we'll go over how to properly qualify leads before speaking to them, what questions to ask, and more.

  Who Are You Trying To Keep Out?

Barriers are the only way you can keep out the leads that you don’t want. There’s literally no other way to ensure “qualified leads” for your landscaping business. This means you have to take some time to think about your ideal customers and what defines them.

Some of the key identifiers for an ideal customer are:

• Location

• Beliefs

• Budget

These are usually the things that will tell you if this person will be a good customer and therefore allow you to spend some of your time and energy into closing them.

The issues come when people are unsure what defines their ideal customer – this is something you really need to consider. At first it will be hard because you have no idea what matters and what doesn’t, but as you work with more and more customers you’ll be able to notice the things that make up the best customers you’ve had.

To identify your ideal customer, answer these questions:

1. Where do my best customers live?

2. What is the ideal project size that I want to work on?

3. How do my ideal customers think? 

4. What do my ideal customers care about?

Just by spending some time thinking about and answering these questions, you’ll have a much clearer idea of who you want to work with which will allow you to set up the right barriers to discourage the people you don’t want to work with from approaching your company.

  Levels Of Barriers

There are different types of barriers that can be used in different stages of your landscape marketing “funnel.” This is because there’s always people that sneak through the barriers and therefore you want to have certain barriers every step of the way up until the point where you meet the customer in person.

 External Barriers

These are barriers that don’t seem like barriers. What I mean is that most people (even you) won’t consider them barriers, but they are.

These are barriers that can either repel or attract your ideal customer, which is why it’s so important to understand who you are targeting.

What we’re talking about here is the content you share on social media: the stories you post every day, the reels you share, customer reviews or testimonials, project portfolio, and any other type of content that you share anywhere.

If you are aligned with your ideal customers, you will definitely attract the people that you want to work with. But if your content is not made for your ideal customers, there’s a chance that you will be repelling them – which you definitely want to avoid.

Keep this in mind when you’re making new content, posting stories or doing anything in the public eye that might negatively affect your reputation. And I don’t mean that you need to be silent about things you care about, all I’m saying is that you need to post content with intent.

Don’t post random stuff while on a Saturday night out with the boys, remember that anything you post can very easily be seen by your ideal customers and you always want to ensure that what they see is someone who they would want to work with.

If you need help with your content, check out our content playbook here:

 Internal Barriers

These are barriers that are more direct and come into play after a potential lead has shown interest in working with you.

This means that they passed through your external barriers because they liked what they saw so now it’s time to take the next step in the qualification process. At this stage you want to make sure that they’re serious about their project, are willing to spend the money for it, are ready to get started soon, and that they hold the right beliefs to work with your company.

These are the questions you want to ask at this stage:

1. How soon would you like to start this project? (Immediately / Within 2 Months / 6+ Months from Now)

2. Our project minimum is $5,000. Please confirm that you are comfortable with that. (Y / N)

3. Please share a brief description of what you’re looking for.

4. How will you select the company you want to work with? (Quality / Reputation / Price)

If a lead answers these questions and passes through our barriers, there’s a very good chance that they’re qualified and what it all comes down to is your ability to present yourself as the right company for the project and your sales ability.

 When And How Many Barriers To Use

One of the biggest mistakes people make when adding barriers to their landscape marketing system is adding too many too fast. You want to work your way up to adding more barriers.

The reason for this is that you need to validate your system from getting new leads by generating volume. The first step is to be able to get a lot of leads in, even if they’re unqualified. Once you see that you can get more than enough leads, you want to start adding barriers.

The key here is to add them one by one. 

For example, if you are running ads and you’re getting 40+ leads per month and seeing that some of those leads are qualified then you want to add some barriers to filter the bad leads and focus your time and energy only on leads that are more qualified.

But if you’re getting only 10 leads and you add barriers, then you’re destroying your chances of getting more leads in – you’ll probably end up getting no leads.

You must have a proven way of getting a good amount of leads into your pipeline for you to be able to set up your barriers.

One important thing to note here though is that when it comes to “External Barriers,” you can’t really add or remove them. External barriers are all about who you are, your beliefs and the way to show that through your content.

Internal barriers are what you need to hold off on until you have a proven method of getting leads for your business.

Now that you have a clear understanding of barriers and how to properly implement them, I recommend thinking about who your ideal customers are, start creating content that speaks to them directly, and once you start getting more leads, add one or two internal barriers to further qualify your leads.

I hope you found value in this resource and if you’re looking for more personal help in growing your business, you can book a 1:1 call with me here where we can do a deep dive into your business and see how else we can further help you grow.

Now that you have a clear understanding on how to pre-qualify leads, check out our "Winning Ads Playbook" to help you get more leads immediately →