An AI assistant can help landscape pros generate more high-end landscaping jobs and warm referrals, without spending extra money on ads or wasting more time chasing or sifting leads.
Here's how
A custom trained AI “assistant” allows you to automate several marketing processes, and achieve both goals simultaneously: 1) cutting costs, overhead and time/energy, while 2) increasing revenue by generating qualified appointments with homeowners “ready to hire.”
Realizing that you can’t grow and scale without some form of paid advertising, you allocate some of your budget towards online marketing to generate leads “cold.” This could mean paying Google, Facebook, YouTube and other social channels to promote your brand, doing 101 things to rank your website at the top of Google search results or even paying lead generation companies who force you to compete against five to 10 local competitors.
Due to those leads being “cold” (they are not familiar with your brand), you not only have to pay time and money to generate them, but also to nurture them several times until they warm up to you and pay that invoice. Out of every 100 leads that fall into that “leaking bucket,” only five or 10 or so turn into paid invoices and happy clients.
You and your sales team will have to MANUALLY reply as quickly as possible to all new leads (before they jump to your competition), spend time answering their questions, overcoming objections and setting up appointments. Along the way, get frustrated at how many are unqualified, then try to catch the other good ones which fell through (because of wasting time with tire kickers). Finally, calculate and send custom quotes to those few who remain, to close jobs with the little that remain.
It’s understandable why most of your attention and energy would focus on those leads that you were able to convert to happy clients, but what about those other older leads collecting dust in your database? Whether it’s a lead that you just didn’t have time to follow up with, or a lead that received your quote but didn’t move forward for one reason or another, that growing database of leads you already paid for could contain some real gold.
It’s a misconception that constantly paying for new leads (“cold” strangers) is the only way to generate increased revenue. New money can come from old leads.
A well-trained AI chatbot assistant, meaning one that you customize to think and communicate like an experienced sales rep of your company, along with the landscaping industry in general, can handle all these tasks on your behalf, 24/7 on autopilot.
If you (hopefully) have your leads organized according to status in your database/CRM, so that they’re grouped together by a) recent fresh leads, b) older leads that haven’t converted and c) past clients who’ve paid you already, then the human-like AI will know how to tailor its interaction with each group.
Fresh leads
At least 50% of phone calls to businesses go unanswered, and instead of leaving a voicemail, those callers are more likely to go down the list and try your competition. Add to that the other potential leads that contact you across all the social platforms, and have to wait for you and your team to get back to them several hours (or days) later.
Actually, the good leads (that aren’t tire kickers) would rather be able to get some kind of instant quote calculated (even if it’s just a range and not exact) upfront, rather than waiting for you to call them back at some inconvenient time for them.
The AI that you feed with your business info and quote calculation methods can now interact immediately with several of those leads and phone calls at the same time, answer their questions about your services and prices and deal with the tire kickers so they don’t eat up YOUR time.
Even if someone calls you at 1:30 in the morning, it’s ready for them. Imagine now where the first time you interact with an appointment (set by the AI), they’re already comfortable with your price and have their questions (and objections) answered. It’s just a matter of arranging details and “taking their order.”
Old unconverted leads
What about the older leads in your database that you don’t have the time or staff to follow up with? It could be they were interested but something else came up, or they needed financing, or some other reason they didn’t convert at that moment. The AI can save you and your team much time by reaching out to them via SMS (or email) and revive a percentage of them into new sales and revenue.
Maybe your sales team are not expert salespeople. The humanlike AI would already have expertise in high-level sales techniques like GAP selling, SPIN selling, the Challenger Sale and so on.
Past clients
Just like training the AI to follow up with your old leads, it can also reach out to your past clients and obtain more positive online reviews or ask them for warm referrals, or even see if they need any ongoing maintenance services.
All of this communication can be done through SMS, email, your website, your socials (Facebook Page, Instagram Page) so that you don’t need to hop back and forth monitoring all these platforms.
Imagine how much time and energy this frees up for you and your team. Many larger corporations have started incorporating such AI Chatbots and relinquished their need for call centers and bloated sales teams, especially since it can handle multiple conversations at the same time. This is how you grow and scale and overcome competition, while still having a life.
