Is your Landscape Company Ready for a CRM?

A CRM, or customer relationship management tool, is a type of software that allows you to manage everything from contacts and scheduling to communication and marketing. In landscaping, it is important to select a CRM that reflects the needs and values of your company, providing all the tools and resources you need to effectively manage your brand and employees in the field.

CRM usage has become more prominent over the past decade as more companies realize the benefits this type of platform brings to the landscaping industry. This has sparked a constant evolution of the CRM framework to better help modern landscapers achieve their goals.

So, how do you know if your company is ready for a CRM? Here at Arborgold, we design our software to support landscapers with a variety of bespoke tools. While we help companies of all shapes and sizes, there is a bit of a learning curve for CRM newcomers. Here are a few ways to tell if you are ready to jump into the CRM game with your business.

You are a Full-Time Company Focused on Landscaping

One of the first ways to tell if you are ready to begin using a CRM is to know where you are in the life of your business. If you are a part-time company, with a variety of specialties, not limited to landscaping, you may not need a landscaping CRM to manage your brand. However, if you are running a landscaping company full-time, and your focus is primarily on lawn care, gardening, and similar projects, a CRM could save you time and money.

Full-time landscapers juggle a variety of roles, including employee relations, accounting, administration, customer service, and of course, the physical aspect of landscaping. Many full-time companies have multiple employees as well. This means creating schedules, managing communication, overseeing inventory control, bidding on jobs, and working with customers. Your CRM can minimize time waste through automation and accessibility, giving you all the tools, you need to be successful from anywhere you can get an internet signal.

You Want to Increase Production Capacity with Existing Crews

Many landscaping companies are well established with loyal customers and a growing enterprise. To be successful as your company continues to expand, you need to increase your production capacity with the team you have in place. Arborgold’s CRM offers ample scheduling, communication, and even GPS tools to ensure you know:

• Where your employees are
• When the next job starts
• Which route employees are taking to get to a job
• Whether they have mapped the best route to get to a job
• Where each piece of equipment is located
• How to get in touch

All of these aspects of landscaping are made visible in real-time, allowing you to stay up to date and focused on your team, without taking away from other management responsibilities.

You Want to Grow Through Cross-Selling Services

Cross-selling is a huge source of income within the landscaping industry. It stands to reason that any client seeking lawncare may also find garden watering services and pool cleaning services helpful. Knowing your client helps you improve your success with cross-selling, and using the right CRM helps you deliver the offer organically.

At Arborgold, our software is designed with landscapers in mind, to help you automate e-mail and other customer correspondence in ways that hint at cross-selling without putting your customer on the spot. You can customize each e-mail by current service and unfulfilled services, so you know clients are seeing information that will catch their attention and possibly land new jobs for your team.

You Need a Better Way to Schedule Jobs and Watch Project Costs

As your landscaping company grows, scheduling becomes more difficult. Monitoring which employee is already in the field, who needs to be assigned a job, which employees have called in sick, and who is on vacation is a lot to leave to manual paper schedules. Modern landscaping teams are using digital schedules to optimize time and organize employees.

One of the great things about using a CRM is that your company is better able to stay on top of employee schedules because everything is updated in real-time. Depending on the settings you choose, your team can check in at worksites, check out when they leave, clock in at the start of each shift, and even request vacation and personal days all from the CRM, making it easier for you to remember who has requested what and where everybody is.

This same tool also helps you manage project costs. As projects grow and evolve, you can monitor the current expenditures, inventory you need to use, and other variables to ensure you stay on target and supply clients with realistic quotes.

You Want One System (And Cost) to Manage All Sales and Operations

Finally, and perhaps the biggest indicator of whether your brand requires a CRM is how many systems you want to be using to manage your sales and operations. A modern landscaping CRM like the one we offer through Arborgold condenses all the information you need into one tool. This saves you time wasted scouring various tools and resources to find the same information. By offering a mobile CRM, you can also view this data from anywhere your internet connections takes you, and share information that needs to be shared, with your entire team.

Merging all your management tools into one easy-to-use platform offers ease of access, minimal stress, and a broader range of company resources.

Contact Arborgold Today

If your brand aligns with the points above, it might be time to try using a CRM for your landscaping company. Arborgold specializes in companies like yours that work in the field and require special scheduling and communication models to be successful. If you are interested in learning more about our landscaping CRM and all it can bring to your business, we invite you to take a tour online.