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Growing your pest control business requires strategic selling and marketing. Developing your strategy is a must to ensure your company acquires new customers and thrives.
You’ll need a unique angle to stand out in a highly competitive market. If you’re looking for ideas on how to do this, you’ll appreciate these pest control sales tips.
In this article, you’ll learn about sales plans and how to create one for your team. You’ll also gain knowledge of best practices for marketing your pest control company.
Keep reading for strategies to boost your business to the next level.
What Is a Sales Plan?
Creating a sales plan to boost your pest control business is the starting point for creating more revenue opportunities. A sales plan includes the objectives, tactics, target audience, and potential challenges.
This document acts as a guide to your business goals. Your sales plan defines how you will reach them.
Creating a sales plan should be a collaborative effort. It’s a good idea to involve sales, marketing, and other stakeholders. An effective one will include the following components:
- The numbers: What are your expectations regarding revenue?
- How you’ll hit those numbers: What tactics will you deploy to support new business generation?
- A strategic direction: How will you define and deploy those tactics?
- Target audience: Who is your ideal customer, and what are their characteristics?
- Roles and responsibilities: Who is responsible for each part of the plan? How will you collaborate?
- Measuring progress: What metrics will you monitor to determine success? Will you track leads, conversions, and engagement?
RELATED ARTICLE: How to Generate More Pest Control Leads
You’ll need data about your current sales performance to create a pest control sales plan. This historical information will help you shape your objectives and get insights.
Another element of a sales plan is dealing with competition. How can you make your pest control business stand out? Part of the strategy is defining your strengths against the weaknesses of other pest control companies.
A sales plan is a comprehensive document. Yet, it will change over time due to internal or external factors. Much effort goes into it, but it delivers significant value.
So, how do you go about creating one? Here are some tips for getting started.
How to Create a Pest Control Business Sales Plan
Building out your plan doesn’t have to be challenging. Based on the components and considerations addressed above, you can develop one that will be meaningful to your sales efforts.
Define Your Target Market.
In this step, you will outline who your prime audience is. Determining factors should include:
- The geographic area of your services. Use ZIP codes, cities, counties, or a DMA (designated market area) to draw your borders.
- The different types of customers you serve. Do you prefer residential or commercial?
- Specific demographics that fit your services. Age, home ownership, or household annual income can all help determine who you want to target.
- Customer interests that show a potential need for pest control services. Things such as liking gardening or home improvement may indicate they would be open to contracting services.
Set Clear Goals.
The emphasis here is on “clear.” Your goals need to be specific. Look back to your existing data on numbers and any previous forecasts. You’ll need to decide:
- The percentage increase in revenue you expect
- The impact of market demand on forecasted sales
- What the competitive field looks like
- How to apply your marketing budget to target ideal customers
These goals should also have a timetable on when you expect to achieve and/or revisit them. Document how you’re going to define and measure success using these objectives.
Outline Your Sales Structure.
Next, look at your sales structure. Evaluating how your sales team looks now will play a role here. As you’ve created goals, they now should inform the roles and responsibilities of individual sales reps.
You may assign salespeople to work with different markets or customer types. If so, this will impact their ability to hit a budget. For example, those working with commercial customers would likely have a higher average deal amount.
Everyone must know what their specific goals are. Clear expectations propel their performance. They should also be part of the sales process documentation.
Document Your Sales Process.
Sales processes often exist only in the heads of salespeople. Putting them to paper gets everyone on the same page.
Consistency across sales efforts ensures a focus on best practices that you have determined as a group. A conducive framework for this is creating sales plays.
A sales play is a repeatable set of steps used to address any part of the sales cycle. It’s like a framework for a sales pitch.
You could have ones for prospecting, setting meetings, communicating, and follow-ups. A sales play addresses a general audience or one of your customer personas.
Other parts of the sales process to include here are:
- Providing sellers with content, presentations, and other content to send to potential customers
- Identifying the stages of consumer buying for pest control
- Requirements for inputting data into your CRM (customer relationship management) system or other application
- Best practices for handling common objections (e.g., price, competition, etc.)
By following these steps, your plan is ready to go. Next, we’ll look at pest control sales tips.
Top 3 Marketing Ideas to Improve Your Pest Control Sales
You’re ready to activate your sales plan. It’s time to put tactics in place to attract and convert new customers.
Pest control marketing relies heavily on the pillars you’ve built in your plan. The sales team should be well-informed regarding tactics, audiences, and expectations.
Here are some ideas to help you hit pest control sales goals:
1. Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You want to be easy to find online. Local SEO is critical for your business’s online presence.
It’s a key channel for those who need pest control services. Every week, 35% of people use search to find local businesses.
For your business to appear in search results, you have to optimize the content on your website. The goal is to rank for keywords people use.
For a local business like yours, ranking keywords often have location components. For example, “pest control services in [city name].”
Also essential for ranking is publishing new content on your website. You need to post consistently to improve your visibility for search terms.
Improving your profiles on Google Business, Yelp, and Bing Places supports SEO, too. These sites all contain reviews, which affects how your website ranks. Search engines also use these reviews as a means to verify the legitimacy of a company.
RELATED ARTICLE: Ultimate Guide to Pest Control Marketing
2. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is vital to support pest control sales. Social media platforms have become a buying channel. In fact, 75% of internet users rely on social media for product research.
There is a wide range of social media profiles. The ones you use will depend on your audience. Your targets are home or business owners. You need to know where they research services.
You can narrow down the list based on your target audience’s demographics. Since homeowners tend to be older, you’ll likely find Facebook a good place to reach them.
For younger generations, you might connect with them on Instagram. To attract commercial buyers, LinkedIn is a good option.
Social media marketing entails being active on these sites. Post your own original content linked straight to your website.
Valuable third-party content is also an option. This content can relate to the community or feature your business. A news article or podcast where one of your experts is a guest is a good way to establish your presence and expertise.
RELATED ARTICLE: 4 Social Media Tips for Growing a Pest Control Business
3. Online Reviews
Pest control customers want to validate the quality of your business through reviews. Ask satisfied customers to leave reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, and others. You can also feature these on your website.
People put a lot of value into the reviews of others. The fact that 76% of consumers read local business reviews regularly demonstrates their influence.
Increase reviews by making them part of the sales process. Once a customer receives services, use automated email or text messaging to request a review. Provide links to preferred sites to make it easy.
These are all long-term pest control marketing strategies. There are more things you can do right now to boost sales.
6 Key Tactics to Improving Your Pest Control Sales You Can Use Right Away
What improvements could you make right now to impact pest control sales? There are several strategies and tools you can put into play quickly.
These pest control sales tips are fast to deploy and can deliver great returns.
1. Stay updated.
Optimize your social media profiles with updated imagery and information. Keep these accurate and up-to-date so visitors know what you do and how to get in touch.
2. Retarget email leads.
Use email marketing to reengage cold prospects. Pull a list of contacts and send out a promo email with a special offer.
3. Knock on doors.
In-person marketing is still a good approach. Especially if you’ve just treated a major termite outbreak in the neighborhood, people can simply inform the neighbor of the occurrence and how you can help.
4. Refine sales technique.
Help each salesperson refine their approach to be more consultive. Sellers sell, but how they do it can impact results. Work with them on their valid business reason (VBR) and customer needs analysis (CAN) strategies. These are important for digital touchpoints and door-to-door sales.
5. Make sure branding is consistent.
Ensure your pest control branding is cohesive across your digital footprint. Do a quick assessment of where your brand lives online. Ensure it all reflects your current branding.
6. Utilize Software.
Implement pest control software to support sales. Choose a platform that’s easy to use so it can have an immediate impact.
Key features to seek out include CRM, marketing automation capabilities, sales reporting, and email and text campaign execution. Compare options to determine which one fits the needs of your business.
During the onboarding process, remind salespeople to use the CRM diligently. Help them by inputting contact information and notes regarding interactions with potential customers.
