Selling commercial lawn maintenance and irrigation services isn’t easy. There’s a lot of competition for commercial properties. You’ve got national players like U.S. Lawns and Brightview, as well as your local competition all vying for the same properties. How do you compete for commercial properties? Communication is the key. Commercial property managers expect to always know what’s happening on their property, and one way to deliver it is to send a completion email after you’ve done your work.

What is a completion email? As the name implies, it’s an email sent after you’ve performed your work. Pretty Simple. It may also include a description of the work you performed, pictures of problem areas on the property and notes about what you expect to do next week.

When & What’s Completed

Communication is one of the keys to building a great relationship with your commercial properties.  Completion emails can contain an itemized list of what services were done and not done on a job. Commercial property managers don't necessarily have time to check their properties to see that you’ve done the job.  Sending an email confirming service makes their life easier.

You can add as much detail as you want. For example, if you’re using HindSite Software, you can create assessments with a series of questions for their field crews. These assessments are completed in real time in the field using a mobile field device (iPhone, Android, iPad, Tablet). They ask things like what work was performed, were there any problem areas, what work is expected to be performed next week, etc. That information is then sent to the office, where it can be added to the completion email as an attachment.

Property Managers

You can send completion emails to multiple people, including  the property manager and their boss. In many cases, that boss was probably involved in the purchasing decision. But if they weren’t, sending a professional, branded email proves to them that their subordinate made the right purchasing decision.

Of course, there’s an added benefit: If a property manager leaves the company and they were your only contact, you may lose that property.   So be sure to communicate with both your immediate contact on the commercial property, as well as their boss so you can build a relationship with all the players. It helps the property manager and it helps you.  

Feedback

If a commercial property manager wants to give you feedback, how does he or she do that? Well, they could pick up the phone and call you. But if you send a completion email with a link to a customer satisfaction survey, they don’t have to. They can answer the survey in a minute or two and deliver honest feedback.  It saves time and enables them to quickly tell you what they thought.

Of course, it also helps you get honest feedback you can use to deliver better service.  We’re based in Minnesota, and we’ve observed “Minnesota Nice.” Not everyone here is comfortable picking up the phone and calling to complain about a service provider. Some are much more comfortable venting to an online survey. Embedding a satisfaction survey in your completion email solves that problem.

Even better, you get actionable insight into what your customers think. Users of our service business marketing add-on, HindSite Connect Pro, can even send follow-up emails to happy customers directing them to leave a review on Angie's List, Google, or other review sites. It's a great way to capitalize on your positive customers, while reacting to your negative ones.

Saves Time

The old saying 'time is money' could not be more true.  Completion emails save your commercial customer time and money by leaving little room for error.  Some green industry businesses prefer to call their commercial properties when a job is completed. That’s great – you can still call them. But now you can have a more productive discussion based on the data in the completion email.  

Plus, if they come back to you weeks later and ask why something was or was not done, with a phone call you really have no proof of doing that job.  With a completion email, you can prove your work was done and that they in fact received confirmation of it. In the end, completion emails are your commercial customers' best friends and yours too.