Plan Your 2027 Sales Hires Before It’s Too Late | Neal Glatt, Neal Glatt Sales & Strategy

Rob Murray (00:30): Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the IM Landscape Growth Podcast. I have a guest I believe needs no introduction because he’s amazing. Neal Glatt. Neal, thank you so much for doing this.

Neal Glatt (00:38): Hey, thanks, Rob. Always a pleasure to catch up with you personally or podcastally. Yeah.

Rob Murray (00:43): Feelings mutual. Neal Glatt from Neal Glatt.

Neal Glatt (00:47): Yeah. yeah, we help businesses who are trying to improve their sales either through hiring or coaching. But it’s funny because it must be five or maybe even six years ago that I met you in this exact format on a different podcast and

Rob Murray (01:02): Yeah.

Neal Glatt (01:03): and you were just like spewing out sales truth and I’m like, my god, this guy actually gets it. we should be best friends. And now I feel like we are a little bit, so it’s fun.

Rob Murray (01:12): I think we’re on our way, my friend.

Neal Glatt (01:13): Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Murray (01:15): it’s been an absolute joy working with you not only through just knowing each other, but referring you to a bunch of clients that you’ve helped, using you to help us do what you do for our clients, which makes it even easier for us to tell everybody how awesome you are. So thanks for being amazing and for doing this.

Neal Glatt (01:30): Yeah, man. it’s super fun and and we love the mutual referrals that we’re able to give. I mean, we’re always super grateful for everybody you introduce us to. and hopefully hopefully some of the people we send back to you guys get a lot of the benefit because you guys as far as I know, you’re the the best out there when it comes to everything intrigue does. And it’s it’s mutually important, right? So, this might I don’t know when this podcast will drop, but we have some of our our people working the booth together at at

Rob Murray (01:59): Mm.

Neal Glatt (01:59): Equip Expo. And it just made so much sense to me because it’s like, yeah, anybody who approaches either of us needs the other. Like we’ve talked before if you do residential landscape and sometimes I get the call like, how do we do more design build? Or you know, recently a lot of design build landscape contractors have seen like kind of the middle of the market dry up. So the super high end’s still there and and now there’s a lot of small low end projects, but the middle’s gone and and a lot of guys did well in the middle. and and they’re like, Neal, how what can we do? And I’m like, You you gotta call Rob. I mean, he’s he’s the guy that, you know, knows how to target homeowners and you can’t really door knock either you have a a massive thriving referral word of mouth business or you don’t, right?

Rob Murray (02:40): Mm-hmm.

Neal Glatt (02:41): And if you don’t, there’s not much I can do, like we can in the commercial world where you can just go knock on distribution centers and get a contract next month.

Rob Murray (02:48): Yeah.

Neal Glatt (02:49): And so and I know that you know, some there’s some commercial searching, but the real, real sexy commercial accounts that people generally want just have a stack of of landscape business cards from people who have tried or given up in the past and so so the the search isn’t there. You need someone to go out and and answer the phones and do really well and present well and and we like to help on that side. So it’s it’s a real And most companies are doing both. So it’s it’s rare that we encounter someone who doesn’t need both our our help, I think.

Rob Murray (03:18): Yeah, and which is, you know, why we get to work with so many same clients together. So

Neal Glatt (03:23): Yeah.

Rob Murray (03:23): the question of this it’s been far too long since we’ve done this.

Neal Glatt (03:26): Yeah.

Rob Murray (03:27): the whole question of this podcast is the what’s the primary growth constraint holding entrepreneurs back in the green industry. and so you’ve answered that before talking about sales systems and we’re in the fall of twenty twenty six. And I’d love to shift the focus today’s around the sales planning process. And we’ll dig into it more ’cause I have another cheeky question for you as well that I think

Neal Glatt (03:49): Okay.

Rob Murray (03:50): might land for some folks in a bit. But when we so we’ll we’ll we’ll get inquiries in February.

Neal Glatt (03:57): Yeah.

Rob Murray (03:58): And they’re like, Yeah, we’re planning our marketing budget for this year and you know, we think we need to really make marketing a priority and we’re just like, It’s February, man, like Your season’s sixty days

Neal Glatt (04:07): Too late.

Rob Murray (04:08): away. So what are

Neal Glatt (04:09): Yeah.

Rob Murray (04:09): you saying to folks? How do you help people understand not only when, but also how to look at sales planning?

Neal Glatt (04:15): Yeah. So, you know, our our lens is always around the the sales people, right? As you know. So it’s it’s who can we hire, who’s the talent in that seat. Yes, there’s sales process stuff that we build and and of course all the tactics around how to present and and that type of thing, but really it’s around the people. And so I think one of the most useful analysis that we do is not like what do we need to train, but who’s going to use that training wisely or for an ROI. And so we just did this with a landscape company. They’ve got nine account managers. they’re disappointed that their account managers aren’t doing enough enhancement sales or or getting more of the maintenance contracts from their existing clients. So they want to do sales training. Awesome. Well happy to help you. before we do, let’s make sure that the people who we invest the time and training into are actually going to benefit. And what we came back from was Five of the people have the will to sell and the sales DNA and some basis for tactics. It would be a lot more beneficial with more tactics. but the DNA is supportive of it, right? And we saw that one of the people is kind of on the bubble and we weren’t sure how much of an ROI they would get from training. And then three of the people were like, We don’t think they have it. Like, according to what the they said in the assessment. They don’t seem to enjoy sales personally. they don’t seem to be super motivated for for sales success. they don’t have much of this DNA. We think that no matter how good the training that we give them is, as soon as they go out and they get told no, that rejection is gonna wipe them out. Or as soon as we tell them that they have to go sell enhancements that are more than $10,000, that that money tolerance isn’t there and they’re gonna freak out. or as soon as we tell to ask tough questions or manage organizational politics at the client, they’re gonna kind of fold. And and that that matters more than the actual tactical training. I can teach somebody exactly how to say something, but if they won’t do it with a prospect because of the we call it the DNA, but the t the the beliefs that they have or the talk tracks in their head, then it doesn’t matter. And so that’s where we start first is Who do you have? And and our our goal is never to displace people, but is there a different role that they should have in the company? And in landscaping in particular, we always see customer service people put into sales roles, and maybe that’s not a good fit. Or we see operations people put into sales roles, but maybe that’s not a good fit. And and so let’s make sure that that before we embark on training, we figure out who is producing to what extent and how much more they could do themselves, right?

Rob Murray (06:57): Yeah.

Neal Glatt (06:57): Well, it’s such your current team. Then we can start to plan for what your goals are. And then the biggest constraint is just how fast do you want to grow? And so you have a number that you want to achieve. when would you like to make that happen? And we can back into okay, here’s who you need to hire and and here’s when we want to shoot for that. you know, generally speaking, it’s hard for us to find folks with industry experience. Just not a lot of super talented salespeople in our industry who are also looking for work at the same time. There’s a couple, but the really amazing successful ones are usually making a good amount of money and happy where they’re at. And exactly

Rob Murray (07:35): A players are on the ice, baby.

Neal Glatt (07:38): right. And so the guys who are applying are maybe the ones who fudge their numbers on the resume or something. and so oftentimes we’re looking outside the industry. and we want to find a complementary industry. So we love to find guys from HVAC or janitorial services or paving services. because it’s a it’s an easy leap, but there’s still a orientation that you have to give. And so maybe you need a month if you’re doing design build, maybe two months of of company specific onboarding for them to be able to have an intelligible conversation with their customer. And usually when you hire somebody They need to give two weeks notice. And usually when companies are doing interviews, it’s taking them about two weeks from the time their can their dream candidate applies. So you got maybe two months of onboarding and a month of hiring. and then we have this like indeed you know, rigmarole that that Chelsea with you guys is on with hundreds of people applying and some of them are real and some aren’t, and it’s hard to tell the difference and You call them and they don’t show up. And so, Chelsea needs a month maybe to to get them started. And so all told, we’re usually in like the ten to sixteen weeks of hey, this is a great or we wanna we want Neal to help us hire somebody and they’re ready to have a conversation for prospecting, right? and

Rob Murray (08:52): Right.

Neal Glatt (08:53): so your planning needs to happen before that.

Rob Murray (08:57): Right. And so which kinda

Neal Glatt (08:58): Mm-hmm.

Rob Murray (08:58): gets into this idea about you know the like planning ahead.

Neal Glatt (09:02): Yeah.

Rob Murray (09:04): and so like let’s just, you know, fast forward a little bit and say, okay, we’ve got our team in place. Maybe we don’t know about the DNA side, but we’re gonna check out Neal Glatt, maybe look at this assessment that you’ve got ’cause it is remarkably helpful. But I’ve got my team in place now I want to look at my growth for next year. So it’s October twenty twenty-six. I wanna look at my twenty twenty-seven at revenue target. I’ve I’ve maybe got a three-year plan. And maybe probably don’t, but maybe I do. And in twenty twenty seven I wanna get to X. So let’s say for the sake of argument we’re a eight million dollar business and we wanna grow twenty five percent and get to ten million.

Neal Glatt (09:36): Perfect.

Rob Murray (09:36): And I’m like, Okay guys, we’re let’s go do it. That’s my plan. How how do we get a bit more like clear on how that’s gonna happen?

Neal Glatt (09:44): Yeah. So there’s there’s there’s only three ways that you can improve your sales, right? So only three different levers to pull to close that gap. One is we can increase the size of our sale. So if your average sales size is eight grand and you did eight million, can we get your average sales size to ten grand and you’ll do ten million? That’s usually pretty easy. because it just means expanding the scope a little bit or or shooting your sights on a little bit bigger size target or or project than you’re currently doing. so that’s that’s one option. The second option is you can work twenty five percent harder. so it’s forty hours a week, everybody’s gonna do fifty hours a week and nothing’s gonna change and we’re gonna get that. And most people that’s not possible because they’re already working super hard, right? And then I I mean Related to that, we could find, you spend four hours in meetings that are useless because they’re all about operations. Let’s stop sending the salespeople there. So sometimes that happens. Sometimes salespeople are busy running around plant material or I called a sales guy one time and he was in a skid steer. And I’m like, What are you doing? You should never be in a skid steer. You’re a sales guy, right? So so Yeah. yeah.

Rob Murray (10:54): Unless you’re filming content for demand, Jen, anyway, yeah.

Neal Glatt (10:59): So so sometimes there’s there’s easy wins with time that we can reclaim. but then the third is can we make you more effective? So if you closed 40% of your opportunities last year, can we get you to close 44% of your opportunities this year? And that would be the actual training. And so the question is, which of those three is reasonable, right? Rob, you you probably as a business would struggle to increase your your customer size because you’re already you’re already charging landscapers for the appropriate amount of ad spend. Right. So you can’t get your customers to to spend more on ads. They’re already throttling it properly for their size. And that’s just the size an eight million dollar company needs for the most part. Right.

Rob Murray (11:43): Fair.

Neal Glatt (11:44): and so when we work with your team, it’s like, okay, well, we got to work on either the efficiency or the time management then. landscapers generally can increase their average spend. If you’re in commercial, instead of finding properties that are like four-acre parcels. Find companies that are six acre parcels. There’s plenty of them. or if you’re

Rob Murray (12:02): Well, ev ev even with us though, we can increase the average by increase the floor. So we will no longer work with folks that are, say, under a million and a half in revenue. As one example. Just to your point.

Neal Glatt (12:12): You do that. Yeah. Yeah. and and or come up with another offering, right? So, hey, we’re we’re already selling this type of package. If you’re a landscaper, design build, we’re already doing patios, everybody gets them. Can we tack on lighting or seating walls or plunge pools or or any of that type of work that would push them all a little bit higher and and you know some of your listeners may not know this story. My very first sale in the landscape industry was 2009. I was in Detroit post global reception recession and I was selling twenty dollar a week lawn cuts door to door. And

Rob Murray (12:55): Good living.

Neal Glatt (12:56): yeah, it was brutal, right?

Rob Murray (12:58): Yeah.

Neal Glatt (12:58): And I knocked on a door and this nice woman answered and I told her the pitch and she was like, I don’t know, it’s kind of expensive. I gotta talk with my husband. can you come back and and do a presentation? And I did all those things and I I got the job. And my last sale in the industry before I started my own consultancy was 2017 and it was for a portfolio of retail locations. There were about five hundred and fifty of them. That piece of paper was worth more than five million dollars a year. And they told me, you know, it’s kind of expensive. I want you to come back and talk to our boss. Need you

Rob Murray (13:35): Ha ha ha.

Neal Glatt (13:35): give a whole presentation? And it’s like I actually invested the same amount of time in each of those sales, right?

Rob Murray (13:41): Yeah.

Neal Glatt (13:42): And and they sort of said the same thing. So so it’s all relative. And when you’re looking at a salesperson, you’re looking through their throughput, it’s like, okay, you you got 12 contracts, you got 120 clients, like whatever your benchmark for success is. I don’t know that it’s reasonable to say go do 10% more or 20% more the next year. you know, the question I was asked is like, what’s so different about 2027 that you’re all of a sudden gonna be that much better in your quantity? And and reps and managers struggle to answer that, right?

Rob Murray (14:14): Mm-hmm.

Neal Glatt (14:16): you know, the only exception is like if you’re in California, California passed a law. Where you can you are no longer allowed to use drinkable water for non-functional turf grass. So if you have a lawn,

Rob Murray (14:28): Right. An ornamental lawn.

Neal Glatt (14:32): yeah, or even just a a turf grass lawn at your apartment complex

Rob Murray (14:35): Right.

Neal Glatt (14:36): or your corporate office, you have to rip it out and put in either ornamental perennials that don’t require water or a zeroscape or something like that,

Rob Murray (14:45): Or artificial turf.

Neal Glatt (14:46): or artificial turf. All of a sudden next year twenty twenty seven, we’re going from eight thousand dollar enhancements to eighty thousand dollar enhancements, right?

Rob Murray (14:54): Yeah.

Neal Glatt (14:55): And guess what? The water companies are kicking back credits and there’s incentives and okay, that’s a real that’s a real key

Rob Murray (15:02): Spike of demand.

Neal Glatt (15:03): it’s what what what what’s that?

Rob Murray (15:05): It’s a it’s like an artificial spike in demand.

Neal Glatt (15:07): Yeah, well it’s a real case that you’re gonna substantially increase your and you don’t need to change your time management or your effectiveness, right? You just yeah, ten X tiles for everybody next year. but then what? Right? We’re gonna you’re gonna get ten times the commission, you’re gonna be okay just backsliding. N not most reps I know who are motivated, right? So

Rob Murray (15:27): Yeah, so then let’s take that real use case though of eight million wanting to go to ten, they want to grow twenty-five percent. And let’s just assume for a moment that their team is doing a good job managing their time and being being efficient with, you know, their their close rates and their sales and they’ve got a decent average sale size. What pieces do I have to put in place? You kind of alluded to it earlier, but like how do I get to this growth goal if I’m sitting there planning right now in October for twenty twenty seven?

Neal Glatt (15:51): Yeah, then we look at adding to the team, right? And that’s the case you guys had. hey, Neal, all my reps are great. They’re all performing. Actually, they’re working super hard. Some of them are covering for some staff that we’re trying to fill. I

Rob Murray (16:02): Mm-hmm.

Neal Glatt (16:03): can’t push them. They had there’s no reason for Rob as an owner to come down and say, do more, but the company needs to grow. So we need to hire some people. And and so that’s back to that four to five month time frame of in four or five months, we’re expecting the market to to be there. So for commercial landscaping, you know, the the depending on where you are in the country, the biddable time frame is like January to March for most of your commercial contracts. your design build residential people start to get interested, maybe February, March, April, May, with a big spike because they want to enjoy it for summer or at least early fall. and then if you’re doing snow removal, a lot of guys are, then your your time frame for buying that is July, August, September, November. So what what target month for buying and then back that up four months, that’s when we want to start talking about potentially hiring somebody.

Rob Murray (16:59): Yeah, okay. Awesome. And so then if I’m if I’m looking at this, you know, growth piece and I’m I’m adding people and then therefore complexity to my team dynamic,

Neal Glatt (17:09): Sure.

Rob Murray (17:09): what do you say to some folks around how they manage leads that come through? So like in our case we’re generating leads for commercial and for residential, they hire two more salespeople. Like how do we like how do you divvy it up? How do you make sure that they’re set up for success to hit their, you know, sales targets?

Neal Glatt (17:26): Yeah. So you know, we view marketing like cover fire for sales folks. we think they need some support. So you have to have some mechanism in place to help them out. and I I would when we go about ter we call that territory management, right? So every salesperson has

Rob Murray (17:42): Mm-hmm.

Neal Glatt (17:42): a territory and how you buy it up. You could do it geographically. so sometimes that makes sense because hey, we cover a fairly valid area and there’s actually fair amount of traffic that we face. And it just doesn’t make sense to crisscross our territory like that when he lives over there and she lives over there. So just, split down the line. and that’s one way you could do it. and then the other way that we’ve worked on it before is like specializing. So I’ve worked with clients who, let’s say in the commercial space, they really like hospitals and they really like HOAs and they they feel like they can do both really well. Well, those are incredibly different buying processes, right?

Rob Murray (18:19): Mm-hmm.

Neal Glatt (18:19): And in a hospital scenario, you have to dress up a little bit, you have to navigate politics, bigger budgets,

Rob Murray (18:26): Long sales cycle.

Neal Glatt (18:27): long sales cycle, exactly right. you have to be comfortable like walking into a healthcare environment and sort of speaking the language and just navigating physically the place. And so we had like a hospital guy, that’s all he did. And then on the HOA side, It’s a lot more casual, but you’re working with a property manager who, is is all over the map in terms of competency, perhaps, right? and sometimes Yeah, exactly. And

Rob Murray (18:49): Getting dumped on all the time by everybody. Their days consist of complaints. That’s it.

Neal Glatt (18:55): and some are super organized and kind of corporate y, and others are just like, you know, stay-at-home moms who do as a side gig or something, and and then there’s a board behind them who’s usually making the decision in most or in full, right? And you have to those those sales reps are going to board meetings at eight o’clock at night and they’re making friends with all the eighty year olds on the board who really care and are are difficult to deal with for and it’s just it’s fully different, right? And

Rob Murray (19:24): Yeah.

Neal Glatt (19:24): so in that case, it’s like, hey, we don’t care about the geography, we care about who’s gonna have the best success at winning this job. And you know, a sales rep. can probably sell to two or three different type of people or use cases pretty well, but nobody can do everything perfectly. And so

Rob Murray (19:41): Mm-hmm.

Neal Glatt (19:42): this is just this idea of hey, what are you talented at? And who do you match up well with based on your knowledge or experience or or style? And let’s go target that. And that’s a fun way to work, because it can feel easy for people, right? You get really good at it.

Rob Murray (19:54): Well, and you get really good at it. You know their problems better than they know their own problems ’cause you’re dealing with everybody’s and they’re just dealing with their own.

Neal Glatt (20:01): Exactly right.

Rob Murray (20:02): Yeah, that’s super cool. So when you you know, you look at territory management, you look like niching through expertise that I mean makes a lot of sense. one of the things I thought would be interesting to get into is this whole there’s a lot of people that F it. People need sales training. It’s bananas out there. Like

Neal Glatt (20:20): Yes.

Rob Murray (20:21): but it doesn’t seem to be the place where people start. They’re just like, you know, leads are we need better leads or you know, we need yeah, w it’s and

Neal Glatt (20:29): Rework the comp plan.

Rob Murray (20:32): and and like sometimes I’m not sure how many times these days you’re working with owners that are still selling, but usually not the most willing to say sales is a skill deficit within their arsenal. What do you see in the horizon across the landscaping industry around this like self-awareness of salesability?

Neal Glatt (20:51): Yeah, it’s usually the last area where we’re like, we gotta get really good at this, right?

Rob Murray (20:57): Doesn’t that seem backwards?

Neal Glatt (20:58): Well, it does to me because I’m not a landscaper, right? Like when we when we were growing the company and crushing it, it was like we’re sales first and we’ll figure out the operations.

Rob Murray (21:11): Right.

Neal Glatt (21:12): so yeah, I if you want to grow really fast, it’s backwards. you know, it’s it’s w But where where these guys start, it’s not backwards if you consider the the experience that most owners have. Most owners fell into this industry and have been doing it their whole life and they they were field guys first, and then they sort of grew up and matured a little bit or tried to get professional, and have, right? And and built a business underneath them. And so their whole worldview is is operations. My whole worldview is sales. That’s all I’ve ever done. So I look at this this is a sales problem. You probably look at everything as a marketing problem, right? So it yeah.

Rob Murray (21:49): Well there’s both, really. Marketing marketing actually creates a sales problem.

Neal Glatt (21:53): Okay, so yeah, for the record, sales is a type of marketing, right? it’s a it’s a marketing function. So marketing marketing reels the world. Right.

Rob Murray (21:57): Yeah, yeah, no doubt. They’re they’re they’re very tightly knit together, yeah.

Neal Glatt (22:05): But and and so for me it’s like, well, why wouldn’t you just sell more or sell four more, right? And these guys are like, Hey, we can produce faster. when I cut along, I could get this much profit. And like those are true statements. but it’s it’s Trying to squeeze a little more juice out of something, rather than just getting a second lemon, you know? And and for me, it’s like, why don’t you just get another one? It’s gonna be so much better, and easier. But not everybody’s I don’t know, not everybody sees the world the same way. That’s part of what makes it fun, I guess. but usually once you have gone through everything, so well, I I think there’s one other reason why is because companies who are successful. Are finding themselves in new levels of business. And so, like, when you didn’t have a salesperson, you kind of figured stuff out. And then you got a salesperson and they create a whole bunch more problems, right?

Rob Murray (23:01): Mm.

Neal Glatt (23:01): Or when you knew all 100 customers that you had, that was really easy to like do customer service because you would just call Mrs. Jones and put out the fire and make her happy. But now you have 400 customers and you don’t know them all, right? Or when you had Three crews and you could just swap one in for the other, even if you know the whole trailer axle dropped off. And but now you have seven crews and you can’t do that anymore, right? and so so the level of or complexity of operation because of the size of it creates other problems that probably distract you from getting back to the basics of sales. but eventually they get there. Even usually when two people call me, they go. We figure out operations. We got a great COO or director of operations who’s running stuff. And we just figure out administration. We’ve got this the system installed and it’s running our our company now. So that’s really good. And we have a handle our numbers. And now we feel like we’re ready to supercharge our growth. And we’ve never actually really considered it. and so we’re calling you, right? That’s that’s usually kind of the statement that I get.

Rob Murray (24:05): Yeah, I’m it’s it’s pr I think it’s very natural, especially in the way that you you said it. I’m curious to see if there’s some folks listening to this that might gravitate to sales and and becoming professionally, you know, good at sales prior, see if that helps but ’cause then you could pick and choose your customer and maybe that becomes easier.

Neal Glatt (24:20): If yeah, if that’s if that’s you, give me a call because I’ll help you take over the world, man. it’ll be so much fun, you know. because it’s a lot of growing pains, right? When you do it the other way. When you when you start with operations, you kind of inherit customers, you get caught in a little bit of a race to the bottom on price. And you know, there’s this really nasty point in business where it’s like, we don’t really want this job. at that price, but we feel like we have to take it because we have all these people. Yeah.

Rob Murray (24:49): We need to keep people busy Yeah.

Neal Glatt (24:52): And that’s a bad, bad place to be.

Rob Murray (24:55): So one of the things I find interesting and even just the way you put it too, and I maybe we can spend a quick moment, you know, rethinking this thing. Operations has this connotation of fulfillment and sales doesn’t. It’s like s

Neal Glatt (25:09): Yeah, there’s a connotation of like lying. Yeah, yeah.

Rob Murray (25:11): Yeah, right, right, right, right, yeah. You know, encyclopedia door to door. They only sell, you know, A, B and F and that’s all you get. but what I find really interesting is that fulfillment operations is just as important if not I mean it’s all but sales operations is an operation.

Neal Glatt (25:28): Yes.

Rob Murray (25:29): from the figuring out who you want to work with and go after to finding interest and having meetings, the way that you build your proposals, the way you present

Neal Glatt (25:38): Yes.

Rob Murray (25:39): and qualify, the way you close and onboard. And it just doesn’t seem to have the same lens. Like people when they look at sales, it’s like a person. And fulfillment is like a team.

Neal Glatt (25:48): Yes. Yes.

Rob Murray (25:50): But I’m trying to move folks towards this idea of thinking about sales operations.

Neal Glatt (25:55): Yeah.

Rob Murray (25:57): What’s your view on this?

Neal Glatt (25:58): Yeah, totally. we we’ve done some of this work, right? with some of the the hiring that we’ve done. And it’s like, dude, what are the numbers this person’s supposed to do in terms of every day they show up, how many calls are they supposed to make? and and now that we’ve done that, it’s like, yeah, there’s there’s a process behind this, right? And when they when they hit this activity on a weekly basis, we know that sales will follow in like three or or five or six, seven weeks. Right. You can and you just see those graphs function the same over time, just separated out. It’s a leading indicator. one of the problems is that like in operations, because I worked in operations too. My my title when I when I left the industry was director of operations. in operations, when you show up to the office and you open up your computer, or I guess these days When you wake up at 5 a.m. and your phone is just littered with notifications, there’s a bunch of people freaking out over whatever caught on fire or who didn’t ever show up or whatever the problems are. And it’s just there’s a list of things to go check off, right? And so that’s an easy way of working. It’s just like reshuffle the list and get through it as fast as you can. I mean, it’s it’s stressful, but you know what to do. In sales, you don’t have that. In sales, you show up and you open up your computer and your day is empty. And there’s no there’s nothing on your calendar. There’s nobody to yell at you if you don’t show up. And so if you dial the phone 30 times or 40 times or 50 times, you kind of just get the same pat on the back, right? from a lot of people like, hey man, good good work today. And so it’s it’s harder to like will yourself to that goal.

Rob Murray (27:46): Mm.

Neal Glatt (27:46): than it is when it’s structured in operations where where everybody’s up like you ignore an operations complaint, it comes back hotter. You skip

Rob Murray (27:54): Yeah, quicker.

Neal Glatt (27:55): a yeah, you skip a sales call. Nobody knows, really.

Rob Murray (28:00): Yeah.

Neal Glatt (28:00): Right? So there’s a there’s I don’t know if it’s peer pressure or nature of work or I think that’s why it’s tougher. But then when when we build, you know, some of the really cutesy dashboards and and for everybody listening what Rob has now and and what we install at companies is it’s like a fuel gauge, right? And there’s there’s red, yellow, and green. And every time you dial the phone, that gauge just creeps a little bit higher. And it creates that thing that drives accountability and celebration around. And so once you build out the systems or the process to be like that fulfillment, you know, framework that you’re talking about. Now you’re like, People are doing actually more than they were before. They don’t feel like they weren’t working hard or feeling like they’re working harder. It’s just super clear to everybody involved, like what what the checkbox is today.

Rob Murray (28:52): Yeah, I’d love that. And then so on on knowing so first of all, you just referenced the idea of like building this with design in mind, right? Whether

Neal Glatt (29:01): Yes.

Rob Murray (29:01): it’s a whether it’s a dashboard with a fuel gauge that shows people their progress, or it’s how you set up who talks to who at what point, whatever it might be. What what’s your take on the we get to the spot with some folks and ourselves included in this where our capacity to fulfill and our ability to sell an onboard are now becoming so predictable that if we

Neal Glatt (29:23): Yes.

Rob Murray (29:23): don’t plan them together, it can go all wonky.

Neal Glatt (29:25): Yes. Yes.

Rob Murray (29:28): And so can you help people understand, first of all, what it’s like to go from, hey, let’s do as much work as we can and sell as much work as we can, to, hey, we’re gonna go after a certain type of work ’cause we have this type of crew capacity. We’re gonna fill that capacity by this month because we’ve been tracking this year over year and understanding how many clients we onboard when. Like what does that whole process look like and and what’s it like when you get there?

Neal Glatt (29:52): Yeah, so this is the the re this discussion is the solution to operations and sales hating each other, right? So,

Rob Murray (30:00): Yeah exactly.

Neal Glatt (30:01): so what typically happens is salespeople just go out and try and guess what they’re supposed to get, right? And

Rob Murray (30:09): Yeah.

Neal Glatt (30:10): and their only value is is the dollar on it, maybe profit margin if you’re using some of the systems in our industry. Those are kind of the only two. And I think that that’s initially the mistake, right? So every company I believe is uniquely able to service a specific type of customer. let’s just look at mower type, right? Either you have push mowers in your fleet and you can do residential lawns, or you do not and you can’t do residential lawns. Either you have flail motors and you can do highwayside work, or you don’t and you can’t. Right. And I know every operator is like, I can get it. We can make it. But no, your your company is uniquely set up to handle a certain type of customer. And it goes really deep. Either you have the patience to take after hours board meetings with HOAs and talk to a hundred people at every place you every physical site you go to, or you don’t.

Rob Murray (31:07): Yeah.

Neal Glatt (31:07): Right. So you got to figure out exactly who your company can serve really well. And then that becomes the target that you give to sales, first of all. Then Sales is only allowed to win what operations has told them they can actually do well and profitably and successfully and have fun doing. And

Rob Murray (31:25): Yeah.

Neal Glatt (31:25): so that’s all they target, then they become an expert at it, then they bring that back, and then operations is able to succeed. And so now you’re around the well, what the heck, man? we don’t even if we can if we want this job, right? My favorite thing, operations folks love to say. Like, hey, if you’re in operations and your sales team is coming back with the wrong job, you did a bad job of telling them what to do. I I believe, right?

Rob Murray (31:51): Yeah. Yeah, well and then and then there’s no like leadership synchronization between the two.

Neal Glatt (31:56): Yeah. Yeah. And sales, you need to not just run out there. You got to go to operations and be like, help me sell more of what you want. And and niche down. Don’t freak out over the fact that Neal Sain cut out 80% of the physical properties in your market. Be excited about the fact that you’re gonna be an expert at that 20% that’s left because I don’t know of any landscape company that has even three percent of their local market share in their service area. And and so success in this industry, which is so fragmented, just means finding that sort of needle in a haystack, if you will, by being laser focused on what it looks like. And then operations fulfillment comes through. When that happens, when you really specialize, you start to figure out if you track your numbers, if I present three times, I win one. Right? If I go to this networking event. I come back with ten leads. And so the the conversion rates start to come through and when done properly, we should have more and higher quality metrics on the sales team than the operations team has for their team. Operations

Rob Murray (33:13): Right.

Neal Glatt (33:14): team should just have hours compared to profitability and like complaints and time to resolution, I think. And then maybe maybe your mechanics have some numbers for their their fleet. Yeah, stuff like that.

Rob Murray (33:26): Downtime and and ma yeah.

Neal Glatt (33:28): in sales we have twenty metrics that we track. That should be way more than anybody else, minus accounting as a function.

Rob Murray (33:36): So what are some of the ones that people never think about?

Neal Glatt (33:39): people never think about cost per sales call. So how much yeah,

Rob Murray (33:42): It doesn’t cost me anything.

Neal Glatt (33:44): right, right? How much does it actually cost you to win a sale, which is the total comp plan of your salesperson plus their overhead, plus all the technology and expense and and equipment that you gave them, plus all the travel, plus all the company gifting, plus all the proposal costs, like it it’s gonna be a shockingly big number. when you get all down to it. So so you are very comfortable with that kind of number because that’s what you do in ad spend. Here’s how much you put in, here’s how much you got out, right?

Rob Murray (34:15): Well, we measure it for us too and it’s a different model ’cause we’re more way more like commercial. Yeah.

Neal Glatt (34:19): Yeah. And and so how come we don’t let look at that as a salesperson, right? and and know if this even makes sense. it certainly gives you an appreciation for your retention number that that we should be tracking. we’ll look at the number of activities, whether that’s a cold call or networking or door knocking or whatever, compared to the number of leads that we get or appointments that we book. We’ll look at the average time spent. So this one’s wild. if you have a proposal that is more than 30 days old, there’s probably north of an 80% chance that you did not win it.

Rob Murray (34:59): It’s cooked.

Neal Glatt (35:00): But nobody looks at that number. And so when I clean up, help my clients clean up their CRMs, I just sort on age first and I’m like, hey, this is dead, right? No, no, they told me. No, they didn’t. Right. Like it’s dead and you don’t know it.

Rob Murray (35:15): this reminds me, Ness owes me a ribeye steak dinner and a bottle of wine on a deal that she’s Vanessa.

Neal Glatt (35:20): Who does? Vanessa does.

Rob Murray (35:22): Yeah, ’cause we we made this exact thing. She was like, no, they’re gonna come back, they’re gonna sign before July first. This was in like April, and I was like, there’s no F and Way. She’s like, this one’s different.

Neal Glatt (35:30): Yeah. Yeah, right. Exactly right. All right. Well, apologize to Vanessa for making her come come good on her bet.

Rob Murray (35:40): well y I appreciate it. Thank you. I I I I totally forgot.

Neal Glatt (35:44): It it just never does. And that’s true. That’s not just true of you guys or landscaper. That’s true of every industry on the planet, right? It is buyers. And so,

Rob Murray (35:50): Yeah, well it’s also buyers. Buyers buy or they don’t.

Neal Glatt (35:55): yeah, because they either have a need to fill and they’re excited to do it or they’re not. And and if if you are consistently winning a good amount of work older than 30 days, then your salespeople are proposing too early. That’s the that’s the flip side of it, right? And so

Rob Murray (36:09): That’s cool.

Neal Glatt (36:10): the you mentioned pipe drive, and I love what do they call it? Deal rot in their system. It’s so cool, right? They call

Rob Murray (36:15): Mm, mm mm.

Neal Glatt (36:17): it deal rot, because that’s what it is. They’re the your deals are not shelf stable, they do rot on you. but nobody looks at that that timing. in fact, most people don’t even have their deals stages lined up, which is something that we look at all the time. So, which is yeah, in the world of

Rob Murray (36:33): Which is fundamental stuff. Like core.

Neal Glatt (36:37): sales, yeah, it’s groundbreaking and landscaping, but it’s fundamental to sales, right? And

Rob Murray (36:40): Yeah.

Neal Glatt (36:40): so, you know, what’s the difference between someone who is doing a site visit versus someone who we had a presentation with versus someone who gave us a verbal award and we’re negotiating, like And and the systems and like you guys have the landscape CRM, which is awesome. if you don’t have a CRM, call Rob for the landscape CRM to get the get those those stages in place because what’s cool now is you when I was in sales, all of this required hundreds of thousands of dollars for software or hours and hours and hours of tracking. And now it’s Yeah

Rob Murray (37:13): Right. Notes and counter reminders and

Neal Glatt (37:17): And and now the systems are so advanced that it’s like, dude, if you just click this button, it’ll it’ll call them and it’ll log it. And you just select from the drop down and then all your statistics are are set up automatically, right? so it’s a whole new world for sales reps in in that way. and yeah, those that those are probably the biggest ones that people never even think to look at, even when they’re they’re fairly mature in their sales salesmanship.

Rob Murray (37:44): Yeah, okay, so one last one before I I gotta wrap up as much as I don’t want to, we gotta do another one sooner than the last time we did one. but customer acquisition costs is kinda what you’re referring to by salesperson. But customer acquisition cost overall for a business, we find a lot of times when it comes to commercial real like commercial landscaping, whether it’s snow or property maintenance, whatever, the the cost to acquire a customer doesn’t usually make it very profitable in the first year of acquiring the customer. It

Neal Glatt (38:10): Correct.

Rob Murray (38:11): But so then a lot of people are like, I don’t even make money in the first twelve months, but then their average ten year of a

Neal Glatt (38:14): You don’t

Rob Murray (38:15): customer’s so d help me help us understand this a bit better.

Neal Glatt (38:18): Yeah. So what it comes down to is a really difficult take that I now have on account managers in our industry, which is if you can’t keep ninety-two percent of the customers that we give you, you should be fired. And it sounds really, really harsh and nobody likes to hear it, but the reality is if we have account managers who are only retaining eighty eight percent. Or 86% or 78% of our customers, this company will be out of business before you know it. That’s it. Yeah.

Rob Murray (38:47): And there’s only so many properties.

Neal Glatt (38:50): There’s only so many properties. And you can’t burn those bridges. So back to statistics, there’s one that I love called Lifetime Company, Lifetime Customer Value, LTV. very few people track it, but it’s really significant, and it is The total value of this customer that they will spend over their lifetime in this business relationship. So you set up a deal for 10 grand maintenance contract at one property and you hold them for 10 or 15 years. Their lifetime value is 100 or 150,000 based on those 10 or 15 years. Add in the expansion opportunities for the other properties that they own. Add in the enhancement. values of all the enhancements they buy along the way. And very soon you will see that this one customer, this one property manager could have a potential lifetime value of a million dollars, of two million dollars, of ten million dollars, even though in 2026 they’re only worth 10 grand. Well now what are you gonna do for them? freaking anything, right? And and so when someone’s that valuable you should go crazy, man. Like Gift them like crazy, appreciate them like crazy, respon surprise them and delight them like crazy because they’re worth so much. And it’s just the opposite approach of what everybody sorry, operations folks, profitability, right? Well, how much did we make? Can we squeeze out another five hundred bucks from them this year? You know what, man? You you probably could, but they’re not gonna stick around to get to that ten million dollar LTV. So it’s a it’s a different way of thinking. And for us, we were in snow removal, so it was a little bit different. But essentially it was like anything they ever ask for that’s reasonable compared to their lifetime customer value, just do it. And when we compared it to that, it was like, hey, what’s not reasonable? And we

Rob Murray (40:50): Right.

Neal Glatt (40:51): really struggled to come up with examples, right? Cause it was like, Hey, this might it’s gonna cost us like like 20 man hours to do that. Like, who cares, man? They’re the greatest possible customer we can ever imagine.

Rob Murray (41:01): Keep the keep keep the customer. Well, and I think that’s the whole idea, is that the this whole commercial game is essentially buying annuities.

Neal Glatt (41:09): Yes.

Rob Murray (41:10): And so if you if you don’t make any money on your annuity in the first year, but you make all the money in the next nine, it’s a good annuity. And you can buy a boatload of annuities. And so some people

Neal Glatt (41:19): Yes.

Rob Murray (41:21): understand this but a few do, so I appreciate the perspective.

Neal Glatt (41:23): Yeah, man.

Rob Murray (41:25): one last thing, this assessment. Just give people a quick understanding of what they have to do if they want to assess their team and understand their sales DNA.

Neal Glatt (41:31): Yeah. So if you want to take a real scientific approach, if you want something more predictable, you want to get a score on how much your people could potentially sell with some training or or what to train them on next, give us a call. my name’s Neal N E A L Glat G L A T T. The website’s NealGlatt.com we’re all over LinkedIn. shoot us a note, we’ll sit down, talk about you and your business and see if it’s the right fit. If it is, we’ll be happy to give you a proposal for getting that worked in super easy for the assessments. but if it’s not, then we’ll refer you to somebody. And oftentimes that’s back to Rob for marketing. but we

Rob Murray (42:09): Maybe yeah.

Neal Glatt (42:10): we have some other good friends like Rob too that that we might refer you to. And so that’s our promise. Either, either after getting to know you for a little bit, we’ll decide, yeah, we’re exactly the best next step that your business needs. And if you agree, we’ll talk about some investment options. or hey, we think you need to take care of this first and you should talk with someone in marketing like Rob or maybe talk to an operations or leadership person. We have friends who do that, and we’ll make that introduction for you.

Rob Murray (42:35): Awesome, you’re the best buddy. One resource you think people should check out, speaker, author, or something, book?

Neal Glatt (42:40): Well, I’m gonna be super biased now, so just follow Cassidy on on LinkedIn. Cassidy Gutter is my vice president. she posts every single day a sales insight, leadership insight. I noticed today she had a quote of the week. I’m like, okay, so we’re doing quotes of the week now. it’s all good. Sometimes I see it. I’m hey, she wouldn’t be charging for this, but she just she just drops that wisdom. So if you want like a really good Sales insight, no bullshit, no posturing, no AI written, you know,

Rob Murray (43:12): Slop

Neal Glatt (43:13): monotro yeah, slop monologues. Cassie is a good resource for you and that’s that’s free for sure on LinkedIn.

Rob Murray (43:19): Okay, cool. Well we’ll put her LinkedIn profile in the speaker notes. As always, you’re the best. Thank you for doing this, and everybody else for listening to another episode of the IM landscape growth podcast.