Growing a landscaping company requires more than just hard work; it demands a system that produces new customers consistently. Without a steady clientele of paying customers providing paying jobs, crews sit idle, and revenue becomes unpredictable at best, and nonexistent at worst. At SynkedUP, we know how important it is to build a customer base. That’s why we’re here to explain how to get landscaping customers for your business by building repeatable systems for marketing, quoting, and follow-up. With those systems in place, contractors can move from chasing leads to confidently managing a full calendar of jobs.
Why You Might Miss Out on the Right Customers
Knowing how to get landscaping customers is a vital part of getting your business, well, off the ground. But like many things, trying to find, keep, and grow a customer base is easier said than done. You may even be doing things you think will net you customers that are in fact doing the opposite. So, if you’re struggling to lock in customers, let’s first make sure you aren’t making any of these mistakes.
Low-balling Estimates
It’s a common enough circumstance: You want to attract and keep customers, so you let them talk you into lowering the price of a potential job, or you estimate a job at the lowest price possible in an attempt to stay competitive. Not only does this seriously threaten profitability for your business, it’s not a great road map for how to get landscaping customers, either. The right customers for you aren’t looking for the lowest offered bid, they’re looking for trust and credibility. A good way to earn those things is by demonstrating your expertise with the job ahead and valuing your team’s hard work at exactly what it’s worth.
Not Knowing Who You’re Looking For
Knowing how to get landscaping customers isn’t just about generating leads, it’s about attracting the right leads. Many contractors never define their ideal customer, which leads to wasted time and mismatched projects. Without a clear profile of your business, what it does best, and what its ideal customer base looks like, your business will end up saying yes to every inquiry that comes your way, even ones that are outside your scope, location, or profit margins.
An “all jobs are good jobs” mentality might seem profitable in the short term, but saying yes to everything will prevent you from being able to focus on high-fit, high-profit jobs that could build long-term stability.
Not Following Up
This one should be a no-brainer. Follow-up is one of the simplest but most overlooked parts of learning how to get landscaping customers consistently. Even the best first impression can be ruined by a slow or inconsistent follow-up process. Every day that passes after you leave a consultation on a customer’s property diminishes your chance of closing that job. Contractors who don’t follow up with potential customers quickly or at all will be forgotten, no matter how good their service is.
How to Get Landscaping Customers Through Better Marketing
Figuring out how to get landscaping customers starts with figuring out the right marketing strategy for your business. A great way to start with marketing is to start small and start local. Even as the world gets more high-tech, simple, local-first marketing tactics remain some of the highest-converting lead sources for landscaping contractors. Think methods like referrals, putting up yard signs, paying close attention to Google reviews, and touting your business at local events.
You can also install small public displays of your work at local businesses and restaurants your ideal customers frequent, similar to Tussey Landscaping’s public landscape displays. These displays act as real-world portfolio pieces—just make sure you have signage with a clear call-to-action visible so viewers know who to contact.
Maintaining an active Google Business profile, complete with recent photos and reviews, will help you show up where people search online. Staying at the top of potential customers’ minds is critical, and regularly showing your work across digital channels is a good way to keep yourself and your business relevant. Treat it like a social media profile; post on it regularly and make it a priority to get reviews. Reviews are gold for online visibility.
If you’re not visible online, customers tend to forget you exist, even if you did great work for them in the past! Use before-and-after photos, job walkthrough videos, and project reels on your business’s website or social media platform of choice to show potential customers exactly what you and your business are capable of.
When it comes to using marketing to try to crack how to get landscaping customers, you don’t necessarily have to go it alone, either! Strategic partnerships can generate warm leads from trusted sources. For example, builders, pool installers, homeowners associations, and real estate agents often know customers who need landscaping work. When those partners refer you and your services, you’re already starting from a place of trust.
In fact, some contractors see enormous growth from this approach. One landscaper added over a million dollars to their annual revenue simply by leveraging long-term relationships with builders in their area. Of course, it wasn’t an overnight success. They spent years nurturing those relationships before they returned results at that scale. The point here is that business partnerships are a long-term commitment, but once you have a strong referral network, the leads that come from it are some of the warmest and most reliable you’ll ever get.
Speed and Professionalism Close More Jobs
So far, we’ve really gone over how to attract leads. If you want to figure out how to get landscaping customers, you also need to figure out how to turn leads into jobs. The most effective way to close more jobs is to speed up your turnaround times! Having a quick turnaround time on a job quote will win you more jobs than offering the lowest price ever will. Not to mention that when you quickly, efficiently, and accurately produce a professional quote, it can go a long way in establishing trust and credibility with potential customers.
Understanding how to get landscaping customers starts with building reliable, consistent systems. Systems like estimating templates, which let contractors build quotes faster with fewer errors, provide a more polished customer experience. Proposals offer another avenue for contractors to hone and highlight their professionalism. A well-designed, clear proposal helps customers understand the value of your work.
Plus professional proposals have the added benefit of reducing confusion and limiting last-minute objections from customers. Just remember: details kill deals. Don’t compensate for a lack of confidence by overloading your proposal with technical jargon. Keep your language focused on vision and outcomes so customers stay excited about what you’re delivering.
And Don’t Forget to Follow Up!
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: A lackluster follow-up, or no follow-up at all, will doom even the most talented contractors. The follow-up process for your business should be automatic, timely, and built into how you conduct sales. When contractors forget to check in after a consult, or assume a customer will call them back, they lose jobs.
In fact, according to Proposify’s State of Proposals report, the average time from first open to deal closed is about 51 hours (just over 2 days). This makes fast, consistent follow-ups that much more important. Automatic email or text reminders within one or two days will help customers keep you in their minds, and help you stay in control of the sale. Mastering follow-up is one of the simplest ways to improve how to get landscaping customers consistently.
Confident Pricing Attracts Better Customers
Accurate, assertive pricing is vital for any contractor wondering how to get landscaping customers. Confidence in your pricing communicates that you know your work is valuable and worth the investment. When you’re not confident in your pricing, customers can smell it like blood in the water. If you hesitate or undercharge, you’re just inviting doubt, and undermining your own authority in the interaction.
It’s important to remember that the best customers aren’t shopping for the cheapest price, they’re shopping for the solution they trust the most. High-trust customers will pay more if you believe you understand their vision and can deliver on your promises.
Confident pricing comes from having a strong working understanding of your break-even rates, overhead, and margins. Unfortunately, most contractors don’t actually know their own numbers. This leads to inaccurate or roughly estimated prices, which leads to undercharging, second-guessing yourself, and burnout. Better, smarter pricing comes from knowing your actual job costs and what profit you need to keep your business sustainable.
Turning Leads Into Long-Term Pipeline Growth
Figuring out how to get landscaping customers also includes learning how to keep those customers (and turn them into loyal advocates for your business). Every customer interaction should plant the seed for future referrals and repeat business. Don’t think of a completed project as the end! Instead, think of it as the beginning of opportunities for word-of-mouth advertising and reengagement. Encourage this growth by asking happy customers for reviews, photos, and offering incentives for referrals when appropriate.
It’s also a good idea to make note of your company’s best customers, tracking where they come from, and then investing more in the highest-converting channels. Tag each lead source— referral, organic, Google, Facebook, TikTok, etc—and note which ones close fastest, or tend to spend more. Then double down on growing your highest channels, and eliminate the ones with the worst ROI. Don’t try to do everything at once. If you split your focus between too many channels, you’ll just spend more and get less from it.
Remember What We Said About Following Up?
Customers who you’ve done work for in the past and old leads should hear from your business regularly throughout the year. To keep your business top of mind, send seasonal emails, make follow-up calls, or put out promotional reminders. Even a simple check-in like “Ready to refresh your patio for spring?” can reopen a conversation, and might even lead to a job.
To hear us talk more about these ideas, watch our on-demand training, 4 Ways to Close More Jobs. It breaks down simple, proven methods for converting more estimates into signed proposals.
Growth and Profitability Have Never Been Easier. Just Ask SynkedUP!
Learning how to get landscaping customers is an important part of growing your business, but attracting new leads is only the beginning. To stay profitable, you need accurate estimates, strong production rates, real-time job insights, and systems that keep your entire operation running smoothly. That’s where SynkedUP makes the difference.
SynkedUP leverages real job data to help contractors deliver accurate production rates, track man-hours, and report on expenses and progress in real time, whether in the office or in the field, via our mobile app. With our custom-built templates, job estimating becomes a quick, intuitive process, allowing landscapers to make and send accurate, professional proposals in minutes, instead of days or hours. With half of all proposals created in 17 minutes or less, and 43% of proposals closed within 24 hours of being opened, it’s that much more important to have a fast, professional proposal process. And if you ever have any questions or concerns, our hands-on support team is more than happy to help!
You have the knowledge and skills to build your business into exactly what you want it to be. Let us provide the tools to make it easy and fun! To learn more about how to get landscaping customers and manage your business successfully, contact us to schedule a demo with SynkedUP today.
