Landscape Lighting: Do Your Customers Really Have A Need For It?

Have you ever wondered why you didn't get the sale? Have you ever kept track of the reasons why?

In the sales process you can usually reduce the reasons why you didn't get the sale, or why your prospects weren't interested, to SIX BASIC OBJECTIONS. By doing this, the theory says, you can start to formulate good responses to overcoming those six basic objections. To test this theory, for the past three years, I've started each of our landscape lighting seminars with this question to the class: "Give me six basic reasons why your customers or prospects won't buy professionally installed landscape lighting from you."

The theory of reducing the SIX BASIC OBJECTIONS works. After putting on seminars in Washington DC, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, St Louis and more... the answers are all almost identical. Green Industry professionals from across the Eastern United States give me the same six basic objections. Everybody can guess the first. Price. There's a surprise. They can guess another one which I have labeled the "kit objection -- I can get it at the home centers for $49.95, so why should I pay you $2,000 for a professional system."

Good objections aren't they? But one of the six basic objections was the most telling, and at the root of why some Green Industry professionals aren't as successful as they could be at selling professional landscape lighting. "My customers don't perceive a need - it's a luxury item."

Do you perceive a need? After three years of doing seminars in major markets across the United States, I've begun to fore. But when was the last time you approached a job site, and informed your client that you could address these three basic concerns with landscape lighting? When I pose this question in a roomful of green industry professionals in a seminar setting, their eyes begin to roll. Then I ask, "Why do people need landscaping? Is their truly a need for it?" After a few people try to defend their plants and shrubs they begin to see how landscape lighting can fulfill a very useful purpose for their customers.

Security concerns? If you don't think people are willing to pay for a certain degree of security, start taking notice of the proliferation of companies that are servicing the home security market. Start noticing how many yard signs are in front of homes today warning possible intruders that the home is protected with a security system. If there are six homes on the street, and only one is completely lit with landscape lighting, which house is an intruder least likely to pursue? With landscape lighting the prowler sees the security sign from the street. Effectively constructing and designing a landscape lighting system that takes into account each concern - beauty, safety, and security - will be very effective in providing ample protection and security to your customers.

If you still don't believe your customers don't have a need for the security lighting you can provide, ask yourself how many of your customers have porch lights? How many would leave that on at night?

With a landscape lighting system, your customers get not only security, but the safety elements are addressed. Changes in the elevation, low level shrubs or plant material that people may trip over, all are potential safety concerns for the homeowner and his guests. Changes in the steps, the deck, the driveway, the entrance ways, all of these potential safety hazards and more can be addressed with landscape lighting. And by building in the proper controls for your customer with their landscape lighting system, safety concerns can be "turned on" with motion sensing devices, timers and more, to give your customer the comfort that his family, and their potential visitors are all able to avoid trouble by having their safety concerns addressed.

As you can see, landscape lighting systems may fulfill more actual client needs than many other offerings being made in the Green Industry today. If you can effectively present to your clients, how you can address some beauty and safety concerns with landscape lighting, you're 90 percent on your way to a sale. That's because the easy part, and by far the biggest added value of a landscape lighting system, is the beauty aspect. Most of us focus first on beauty in landscape lighting, and so dramatically diminish the safety and security issues, that we also begin to believe in the myth that landscape lighting is a luxury. You have to believe, and with good reason, that an effective landscape lighting system fulfills some basic overall needs that every client you have wants to be fulfilled.

Being able to effectively present this to your clients goes a long way toward overcoming the most often stated objection to landscape lighting. Price. By showing your customer how your design, and your concepts will address all of these beauty, safety and security concerns, your customers will begin to see that you're not only installing a high quality product, but you're providing them an understanding an knowledge that will create a system that all value to their home.

Now let's talk about the selfish side. Nothing can help your referrals more than an effective landscape lighting system. It will not only expand the "living space" for your clients, it will give them 12 month access and enjoyment to their landscape investment. In Michigan, where you only have abundant day time light from late April to late September, landscape lighting's role in keeping your customers satisfied is even more dramatic. Consider Joe Homeowner who just made a large investment in his landscape. When is he going to really get to enjoy it? A couple months out of the year at best if there isn't landscape lighting. For a fraction of the total cost of landscape installation, landscape lighting will allow your customers to benefit from the safety and security aspects of landscape lighting, and enjoy the beauty that you brought to them for an entire season.

To overcome each of the basic six objections that are in every sales presentation, first overcome your own misconceptions. There truly is a need for landscape lighting. It's not a luxury. It's something which will bring year after year of benefits to your clients. And, it'll still do wonders for your referrals.