I've been selling landscaping for 40+ years now, and in that time, I've worked with all kinds of clients. I've sold to the engineers who want to talk about the specifics of the plan and see detailed drawings, the business owner who is worried about not having to worry about the landscaping, and the stay-at-home parent who wants to talk about how the end-result space will be used for hosting or playing. What's obvious to every salesperson is that every client will require different information and support in order to make their decision. 

Dawn Arnold, our Director of Sales Operations at Grunder Landscaping Co., recently held a training for our sales team based on a presentation she attended at GROW! 2025 in Columbus, Ohio taught by Megan Parker and Tracy Wallingford, two of our executive coaches with McFarlin Stanford who are facilitators in our ACE Peer Groups and coach our GLC Team on our Clifton Strengths journey. This is such a smart use of content and education from an industry event: to bring the ideas you learned back and teach them to your whole team. 

Megan and Tracy used the four domains of Clifton Strengths as a way to filter how certain personalities want to be sold to. Executors, Influencers, Relationship Builders, and Strategic Thinkers all want to be sold to and communicated in a different way. We re-presented this information to the sales team, then asked them each to identify a client they've worked with recently and which category the client fit into. Dawn asked them to evaluate how they could've better tailored their approach with this information. The sales team had a great discussion about this, with salespeople chiming in to offer suggestions to how others could handle a situation, too.

So, this week here's my task for you: look at the education you've had in the last year from industry (or non-industry) events you've attended. How could you do a short presentation to your teammates about what you learned and then facilitate a discussion to take those learnings one step further?

And if you're looking for ways to learn more, we have plenty of opportunities coming up. Join us at one of our two remaining Grunder Landscaping Co. Fall Field Trips, come to Annapolis, MD on September 23-24 for the NALP Field Trip, sign up for our Virtual Sales Bootcamp in October, join us for ACE Peer Group Discovery in November or lock-in early-bird pricing and register for GROW! 2026 in Dallas, TX. I hope to see you soon, either in-person or online!