Most of Grunder Landscaping's growth in the last 5 years has come from commercial work that we've won organically, not through acquiring the business. As we look ahead to the future, we're adding more commercial work to our plans, too. That means looking for more clients, which is something I'm highly focused on in my role in business development for the team. Here's where we're having success finding new clients: 

First: Relationships

Even more so than in residential landscaping, relationships lead to sales in the commercial space. We're nurturing relationships with architects, municipalities, and general contractors to get referrals from them as they need landscaping work done on properties they work on themselves. 

You may have heard me say it before: One lunch in 2024 lead to $3M in work for us. Business development activities like taking people out golfing, inviting an acquaintance to lunch, or attending chamber of commerce and BOMA events are great ways to deepen relationships with new people. We've won a lot of installation work as a result of relationships we've built in the past two years, and we have more work on the horizon. 

Relationships have power, but equally important is delivering when someone you know decides to trust you. Which brings me to:

Second: Referrals

Especially with maintenance contracts, we're finding that many businesses will trust us with their maintenance for one year and then will send more business our way once we prove ourselves. A simple: "Do you manage any other properties that we could quote work for?" Is often all it takes.

This has been especially impactful when one property manager might have multiple hotels, apartments, office complexes or shopping centers that they manage.

With commercial sales, we've found that it's important that sales teams have the tools they need to be successful: production crews that do good work, competitive and accurate bidding systems, software like Aspire and Bobyard to make it easy to send out proposals quickly, and then tactics they can rely on that will find them new prospects.

It's not always an immediate payoff in the commercial space (sometimes we have to wait for other contracts to expire, budgets to reset, or other trades to finish their work), but the work is out there for salespeople who are willing to do the legwork to win it. 

Want to invest in training for yourself or for your sales team? We have lots of options. We offer our sales training through Greenius by Granum which can be added on to your existing Greenius membership so your sales team can access it on-demand.

And new for this year is The Landscape Pro's Sales Training. Use it to get new salespeople up to speed, or to refresh your team's skills this spring. This is training we put our own sales team through at Grunder Landscaping, so we know that it works!  

Marty Grunder
Founder & CEO
The Grow Group & Grunder Landscaping Co.