Behind every outdoor living space, there's a potential for it to be transformed into the most popular area of the home—creating a cozy outdoor retreat and generating a high return on investment upon selling, compared to other home improvements.
Below are three concrete ways to help you seamlessly lay the groundwork for successfully selling hardscape to your customers.
Base preparation is the foundation of a beautiful, long-lasting hardscape, as is the working relationship between you and your customers. It’s crucial to prepare a foundation you can build upon. Begin by talking to your customers who are interested in keeping up with the latest backyard landscape design projects and trends. Taking time to understand your customers enables you to earn their trust and learn their preferences for outdoor living spaces.
By understanding your customers’ preferences, you can determine how to provide them with an outdoor living space, ensuring your finished product matches their expectations and interlocks with their daily life.
“It’s important that you know your customers so you can offer and ultimately create what it is they’re wanting to achieve and accommodate their lifestyle,” said Jesse Cravath, Ewing’s National Hardscape Product Manager.
Also knowing your customers helps create unique selling strategies. Outdoor living welcomes opportunities for increased sales in hardscape specialty products, such as an outdoor kitchen and bar, fire pit or pizza oven.
“Don’t miss out on selling opportunities,” Cravath said. “You want to take advantage of the opportunities that come with selling hardscape. Start by asking your customers multi-pronged questions. Often times one question leads to another, which can lead to a sale of something your customer wasn’t even thinking of buying."
You can also include other specialty services, like outdoor sound systems, landscape lighting and…mosquito repellent?
Yes! Maybe you have a customer whose family enjoys using their swimming pool area and wants an outdoor kitchen added to accommodate their backyard oasis. After selling them on the kitchen, ask if they have problems with mosquitoes. You can increase profits by installing mosquito repellent fixtures.
For a natural blend and balance between your customers’ softscape and hardscape (and a successful unification of old landscape with new), you can achieve a cohesive outdoor living space for your customers by being aware of and complementing their existing features and designs.
Explain to your customers the relationship between hardscape and softscape. These subcategories of landscaping should work to form a complementary design, a design showcasing a beautiful and well-balanced outdoor living area.
Discuss with your customers hardscape options pertaining to sizes and cuts, as well as colors and blending options. Make sure your customers’ selections mesh with their existing environment. The most common colors are shades of brown and tan. However, if budget isn’t a concern, silver and gray are beginning to trend.
It’s important to accommodate these hardscape options with your customers’ surrounding environments. A common dilemma is successfully utilizing or working around what’s already established, like a pool for instance. You don’t want the newly installed finished product to clash with any existing hardscape, softscape or features.
“You want to complement your customers’ area where the hardscape will be installed,” Cravath said. “When selling hardscape, and to achieve a finished product that matches your customers' expectations, it's important to discuss the patterns, sizes, colors and blending options that best work in the existing landscape.”
3. Consider existing installations
Existing landscape installation features, such as drainage, cannot be overlooked, as installing hardscape has the potential to create problems later on, like flooding.
To avoid such problems, plan ahead and map out the jobsite with your customers. Draw up a construction plan that considers the basics of your customers’ landscapes.
Have a story, helpful tricks or tips about hardscape? Comment below! Stop by your local Ewing store to get all your products and hardscape questions answered for your next project.