landscaping and pavement maintenance diagrams

Best Practices: How to Build a Database of Property Measurements for Your Most Desired Prospects with Go iLawn and Go iPave

Would you like to have a database of property information for your most desired prospects for your landscape or pavement maintenance company? Who wouldn’t, right? Well, I have good news for you. This is really easy to do on Go iLawn and Go iPave. Seriously. In a few easy steps you can start paving (or mowing) your way towards total market domination.

With the help of a handful of our tools and a little bit of organization on your end, you can easily build yourself a comprehensive database of prospects that you can tap into again and again.

Step One: Conquer the Building Blocks of Your Property Measurement Database 

It all starts with saving your property photos and information when you’re measuring in Go iLawn and Go iPave. If you’re already doing this, then you’re on your way to building up your database. If you’re not already doing this, you’ve got to start saving today because you can’t build a database without data. With that said, let’s do a quick review of what you can and should save when measuring properties on our sites:

Property Photos

Be sure to save at least one property photo per takeoff. We don’t limit you on the number of photos you can save per property, so the possibilities are endless as far as the types of photos you can add to your database. I would recommend saving overhead photos of the property with and without measurements, as well as the north, south, east and west photos of the property.

Weaver Pkwy blank and full service

Excel Spreadsheet with Measurements

You can export your property measurements to an Excel spreadsheet that shows the property address and all of the property measurements for that particular property.

A tip to help you get better data on your spreadsheet is to change the labels on your property measurements to something descriptive so you know what your measurements are for when you save the spreadsheet. For example, if you measure the front yard of a property in our program, we’ll give it a label that will say something like A-56S. Change that label to say “Front Yard” and when you save your spreadsheet, it will say “Front Yard” next to your measurement rather than A-56S.

When you are looking at information for this property months down the road, you will appreciate that you took the time to add a descriptive label to your measurements.

Go iLawn excel spreadsheet with labels

Workspace Files

This is your Go iLawn or Go iPave file that saves your property measurements to your computer so you can load them up at a later date to make changes to your measurements or photos. Workspace files will save you an incredible amount of time if a customer wants to change something about an estimate. All you have to do is load it up, make the changes and voila-you are done.

Having a database of workspace files will be extremely helpful down the road as well because if you’re tapping into your database next year, or the year after to provide a prospect a quote, you can load up the workspace to be sure nothing has changed on the property since you last measured.

Step Two: Set up a System for Organizing Your Files

Your property photos, spreadsheets and workspace files are the building blocks of your property measurement database so it’s important to take the time to properly organize them. You might want to create a “Go iLawn” folder on your computer for example, and within the folder create folders for each ZIP Code or area. Save your properties to the appropriate folder so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for when you’re ready to market to your database.

It’s also a good idea to use the same file name for all three file types so you can quickly find everything you need when it comes time to market to your prospects.

Step Three: Target Your Most Desirable Neighborhoods & Enlist the Power of Parcel to Parcel 

Now that you know what files you’ll need to save and how you’re going to organize them, it’s time to start measuring and producing your data.

Because you know your market well, you probably know key areas (ZIP codes, neighborhoods etc.) where you would like to grow your business. I would say try to think of an area where you know of three or more properties you would like to have in your book of business. Select an address, business name or street intersection in one of your most desirable areas, and start measuring your first most desired prospect property.

When you’re finished and you’ve saved your property photos and information to your Go iLawn or Go iPave folder, we have a handy little tool that will help you move on to measure neighboring properties that you want to add to your database. It’s called the parcel to parcel tool and it’s represented by a four leaf clover on our tool bar.

The parcel to parcel tool will give you the property boundaries and addresses for any property you use it on (as long as we have property boundary information for your area). This means you can use the parcel to parcel tool to go up and down the street and measure every property in your desirable ZIP codes or neighborhoods.

Here’s a quick video that shows you how to use the parcel to parcel tool:

Step Four: Achieve Total Market Domination One Property at a Time

Building yourself a database of your most desired prospects for your landscaping or pavement maintenance company is going to take some time, but it will be worth it in the end. By measuring one extra property when you’re working on Go iLawn and Go iPave you’ve added one more potential sale to your sales pipeline.

Plus, when it’s all said and done, you will have tons of valuable information about the properties in your market at your fingertips. And the best part about it is you can tap into it again next year, and the year after that, and the year after that…until you win the business from all of your most desired prospects and you have to build yourself another database for total market domination.

Go get ’em!

 

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