Pre-Selling and Pre-Buying Your Seasons

Plant For Profits Column, Leslie F. Halleck

Don't Let Fear of Commitment Get in Your Way

Getting ahead of the season remains one of the biggest challenges (and opportunities) for businesses in the green industry - be they garden centers, plant shops, landscape design build firms, or tree care companies. If you don’t know what you’re going to be selling, before you have it to sell, it’s pretty tough to get customers excited about what comes next.

Creating interest, excitement, and a sense of urgency (FOMO) with your customers, whether it’s about buying spring-blooming bulbs or booking next season's color enhancements, requires lead time. We’re all consumers. We all have our own busy schedules, needs, and desires and thus we all typically have a running list of to-dos and purchasing priorities in our mind. It can take a little while, and repeated exposure, to finally pull the trigger on a purchase or have the time to get around to visiting a particular retailer. The same goes for our customers.

You need to get on their mental to-buy list well before it’s time for them to buy. This is akin to stimulating reticular activation in your customers minds. By exposing them now to what they’ll need from you a few months from now, you’re waking up their minds to it and they're more likely to keep thinking about what you’ve shown them.

We can’t expect to wait until a particular plant, product, or service is in stock and available to tell everyone about it and expect them to rush right in or call and book services right away. Sure, there may be some high-demand items that come with built in urgency that drives immediate impulse buys. But for the most part, customers need time and multiple reminders about what you have to offer before you can expect them to make the purchase.

So, what must you do? You must pre-sell every season. To effectively pre-sell a season, you must pre-buy the season.

When it comes to tangible inventory, such as plants and gardening tools, it’s tough to plan marketing and execute pre-season promotion, if you don’t know what you’ll actually have in stock in advance. Yet, buying on spec - your JIT (Just in Time) inventory you select from current availabilities- is still pretty pervasive across the industry. Waiting until product may, or may not, be available (JIT inventory) may assuage your internal fears about having too much inventory on hand; but it prohibits you from pre-planning your seasonal marketing, promotions, and customer education. It leaves you in reaction mode, versus planning mode.

For example, if September or October is the time to start seeding and planting cool season vegetables in your area, you really should be talking about using cool season greens and herbs back in June and July…throughout the summer months. When it’s hot and miserable, and many gardeners may be taking an August break from outdoor tasks, there’s nothing better than looking ahead to a nice cool fall with a garden filled with fresh salad greens. That means you’ll need to know, by the beginning of summer, what you’ll plan to have in inventory in the way of cool season vegetable and herb seeds, transplants, fertilizers and tools. At least part of that inventory should be pre-booked. That way, you can start those conversations confidently with your customers. Same goes for anything else you sell in fall.

Plus, we sell live seasonal goods and timing, temperature, and weather is everything. If we don’t tell customers about when and what to plant in their garden well before it’s time to do so, they may miss important planting windows.The reality is we owe it to our customers to give them advance notice and education. Not getting our customers thinking about something they’ll need to be doing in the garden three or four months from now, might leave them scrambling during the season, or missing planting or service windows altogether.

You might think this practice only applies to retail products, but it doesn’t. If you’re in landscape design/build there are plenty of plants and plantings you’ll want to pre-premote as well as color installations you’ll want to pre-book. That means you’ll also be pre-booking with your growers.

I get it - you’re probably afraid of getting stuck with too much inventory, or inventory that doesn’t sell. Pre-booking plants and products is a commitment to that vendor. You don’t get to just decide you don’t want it when it’s time for that product to arrive, even if the weather isn’t cooperating. The first key to taking the fear out of the buying equation is to use smart inventory management skills, such as utilizing a running open-to-buy plan for each month so you can supplement your pre-bookings or pull back on your buying using spec availabilities (JIT inventory) in real time. Then, you make sure you have a marketing plan for how to sell the plants and products, before they arrive. If you do a good enough job pre-selling the product to your customer, the demand will be there when the inventory arrives.

While we all have a busy and potentially profitable fall and holiday season to keep our eyes on - and yes that means you should already have your fall holiday plants, greens and trees pre-booked by now and be starting to talk to your customers about them. Or, selling your fall and holiday color enhancements or porch updates. You should have been (or be) booking spring inventory at the summer trade shows and getting to work on spring marketing and promotions…NOW. Don’t wait until January or February to work on spring, or you’ll definitely be leaving a lot of money on the table.

See what I did there? I’m pre-selling my season. It’s very common for green industry businesses to contact me in January and February, usually in crisis mode, to help them save or revive their business in the spring season. But that’s just about the worst time to try and embark on this journey with me. It’s often too late to make meaningful adjustments to inventory bookings at that point, or have enough lead- time to create effective marketing. It’s also a difficult time to make staffing changes that need to be made, as you’re heading into peak season. In my experience, it’s almost impossible for most business owners to effectively execute a lot of my advice and recommendations once spring has sprung (or the summer installation season for many landscaping companies). Most of you are just trying to survive the season. SO, if you’re considering getting some professional help with your business, and are counting on a profitable 2026 spring or summer season…let’s talk this fall!

You can subscribe to my weekly Plant For Profits newsletter , or my monthly Halleck Horticultural newsletter, HERE.