We’re putting on a can’t-miss webinar tomorrow with our resident sales expert and columnist Marty Grunder.

It starts at 12:30 EDT tomorrow, and you can register here.

Yes, it costs $69.99. But you’ll get invaluable insight and proven sales strategies that you can implement in your business tomorrow, including:

• How to screen each and every prospect to make sure you are meeting with prospect who will buy.
• What you must do before each and every call to improve your chances for making a sale by 50%.
• Why your price doesn’t matter if you do 3 simple things.

Plus, you’ll get a  sneak preview of the L&L State of the Industry research on revenue and profits from me.

If you can’t make it tomorrow afternoon, you can still register to get access the recorded version later on.

So, if you want to increase your sales this fall and in 2013, you owe it to yourself to spend an hour with us tomorrow. You’ll be glad you did.

Marty’s great idea this week helps you focus on your ever-growing to-do list.

Take a notebook and a pen and go to a quiet place and write down the 3 most important things you must do between now and the end of the year to have a successful year. If you end up with 5, okay, but 3 is even better. Then get focused on those and spend time each week on them.

Read the full post at Marty’s site.

Marty Grunder tells us this week to focus not just on our work, but what our work does for us.

I just got back from being on Spring Break with my family in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. The fact that I have a team at Grunder Landscaping Co. that is so good I can leave for a week during the busiest time of the year says a lot about my leaders. I would not be able to do this if it weren’t for them. Our trip was not anything fancy; we drove down there; we stayed in a condo; we cooked some of our own meals; we went out to dinner with our friends who came down with us; and we did a whole lot of bonding and a whole lot of nothing. And, we enjoyed our success. My wife Lisa and I are lucky beyond belief. We don’t have more money than we know what to do with but emotionally we’re filthy rich! So, in the next week, make sure you take some time to enjoy your success. It doesn’t have to be a big deal; go to dinner; take an afternoon off and go home early; buy a new pair of shoes; get your car detailed; just do something that enables you to see some of the fruits of your labor. It’s spring and landscapers are busy now. We need to take a deep breath and sit back once in a while, even when we are our busiest.

You can read the full story – including what Joey Votto, the Cincinnati Reds and $220 million dollars have to do with it – here.

Here’s our Friday digest of fun and interesting stuff from the web. Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

• Small business M&A activity is at its highest point in three years.
• Phoenix housing is back on track. (via @martygrunder)
• How we pay taxes.
• Joe Calloway offers some great advice.
• We should all aspire to this level of brand loyalty.
• Modern (business) etiquette.
• Above: Mike Schwarze of Mike’s Tree Care saves a baby owl, remains awesome while doing so. (via @voiceoftreecare)

Don’t tell Marty Grudner, but in May, Frontier Airlines will stop serving its beloved chocolate chip cookies.

The sugary treat that for many years had delighted weary passengers is going the way of … pretty much every other nice thing that used to be associated with air travel.

Save for the elite class of business traveler (who are hard to see what with all the chickens flying around back where I sit), most of us have seen benefits and extras like Frontier’s cookies disappear from airlines and many other services we purchase.

That’s why doing small things for customers can go such a long way to cementing a relationship. Send a hand-written thank-you note. Call a few days after the first application to make sure the service was good.

These things don’t cost a lot, but they’re worth a ton.

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

Here’s our weekly digest of fun links from around the web. Hope you like them!

• An edible urban forest is planned for Seattle.
• You can help shape the next version of LEED. (via @waterguru2)
• Nearly half of Americans now own smartphones. More than 60% of people with household income of more than $75,000 do.
• On sick days and dedication. (via @martygrunder)
• A new app to track your water footprint.
• Woman smoking meth burns down Florida’s oldest tree.
• Above: A record player that makes music from trees.

Have you signed up for GROW! yet? It’s an annual business development conference put on by Marty Grunder and a team of experts. The whole thing is designed to help you improve your business, but also help you develop as a leader.

There’s still time to sign up.

This one comes from L&L columnist Mary Grunder, who gives us an inside peek at how his maintenance team operates in the winter months.

At the end of the year, his fleet and facilities  manager, Joe Spatz, sends out an email to the company, asking after their trucks, equipment and tools. At Grunder Landscaping, Joe is responsible for 27 vehicles, 21 trailers and 150 individual pieces of equipment.

Every December, he wants to know what needs to be repaired or replaced during the winter, so everyone can operate efficiently out of the gate come spring.

“This is a small thing we do, but it’s thinking like this that helps us improve,” Marty says. “And when you can get your people to do this (I had nothing to do with this), you are on the right track.”

You can download Joe’s form here.

I’m down in rural Alabama this week attending the fourth-annual Green Industry Grad School. It’s a three-day development program put on by Agrium Advanced Technologies for about 40 LCOs from across the country. Thankfully, they put me up in a cabin with wireless, so I’m not too far off the beaten path.

L&L columnist Marty Grunder works with AAT, and he opened the event last night after dinner with his talk, “Outdone! 11 Ways You Can Outsell, Out Service and Outdo Your Competition.” Regular readers of his column and L&L will recognize the talk, but it’s got great, easy-to-implement messages for any company as you head into the off season.

Here are my favorites from last night.

1. Offer great customer service.

This one sounds like a no-brainer, and it is. But think back on the last week of interactions you’ve had with other service companies. How’d they treat you? “The competition can’t copy how you treat your clients. Don’t give them a reason to go anywhere else,” Grunder says.

4. Have a team atmosphere

One of the complaints I hear most often from readers is that they can’t find quality employees. One of the best ways to attract good people is to take care of the folks you’ve already got. People talk, and you’ll become a magnet for solid hires.

“For someone to feel like they’re part of a team, they have to be valued – they have to be loved,” Grunder says.

7. Set objectives and 11. Have a plan

These two are closely linked. This winter, write down where you are now as a company, and where want to be in 12 months.Then just connect the dots. Once you do that, tell everyone on your team what the plan is, and stick to it.

9. Learn

Not everyone can attend GIGS, but there’s a world of resources at your disposal. I’d hazard a guess that if you’re reading this, you have access t the Internet. Or, attend one of the hundred regional trade shows that take place between now and March. Or read a book.

You can read the full list of Grunder’s 11 tips here. Stay tuned for more coverage of GIGS.

How much do you pay for print ads in your local shelter magazines? Radio spots? Flyers and mailers and postcards and rented lists and door-to-door salesmen to sign up new customers?

Or, if you rely on word of mouth: How much effort do you and your team put into your work to ensure Mrs. Jones tells her book club about how much she loves her new patio?

Take a minute this morning to think of all the time and hard costs associated with a great referral program, landing new business and keeping current clients happy.

Then listen to your receptionist answer the phone.

Seth Godin describes the bad side of this process bluntly:

When a new referral shows up, all that work and expense, and then the phone rings and it gets answered by your annoyed, overworked, burned out, never very good at it anyway receptionist, it all falls apart.

Marty Grunder always asks his audiences why the (often) lowest-paid person on your staff is (usually) the first person new customers deal with.

You spend a lot of time each day with your foremen and crews and suppliers. But your customers spend most of their time interacting with your folks on the phone.

The more effort you expend pusing people to call in, the more you should work to make sure the folks answering those calls are doing it right. Otherwise you’re wasting a lot of time and money.