Seven small enhancement wins changed how Elevate looked at its pipeline

Mike Fariss knew Elevate's crews needed more work. The confusing part was that the sales pipeline didn't look empty. There were real dollars sitting in enhancement proposals. They just weren't turning into enough jobs the team could schedule.

Elevate Landscapes runs landscape maintenance, irrigation, installation, and snow removal out of Colorado Springs. Like every landscaping company, its summer has a rhythm — and this summer, new sales had hit a lull while the crews still needed work on the board.

A large proposal can make a pipeline look healthy for weeks. It doesn't keep a crew busy until it closes and gets scheduled.

Instead of “sell more,” Mike asked “sell what?”

The easy move when sales slow down is to tell the team to sell more. Mike didn't start there. He started with the close rate on construction and enhancement work — it looked weak, and he wanted to know why.

Using Capsa's Sales Dashboard, he broke the team's enhancement proposals down by size and looked at what Elevate was actually proposing — and what it historically closed.

I found that in Capsa.

The distinction that matters here is easy to miss when you're only watching one pipeline total. Dollars sitting in open proposals, jobs likely to close, and work that can reach the schedule soon enough to matter are three different things.

The wrong type of bid

What Mike found wasn't a lack of effort. It was a mix problem. Too much of the team's proposal effort was concentrated in larger opportunities — many above roughly $20,000. Those proposals made the pipeline look heavier, but they closed less often.

Meanwhile, there were too few of the jobs around the roughly $5,000 size that Elevate had historically won more often — the smaller enhancement work that closes fast and fits onto the schedule quickly.

We aren't getting enough of the like $5,000 jobs being bid out.

The problem wasn't a need to chase more total dollars. It was the wrong type of bid for what the business needed right then: near-term work for crews that were ready to run it.

One person, one batch of smaller proposals

Mike's response was deliberately simple. He put one person on producing a batch of smaller, easier enhancement proposals. No reorganization, no new process — just a clear reallocation of proposal effort toward the size of job the team actually won.

Capsa made the pattern visible. Mike made the call.

Seven wins in one day

On July 15, seven of those smaller enhancement proposals were proposed and won that same day, totaling $2,089.

We got like six of them back yesterday.

Mike was recalling the day from memory — the system record counted seven, all proposed and won on July 15.

By the end of the week, the batch approach had added up: Elevate won 18 enhancement proposals worth $11.3K during the week of July 12–18.

From the pipeline to the schedule

None of the seven wins was a big number on its own. That was the point. Small enhancement jobs don't sit in a pipeline for weeks waiting on approvals — they close fast and slot in fast.

The team could put the new work onto the following week's schedule alongside maintenance visits already on the calendar. For a company whose real problem was keeping crews busy in the near term, that's the outcome that mattered — not a bigger pipeline number, but closed work on the schedule.

A new Monday habit

The seven same-day wins make a good story. The more durable change is what Mike did next: he made the sales-goal view part of Elevate's weekly Monday sales meeting.

This will now be part of my weekly sales meeting on Mondays.

That turns proposal mix from a one-time discovery into a standing management question: are we proposing the kind of work we actually close, in the sizes we can schedule, at the pace the crews need? A pile of proposal dollars doesn't keep a crew busy. Closed work on the schedule does.

Try this with your own pipeline

You can run the same analysis Mike did. It takes one afternoon:

1. Pull the last 90 days of enhancement proposals.
2. Bucket them by size. Start with under $5K, $5K–$20K, and over $20K, then adjust the bands for your company.
3. For each bucket, calculate proposal count, total dollars, close rate, median days to close, and median days to start.
4. Compare likely wins with the next two to four weeks of crew capacity.
5. If one useful size band is underrepresented, assign an owner to build and send more of those proposals.
6. Review the mix weekly instead of looking only at total proposal dollars.

The takeaway isn't “only sell small jobs.” Elevate needed a better mix for that moment. The takeaway is to make sure the proposal mix matches the work your team needs — by count, size, close rate, and timing, not only total pipeline dollars.

The wins, at a glance

Capsa helps landscaping teams see proposal count, size, close rate, and revenue targets in one place — before a sales gap becomes an empty schedule.