Cross-Selling Offers Growth Potential

Most PMPs (85 percent) said mosquito control is offered as an add-on service at their company location, found the 2023 PCT State of the Mosquito Control Market study. In follow-up interviews, they said this provides huge potential to cross-sell the service to existing customers.

Rollins CEO Jerry Gahlhoff, speaking on a 4th quarter earnings call in February, said the company has “plenty of customers” who don’t currently use its mosquito control service; as such, “the upside looks endless” for cross-selling this (and other ancillary) services.

Freedom Pest Control leverages mosquito control to grow its recurring revenue base. People who request the service are the company’s ideal customers — they typically have kids and are worried about more outside pests than just mosquitoes.

“That’s the customer we want to sell our gold plan to,” said President Tom Drapeau. The gold plan protects homes against general insect pests and mice for a monthly fee.

Drapeau designed a marketing plan specifically to convert mosquito customers. “The goal is to bundle everything together: mosquito, tick, termite, general pest control. The optimum customer has all these problems, and we roll them into one bundled package, and we take care of them all,” said Drapeau.

A thorough site inspection can create opportunities to sell additional services. While looking for mosquito breeding sites, “you can tell if there are tell-tale signs of structural pests trying to invade the house,” explained David Madurski, owner of Madurski Termite & Pest Exterminating, Florence, S.C.

He alerts customers to his findings and provides a quote for bundled services. “We have a lot of customers who do the combo services with the structural and the mosquito based off of that,” said Madurski.

Offering mosquito control can help retain customers, as well. “If we don’t (offer it), somebody else will,” said Michael Grace, president, TNT Exterminating Company, Macedonia, Ohio. A while back, he lost some clients to a mosquito franchise company, which prompted him to begin offering the service in earnest.

Providing mosquito control is a “love-hate decision” that doesn’t quite fit Grace’s business model and accounts for less than 1 percent of company revenue, but it keeps customers from spending their money elsewhere, he said.

At Freedom Pest Control, mosquito control sales “took off” after Drapeau created a separate business unit called Mosquito Busters. The suggestion to do this came from his manager, who previously worked at a mosquito franchise company. Drapeau learned from him that people who want mosquito control are drawn to companies that specialize in this service, just like people who want pizza go to a pizzeria and not to a Chinese restaurant.

According to the PCT study, 56 percent of PMPs said mosquito control franchise companies were the primary competition to their mosquito business.