Emergency rooms across the country logged their highest rate of tick bite visits for this time of year since 2017, according to CDC data released this spring. April visits climbed more than 25 percent compared to the same month in 2025, with the Northeast recording the sharpest increase of any region. For pest control sales teams, that kind of public health data changes the conversation before a rep ever knocks.
Milder winters have been cited as a leading driver, since ticks that would typically die off in a hard freeze are instead surviving into the following season in greater numbers. That earlier, more active season means homeowners are noticing tick activity well before the calendar would normally put pest control on their radar.
Grit Marketing, which trains representatives to sell pest control services directly to homeowners, has built its approach around that kind of situational awareness, treating a spike in local health data as a legitimate reason to be on someone’s porch rather than an excuse to lean on urgency the data does not support. More on the organization is on its website, and earlier coverage of its training results details how that approach has shown up in performance numbers.
Whether that data-literate approach converts into more closed inspections is ultimately a local question, but the underlying premise is straightforward: a pitch grounded in a season homeowners are already noticing lands differently than one built on a generic script that ignores what is actually happening in a given week.