“A season like this one rewards reps who did their homework,” said Garth Massey, co-founder and president of sales at Grit Marketing, describing the company’s approach to this year’s unusually active tick season. “The data is public. The difference is whether you can explain it clearly enough that someone trusts you to fix the problem.” The comment came as CDC data showed emergency room visits for tick bites running at levels not seen since 2017.

The comment reflects a broader strategy at the company: treating a spike in CDC tick bite data as a reason to knock on doors with an informed pitch, rather than leaning on urgency the underlying numbers do not actually support. Emergency rooms nationally logged their highest rate of tick bite visits for this time of year since 2017, with April visits up more than 25 percent over 2025 and the Northeast posting the sharpest regional increase of all.

Grit Marketing, which trains representatives to sell pest control services directly to homeowners, positions that kind of data literacy as core to how it prepares its sales force rather than a one-time talking point. More on the organization’s training philosophy is on its website, and coverage of a recent season\u2019s results shows how that training approach has translated into performance figures.

Massey’s framing draws a clear line: a pitch grounded in a federal health agency’s own published tracker can be checked against the same public data the rep is citing, which is a different kind of claim than manufactured scarcity that tends to collapse under a homeowner’s own research.