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Getting Your First Cleaning Business Leads

 

When you first start your cleaning business, you’ve got new crisp business cards, ads that you personally developed, cleaning supplies ready to go and eagerness to start cleaning. However, the success of your cleaning business, home cleaning or commercial boils down to one thing: you need leads.  Without your first cleaning business leads you might as well shut down shop, because let’s face it, business leads equal sales and sales pay yourself. Leads are what successful sales people convert to customers and grow long lasting relationships. If you can successfully convert your cleaning business leads, you are off to the races as they say.

Sounds simple right?

Actually it is pretty simple. Converting your cleaning business leads into customer is essentially your bread and butter of how successful you’ll become with your cleaning business or any other business for that matter.  The place many people get off track is at the beginning, as they don’t even know where to start.

Certainly we can mutually agree on one thing: there are many ways to get cleaning leads. But which ones are most effective? Which require a minimum investment of your time and money? These are some of things you need to think about. Hopefully in today’s post I’ll be able to make the picture clearer en route to gaining some of your first cleaning business leads.

Hand Out Flyers

This is probably the most simplest, least time consuming and least expensive way to gain your first cleaning business leads. When I first started out, this was my bread and butter. It worked well for me because I could create my own flyers and more importantly distribute the developed flyers myself. Here’s how to effectively hand out flyers in hopes of gaining your first cleaning business leads.

  • Develop your own at home flyer
  • Include a few words on why anyone would want to do business with you
  • Don’t forget to include your phone number and any other contact info
  • Hand out your homemade flyers to friends, family members, neighbours etc.
  • For those of you in commercial cleaning, visit small businesses in your neighbourhood during and after work hours.
  • Always carry business cards, and be ready to hand out at any interaction along the way.

FREE Advertising

A website, even a simple design, will place your business name on the Internet, but that doesn’t guarantee that your website will rank high or even display in search results of Internet users looking for the products or services that your business offers. Let’s hope that you either have a website or that you’re in the process of creating one. Having a website is one of the simplest ways to establish online presence. Here’s where you can advertise your new cleaning business online for FREE.

Yahoo Local – One free business listing where you can include your web address, phone number, physical address and add your business up to five different categories.

Google Places – Very similar to Yahoo’s Local where you can add your web address, phone numbers etc..

Merchant Circle – Similar to Google Places and Yahoo Local. It offers the same free basic online listing, but it also allows you to add a picture.

Yelp Canada- Enter you business name, address, phone, email, website URL, up to three categories, and hours.

Kijiji – On Kijiji you can list your print ad for free and up to four pictures. You can customize the ad any way you like. Here’s a sample cleaning services ad on Kijiji.

Craigslist – Very similar to Kijiji in the sense of you listing your own cleanings services under the category services offered. List your website, phone number, address and up to four pictures.

Cold Calling

Cold calling is one of the hardest things to perform successfully.It’s s sore topic for most as most entrepreneurs dislike cold call. Let’s face it, who likes getting doors slammed in their faces. I certainly don’t. It’s demoralizing, exhausting and very counter productive. However, I learned cold calling can be effective by simply doing the following:

  • Plan before you call
  • Seek out a personal connection
  • What can you do for the client attitude?
  • Careful note taking

Direct Mailers

This is a real simple process.However, I’ve never done much direct mailing. This isn’t because I don’t believe that the process is effective, in fact direct mailers are very effective. Friends in the cleaning industry have been very successful with direct mailers. Anyways, I won’t get into details as to why I haven’t done much direct mailers, but instead wanted to share with you on how you can use direct mailers to gain your first cleaning business leads.

So, by now you may be wondering where you’re going to get addresses for your direct mailer? Well there are several ways you can get cleaning leads (addresses) to mail to.

  1. City Directory – Mainly for residential homes.
  2. Online Search - Mainly for commercial establishments.

You can make good use of your local city directory by heading  to the nearest library where it’s kept and making use of it regularly. In case you didn’t know, this book not only contains all the names and addresses of anyone living in your town, but other information about them as well such as household income (in generic ranges only). All you need to do is ask the librarian for the City Directory. The librarian will then probably ask for your ID which they may hold this until you finish with the book.

Pay attention to high-end neighborhoods in your area, then copy the pages with all the names and addresses. Then head home and take the info from the copies and start writing envelopes. After that you just stuff the envelopes with your marketing and place them in the mail. You can include a sales letter with a flyer plus a business card inside. This is a real simple process that works provided you have quality marketing material. Quality will depend on your interpretation of quality, so take your time developing your flyer.

Cold Calling Success With Your Cleaning Business

Cold calling is one of the hardest things to perform successfully. Knocking on 50 doors a day, and only getting two or three promising leads would lead even the most confident person to give up. That’s the downside of sales is any industry, whether you’re selling yourself, your service or a product it can become demoralizing pretty quickly. When I first started out with my cleaning business, cold calling was relatively foreign to myself. I had the marketing background, but selling was certainly not my cup of tea. It took me months to land even a solid two or three leads, but eventually I started to turn the corner and the leads became customers.

After growing frustrated, I turned to some reading and a friend who’s been in sales for as long time in hopes of revamping my strategy. I cut my number of calls down, but spent more time researching and weeding out prospects before picking up the phone.  Here’s what I learned and how I became friends with cold calling again.

Plan Before You Call

One thing I failed at miserably was planning ahead before I made the cold calls. I used to think that by dropping in with a business card would be enough and the business would start to pour in. Boy was I wrong! I realized through a lot of trial and error that it’s not about the quantity, but rather about the quality of the cold calls. Who will you be calling? When will you be placing your calls? These are questions you should answer the day before you make the calls. Since there are many businesses, target a certain section of the city or certain types of businesses. This will help you stay organized and delay your travel time. Since I was employed full-time, most of my in person cold calling took place in the evenings or weekends. The upside to this was that it gave me an opportunity every evening to sit down, block out sometime and organize myself ahead of next day’s cold calling.

Research  Before You Call

This point could very easily tie in with planning before you call, but I wanted to separate it to simplify the process. Researching ahead of your cold call seems pretty tedious, but the success of your call totally depends on how well you arm yourself before the call. The more you know, the better you’ll be off when you walk through the doors. Simply stop do a Google search on the company ahead or even look up the prospect on LinkedIn before you make the call. Even if you’re not going to use the information, you will come across more confident and more powerful when you have information on the other person and their company.

Seek Out a Personal Connection

Whether through online research or during the phone call itself, you should try to find a personal connection with your prospects. Your research might reveal that you share the same view on a mater or have a past connection with the same company. During the call, you also might discover a common interest. Let’s say that your kids and your prospect’s kids play hockey, this would be a great way to break the ice and ease the pressure on both sides. More importantly, it will give you insight about the prospect on a deeper level.

What Can You Do For Your Client?

Never forget this: People don’t care about you, they care what you can do for them. Ask a lot of questions during the call, rather than talking about yourself. Show your prospect that you care and are there to help, rather than just do another pitch like all the other predecessors. Learn about your prospect’s business needs first, so you can more effectively tailor your pitch.

Careful Note Taking

Since you’re likely a start up or relatively new in the cleaning industry – you likely don’t have a proper professional note system on your computer. However, that shouldn’t stop you from taking careful notes after your cold calling session. What works well for me is my notebook. It’s a simple 250 page notebook that I write down all my thoughts, ideas, sales visits, and other notes pertaining to the business. It’s easy to follow, as all my notes are dated and more importantly it’s all within one place. Often this notebook doesn’t leave my house, but anytime I leave the cold call session I ensure to take a business card with me. Generally I make a couple of quick small notes on the back of the card, which I later revisit and transfer into my notebook.

Final Thoughts

Sales calling is never an easy process, but not following any of the above suggestions makes cold calling that much more difficult. Rather than only going up against a potential prospect, now you’re fighting against yourself due to lack of proper research, preparation and planning. Get into a routine of doing the above steps, and soon enough this will become second nature, but more importantly your cold calling success will become greater and eventually the sales will start to flow in over time.

Readers, could you suggest any other tips for cold calling?

First Rule of Sales: Never Knock the Competition

Never forget this: The first rule of sales is to never knock the competition. I’ve never don much sales cold calling in my career, so my experience was limited until I started my office cleaning company. And over the past three years I’ve learned a lot in terms of sales as a whole, cold calling and approaching potential clients. One of the first rules I was taught when I started making my way around and pitching my cleaning services was to never know the competition. It’s sales basic, yet many relish at the opportunity to bash the competitors.

Even though you’ll behave yourself when you do your sales pitch, one thing is certain is that you can’t control what others will say about you or your business. What if you walk into a potential client’s office and through your pitch they let you know something negative was said about you by your competition? Maybe your potential customer is making it up or maybe it’s true, but how can you tell? One thing is for certain is that you have to respond.

The question is: How do you respond professionally without sounding defensive?

Here are a few tips on how to respond to a “knock on you or your business” in a professional manner.

Accept the Reality

Being prepared is half the battle to successfully responding to criticism. You must accept the reality that others will talk about your business or at times about yourself in an unfair and untrue manner. That’s how certain sales people stoop low, without much regard for the other side. Over the course of your business life span and cold calling career, you’ll have ample opportunities to respond to some form of negativity aimed at your business. Be prepared and know what you’ll say in return, the last position you want to be is pondering your answer.

Good Response Example

“Company 123 is a tough competitor. They’ve been in the industry for many years, and we know this because we compete with them on a daily basis. Like any other business, if they weren’t good they wouldn’t be in the business or competing with us. I try and stay in tune with my competitor’s products and services as much as possible, and rest assured that when it comes to quality, top notch service and reliability, our company is second to none in this market”.

The above would be a solid response in my books. Regardless what was said about you, you’ve risen above by elevating yourself above the fray. More importantly you come across as a class act towards your customer, and all because you didn’t allow a comment to affect you. Furthermore, whether you use the above response or respond in your own manner, the key is to put together a response on the offensive and not come off defensive. This will show your confidence and in turn you’ll avoid a long unnecessary explanation.

Some Reasons Why Your Service or Product is More Superior

Here are three reasons I’d focus on in your response:

  1. Quality of your product or service
  2. Customer service
  3. Yourself and what you bring to the table through your company

Emphasize why your product or service might be superior to those of your competitors, and don’t be afraid to use numbers. For example, I generally try to give the customer a rough schedule of what I’d do during the clean if I was cleaning his facility. Next, I try to emphasize on how we can make full use of the time were there, such as possibly only dusting once a week and using the extra time to focus elsewhere. Finally, when you mention something your company offers, be sure to remind the customer what the benefit is to him or her.

Final Thoughts

From time to time you may have to deflect negative statements some of your competitors make about you or your company, but staying true to sales professionalism well never all yourself to be sucked into the competition contest of “they said”.  Being prepared with your response will keep you on the offensive and prevent you from having to back peddle.

Readers, have you ever walked into a situation where you were called out on what your competition said?

Cheers.
Eddie

Photo Credit (playpennies)