52. How To Grow Your Cleaning Business Without Spending Money on Paid Ads (5 Steps)
Your new Growth Plan.
As an owner-operator, the main goal for your cleaning business is revenue growth.
Consistent growth is hard to achieve without focused effort.
Clients are the key drivers of revenue generation.
To win more clients and to increase the value of those clients, you need a growth plan.
Agenda
Step 1 - Sharpening the Axe
Step 2 - Chop the Wood
Step 3 - Start the Chainsaw
Step 4 - Your Free Apprentice
Step 5 - Systems to Scale
Step 1 - Sharpening the Axe
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
- Abraham Lincoln
Most cleaning businesses deliver their services without understanding their clients.
They never ask for feedback - no news is good news.
Instead, they provide a range of services to generate revenue from different opportunities.
As a result, they find it difficult to scale.
To maximise the best opportunity, you need to determine who your ideal clients are.
Get to know and understand them at a deeper level by asking for feedback.
Identify the benefits and results your service has achieved for them.
That way you can create a valuable service offer that claims to solve your ideal client’s number 1 problem.
Collecting feedback means you can create great case studies and testimonials.
When prospects want to learn more about your service offer, you can use them to support your claims.
You need to appeal to the number 1 priority of your ideal clients.
Clients have limited time and resources. They will always favour solving their priority problems.
When you understand these problems, you can position your cleaning business in a category of 1.
You’ll stand out from the market.
You become the cleaning business that solves your ideal client’s most important problems.
Step 2 - Chop the Wood
Once you’v created a service offer that your ideal clients will love, you need to get in front of the right people.
Most owner-operators chase low quality, low intent leads.
Why?
Because they don’t have a consistent method of generating new opportunities.
They turn on Google Ads, paying £25-£30 per click for commercial cleaning searches.
When a click converts to an enquiry, rarely are they the type of lead you want.
It’s an office manager looking for a 3 hour cleaning on a Tuesday afternoon with a budget of £25.
Not the type of leads to grow your business.
Relying on referrals may bring in better quality leads, but it’s an unreliable channel for growth.
Spending money and energy on ineffective channels or expensive agencies produces disappointing results.
There is another way.
Focus on two channels - LinkedIn and email.
Create a communication plan where you connect with ideal clients and decision makers at scale.
Provide value upfront, for FREE.
Leverage your case studies as evidence of the value and benefits you provide to clients.
Learn procurement cycles.
Nurture opportunities to deliver your message at the right time in their buying process.
Avoid bidding on competitive cleaning contracts with a consistent follow up process.
Step 3 - Start the Chainsaw
Now that you have two marketing channels to focus on, it’s time to connect with your ideal clients.
At scale.
To begin the process of selling prospects into a cleaning contract, you need a sales process.
99/100, owner operators are responsible for sales in their cleaning business.
No one can sell like you.
Close rates for owner-operators are 2X higher than trained sales reps.
Why?
Because you have conviction.
You don’t want to step out of sales for fear of wasting quality opportunities.
But you have limited time. There are other responsibilities you need to deal with every day.
Unfortunately, you become the bottleneck in your business.
You are the limiter to growth
There is another way that saves 80% of your time.
Put in place a proven sales system.
Let a sales development rep work on your behalf to book meetings and site visits.
They disqualify prospects that will never consider you for an opportunity to tender.
Discovery Call to find qualify prospects and identify the bidding process
Value based content nurturing
Site Visit
The Follow Up - Proposal and Sales
This process removes you from 80% of activities without sacrificing results.
Cut unqualified leads and convert more engagements into cleaning contracts.
This creates a scalable, repeatable process.
Step 4 - Your Free Apprentice
As you start filling your pipeline with a repeatable sales process, you know what works and what doesn’t.
But… you’re still relying on manual face-to-face engagement for sales interaction.
It requires A LOT of energy to turn a cold lead into a long term client.
The average buyer needs at least 7 hours of engagement with your business.
You need many meetings, site visits and customised proposal to get a client over the line.
Scaling is limited, and inefficiencies increase as you grow.
To overcome this, you need to create value based content.
Position yourself as a Key Person of Influence.
Get prospects to engage with you so they feel like they know you, what you do, and how you can help.
Even before meeting them.
During the discovery call, your prospect is 5x warmer and happy to dig into the details of how you can help them.
Give prospects massive value to build trust and engagement before they meet you.
Develop a sales message to cut through the noise and create demand for your cleaning business.
Step 5 - Systems to Scale
Once you have a sales system in place, you can track, review and audit the process to improve and scale your results.
With sales and marketing dialled in, you’re ready to build a team without increasing your workload.
Growth becomes all about the people.
“One additional person added to the business can increase productivity massively.”
- Ben Francis, CEO of Gymshark
Now you have the time to work on your cleaning business instead of in it
Content to check out
In this week’s episode of The Growth Lab podcast, I share 5 sales tips that I’ve learned from guests on The Growth Lab podcast. Listen here.
Prefer watching over listening? Check out The Growth Lab podcast on YouTube.
Need More Help?
Email me with the growth strategy for your cleaning business. The more details you provide, the more personal I can make my response.
Want to 3x the growth of your cleaning business over the next 12 months? Book a call.
Thanks for reading!
Matt @ The Growth Lab
Forwarded this email?
Subscribe here:
Thanks for subscribing to The Growth Lab.