The Key to Growing Your Commercial Cleaning Business Is Following Up
Tips to help you stand out from the competition
A key concept for growing a commercial any cleaning business is following up on your leads.
Wasting leads is the fastest way to ruin your marketing efforts.
You’ve invested time and money into generating quality leads.
Letting them slip through your fingers because of you lack a follow up process is an expensive mistake.
To take your sales process to the next level, you need to master the art of following up.
Agenda
Quick on the draw
Be persistent
After a meeting
Systemise to scale
Step up your game
Quick on the draw
Harvard Business Review published a report titled “Best Practices for Lead Response Management”.
It highlighted the importance of calling leads quickly after they request information.
How fast?
Within 5 minutes.
As the chart shows, there’s a 10x decline in responsiveness when leads are called ten minutes or later.
Calls that are responded to within 5 minutes increase the chances of qualifying the prospect by 400%.
If you’re going to invest time in paid ads, SEO or outbound email campaigns, be ready to pick up the phone when the calls start rolling in.
Be persistent
"Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough"
- Michael Jackson
It takes somewhere between 8 and 13 touches to progress a sale.
You can more than double your chances of contacting a lead IF you’re willing to call them 6+ time instead of once.
The same Harvard study found that when a lead is called 6+ times, there’s a 90% chance of making contact. With a single call, this number drops to below 40%.
You won’t win new business taking the ‘one and done’ approach to leads.
This one simple change can significantly increase your chances of success.
Most cleaning business owners I speak with focus on increasing the number of leads they generate.
Constantly generating new leads is expensive.
When I ask whether they have sales process in place, they go quiet.
Instead of increasing the number of leads, I explain that they should focus on following up with leads they’ve already collected.
How many times should you follow up?
As many as it is necessary for you to move onto the next stage in your sales process - a meeting or a site visit.
Only when a lead officially asks you not to contact them anymore should you stop reaching out and focus your efforts on other opportunities.
After a Site Visit
You’ve done the hard work to get a site visit.
It’s gone well and you send your proposal over.
Then…
Most people only bother with a single follow up call and write the opportunity off too early.
According to sales stats, 80% of sales occur after at least five follow ups after a meeting.
If you’re doing this much following up, you’re going above and beyond your competition.
By reaching out for a sixth, seventh and eight time, you’re spending more time on the lead than anyone else.
Getting to a site visit and submitting a quote are significant steps in the context of winning a new contract.
Out of all the potential options, a client has given you the opportunity to bid.
Don’t let that go to waste with a single follow up.
Systemise your sales process
Commercial cleaning leads are hard to get.
They’re finite and come at a significant cost.
That’s why it’s important to stick with a lead as long as possible.
You want to maximise the value of each lead.
Creating a sales process where each lead gets 12+ touches will increase your chances of generating new business.
If you’re not reaching that standard, you’re leaving money on the table.
Don’t let leads that could be converted in the long run, slip away.
For regular and effective following up, you need a system to manage your sales process.
Use a CRM like Hubspot or Salesforce to record client communication, schedule tasks and manage you deal pipeline.
Utilise your CRM to create nurture and sales sequences that deliver the right message to each of your leads at the right time.
You can go one step further and use janitorial software like CleanGuru or Jobber to automate your bidding process.
Streamlining communication with existing leads and outreach to potential new leads is essential to prevent marketing from taking over your entire calendar.
Step up your game
Aim to improve two elements of your follow up process:
The speed of your response.
Increasing touches.
The speed of your response.
To beat the competition, become faster about following up with your leads.
The average company takes 44 hours to call a lead after a form is submitted or an email is received.
Reduce this delay to five minutes or less.
Organise your business to be prepared to quickly make a return phone call when you receive an enquiry.
By doing so, you should get far better results than others playing the same game.
Increasing touches.
As mentioned, research shows that 12 touches should be your benchmark for following up and nurturing lead.
On average, businesses touch base with leads less than 4.5 times before giving up.
It’s natural to doubt the likelihood of a lead converting when nothing has happened after a few touches.
But, just like decreasing your response time, there’s an opportunity to stand out from the crowd.
The extra conversions that result from that persistence could lead your cleaning business to win that next big contract.
The good thing is that you don’t need to develop any new skills to follow up with leads.
You just need the right system in place and make sure that the system is executed every time.
That just comes down to hard work and attention to detail.
Content to check out
Check out The Growth Lab podcast. Weekly episoded with strategies, tools and tactics to help grow your cleaning business. 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 increase your revenue by £250K/mo in 12 months? Book a call.
Thanks for reading!
Matt @ The Growth Lab
Forwarded this email?
Subscribe here:
Thanks for subscribing to The Growth Lab.