Why Your Cleaning Business Is Losing Out On $1000s Of Dollars

We are not immune to forgetting completely about old leads and clients that we’ve dealt within our Cleaning Businesses.

 

I’ve done it in my Cleaning Businesses and still do it in freshOps from time to time, however, we have to realise that just because someone said “No” today, doesn’t mean it can’t be a “Yes” in the future.

Not staying in contact with leads and not re-engaging old leads is why Your Cleaning Business Is Losing Out On $1000s Of Dollars

These Leads that we may have had a previously unsuccessful experience with, are Gold Mines.

Leads

We’ve all had them. They make a Web Enquiry or Call the office and Leave a Voicemail, we follow up, but don’t hear BOO from them.

Everyone, including you is busy. We have busy lives, we’ve just had Easter & School Holidays, leads can often make enquiries, and then later have other priorities or fires that they have to deal with right now. The last thing that may be on the mind now is you.

However, you have to persist if you want to win more cleaning contracts.

So it’s important to establish a strategy within your business to stay engaged with all your Leads. Quite simply, they opted in to be contacted by you, so you’d hope it’s only common courtesy to let you know they are no longer interested.

They are busy, but they will update you eventually. It’s not hounding them, unless you continue after they’ve said no thank you. Prior to that stage, you should continue to presume they still are interested in your service.

I can’t tell you how many times, I contacted a lead weeks later from the initial enquiry regarding Commercial Cleaning Services, more so expecting them to see we’ve already engaged another.

The aim was to keep my leads organised, but then to have them say, “I’m sorry, I’ve been off work sick or at a conference” there was a myriad of reasons. More importantly it highlighted the benefits of following up.

 

Unsuccessful Proposals

We are all in Business for the long term I would hope, so if you don’t land that Contract this year, there is always next year, and the year after that. This is where some email automation can help stay in contact even with those Deals that we lost.

Cleaning Contracts are often Contract Based or Performance Based, either way, they still have end. The contract is going to expire or the current contractor will eventually drop the ball. (We all have let’s face it) What you want to be is the first person they think of when this occurs.

 

This doesn’t need to be  part of an Email Sequence. You can simply put a repeating date in your Calendar or CRM to call them every quarter, just as a courtesy to see how the current provider is going.

The fact is, even in the Cleaning Industry which is B2B, Customers still often buy from the person. If they like you and you develop a rapport with them, they will buy from you eventually.

Only this week, we had a Customer subscribe to freshOps that we spoke with 4 years ago.

 

Back then we were almost meet with a P*&S Off, not interested and never while be.

 

However, times change, budgets change, management change, owners change, client expectations change, workforces change and every other factor that influences our business decision can change over time.

 

Ex – Customers

I mentioned this to a user the other day who thought I was mad. The fact is, I’d hope your are Growing your Commercial Cleaning Business. When I refer to growth, it’s not just based on the Profit & Loss. As our businesses grow we develop systems. Systems are often developed out of need for most businesses.

A problem arises, they need a solution, they need a system to run that solution.

So I’d hope your business is different for the better today, than it was 3 years ago when you lost that Contract.

What you have in your favour, is that the Customer did buy from you once. So there was something about your product, brand or maybe it was you that they liked before.

I’m sure they, like most of, get really disappointed when a business that we like doesn’t deliver. As business owners, we probably take it the hardest, when our business doesn’t meet the clients expectations.

In my experience, there is always an opportunity to re- engage old customers, as long as you’ve made serious inroads or eliminated the reasons for them leaving and can demonstrate that to them clearly.