Tom, what’s the single best way to get customers for my cleaning business?
When I hear that question, I often wonder if the individual knows just how hard a question it is to answer.
It could be answered in any one of a dozen ways. This is because each persons situation is unique.
What may be a good answer for one may not be a good answer for another. To give you an example of that at work, consider this. One person with very little money to start may ask me that question. Now what if I respond with one of my favorite methods, direct mail.
I would be doing that person a disservice by telling them direct mail. Why? Because direct mail is not really a cheap way to go. They run the risk of going broke before getting any cleaning customers. So the better answer for them would be networking for the most part with a dash of some other low cost methods.
But for the person who is a little better funded, direct mail would be the best answer. This is because you can reach many more people with direct mail than you could at a networking function. The fact is you can send out several hundred letters in a snap but you can’t meet several hundred people at a networking function.
Now back to the question I get asked all the time. I think (and I preach this at every chance) the question needs to be rephrased and slightly altered. It needs to go more like this…
“Tom, what are the best ways to get customers for my cleaning business?”
People who are looking to start a cleaning business need to ask this question instead of the former. I think people who are new to the business tend to fixate on just one way to get customers. They do that because they just don’t know any better.
The fact is once you are in business a while, you soon realize that there is not one magic way to get customers. It’s all about a collection of various methods and techniques (if you need help getting cleaning customers click here) that keep the phone ringing consistently.
You need to view your marketing efforts like a river. The largest and most powerful rivers in the world are ones that have many smaller rivers, streams and brooks feeding into them. Even if you cut off one or two tributaries completely, you would not stop the flow of water in that river.
Your promotion methods need to work the same way in your cleaning business. This means you need to do a little of everything to have a well balanced company. You don’t want to depend too much on any one technique.
This means ideally you want to join some networking groups, use direct mail, go door to door in office parks, utilize some cold calling scripts, make use of the classified section in the paper, build a website and use social media too. I could go on and on but you get the idea.
Of course your efforts should focus on what gives you the biggest bang for your buck first, then spread your time and money amongst the other methods to make sure you are playing it as smart as possible.
At the end of the day focus on being as well balanced as possible and track every single call that comes into your company. Make sure you ask “where did you hear about us” so that you know what methods are working best and which ones need some tweaking.
To summarize, getting cleaning customers is all about using as many techniques as you can handle. This allows you to cast a wider net that brings in more customers than any single method could.
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