You’ve done all the grunt work to get your business off the ground. All you need now is CUSTOMERS.
This is the fun part for about half the folks who get started. Sadly the other half get STUCK here and don’t know what they are doing wrong.
It goes like this for the two halves… The successful half meets prospects and closes deal after deal. The unsuccessful half goes out on bid after bid, meets prospect after prospect to no avail. Nobody wants what their offering! It drives the second group CRAZY.
Why is this happening?
While the process of “getting customers” has many moving pieces, there is one in particular that kills more dreams than bug repellant kills bugs. What is that you ask? Well it’s quite simple. It’s called “over complicating the process”, and many people fall prey to it.
This is true no matter what business you are in AND there is no shame in it. After all, for most people starting a business is not something they have a lot of experience at. The first time around doing anything means it’s guaranteed YOU ARE GOING TO LEARN A LOT.
For those of us in the cleaning industry this “over complicating the process” boils down to equating “getting customers to landing a man on the moon”. It may SEEM that hard, but it’s all in the way you look at it.
The simple way to attack this problem is to UNDER COMPLICATE the process. Yes, I may have made that word up BUT that is about the only way to describe the cure. All I’m really saying is you need to strip the process down to the bare essentials. When you do that, things will change.
How do you UNDER COMPLICATE the process in the cleaning business?
The approach that has worked for me and surly will work for you is quite simple. Whenever I meet a prospect while out on a bid hoping to get the account or talk to someone at a networking event and I keep the following in mind…
My goal is to CONVINCE whomever I’m talking to that me and my company are capable of taking out their trash, cleaning their bathrooms, vacuuming their carpet AND solving whatever cleaning problem they currently have. THAT’S IT!!
Sounds pretty simple huh? Know why? Because it is!
Another thing I know is that you can do the same thing. REMEMBER… at the end of the day all you are being asked to do by the anyone who has an interest in hiring you is the following…
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Take out the trash.
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Vacuum where the dirt is.
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Clean bathrooms so well you could eat off the floor.
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Solve some combination of the above the customer is having.
That’s why I say you need to take a big step back and UNDER COMPLICATE the process. The four main points I just described is all you are doing for the most part in 99% of all jobs. When you CLUTTER your brain with all the other “stuff” that doesn’t matter, it gets in the way of the deal.
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