This is a blog on how to figure out the right amount of frequency and reach when selling commercial cleaning services, janitorial and carpet cleaning.

This specific exercise is focused on a door to door sales route. We can apply this to any marketing plan, the point is we are never going to remember a tv commercial or radio advertisement after seeing it one time.

Its impossible to remember any form of marketing from experiencing it just one time. Our goal is to create a routine where we can contact X number of leads 3-4 times a year and with follow up direct mail or email 6-8 times a year in total contacts or touches.

You can find tons of research on this subject and it usually comes in between 6-11 times is the optimal number of contacts. What we are trying to figure out is what is the best return on investment for our marketing dollars.

 

What is The Optimal Number?

We know 1x is not enough and monthly personal contact is probably too much for a local carpet cleaning service. The question is where is the sweet spot?

I always like to start off with a plan or campaign when researching different marketing strategies. Here I list who am I targeting, what are my goals, what services are we focusing on.

For this exercise we are focused on frequency and reach. The goal is to map out a plan or routine to follow for the whole year and most importantly figure out our costs. Once we know how many leads to contact in a year it becomes easy to figure out what our costs will be and what kind of return on investment to expect.

Who Are You Targeting?

The goal of all this is to figure out the sweet spot, to find that optimal number of leads to contact and how often. Definitely takes some testing and practice but when you find that best place to be, profits will follow.

This might even change by industry or category, you might find that restaurants only take 2-3 contacts but medical or churches take 8 contacts. Once you know that information then you can adjust your routines.

What is the optimal number of contacts per year? For this exercise we used 8, my belief is 6 would be fine but no less than six times per year. Now how to split that up is personal choice, 3-4 personal contacts for door to door sales is a good target for me. No less than 3 times per year in my opinion for door to door sales route.

This is simple template, the orange cells are what you input and grey cells are the calculations. The first question is What is the yearly routine? We used 4x year or quarterly for door to door personal contact and 2 direct mail pieces, 2 emails for follow up. We started with a goal of 8 contacts total for our optimal number.

How Many Businesses In An Hour?

This is going to change based on the density of the neighborhood, in a heavy retail sector with lots of restaurants you might be able to connect with 15 an hour where a targeted leads list of say churches might take 3 hours.

Using the template no we know we need 195 leads total to make our goal of 15 per week divided by 4 times per year. Once we know 195 is the total number, we can start to do searches of different industries and categories until we reach that 195.

This becomes much easier now, we used the template to come up with 195 total, now we input direct mail at 2x year. This equals 390 pieces we are going to need to fulfill the entire campaign. Always want to have more so I would order 500 direct mail pieces. This can be brochures, flyers, postcards or even sales letters. Completely personal choice and who the prospect is.

 

Marketing Tools

With this marketing tool we can now run different ideas to find the perfect mix of door to door, direct mail and email for our specific situation.

You may decide that 4x a year is too many personal contacts and knock it down to 3 but add 3 direct mails. All of this is much much easier to figure out by first starting out at top with an optimal goal and then filling in the blanks.