This blog asks the question, what are the best commercial accounts for a cleaning service. This specific blog is focused on commercial accounts, commercial cleaning and janitorial services.
In most markets we have 10’s of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of businesses we can target. The question I receive literally everyday is which are the best accounts?
With Account Based Marketing we want to narrow down that number of 30 thousand (or whatever) to a manageable number of 500 or 1000 contacts or leads. It is far more effective to market to 100 businesses 10x then 1000 businesses 1x.
In this presentation we will ask 5 questions to help filter down the number of leads to a manageable number.
- Building Size
- Services
- Times/Days week
- Equipment options
- Number of current employee
- Building Size- do you want small, medium or large (note this is relative some cleaners think 10,000 sqr feet is large and others 100 k.
- What services will you perform? In this example we listed carpet, floors and janitorial.
- What times and days of week will your operation run? We listed Monday – Friday 8am to 10pm and Saturday mornings
- What are your current equipment options? We listed truckmount and basic floor machines.
- Number of current employees? We listed 5 employees
The reason we are asking these questions is the answers can completely change the type of businesses we want to target.
Filtering the Prospect Accounts Down
In this section we will go over some of the answers.
Building Size- 10k to 50k in this exercise we defined this size as a medium size account (yours may be different).
Type of Services- we want to stick with 5 day a week accounts and have a min of 3 hours day. (just an example)
Times/Days Week- we are sticking with 8am – 10 pm and Saturday morning. See now we can easily narrow this down by deleting certain accounts.
Restaurants, retail and all night clinics will be deleted because they operate 24/7 and we don’t want that.
What we do want is private offices, professional offices, office buildings. These type of clients are typically 9-5 Monday through Friday.
Equipment Options- here we listed truckmount for carpets and BASIC floor machines, meaning no propane equipment or autoscrubbers.
With this as our equipment, again we can delete retail right off the bat and office buildings with large amounts of VCT. Schools typically have VCT also so I would delete them also.
This would point to offices again because they have vct in cafeteria/restrooms usually in small spaces.
Current Staffing- 5 Employees The reason we ask this question is if we only have 5 employees then for now we would want to stay away from excessively large jobs that would require hiring 10 people or more.
At least until we have the infrastructure and cash flow ready.
This puts us somewhere in the 5k to 20k sqr feet range
Prioritize The Best Office Cleaning Accounts
Now that we have narrowed this down some, we can prioritize the contacts. High priority for example we may contact 8 times year, medium 4 times year and low priority 2x year.
This is what Account Based Marketing is all about, squeezing the most out of our time and money.
High Priority- Large churches, medical offices 10k to 20k sqr ft.
Large churches because they are 5 days week, most smaller churches will only be 1-2 days
Medical offices 10-20k because that size fits into our min of 3 hours day and 5 days week.
Medium Priority- Government contracts and Professional offices
Government contracts will state specifically size of building and days of service. This way you can pick choose which ones to bid on. Based on exercise above 10k to 20k range fits
Professional offices 10-20k fit into our answers from above also. Also professional offices gives us great diversity of industries. Architects, Engineers, Lawyers, etc.
Low Priority- Industrial businesses
The reason we put them at low priority is they typically have a lot of VCT and we stated we only have basic floor machines.
BUT this may only be a local thing.
Conclusion
Note this is only an exercise of HOW to ask questions, give answers and then use that information to filter down the data.
My answers are just examples to show how to do it.
