What I Learned Making 20k Cold Calls for Commercial Cleaning Services

In this blog we go over phone cold calling or telemarketing for commercial cleaning services. This can include janitorial services, commercial carpet cleaning and any specialty cleaning service.

We used to make about 20k thousand cold calls a year using the phone, so I have tons of data points. Here is a couple bullet points I learned.

The effectiveness of using the phone was was directly related to the size of the company. I can clearly see among leads, estimates, closes as the companies become smaller and smaller so did the effectiveness.

When you think about this, it is for very practical reasons. Most larger businesses have specialists that deal with cleaning services, vendors in general. For example facility managers, corporate buyers, directors, maintenance, etc. 

These people do not deal with the other areas of a business, just maintenance related issues and vendors, their phone traffic is going to be limited.

Some other titles small business owner, office manager are receiving phone calls from all of these other callers also. In the big picture we are a very small piece of the pie in their business, they want to focus primarily on their clients.

• 50+ employees was best
• 30-50 employees still good
• 20-30 employees things start to really drop
• 10-20 employees you see a big drop off now

Like everything else in business we are going to have some exceptions

Like everything else in business we are going to have some exceptions to this. Some businesses can have lots of square feet or special needs but only have a small staff.

Below are exceptions to think about that would not apply to this campaign.

• Commercial property managers were great but residential PM apartments did not fair too good on the phone.
• Restaurants did well among all sizes, still think door to door is better though but still good
• Churches did good, a lot have part time hours and security doors  making Door to door sales difficult.
• Schools, daycare did very well regardless of size. Same as above most will not let you in.
• Government is almost always signing up for a bid alert on federal, state or local websites.
• Any chains of any kind the phone was good, often the regional manager is offsite or even has an office outside of the area.
• Referral source of any kind really need to meet people face to face, phone not effective at all.

In conclusion, these were my real life experiences. Now this doesn’t mean marketing through the phone cannot work well, this was my personal experience on the absolute best returns.

You may come up with a different script, have warm leads, all kinds of variables can change these numbers.