Turn Customer Profiles Into Goldmine Of Cleaning Accounts

In today’s blog we are going to talk about how to turn customer profiles into a goldmine of new commercial cleaning accounts. There is no super, duper secret marketing tactic that always works, if business was that easy, we would all be billionaires.

But what we can do is increase our probabilities of success, that’s the goal here.

Its counterintuitive, most people think they would rather be #50 in a large space than #1 in a medium or small space but the opposite is true.

Great book that highlights this topic is by Malcolm Gladwell called David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. People always think of the story with David being the underdog. But he was a sharp shooter with this big goof standing in the middle of a field.

Easy pickings ….

The part that interests me the most was when he talked about colleges. students have more success in life being #1 at a medium school than #50 at Harvard.

See when you are #1 you get all the attention and it really builds self-confidence even if it’s in a smaller space.

Same thing happens with commercial cleaning services. Better off being #1 in a town of 50K people than being #50 in a town of 500k people. Same reasons, you really build up self-confidence being #1 even though the space is smaller. Can always grow from there.

Now in small business that space doesn’t have to be geography, it can be a service, demographic, etc.

For example, you could choose to dominate medical buildings or property managers and large or small building sizes.

How Can Commercial Cleaning Services Use This Concept?

In the marketing world, we are better off contacting 1000 businesses 10 X versus 10,000 businesses 1 X. This is a very simple concept but most cleaning businesses have a hard time understanding the impact. Most will think I want to contact as many as possible.

If you just look at your own purchases, I think it will become obvious that you experienced that brand 100’s and maybe even 1000’s of times before buying. This is exactly what a commercial cleaning service is trying to accomplish but on a much smaller scale.

How To Create a Commercial Cleaning Customer Profile

In most markets there will be 10’s of thousands of businesses. The challenge is we can’t afford to reach all of them equally. With this exercise our goal is to narrow down the number of businesses to a reasonable number that fits our specific budget.

This is why it is critical to create a monthly budget of what you can afford to do and how much time you can invest. Going through this process will make it a lot easier to make decisions.

*** Note you have to decide for yourself, this is only a sample exercise

Step 1- Come up with 3-4 potential targets

Then think about how much money they spend annually to help decide if its worth pursuing. If you don’t have experience then ask around in social media for averages.

We came up with 3 options and chose 1

We came up with 3 potential targets of medical, restaurant and commercial landlord. Then we looked at how much money those categories spent in the past on average.

*** Note this is hypothetical

After evaluating them all we chose Commercial Property Managers

Step 2- What are some variables to consider

Building Size- small, medium, large

Services- janitorial, floor care, carpet cleaning

Times, Days week- Monday through Friday, weekends and 1^st, 2^nd or 3^rd shift

Equipment available- what kind of equipment do you have

Employees- how many employees do you currently have? For example, if you only have 5 employees, calling on large accounts might be tough right now.

Step 3 Personas or Personal Attributes

One thing you will start to notice is certain industries or sizes can have similar personal attributes. The purpose of this exercise is after defining a couple vague attributes we can start to think about where and how that person might look for and view information.

20-year-old have completely different habits versus 50-year-old. This is a vague exercise that becomes important when deciding what marketing tactics to use.

Our example was for Commercial Property Managers

Step 4 What Marketing Tactic To use?

Now we have some basic information on this prospect we then can start looking for best ways to reach them.

One thing that stuck out to me is commercial landlords tend to be older, much older than say restaurant managers. Why does this matter? Direct mail is a higher probability bet for an older prospect.

LinkedIn is very popular among PM’s, mostly they are either looking for tenants themselves or creating a good profile for future job prospects.

BOMA and Chamber of Commerce is also a common association for this prospect.

Step 5 is Creating a message

Creating a message can come in several ways, we can come up with positive outcomes our services provide or we can talk about pain points?

What are some things a commercial PM wants?

Then What are some of their pain points?