In our work with cleaning companies across the country, the most common question we’re asked is “How do we grow our company?” You started your company to create a life where you control your time, but growing a company isn’t easy. We understand. Fitting in sales and marketing between home cleaning appointments can be overwhelming.
The process doesn’t have to be overwhelming as long as you have the right process in place. Our philosophy of creating trackable marketing that drives growth is focused on these five areas:
Marketing Lead Generation
Your sales team may close new clients, but you need new leads (quote requests) for them to close. While referrals are the lifeblood of a startup, don’t expect them to generate the volume of leads you need for major growth. Your marketing should be a lever that you can pull to open the flow of leads. While you can’t control when someone will make a referral for you, you can control other channels by investing time or money.
Explore developing these marketing channels:
- Social media: Yes, it’s free, but requires a lot of time to understand the algorithm and to create the type of content that earns organic engagement and leads. Most people are on social media for entertainment, so be entertaining. Don’t just ask for a sale. Entertainment doesn’t mean, “be funny!” There is a wide range of content that can be successful, but I’ll save that for another post. Social media companies also throttle business accounts at a certain point, meaning you’ll need to pay to grow your reach.
- Email: It’s not dead! It’s the most reliable (and least expensive) communication channel because it doesn’t rely on algorithms to ensure delivery. All you need is a list. Leverage your existing clients and past leads to upsell new services or larger packages and offer enticing promotions to leads. Just make sure you have permission! There are laws around who you can send emails to, which I’ll cover in another article.
- Advertising: This may be the most effective short-term channel. When done right, you can target people searching for your services immediately. As you adjust your growth goals, you can add or remove investment. Working with a professional who can configure your account correctly will help you make the most of your budget. For digital advertising to work well, it requires the right technology to track conversions. That’s why we set up analytics and proper tracking codes with our digital advertising services.
- Joint Ventures: This may be the best channel for generating highly motivating leads, but requires a partnership with another business. Working together, create an offer that you’ll both promote. For example, you may create a spring cleaning package that includes carpet cleaning from a partner business. And that partner business will promote a carpet service that includes your home cleaning services. The packages can be as big or small as you want, and you can have multiple joint ventures active at the same time, which can be very powerful with the right partners.
When you need more customers because of a new hire or open schedule slots, and you’re not getting enough referrals, you’ll be thankful you took the time to build up one of these other lead generation areas that you can turn on or off.
Sales Close Rate
Your sales close rate has and major impact on your revenue and growth. Poor sales closing rates could mean you won’t overcome attrition and your business will shrink, or it could mean explosive growth. Let’s explore this in this example with 2 different sales close rates:
Suppose you earn 50 leads per month, and your sales close rate of recurring clients is only 25%. You’ll close 25 clients a month, which if the average cleaning is $150 and a biweekly frequency, is worth $316,875 the first year. And if you keep all those clients for a second year, it would be worth $585,000.
Let’s do the same math but make the close rate only 10%. The first-year value would be only $126,750 and the second year would be worth $234,000.
Each single point improvement in the sales close rate is worth $35,100/yr. That’s a nice bonus at the end of the year, or another team member. Be sure to spend enough time on sales training to improve close rates.
Customer Lifespan
Similar to your sales close rate, your customer lifespan has perhaps the most impact on your revenue and profit. We like to talk about this in terms of your attrition rate. The higher your attrition rate the more clients you will lose each month and your sales team will be playing catch-up more and more, rather than adding actual growth.
This is best explained with an example:
Suppose you have 100 clients. If you have a 10% monthly attrition rate, you’ll be replacing your entire stable of clients each year. If we use the same industry average as the last example and a sales close rate of 15% and 50 leads per month, your company will contract to 75 clients.
Now let’s calculate this with a 5% attrition rate. We’ll keep the same 15% sale close rate and 50 leads per month. In this example, your company will grow to 150 clients.
One scenario leads to a 25% contraction, while the other leads to 50% growth. That’s a big impact for only 5 percentage points. Focusing on client relationships and increasing lifespan can lead to huge gains for your company.
Upselling
It is said the easiest dollar to earn is from someone who has already spent a dollar with you. Your clients have experienced your services and have grown to trust you and your team and a significant portion of them will be willing to pay for more value.
There are 2 main ways to upsell:
- Sell more services: This can be in the form of larger packages or add-ons.
If you can sell just 30 clients on a $100 add-on, you will have brought in an extra $3000 in revenue. Now do that every month and you just generated an additional $36,000.
- Increasing frequency: Having customers increase their usage frequency will increase your revenue. Upselling just 30 clients from monthly to biweekly services is worth an additional $42,000 a year.
Upselling can be a powerful growth lever. One way to do this is to make upsells part of your email & automation strategy.
Revenue Streams
Diversifying your revenue streams is another way to increase growth for your business. Whether it’s a complimentary home service or an entirely new sector, use the resources already available to you. Some of our clients offer the following services as revenue stream diversification:
- Laundry & Linen Service
- Organizing Services
- Window Cleaning
- Blind Cleaning
- Carpet Cleaning
- Car Detailing
- Construction Clean-up
Starting a new revenue stream is almost like starting a new business. The upside is that you already have support form your existing team, software, and vendor relationships. Offering new services like these opens up new sectors and populations.
Other areas that can lead to growth:
- Operational Efficiency: Improving your efficiency can lead to an increase in your capacity, or an increase in profit. Switching from duo cleaning groups to single cleaning groups can open your capacity to add new clients to the schedule. Being less wasteful with cleaning products will reduce costs, thus increasing profits.
- Website Conversion Optimization: The average conversion rate of a website is 1-3%. That means for every 100 people coming to your website only 1-3 will convert. If you improve that to 6-10%, you essentially triple your lead flow. Be sure you have a website optimized for conversions.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Improving your search engine optimization will increase your awareness across search, which leads to more click, and more peopl on your website, which leads to more conversions. SEO is a long-term investment that earns small wins that compound over time.
All of these levers are an important part of your growth strategy and putting time and effort into all of them at once would be very difficult. So choose one or two areas to focus on and once those are in place move on to other areas. If you’re looking for a shortcut, implementing The MPM System™ will put a proven marketing system in place to help you reach your goals.