Every cleaning business needs as many cleaning contracts as possible. This is a comprehensive guide on how to get cleaning contracts and boost the profitability of your cleaning business. Getting house, commercial and office cleaning contracts is highly important as the sustainability of a cleaning business highly depends on the owner’s ability to approach and book clients. While that may sound an easy task, it certainly isn’t.
Especially since cleaning business owners have to deal with lots of other matters at the same time they’re trying to get more cleaning contracts.
How To Get Cleaning Contracts
On a competitive market such as this one, learning how to get cleaning contracts is absolutely essential towards the success or failure of your cleaning business. If you don’t learn how to get cleaning contracts for your business, your competitor might. And unfortunately, it won’t be long until you’re out of business. So, let’s take a look on a couple of things you can do to get some more cleaning contracts. Note that learning WHAT to do in order to get more cleaning contracts doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be successful at it. You also need to know HOW to do what you’re about to learn. To that extend, read the entire guide as we’re about to teach you both.
# Realtors are perfect for house and office cleaning contracts
Realtors are an absolutely great group of professionals to focus on for getting more cleaning contracts. Think about it. They do want their (for sale) properties to look all shiny when they’re having a client over to inspect them, don’t they? This is exactly why realtors make a perfect client for your cleaning business. They need to keep their assets clean all the time, it’s just good business for them. To successfully approach realtors and other professionals (such as construction agencies etc), you need to
apply a certain level of professionalism to your business bidding proposals and the overall structure and appearance of your business. We’ll talk about that later on this guide.
# Create your own website and generate leads for cleaning contracts
This is another great way to increase leads and book more and more cleaning contracts. Creating a website may seem intimidating at first but you don’t have to be a tech guru to go through it. A website might cost anywhere from 400$ to 12.000$ but you definitely don’t need to take the expensive way out. A small, clean and simple website can do a great job generating more leads for your business and thus, more cleaning contracts. However, there’s more to it than just building a website.
You’ll need to optimize it so that you can have it ranking high in search engines, especially Google. That requires ongoing work. If you need help designing a professional website and/or help to make it rank high in search engines for your keywords of choice (such as cleaning services in Oklahoma), feel free to contact us. We have a team of experts that specialize in creating cleaning business websites as well as ranking them high in the search engines.
Alternatively, if you do have some (not a lot) technical skills, you can try building a website for free using a free online service such as wordpress.com or weebly.com. Remember that in order to get leads and thus, cleaning contracts, you’ll have to do some search engine optimization (SEO) to rank your website.
# How to get cleaning contracts with Craigslist
Using Craigslist is truly simple and very efficient indeed. And it’s free. You can have a small ad posted on Craigslist and generate leads like crazy in a matter of hours. Craigslist allows you to advertise your business up to NINE categories in 500 cities around the world. Choose only the cities you are able to serve to maximize the potential of booking cleaning contracts.
Keep your message short and simple, make sure your contact information is easy to find by placing them on top of your ad postings and keep your ads updated. Double check for grammatical errors and ad an attractive title in your listing.
# A few more ways to get cleaning contracts
Flyers. Printing advertising flyers is an old fashioned way of doing things but it certainly works well up to this day. Many business report enormous success getting cleaning contracts with flyers. Just make sure you keep the pollution to a minimum to avoid people talking low of your business name. If anything, you represent a cleaning business, you’re supposed to be CLEAN and thus, you don’t want your flyers polluting your city’s streets. Door-to-door distribution is a great way to avoid that.
Business Cards and Promotional Items. Business cars are a must-have. No question about that. Promotional items are optional of course but they do help towards building your brand name and ultimately, you’ll be getting more cleaning contracts as your reputation grows.
Direct Mail. This is highly neglected but many cleaning businesses report stunning results on getting new cleaning contracts by directly mailing potential clients.
Now that you’ve learned what to do in order to get more cleaning contracts, you’ll need to learn how to make all the magic happen. There’s a great deal of things you can improve through time to become increasingly successful with getting cleaning contracts. To name a few, you could improve your personal skills on communication and making sales, managing your business, branding and marketing as well as your personnel hiring and management skills. You’ll also need the right TOOLS to help you in the process. And getting the right tools is a great way to make your business look professional.
The reason you need such tools (and skills) is because the market is so demanding that it simply requires you to be perfect in what you do.
Especially when dealing with other businesses to try and get commercial cleaning contracts, businesses such as realtors or construction agencies (as we talked about before), you will need to look, feel and prove to be as much professional as possible. Regardless of how you’re trying to approach clients, if it’s by phone or direct mail or even by meetings, you do need to make them think you are a true professional, representing a reputable and trustworthy business.
Fail to do that and you shall fail with getting cleaning contracts! Especially commercial cleaning contracts.
# Proper bidding & Cleaning Contracts Professional Templates
First of all, you need to price your services correctly. Otherwise you’re risking to either build a bad name for your business or leave money on the table. Most cleaning businesses do this all wrong and never realize it. In order to bid properly, you’ll need to analyze your costs effectively and then come up with the best offer for both yourself and your client. To do all of that effectively, you’ll need professional bid sheets and contract forms. It would also be a good idea to learn from industry seasoned experts. That way you can speed up the process and minimize the time you need to invest on coming up with the right data while allowing fatal mistakes that cost money and reputation.
The cleaning business start-up/growth packages we suggest come with a great deal of other resources that, in our opinion, are absolutely priceless for a cleaning business. They will help you set up and print professional proposals that go a long way into getting more cleaning contracts. They come with professional cleaning contracts agreements (templates), invoice templates, sales letters and forms, tutorials about starting or growing your cleaning business and more.
If you want to take a look and learn more, click here.
When you’re able to print high quality, professional proposals and contracts using the knowledge you’ve acquired and the templates included, prepare as many as possible and direct mail realtors and other potential clients.
# What comes after a professional proposal?
When you mail proposals to clients, make sure YOU are the one to call first. Be polite and confident, briefly introduce yourself and then let them know you’re calling in regards to a special offer about cleaning services (it should nearly in their mail by the time you call them). While on the phone, never ask them IF the need cleaning services. Chances are they’ll tell you they don’t.
On the contrary, let them know WHY they NEED your cleaning services. Both businesses and households (if you’re taking up both) love to be given the gift of time. So have them picture their life without having to spend time to clean themselves. If it’s a business, they’ll also want to hear how a clean workspace or a house for sale (in case of a realtor) can help them increase productivity and sales respectively.
You can also try improving your communication skills by buying relative books. Improving your communication skills will also improve your capability of making sales. We’d suggest that you dive into that as well, sooner or later. This is something to do while you’re taking a holiday or in your spare, free time. Buy and read a book on increasing communication skills and you shall not regret it.
# The importance of your staff in getting cleaning contracts
As your business grows, your time will be extremely limited to maintain relationships with your clients. This will put your staff in the front line of maintaining a healthy image for your business to your clients. Your staff will be interacting with your clients more than you do, eventually. Thus, hiring the right people, not only saves you time (in training etc) and money but it’s also vital to your business branding! You can improve your hiring skills by following expert advice, should hiring become a critical aspect of your business.
If we could give you an advice is this: Never, ever hire people that have never worked before. Doesn’t matter where and what they were doing. Chances are there’s a good reasons someone’s not working and unless you have the time and money to experiment, go with proven solutions. Especially when you’re hiring for the first time.
We’ve reached the end of our guide on how to get cleaning contracts. Hopefully you’ve learned something so far.
Always invest in improving the assets of your business and your personal skills. While there doesn’t seem to be a clear connection between your personal skill-set, your business bidding software and the overall ability to book cleaning contracts as a result of having these assets or not having them, we assure you there is a very high relevance. And it’s unclear or clear, for some owners, things like these that make the difference in making it big with your business or getting lost in a highly competitive environment. Good luck with getting more cleaning contracts!
