Episode151 with Paul Lucero The Pros Commercial Cleaning Can You Make $1000/hr with Commercial Cleaning Sales? If so, how do you automate it?? Today Mike breaks down commercial cleaning sales with guest Paul Lucero, full time student AND owner of The Pros Commercial Cleaning. Paul wants help offloading some of the work and automating his commercial cleaning sales processes. In this post you will discover: How do I get prospects to come to me? How do I get those prospects to become customers? In the podcast Mike mentions some additional FREE resources to add to your marketing genius, here they are: Getting the right message and media Marketing to a niche Google Adwords for cleaning companies Like many of you in Cleaning Nation, Paul has a full time job (as a student) and wants to know what he can and can’t automate in his business. Specifically is it possible to automate commercial cleaning sales. KEY POINT: Residential and commercial sales are totally different when it comes to automating them A typical residential account is around $250/ month. Commercial cleaning services can range from a couple hundred to tens of thousands of dollars a month. Couple that with the fact that commercial clients have different needs than residential and you can start seeing the difference. Since residential customers are so much smaller and more similar to one another, in some circumstances, it is possible to automate the sales process. Since commercial accounts are larger and have specific and custom needs, there really is no way to automate the sales process. That doesn’t mean you as the owner have to go on every sales call (although that is not a bad idea for smaller companies), but it does mean a human being does have to go on every sales call. Let’s get back to that amazing $1,000/ hour claim we mentioned at the beginning of this post. If your average commercial cleaning sales job is $500/ mo and your average customer only stays 12 months, your average customer is worth $6,000. If you give pay half of that to your employees to clean, that still leaves $3,000. Assuming the sales process takes 3 hours, you are making $1,000/ hour. Keep that in mind before you consider automating your commercial cleaning sales process. Even in light of the numbers so many owners of cleaning companies complain they don’t have enough time. The problem is, they are too busy doing $10/ hour work to focus on the $1,000 hour work. Here are some examples of $10/ hour work: Paying bills Buying supplies Dealing with cleaners Cleaning the office KEY POINT: When you are trying to offload things from your plate make sure you choose the right things So what happens when you physically have too many commercial cleaning sales calls to go on but don’t want to hire a salesperson? The first step is to realize that not all prospects are created equal. Start by identifying your perfect ideal customer as well as your time wasters. Just because someone calls for a bid does NOT mean you have to go. Actually, you want to limit the quantity of bids you are going on so you can focus on the quality of bids you give. A great way to do this is to categorize each prospect (and customer), Red, Yellow or Green. Red- These are customers you won’t take no matter what- too small, too far, etc. Yellow- You take these customers if they come to you, but you don’t actively seek them out. Green- This is your ideal prospect, the prospect you spend all of your marketing time and money attracting What if you DO want to hire a salesperson? If you still want to hire a salesperson, make sure you follow these key guidelines: Pay commission only Set standards they must adhere to They have to close x amount of the jobs per week/month. Make sure you have parameters that are clear They have to go on a new commercial cleaning sales appointment within 24 hours, They have to give them a bid by x amount of hours after the appointment Ideally that salesperson will take care of the commercial cleaning sales calls that aren’t your Green A+++ prospects. That will free up more time for you to focus on getting and winning those Green prospect accounts. They key to any cleaning company owner’s success is using your time wisely. Automate the low dollar tasks and spend the bulk of your time doing the $1,000/hr tasks and see how much further you go. With that, we end today’s blog and Paul wraps it up in the….