[Rosemary Bolton]

Please could you help me. I run a commercial cleaning business and have done for 6 months. After a slow start we should have reached a turnover of £9K for the whole operating period next month.

We do offices and factories. I currently have 4 contracts and 6 staff.

How can I drum up trade? I have a website and spend my time on telesales. I first used Experian data but I now just use free data on Thomson local. I send out emails to people I contact via the phone. I also offer £50 cash to any current companies if they recommend me and it results in a sale. I tried flyers and advertising in the local press but this generated zero leads.

Please could you help me? I would appreciate it so much!

[Mike_Boxall]

Hi Rosemary

If you search through some of the older posts and topics you'll find there's some really useful information - it can just take a bit of time to find it! One of the best things to do it try to identify, say, your top 100 potential clients within your local area and put together a plan to contact them either by phone or letter every 3 months without fail. I read an article just today that suggests you need to contact someone on average 6 times before they'll even agree to see you for a quote. I'm not sure if that's the correct number or not but I'd certainly agree with the principal of keeping in front of people. For the type of contracts that are likely to be of interest to you, I's have thought that some of the networking organisations like BNI would be good for you.

Regards

Mike     

[Rita p]

Hi Rosemerry,

Just like you i have been running my business for six months, and i don’t have any staff as of yet, am hoping to find contract work, but it’s hard to get any work at times.

 Just like Mike had mentioned to you about BNI, i have been a member of BNI for a month and had couple of jobs out of it, if you are hoping to look into this, then, first you can be a visitor and see for your self how its runs, after your couple of visit you like to be a part of, you need to pay to become a member then have to attend the meeting once a week as arranged.

Hope i have been some help to you.

regards

Rita

[Office Cleaning Company]

Adverise online?

You could try throwing money into the pit that dare not pay its tax? It does work (imo not as much as it did years ago). You can usually get a £50 voucher for google to trial it out in business/pc mags. This will not go far though. It's now pretty complicated (adwords) and like anything takes work and effort to get it to work to suit your needs; to point you in the right direction though and to save you a ton of money if you do go down that route you need to learn 2 words "negative keywords".


good luck

[Ian Flint]

you will find it very difficult to generate commercial work but easy to get domestic at sensible prices too! It may be worth promoting this to increase the size of your operation and reputation while being careful not to distract yourself from your main goal of being a success in the world of contract cleaning.

Don't get sucked in to cleaning the houses yourself, thoroughly vet and interview and train staff to do this for you.

Good luck!

Ian

[sezzle72]

Digital marketing It's not cheap it took a couple of month's to set up including a total overhaul of my website to get a better ranking on google, key words, meta data ,but since then i have nearly doubled my turnover in three month's.
I am probably shooting myself in the foot by posting this, but we all need a little help!


 The company I used was digicrab.com Absolutely worth every penny!

[Rosemary Bolton]

thanks so much that sounds like a great idea! how nuch did digicrab charge you?

[qginsburg]

Cold calling still works for me.

[dmckellar]

you can increase turnover by looking for new contracts or look into ways to save money as well?

do you need 6 cleaners to turn over £9k?

cold calling is good and does still work - sometimes sending out promo pens/notepads works - i did it when getting into construction trades and i got phone calls back and also i "hounded" them for a while until one took pity on us