I don't know why you would want to pay another window cleaner to put up Facebook adds for you and then sell any inquires that come in back to you.
As far as i am concerned this is the exact same principle as canvassing or leafletting. Some window cleaners dont want to canvas or aren't willing. So what do they do? They pay a canvasser to do it for them. Some people dont want to drop their own flyers or leaflets, so what do they do? Pay a company to drop leaflets.
It's exactly the same thing just in a different format......
Granted, it's alot less effort involved posting adverts on fb than it is to canvas yourself or put out leaflets, but at the end of the day it's just another form of paid advertising/marketing and some people dont want to sit at home posting adverts after working all day long. Some people just can't be bothered either.
I see all of the flaws with this method but i also see why people would choose to do it.
Sorry to disagree with you but what you said there is just wrong and not a comparison at all and heres why.
Leaflets. While you can do them for free yourself they really only work in mass volumes, so it is not possible to deliver 100,000 yourself in order to get a decent response. Hence you pay someone to do something that you actually cant do yourself.
Canvasing. Again is something that needs to be done again and again to get a decent result. I can see why someone wouldn't want to do this themselves having been out all day cleaning.
Facebook lead generation does NOT require someone to spend every night posting ad after ad. Once you set it up in less than 1hour its done and that's that. I know because I did it after using other people to do it for us and paying for crap leads. In the end we closed it down because we also got crap leads although for a lot less money per lead by doing it ourselves.
Bottom line...……. People don't go on facebook to shop for a window cleaner or anything else. They see your add in there news feed and click which sends your there contact info ect…… IF you manage to get them on the phone at all(hard) they have usually totally forgotten about that click and are generally not interested at all.
Believe me Im no expert with these things. I taught myself by watching youtube videos, simple as that. There is NO secret formula to this.
Lee most of your points here are valid, but i still believe there is a market for lead generation alongside other methods. The reason why i personally think lead generation is good is because of the low cost per customer gained. This means that if you have high volumes of leads coming in, you can just weed out the rubbish ones straight away. You don't have to worry about committing yourself to a customer because you know the lead hardly cost anything so its much less of a loss if you decide they dont fit you customer profile.
Example
Canvassing
£10 customer - Priced at x3 - will cost you £30. That's 3 cleans minimum. More like 4 cleans if you include drop offs and fuel wasted for 3 cleans. Will take you 4 cleans to get your investment back regardless of the quality of customers.
Leaflets
I can't really comment on this because i haven't tested it myself and i dont know the average cost to gain a customer, but somebody was telling me that it can be as high as £50-£100 to gain a customer for an average monthly value of £15-£20.
Once again you are probably talking 3-5 cleans before you make your investment back. Now ofcourse from what i hear with leafletting the customer retention is ALOT better, so longterm this method does make sense from alot of what i am hearing. Also once again you can price the job yourself and the customer knows exactly how you operate before you start, unlike using a canvasser or buying a round.
Leafletting is something i definitely want to try Lee and i will get round to it.
Lead Generation
£10 customer - if you pay for lead generation i worked out the price works out on average at £15-£17.50
This means that by the time your second clean is done your in profit. This included removing time wasters before you even start.
Because it is so much cheaper to acquire customers this method, i think it can allow you to be very selective about who you take on. I personally phoned all leads directly and gave them prices over the phone and very quickly could tell if they fitted my customer profile or not, just by speaking to lots of people over and over again. I was phoning on average 30 leads a week. All of the leads i received i managed to get atleast 90% on the phone and confirmed customers getting rid of timewasters equalled about 65-70% of all leads.
Cost wise it was way more effective for me than using a canvasser that is one thing i am certain of. However i still have not used leafletting so i can't compare to that until i try it myself with a minimum of 10k flyers going out.
So in short whether you do your own in house lead generation or pay somebody else to do it for you, it can still work as an alternative method to gain customers, and is relatively cost effective, including taking into consideration customers of shall we say a lower quality overall and retention.
That is my thoughts anyway, maybe i will be eating my words in the next 6 months
