Did you know the U.S. janitorial services industry is worth $90.1 billion and that there are north of 1.2 million janitorial services companies in the U.S. this year?
While businesses increasingly realize the importance of outsourcing cleaning functions, that doesn’t mean there isn’t fierce competition in the commercial janitorial cleaning services space. That means you need to know how to get commercial cleaning leads for your business.
If you want to get more high-quality leads for your janitorial business, you should:
- Pinpoint What Your Dream Janitorial Lead Looks Like
- Practice B2B Appointment Setting to Secure High-Quality Sales Meetings
- Maximize Your Commercial Cleaning Marketing Strategy With SEO
- Target Your Hottest Janitorial Leads With Paid Search and Social Ads
- Align Your Sales and Marketing Strategies for Greater Impact
Pinpoint What Your Dream Janitorial Lead Looks Like
Your company’s ideal customer profile (ICP) identifies the most valuable buyer for your commercial cleaning services. The ICP focuses on the type of company that’s the right fit for your commercial cleaning services. An ICP isn’t about targeting your total addressable market; it’s about seeking out businesses that most closely align with your commercial cleaning services.
Some ways that companies can determine their ICP is by looking at their current book of business and identifying commonalities between them, such as the most common:
- Decision-makers
- Industry served
- Number of full-time employees
- Square footage of cleanable space
- Cleaning product and service interests
- Pain points with previous commercial cleaning providers
Identifying an ICP is essential for commercial cleaning lead generation for the following reasons:
Find Leads That Are the Best Fit for Your Services
It’s a waste of time and effort targeting businesses that don’t have the size, budget, or requirements for your commercial cleaning services. Using your ICP, your sales and marketing departments can accurately and quickly identify and focus on the right leads and turn them into profitable long-term contracts. Your ICP will provide the right lead selection criteria to boost conversion rates and lessen customer churn rates.
Reduce the Amount of Time a Prospect Spends in the Sales Cycle
Do you want to spend less time turning leads into long-term customers and more time meeting the needs of your customers? A well-thought-out ICP will help because it presents them with sales and marketing assets that align with what they’re looking for in a commercial cleaning partner.
Ensure Sales, Marketing, and Services Teams Are Aligned
Do you sometimes feel as though your services, sales, and marketing departments are working on their own separate islands? When you have identified your commercial cleaning company’s ICP, you can ensure these departments are working together rather than butting heads. Your services team will ensure commercial cleaning services specifically meet customers’ needs, your marketing team will create highly personalized content, and your sales team will understand which leads to prioritize.
Gain Referrals From Loyal Customers
When you add high-value customers and meet or exceed their needs, the odds are that they will recommend your services to others. That will bring in further business opportunities.
After figuring out the ICP, you need to identify buyer personas. Remember that the ICP refers to companies your business wants to target. But the buyer personas refer to the decision-makers and the end users at these companies. They have different motivations, so it’s essential to know who you’re dealing with to reach them effectively.
Develop Buyer Personas
Buyer personas describe who your ideal clients are, what challenges they encounter, and how they make decisions. There may be different buyer personas without a single company. For instance, if three people need to give their approval before a company signs a contract with your commercial cleaning business, there are possibly three buyer personas you must consider. It’s your job to discover who these decision-makers are and how to reach them.
A buyer persona is like a biographical sketch that describes a specific type of prospective customer. What follows is an example of a buyer persona that might resonate with your janitorial cleaning business:
Busy Harold: “Busy Harold” represents a business owner with multiple facilities spread out around and about town. He has too little time and too much to do, understands the importance of outsourcing cleaning responsibilities, and wants to hire a company he can depend on so he can focus on growing his business.
When you’ve developed buyer personas, your marketing team will understand essential details about any lead that fits your ICP. It will be able to create marketing materials that focus on the pain points of such prospective clients.
Busy Harold: “Busy Harold” represents a business owner with multiple facilities spread out around and about town. He has too little time and too much to do, understands the importance of outsourcing cleaning responsibilities, and wants to hire a company he can depend on so he can focus on growing his business.
When you’ve developed buyer personas, your marketing team will understand essential details about any lead that fits your ICP. It will be able to create marketing materials that focus on the pain points of such prospective clients.
Practice B2B Appointment Setting to Secure High-Quality Sales Meetings
If you don’t have a B2B appointment setting system in place, you won’t secure the high-quality sales meetings that come from commercial cleaning leads. Once a qualified prospect is ready to take the next step in the buyer’s journey, a sales development representative (SDR) should set up a sales meeting between the decision-maker and a member of the internal sales team.
B2B appointment setting usually leads to a faster and better ROI than inbound marketing strategies alone. It’s a business growth strategy where sales teams cold call, email, and nurture relationships with leads in the sales pipeline.
If you want an appointment setting strategy that yields results for your commercial cleaning company, it’s important to follow these steps:
Step 1. Set Goals
Before implementing an appointment setting strategy, you need to figure out the end goal of this sales development approach. Doing so will help you stay on course so that everything you do gets you closer to reach your long-term sales goal.
Step 2. Build Your Prospect List
After establishing an appointment setting goal, you must build a sales pipeline by filling it with prospects. Every sales team has their own approach to building their prospect list, whether it’s seeking them out online or buying prospect lists from third-party vendors. However you decide to approach building your sales pipeline, you must narrow down the types of prospects you want by ideal decision-maker, industry served, company size, revenue generated, etc. to ensure sales reps are reaching out to janitorial leads that meet your ideal customer profile.
Step 3. Quality Leads
Now that your prospect list is built, SDRs must start cold calling or sending emails to prospects, aiming to introduce your business and establish relationships with decision-makers. During this step, it’s essential that sales reps verify the prospects sales and marketing qualifiers they gathered in step 2, converting them into qualified prospects. If the prospect doesn’t end up meeting your cleaning company’s qualifiers, they should be removed from the pipeline so SDRs can focus on more qualified sales leads.
Step 4. Nurture the Relationship
SDRs must nurture relationships with leads until they’re ready to sign a contract for your commercial cleaning services. During the lead nurturing process, you need to help them see how your commercial cleaning solution could be better for them than what competitors offer. This includes making follow up phone calls and sending routine sales emails to see where they’re currently at in the decision-making process and exploring what they need to push them towards the end of the sales funnel.
Step 5. Set Sales Meetings
Last but not least, the next step is to set sales appointments between a decision-maker and a member of your internal sales team. During these sales meetings, sales and account executives present qualified sales opportunities with a personalized presentation that encourages them to sign on for your commercial cleaning services.
Maximize Your Commercial Cleaning Marketing Strategy With SEO
Your commercial cleaning business also needs an SEO strategy to generate inbound commercial cleaning leads. When businesses that fit your ICP look for commercial cleaning companies online, what terms are they using? They may be searching for phrases like:
- “Commercial cleaning services near me”
- “Benefits of outsourcing commercial cleaning services”
- “What are electrostatic disinfection services”
Your SEO strategy needs to include researching keywords to know what search terms your target market uses. If you’re not doing this, you must revamp your marketing.
The most essential component of an inbound marketing strategy is website design and development. Without an SEO-focused website, none of your other efforts really matter. Your customers are online. You must be online as well since you have to have an online location where you can direct customers so that they can get in touch with you.
After setting up a commercial cleaning website, you must develop a good search engine optimization strategy. Common SEO best practices include researching keywords, on-site optimization, and building backlinks to a site. A good content strategy is also key. A good content marketing strategy will help you reach businesses that fit your target demographic and help them find you online.
When people enter search queries online, they tend to focus on the first few entries on the first search engine results pages (SERPs). So, if you’re on the bottom half of the first page or on subsequent pages, they may never find you online. You need a commercial cleaning marketing strategy that consistently ranks you at the top of SERPs for key terms.
Producing good content on a regular basis will attract eyeballs. Going about it the right away will lead to as many inbound leads as your sales and marketing team can handle. It will resonate with potential buyers that are seeking commercial cleaning services. So, a purposeful content strategy will bring in the right leads.
But to reel them in, you need calls to action that direct prospective customers to relevant landing pages. It’s about informing leads about what they need to do for more information, to book a consultation, or whatever else. Explain the next steps and make it as easy and painless as possible. It will boost the odds of prospective clients becoming inbound leads who can be nurtured until they’re ready to take the next step in the sales cycle.
For more insight into commercial cleaning digital marketing best practices, read our blog here.
Target Your Hottest Janitorial Leads With Paid Search and Social Ads
A paid advertising campaign is essential to retarget potential buyers looking for your commercial cleaning services online. How can your janitorial business accomplish this? Paid search ads and paid social ads are proven methods. You can choose one, the other, or both.
That doesn’t mean that one option might not be the best for your commercial cleaning business. Select an advertising solution that makes the most sense for your target market and buyer personas to ensure you meet leads where they engage most.
Align Your Sales and Marketing Strategies for Greater Impact
Sales and marketing are often seen as two separate departments. But they need to work together as a cohesive unit if you’re going to achieve your corporate objectives.
What if SDRs call prospects and the prospects say they’re not in a place to buy yet, but are interested in potentially investing in electrostatic disinfection services when their contract is up? In such cases, the SDRs can put them in the lead nurturing stage of the sales development process. Since the SDRs know what kind of cleaning services the prospects are interested in, they can put them in an email marketing campaign that’s specifically centered around electrostatic disinfection services. So, they always receive content that’s relevant to their needs.
Key Takeaways
If you execute the right strategies in the most effective manner, getting commercial leads for your growing janitorial business is possible. You need first to figure out your ideal ICP, practice B2B appointment setting to set up productive sales meetings, leverage SEO to create a more effective marketing strategy, target your most promising leads with paid search and social ads, and align your sales and marketing departments for more significant impact.
If your commercial cleaning business needs help with any of the above, Abstrakt has the answers you’re seeking. We collaborate with growing commercial cleaning businesses across the U.S. to help them fill their sales pipeline with qualified janitorial leads through appointment setting and digital marketing efforts.
Contact Abstrakt today to learn if there’s availability in your commercial cleaning market!
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