I have learned that trust and a good relationship between manager/owner/“man in charge” is super important. Smiling is a plus too.
Here’s a story of that from the other day.
So i’m going along my route and someone tried taking, I mean low balling just to steal, my accounts in a strip plaza. This window cleaner tried to take every single account by low balling.
The businesses informed me of this. The most common response I got was, “why would we switch, we like you”.
I have always made it a big thing to wave and say high. I don’t waste any time, I just go the extra mile to be nice because they notice this. This has saved me from losing accounts. People would almost pay me to come by and smile…not really.
Keep in mind that some managers/owners are not nice, so just be friendly and in sticks in there mind.
If you waste 25 seconds to say hi and ask how they are doing in every store, you could waste like half an hour. BUT could save you from losing the account to a low-balling cheap-horrible jerk window cleaner.
Good relationships are very important. I agree that smiling, saying hi, being friendly, trying to remember peoples names are extremely important.
But you don’t just have to be friendly to the owner/manager, be friendly to all, even the seemingly lowly people of the company. Often they have a lot of infleuence on window cleaning choices. And you never know when a manager or owner is doing a lowly task.
Don’t waste time either, but from time to time, you can have a nice chat with the owner/manager if they are in the mood to shoot the breeze. Often they are too busy and a simple hello or smile is all that is necessary. Often you can get much information about what’s going on in the neighbourhood, a new store that’s moving in, or they can pass on your name to a prospective client.
I am curious Mike, why is it you do not want to do resi? Why risk 16 months trying to get to $100 when you can get it tomorrow doing resi?
Yeterday I worked 3 hours and made $300, not only that, the customers were absolutely wonderful to deal with… as most are. [I]Most[/I] commercial clients could care less if I fell off the earth, as long as someone shows up to clean the windows.
I do not find that to be a fulfilling feeling, but that is just me.
Right now my window cleaning experience has been doing commercial. That’s what I’m really good at. So I want to use my experience and build up a solid route. The 16 months I refer to is a goal of mine to make a route of $100,000/year. It would not be a route in the strictest form of the word. It would include car dealerships, industrial units, contracts with property managers, medical offices, upscale stores, and contracts for chains of stores. It would probably include very little mom and pop stores, fast food restauraunts and struggling business. So far I have $6,000/year of work.
I like the simplicity of commercial work, the easy scheduling, dealing with professionals, and some of my customers are really nice.
I do some houses thru a subcontracting aggreement I have. So I’m not totally closed of having houses as a part of my revenue stream.
Mike,
Here are a few things I would do. Concentrate first on the largest jobs in the area. If you can land some of these, it will be more worth your time to keep returning to get some smaller accts. in that vicinity. Or try to become THE window cleaner in a particular cluster of places. At least in my experience that seems to discourage others from hitting an area where everybody is using you. Also, make repeated stops on good prospects. They’ll at least know you’re serious and when the need arises, it’s close to a shoe-in that you’ll be their window cleaner.
I don’t use a sense of urgency and I don’t pressure sell. The way I look at it…those windows aren’t going anywhere and sooner or later I will be doing them. I will keep stopping by until I am told not to. If the current cleaner is doing a good job, I will tell them so and say that I will be around if they decide to make a change. I am only looking at long term
And as an aside…I know the people at A-1 Orange and Sunshine Cleaning Systems very well and have worked with both of them…I worked at Sunshine in Ft. Lauderdale way back in the '80s and have sub’ed work in Orlando and other parts of the state for them when they couldn’t get to it…I have known Moose for many, many years
I don’t give a sense of urgency, why? I’m not a used car sales-man.
I went into a potential clients office and talked to them. The manager said shes doesn’t know about getting a WC. I talked to her for a bit and we really didn’t get anywhere, but I got alot of good information. She said she would call me if they needed one. I replied with, “I check back with in a couple of weeks, ok?”. She said great.
I established a good relationship and trust. I did not pressure.
I would suggest reading some Tom Hopkins and other sales books.
In the end you have to:
Sell yourself
Sell you service
Sell yourself some more
I think that you are hitting a subject that it every business’ problem. Especially our industry as a whole. I have recently purchased a book that attempts to explain to you what to do in these exact situations. The book is called [I][U]How To Win Customers And Keep Them For Life.[/U][/I] by Michael Lebouf, Ph.D.
His intuitve advice completely changed the way that I look at new route-work customers and how I solicit new areas. Since I began using the ideas in the book(just over two weeks now) I have doubled, maybe even tripled, the amount of successful cold calls and solicitations of new route customers.
I used to do the same as you, get about 1%. I thought that it was just the cost of getting new customers.
I have a different way of selling commercial accounts.
I rarely intend to land the job on the first visit. I used to try, and sometimes got them, but mostly I found that it takes 3 visits to land a commercial route job.
So that’s just how I sell accounts now. The amount of time between visits depends on what kind of account it is, and in what condition the windows were in when I first left a card. In general I like to show up weekly if I want to sell it as a weekly job, or every 4th week if I want to sell it as being an every 4th week account. I leave a card everytime I’m there with an estimate. I try to speak to the same person too, otherwise it’s almost useless.
However, if it’s a new business, I intend to sell the job on the first visit, seeing as how they’re going to be bombed with window cleaners during that first month or two.
