Telemarketing is a tried and tested lead generation strategy focused on bringing high-quality leads into your sales funnel. It benefits commercial cleaning companies because it focuses solely on your target prospects and does not waste time on the broader market.
When it comes to lead generation, cleaning companies are often faced with two issues:
Appointment setting and winning over new customers.
Whilst you have an extremely large market, there is also an abundance of competitors. Therefore, differentiating yourself from the competition can be difficult. Telemarketing can be used as a very effective tool to bridge the gap.
Methods of Generating Cleaning Leads
Paid ads on Google, content writing, knocking on doors, leaflet dropping… Without listing everything, there are many methods you could use, but the questions you are probably asking yourself are:
“What is going to generate the greatest return?” and “What commercial cleaning lead generation methods are going to work best for me?”.
Many cleaning companies have tried telemarketing in the past, you may even have an in-house telemarketer making outbound calls!
If you’re reading this article, chances are that what you’re doing currently isn’t working as well as it could, or more importantly, you feel as though it could be working better.
If you have tried telemarketing previously and found that it did not work for you, we’re not surprised. Managing telemarketers, developing a well-defined message, and building the right database takes time and experience.
The cleaning clients that we work with often want to achieve one of 2 things:
- They want to generate high-quality sales appointments that they can sell to within sectors that they are experienced in.
- They want to meet with prospects that have a genuine need for their services and want to buy now. Let’s face it, if you’re working in a highly competitive market, you only want to be spending your time out of the office meeting with serious prospects.
A well-thought-out telemarketing campaign that is geared towards generating high-quality sales leads for your cleaning business can prove to be a game changer.
No longer are you fighting against the competition, you’re leading the race meeting with prospects at the right time when they want to buy from you, not just when you want to sell to them.
This guide on generating commercial cleaning leads is going to give you the tools to generate high-quality sales leads for your cleaning business – if you don’t have the skillsets internally, The Lead Gen Specialists team can, of course, help!
However, to explain why telemarketing works so effectively for commercial cleaning companies, we first have to understand why your current strategy might not be working.
How Do Commercial Cleaning Companies Generate Leads?
In 2022, the market for commercial cleaning providers is highly saturated. For example, in just London and the Southeast alone there are around 11 thousand operational cleaning companies.
This begs a couple of questions: How could prospects find my business, and how are my competitors currently generating new leads?
Search, SEO, & PPC
One method cleaning companies use to generate inbound enquiries from prospects, is PPC and SEO.
Whilst these tools can be effective, the problems with SEO and PPC are the same: cost and oversaturation. With the sheer amount of commercial cleaning companies operating in the UK, your web pages are competing with thousands of other businesses to rank highly on Google and bid on relevant keywords.
So, without meticulously updating your web pages and assigning large budgets to PPC efforts, your business is likely to get lost in the void of search results.
Word of Mouth
Another lead generation method, popular with commercial cleaning companies, is word-of-mouth marketing.
This method of generating new business works effectively for B2C cleaning companies, as well as for B2B cleaning companies, albeit to less of an extent. Whilst you are likely to receive inbound enquiries from references, it almost certainly will not lead to substantial growth within a reasonable timeframe.
Bearing these factors in mind, commercial cleaning companies throughout the UK need a proven method to generate highly qualified sales appointments with only those who are interested in buying…
Why Is Telemarketing Effective?
As a commercial cleaning company, telemarketing needs to be utilised correctly. As mentioned, you may have already utilised telemarketing to no avail, whether outsourced to an agency or via an in-house telemarketer. When implemented correctly, telemarketing can generate a steady flow of sales-qualified leads for your business.
Telemarketing allows you to generate new business by booking appointments with prospects who are interested in your services.
A professional telemarketer will do this by getting through to the Decision Makers in your target businesses and holding effective conversations, delivering your messaging, and positioning you as a credible contender for supplying cleaning services.
In addition, by deploying a professional telemarketing resource, you can gather important data for your campaign like incumbent solutions, renewal dates for any pre-existing contracts, current pain points, or why a prospect may not be interested.
You might ask yourself why this is important, but being able to gauge why your prospects aren’t interested in your solutions will allow you to adapt your services and your messaging to suit the needs of your prospects, allowing you to become more competitive.
Whilst this is great, one of the most important reasons to gather relevant data from your telemarketing efforts is to build a sales pipeline.
Sales Pipelines
In the commercial cleaning industry, you’ll come across prospects who are not currently reviewing their solutions, but this doesn’t mean they won’t be interested in your services. Without a sales pipeline, you could miss out on a qualified lead because, although they may consider your solution at some point, the timing might not be right.
If your cleaning company is not actively building out a sales pipeline with contract renewal dates, you could be missing out on potential buyers!
For example, your prospect is in a contract with your competitor and is not currently looking to review their cleaning solutions, so they stay uninformed about your services.
When the time comes to review their incumbent solutions, they search Google for commercial cleaning companies, but your website doesn’t appear on the first page, and they never find you.
Utilising outbound marketing via telemarketing, whilst building a pipeline of qualified leads, means that you can reach out to those who are likely to be interested. If they are not currently looking to review, you can call these prospects back when the timing is right for them, and they are ready to consider your company as a contender. This generates a qualified lead that you may have otherwise missed.
Not just this, but having an extensive pipeline of cleaning leads provides security for your business, as you always have a list of interested prospects to convert. Learn more about maximising your sales funnel here.
How to Ensure the Success of Your Telemarketing Efforts?
After reading thus far, you’re probably wondering how you can better ensure that telemarketing is going to work for your business, especially if it has been unsuccessful in the past. Luckily, there are a couple of factors that can help you increase the chances of your commercial cleaning lead generation efforts proving successful.
The base of any B2B lead generation mechanism is intelligently sourced qualified data. Lead generation, without using professionally sourced data, is essentially shooting in the dark, even if you eventually do hit something, you will have wasted your resources in the process!
Sourcing data based on the personas of, not only who you currently sell to, but your target prospects, increases the chances that you are only going to call interested parties. This saves time and increases the likelihood of your commercial cleaning leads converting into buyers, helping increase the ROI on your marketing spend.
Another way of increasing the chances that telemarketing will be successful for your business is ensuring that if you decide to outsource your lead generation efforts, you choose the right agency. Ensuring that the business you work with is experienced in effective lead generation, and has the ability to source data on, and converse with the correct prospects will help guarantee that the messaging and delivery of your campaign will be effective. These factors will increase the ROI of your marketing spend. Operating in such a saturated and competitive market means that most commercial cleaning businesses are competing on cost, so ensuring that you utilise cost-effective resources like telemarketing and are seeing a high ROI will help you stay competitive.
Why Telemarketing Will Help You Generate Commercial Cleaning Leads
In conclusion, as a provider of commercial cleaning services, you need a B2B lead generation strategy that generates high-quality appointments. To ensure that you are not wasting your time and can successfully convert leads into new business, you will need a sales pipeline in order to maximise the ROI.
In order to stay competitive, your strategy needs to be cost-effective and a worthwhile investment for your business, so choosing the right lead generation professionals could be the key to the growth of your business.
To find out how The Lead Gen Specialists are already helping businesses like yours generate high-quality sales leads and appointments, contact us today, or read one of our testimonials from Westgate Cleaning.
Call 03332 400 054 or email enquiries@leadgenspecialists.co.uk
