Hood Cleaning Companies 3 Biggest Marketing Mistakes
It’s been 3 years since my first marketing of a hood cleaning company. I have to say that it’s not always been easy. But I’ve learned a ton. I have to say that the biggest mistake that I’ve seen hood cleaners do in their own marketing is simple. It does not have to do with the internet. Nor does it really have much to do with marketing per se. You curious? Want to know where I’ve seen more mess ups in the hood cleaning business? Here we go…
Mistake #1: Letting ANY hood cleaning phone calls go to voicemail.
This is huge! When someone looks up a hood cleaning company on the internet and they call, chances are that they’ll not leave a message if they get voicemail, or they’ll leave a voicemail but move on to call the next hood cleaner on the list. I’ve surveyed this situation several times and it has panned out that if a hood cleaning company call is not answered, 80% of the time, they moved on and the original company did not get the deal. So, if you’re closing on a typical amount of leads in your business, but you’re cutting your opportunities by 80%.
Running the numbers: Let’s say that you’re closing 35% of your leads. That’s a pretty easy number to achieve. So, if you use $500 as an average value of a single cleaning, the numbers could be like this on 100 phone calls. And let’s say that you do answer 50% and 50% go to voicemail.
On 100 calls, that is 50 that you get a 35% chance of doing the work. And Another 10 that you get a 35% chance on (80% of 50).
Dollars made: $10,500 per month
Now, if you always answer your 100 hood cleaning phone calls, you get a 35% shot at all 100 calls.
Dollars made: $17,500 per month!!! That’s an INCREASE of $84,000 per year.
Hood Cleaning partners, please take this to heart. Even if you have to pay someone to answer your calls, you can increase your income by 3 fold of what it would cost to pay someone to answer your phones for you.
We’ve seen this time and time again. Our friends at Nashville Hood Cleaning Pros saw this first hand. They thought that if they just got back to the people that left voicemails within one day, they were doing well. What they did not realize was that they lowered their odds tremendously on the clients that left voicemails, but also, they did not know about the callers that simply hung up on the voicemail. We put a tracker on their phone line so that we could gather the analytics. We found that 55% of the callers simply hung up without leaving a message. Again, it worked out to 80% of those incoming leads were wasted.
Mistake #2: Not setting an immediate hood cleaning inspection appointment.
When you get someone on the phone – you should have one goal and one fallback goal:
1) set an appointment to do the actual cleaning.
2) (fallback) Set an appointment to inspect and quote.
If you simply give prices on the phone, you give up human interaction with someone that can keep giving you business for years. Don’t think of a hood cleaning as an opportunity to make $500. If this restaurant needs a cleaning quarterly, and you get to clean it for the next 5 years, your relationship with the decision maker can be worth $10,000. And even more, if you get to add services to the package.
So, make an effort to always meet with your prospective hood cleaning clients as soon as possible. And don’t think of a hood cleaning as a one-off event. Go for the long term. It will add value to your company.
Mistake #3: Missing a hood cleaning inspection appointment or hood cleaning appointment.
Don’t miss or be late for an appointment EVER. If you show up 30 minutes late for your first meeting, you’re setting the precedence that you do not value the clients time. When you show up late, and you apologize, the client will accept the apology because it is forced politeness. I call this being ‘California nice’. ‘California nice’ is when someone says, “I like your ideas. We should do lunch. I’ll have my girl call your girl…” It’s polite, but its just to be ‘nice’ while your face-to-face, but when you’re out of their site, you’re dead to them. They expect to never see you again.
The fix is to calendar every call on your calendar and add time between appointments that would allow you to get clear across town.
You know that you’re not going to go 100% of the time without being late – but you really need to try hard. BUT IF YOU CAN’T, carry some gift cards for Starbucks or something, and give them to the person up front as an apology. A $10 gift card in hand will help you smooth over being 10-20 minutes late.
This was a guest post by JR Fent of Hood Cleaning Marketing. HCM increases customer counts & profitability for over 40 hood cleaning companies nationwide and is responsible for generating over 1000 phone calls for new hood cleaning quotes each month. Call JR and his team if you want to grow your hood cleaning company drastically in the next year.