When you own a cleaning business your goal should be to maximize every single chance you get to obtain cleaning accounts.
That makes sense but sadly many people fail at this all important task and they don’t even know that it’s happening.
What I’m about to tell you may be one of the most important lessons you’ll ever learn in the cleaning business. This lesson doesn’t just apply to cleaning, it applies to every business out there. The lesson is this… how fast you respond to a request for more information from the customer has huge implications for your bottom line.
A Quick Return Call Is Key
In a perfect world, every call gets answered. But sometimes a message gets left. So let’s say you get a phone message (or web-based inquiry) from a potential customer who wants you to contact them about a cleaning job of one kind or another. This would be a person or company that you have no business relationship with, it’s just a hot lead coming across your desk.
How fast you take action on that lead may be the single biggest indicator of how successful you will be in the cleaning business. I say that because if you don’t act fast, that hot lead for you will turn into a hot lead for someone else faster than you think.
Want to know how fast? This is really going to amaze you… but it can be as little as 5 minutes. Yea you heard right… 5 minutes can make or break your ability to turn that hot lead into a customer. This isn’t really news.
How fast you call someone back has always been an important indicator to a business persons success or failure. That’s why I’ve always been preaching the importance of calling people back as fast as humanly possible. I mean it just makes sense if you think about it.
Scientific Study Proves Conventional Wisdom
I found a study that was done by a company that analyzed three years worth of sales data from a cross-section of companies that included over 15,000 lead requests by consumers seeking products and services from a company.
Basically this study just put an easy to understand mathematical formula in place to drive home what everyone already knew… that calling people back fast does matter, and it matters in a big way. Let me go over what this study discovered real quick.
When a phone call or web-based lead generation form was received by a company this is what they found: The company that responded within five minutes versus thirty minutes was 100 times more likely to get a hold of the person who was seeking information.
What does that mean in practice? Well lets say you get a call or email from a customer asking for info about a service you offer and you wait just 30 minutes to call them back… that means you are 100 times less likely to be able to get that person back on the phone.
That’s huge folks! That’s really huge! The moral here is call them back ASAP! The next tidbit from the study showed how likely a company would be able to qualify a lead that came across their desk.
Basically this means taking that same customer who called a moment ago and turn it into an appointment, much like you would do when go visit a customer to give a bid. It’s the same thing! What they found was you were 6 times less likely to be able to make that appointment with the customer to give a bid if you waited an hour to call back.
So what this means is that the cleaning company that waits an hour to call someone back and try to set an appointment is six times less likely to achieve that goal. So as you can see… calling people back is not just an old wives tale that one business person passes to another, it’s actually scientific fact!
This data boils down to one simple conclusion… If you have two cleaning companies side by side getting the same hot leads coming across their desk they do not get the same results. One company will earn tons more money. And that company will be the one who calls those potential customers back the fastest.