Episode 7: Which Cleaning Customers Get Your Attention?

Episode #7 -- Which cleaning customers should be getting most of your attention? The larger sized clients with high profits or the smaller clients that seem to take up a large chunk of your time? Plus, a great resource for training your office workers and supervisors.

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Episode #7 - Video Transcription

Today I'd like to talk about how much attention you should be giving to each of your customers. When it comes to commercial cleaning, most cleaning companies start out the way WE did - taking on smaller sized clients and then working our way up to larger and larger sized accounts. What ends up happening is, you end up with a combination of small accounts that get cleaned once a week for a couple hundred dollars a month and then you'll have several large accounts that get cleaned 5 days a week for several thousand dollars a month.

Residential cleaners may have a similar situation, where they take on clients who only want occasional cleaning, or once a month cleaning, even though they'd love to have all their clients on a once a week or every other week service.

So when it comes to your clients, who do you think you should pay more attention to? The client paying $3000 a month for a 5 day a week service, or the client paying only $200 for a twice a month service? Or if you're a residential cleaner, do you pay more attention to the client paying for a weekly service or the one paying for a once a month service? Of course it's important to give the best service possible to each and every cleaning account, but it's also important to keep in mind which customers generate most of your income.

Does it ever seem that you're spending too much time catering to a small, not-so-profitable account? If so, that's a red flag that you need to do something about. Let's say you're spending just as much time dealing with a client generating only $100 in profit a month as you do a with client generating $1000 in profit a month. Does this seem like the right way to be spending your time?

Several years ago we decided to take a close look at these small accounts in our business that seemed to be a time and energy drain and decided to let a few of them go. What we found is that we freed up time to take on one new larger account that replaced three of the smaller accounts, AND we got rid of a lot of headaches all at the same time. Plus we only had one contact person to deal with, rather than three.

So when thinking about which clients should be getting most of your time, consider the following:

• 1. Which of your customers sing your praises and think you're the greatest thing since sliced bread?

• 2. Which of your customers give you those extra services that add profit to the bottom line, like carpet cleaning and hard floor care? And which ones only want the basic cleaning, never asking for additional services that will help maintain a cleaner and safer environment?

• 3. Which of your customers go out of their way to give you compliments or positive feedback on your cleaning services (and not just the complaints)? Don't these customers deserve more of your attention? Make time to call them up regularly to thank them for their business and ask, "What can I do for you?" And be sincere when asking the question.

The power of building these relationships will help build value and trust for years to come. And when you pay extra attention to your best and most profitable customers, your bottom line will continue to grow. Now I'd like to hear YOUR thoughts on this topic. Do you feel you should be paying more attention to larger, more profitable clients? Post your comments below the video at CleaningBiz.TV.

Before I move on the the next segment I want to take a moment to tell you about CleaningBizMarketingMaterials.com. Our partners at GoBigPrinting helped US put this amazing service together. This is the only place on the Internet where you'll find direct response marketing materials created exclusively for the cleaning industry. You can customize and personalize everything from 4-page newsletters, postcards, self-mailers, comment cards, door hanger flyers, greeting cards and more! So check it out at CleaningBizMarketingMaterials.com -- and be sure to watch the videos!

Episide 7 Resource: JingProject.com - Video Transcription

Today I'd like to share a great resource that you can use in your cleaning company. I've been using it for years and love it for training office workers and supervisors who need to do things for me on the computer. It's a free piece of software called Jing, which you can find at www.jingproject.com. You can also buy the Pro version for only $14.95 a year.

What Jing does is record your computer screen for up to 5 minutes. It can also your voice, so you can talk them through a procedure, step-by-step. So, when you want to train an employee on how to do a certain computer procedure, just open up Jing and start recording! They host the video on their server and give you a link that you can email to your employee. Your employee just clicks on the link to start watching! The employee should also keep a file of all the links you sent them for training, so they can watch whenever they need to review the procedure.

You can train them on anything from how to invoice a customer to how to enter a new employee or new client into the system to paying bills! There is no end to what you can train your employees to do, on the computer! And for those tasks that need more than 5 minutes, here's what I do. I record a series of videos, so I call them Part 1, Part 2 and so on. Now with the free version you'll get a limited amount of server space, so it's worth upgrading to the Pro version. So if you want to save time on training, check out www.jingproject.com!