When you first start your business, any business is good business. A house wash here, a driveway cleaning there and the occasional fence. You're on top of the world. Making several hundred dollars per week when you're not working your 9-5. As your business grows and you gain experience, you start to realize bigger is better. Commercial work equals bigger paying jobs, easier to work with customers, higher profit margins and eventually pressure washing becomes your full-time job, no more 9-5. The only trouble is finding these jobs. So, you keep your attention focused on house washing.
At first, friends and family were more than happy to hire you and even make referrals, but that market eventually taps out. You turn to paid advertising. You hire an SEO firm, start running google ads and maybe even pay for some ads on social media. Your business starts to grow again, you're paying the bills from just pressure washing. After a couple of years, you notice year over year growth slows down again. You have dreams of 2 or 3 trucks on the road, a receptionist to take your calls for you, and you are now working on your business, instead of working in it. No more getting wet or smelling like bleach all day. But those dreams seem just out of reach. You think about commercial work again, but how do you land those jobs?
The answer is simple, cold calling. Sure, occasionally you will get some commercial work from your paid ads, by handing out business cards and even word of mouth, but those aren’t enough to help you achieve your goals. You’ve got to proactively reach out to commercial customers and cold calling is how you do it, but how does it work?
It’s about process and consistency. Cold calling scares most small business owners. No one likes to deal with rejection, being told no, or even being hung up on. Yet you must. Instead of thinking about cold calling, think of the process as prospecting. Cold calling is only part of the prospecting process. Prospecting consists of 3 phases.
At this phase of the process, you utilize LinkedIn, your social media network, your Chamber of Commerce, and other networking organizations to find who the decision maker is for various companies. During market research, you are not selling to anyone, you are simply asking questions. Your goal is to develop a list of prospects who you want to contact and try figure out who the decision maker is.
You run into someone at a Chamber of Commerce event that works at Fruit of the Loom and ask, “Hey, I noticed you work at Fruit of the Loom, would you happen to know who is in charge of facilities out there.”
On LinkedIn you get a notification of someone celebrating their 3-year work anniversary at the local Macy’s factory. You send them a congratulatory message and then later ask them who is the plant manager out there.
You drive past a dirty apartment complex and take note of the name and address. When you get home you hop online and figure out who Property manager is.
All this information goes on your list. You have not made any calls yet.
After you have compiled your list it’s time to start making the calls, but remember, this is a process. We are not going to just randomly start calling. We need to implement a strategy for your prospecting calls. There are lots of systems out there, but the one that we like the most is called H.I.P.S. This stands for High Intensity Prospecting Sprints. We are not sure who originated this process, but we first heard of it in a book by Jeb Blunt called Fanatical Prospecting. A summary of H.I.P.S. is that you set a specific time on your calendar each day called a Sprint. During your Sprint, you make your outbound prospecting calls. During a Sprint, you take no phone calls, you don’t answer any emails, no social media. You remove all distractions and get to work.
To take it a step further, you are systematic about it. If your list consists of 30 prospects, break your list up into smaller bite size Sprints. If you call 6 prospects per day, you can contact all 30 of your prospects each week. You don’t call them only once though. You will rarely get through to the decision maker on your first try. You need to contact each prospect between 5 – 7 times until you either get through, or get told no. Once you finish with your list, which means you have either gotten through to a decision maker, have been told no, or have contacted all prospects 5 – 7 times, you start over at phase 1, and start building a new list.
For the prospects who you successfully cold called, reached the decision maker, and provided an estimate; it’s time for the step that a lot of people fail at. The follow-up. Warm leads are leads where the prospect was looking for you. They typically have already gotten pre-approval from management and just need a bid from a qualified professional to begin the work. These are easy.
Cold leads on the other hand take some work. You must do your market research; you have to cold call and then you must convince them to receive a bid from you. If you are successful at this, then the prospect must begin the approval process. This takes time, and because they weren’t actively looking for pressure washing, getting that approval is probably low on their list of priorities, that’s why you must follow up.
With Cold Customers, it can take 6 – 18 months to begin the work, and if you aren’t following up on a regular basis, you can get lost in the day-to-day shuffle. If you’re afraid of being annoying, be up front with them when you speak to them. Ask them how their process works, how long it takes and ask their permission to check in. Most people will appreciate the curtesy and even tell you to check back in a month, 3 months, or on a specific date. Without the follow up, all your hard work will be wasted.
The prospecting process takes time but is worth it. Because it’s so important, larger companies typically hire a professionally trained inside sales rep to do the prospecting for them. According to Glassdoor, the national average salary of a professionally trained inside sale representative with at least 1 year experience is $71,504 per year. Most small business owners can’t afford that, so what do you do.
You feel like you're stuck in between a rock in a hard place. Your choices are do the prospecting yourself which you either don’t have the time to do or you are uncomfortable doing or hire an inside sales rep which is not in your budget.
You ate not stuck though, there is a third option. Pro Pressure Direct. Our staff are professionally trained team members that will become intimately familiar with your company and your service area to help you achieve the growth you desire. We offer a variety of packages to assure you get just the services you need, no more or no less. Each package comes with the option for a flat monthly rate to assure you don’t get surprised by a large bill, or with a risk-free pay scale.
To learn more about our services, contact our sales manager at Melissa@ProPressureDirect.com or use the button bellow to request a call back.
Copyright © 2022 Stat Central - All Rights Reserved.
Powered by GoDaddy