5 Reasons WHY an In-Person Walkthrough is Important

So you've done the sales cycle. You've found the lead. You marketed to them. They want a quote. Now it's time to do that walkthrough. Here's the question of the day: Do you do an in-person walkthrough? Or do you price it site unseen provided you had all of the information needed?

Early in my commercial cleaning sales experience, I had a challenge with asking to book that walkthrough. Usually the prospect's point of contact would effective demand that I give a price over the phone in lieu of a visit. And I heard all sorts of excuses like "I can't meet with you!", "My boss needs a price this afternoon.", or "we don't have access to the property due to security (and in the Washington, DC area, lack of access to secured facilities was a legit excuse). But despite doing dozens of proposals site unseen for various reasons, I NEVER won a single one of those.

A common objection I hear from cleaners wanting to skip an in-person walkthrough is around the amount of time needed to go there and back. The first thing that comes to mind is the dozens and dozens of hours I spent putting together proposals on limited info that proved fruitless.

I'm making a case here for in-person walkthroughs and there are five reasons why we do them. Before I dive in, I'll never give a quote site-unseen. I don't care how awesome the property seems or even if the validity of any info is fully legit. I won't bid unless we meet in person first. 


A Majority of Communication is Nonverbal

There's a quote that's been going around for decades that 93% of communication is nonverbal. Some articles suggest that 55% is body language, 38% is tone of voice, and the remaining 7% is the actual words you use when you communicate. There's actually debate on the percentages, but those who study this all agree that a majority of communication is nonverbal.

I've seen posters within FB groups end client relationships over a misunderstanding on a text or email. How many times in our own personal relationships and lives have we confused words to mean one thing when they really mean another? If you're relying on client text or even voice you're missing the most important elements and that's watching them react to your selling points and learning their hot buttons in terms of what's important to them. You're missing out on a majority of the communication.

Some Concepts can Only Be Explained in Person

Ok, so you get the opportunity to bid on 10,000 sqft office. They want weekly services. You feel in your gut that they need at least 3X/week at a minimum. They tell you the office is empty. You trust them but they're wrong because you are bidding from a phone call or email instead of visiting it in person. Instead of your perceived 30-40% occupation, they're at 100% and the facility is all cubicles. That 3-4 hours you thought it would take now takes a solid 5-6 at a weekly frequency and you've lost out. You've underbid. 

Your prospects will NEVER tell you the full picture. They're not telling you the full picture because they're not cleaning professionals like you are. They don't know what's important to you. Therefore, they won't give you needed datapoints to help you come up with an accurate price. 

Let's say they tell you 10,000 sqft. office with 40 people working in there. But what they failed to tell you was that they have glass walls that need to be spot cleaned nightly. Or maybe they worked at a past office that took 1-2 hours, and it's the same size. They'll tell you that it takes 1-2 hours but what they didn't explain is that the other cleaning company had 3 people working within that time. 

These scenarios can lead to financial loss. But a simple visit would have cleared it up. 

You Can Discover Their Pain Points

Strangers generally don't get vulnerable over a text or email. There could be a number of reasons for this like the time needed to type it out. Another could be they have the knowledge that you can't respond in a very empathetic way over text or email, or even over the phone there's a lack of a personal connection usually. 

However, when you meet in person, you'll always pull out a good 2-3 pain points if you ask the right questions. Some of these can only be discovered by observing their body language and other non-verbal queues .I'll ask questions like, "If we could change one thing about the cleaning tomorrow, what would that one thing be?" and "What do you like least about the cleaning services right now?". You can gauge their answers by their nonverbal queues and see what's most important to them.

Another thing I do that help in both our pricing and priorities for them is to listen out for repeated words. For example, if they say "dust" 3 times in our in-person walkthrough, then I know that dusting is a hot button and I can drive that point in our proposals and follow-ups. 

We also track pain points from each prospect. We use these pain points to hone in our marketing and sales process on future jobs and that has helped us win even more contracts. We're able to mirror those pain points even if that prospect never revealed them. That's something we can never do without a walkthrough. 

Use a Walkthrough to See the Condition of the Property

I alluded above that a walkthrough helps in pulling in facts about that property. But the prospective client can give you all the facts but leave out the condition. Let's say you bid site unseen and they complain the last cleaning company failed to mop their floors. You take their pain point into consideration and promise better floors. You win and show up for your first day. Well, those floors were all dirty alright, with a layer of wax on top. You can mop until you're blue in the face and those floors will look exactly the same. So now you're faced with negotiating with the client again if they want it fixed, or you're dealing with a new set of headaches, or you suck it up and fix their floors, potentially at your cost.

In the case for residential cleaners, how many times have we seen examples where the poster came to the property for the first time after they bid and won it, only to be in total shock to its condition? I see stories like that all the time. If it happens in residential, could it happen to commercial? You bet. I recall bidding a school and this school had open-faced lockers. There were no doors to hold the students' stuff in. It spilled out all over the floors. A walkthrough helped determine that we needed to add an extra hour to clean for 250+ students just so we have full floor access. 

The last location I bid site unseen was at the peak of COVID. We cleaned a 5000 sqft commercial kitchen located in the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health outside DC. We got that gig because we had a client that managed that location and the lease to operate that location had ended, no thanks to COVID. So we were asked to clean it. Now I used to co-own a restaurant many lifetimes ago. I'm familiar with kitchen cleaning though I avoid it at all costs. But we took on this job because we wanted to help our client. We accepted the job site unseen. We get there. It's everything I expected except 1 thing...they had no gas and we couldn't use any electricity to fire up the major appliances (commercial griddle, ovens, etc). Plus there was no hot water. 

We're not miracle workers. We can't fix it all. A walkthrough helps you set client expectations going forward and as the "expert" you need to be able to convey that to them before you send a price. 

People Buy From People

I took a sales training and they said that "people buy from people, and not from companies." For a long time I didn't understand that. It wasn't until I was in a sales walkthrough and the prospect told me that he really liked the time in the walkthrough and said he'd rather buy from me versus a company. I didn't want to tell him we were a company and I wouldn't be doing the cleaning. I didn't want to ruin the moment. But he later went on to explain that our sales process was personal and not business. I think what he meant is that if we stuck to a text or email, we wouldn't have the same results.

People crave the in-person human interaction over text or email, or even no communication whatsoever. As a grand experiment, pass out 500 flyers. Just slide them under office doorways. I bet, at best, you might get 5 phone calls asking for a quote. Repeat the process but this time have convos with 500 prospects while handing out the same flyers. Some will reject you. Some will slam the door in your face. But some will want to learn more and they'll be genuine about it. Instead of 1%, I bet your odds increase 10X. Same work but with added time for a 1 minute chat per location is all you'd need. If you feel this is true, could the same happen if you did in-person walkthroughs?

I hope this helped in your business journey. Whether you're commercial or residential, and if you're doing no walkthroughs, consider a new approach. I promise that you'll win more business and you'll be more profitable in the process. 

 Next on Deck: How do You Find the Square Feet of a Property? (Coming 1/22/25)