Ultimate Lead Guide - Finding Schools

Schools are our 2nd installment in our Ultimate Lead Guide series. Aside from our Winning With Marketing series, be sure to also check out:

The Introduction
Places of Worship
Medical Offices
Government
Office Buildings
Car Dealerships
Banks
Gyms (coming 8/14/24)

Schools are my jam. I love cleaning them. I think they're easy to find and win. And of all of our niches over the years, we had relationships that spanned 4+ decades. If treated right, they'll be loyal forever.

Before we begin, know that there are two main types of schools and there are multiple subsets of schools. The two main types are public and private.

In private schools, generally that campus makes decisions for themselves for their own cleaning service. Sometimes this school is completely independent. Sometimes they're tied in with a church or other schools even, created multiple campuses. 

Unlike private schools, public schools are generally tied in with a school district. It's not that common the school can decide on cleaning for themselves, or at least not in urban settings. And generally, public schools have their own staff, but not always. I'm in the DC area. In Washington, DC all of the public schools' cleaning is done in-house, as are Montgomery County Public Schools, Prince Georges Public Schools, DC Public Schools, Arlington County Public Schools, Fairfax County Public Schools, Loudoun County Public Schools, and others. However, and oddly enough, Alexandria Public Schools works with one cleaning company across all schools and is published through a Request for Proposal (RFP) and any cleaning company can bid. Certainly check with the school districts near you for more info.

Back to Private Schools, know that there are different subsets. These include K-8, or similar, high school, colleges, daycares, preschools, technical schools, Montessori schools, magnet schools, and more. Don't limit yourself to the typical K-8.

To find them, I'll do a visual walkthrough of how I find private schools. Once I find them I put them on my lead list for schools and I start marketing to them. My favorite sources of marketing for schools are sales letters, sales calls, email marketing, SEO, referrals, and associations.

Top sources for Leads for our company over the years for Private Schools:

1) Google, 2) State Databases, 3) Lead Magnets, 4) Referrals, 5) Affiliations, 6) Best Of lists, and 7) School Closure lists


Google:

Simply google "private schools near me". It's that easy:

Just by googling, you now have access to the school name, their website, and phone number at a minimum. At the very least you can call them, mail them, or even visit them (exercise caution on visiting some schools; not many like that). 

If you go into their website, you can sometimes find email addresses, and you can find contact information, as well to see who is who. On that note, who is who? Well, the decision-maker could be the principal, vice-principal, facilities manager, director of buildings and grounds, office manager, business manager, pastor (if tied in with a church), or even the CFO. All of these were titles that decided on and signed our contracts. In one example, we bid on a Lutheran school in which the 2nd grade teacher made the decision (in other words, don't assume anything; talk to everyone).

If needing emails to do email marketing, and you can't find it on their site, you can use resources like Hunter or Seamless along with LinkedIn SalesNavigator for email sources. 

State Databases:

Education is regulated. Your state doesn't allow you start and build up a school without meeting education standards. Your state gives approval or accreditation on schools. In Virginia there are a couple of sources of memberships that private schools can be affiliated with. Certainly check with your state and see which organizations oversee private schools.

Lead Magnets:

Ever visited a website and had a pop up appear asking for your contact info. More than likely that's a lead magnet. A well optimized website would benefit from lead magnets. We had them on our site and whenever someone visited our Gym niche page, they'd see a lead magnet for a gym. For churches, they'd see a lead magnet for a church. We did the same for other niches, including schools. We would entice visitors to give us their contact info. In exchange, we offered a free download they can use to evaluate cleaning services. In our example, we simply took the scope of work and made a checklist out of it. We pulled in dozens of school leads as they visited our website. Below is an example:

Referrals:

By far our #1 source of leads that converted were through referrals. Schools call other schools to ask about services. If you do a great job, they'll refer you to others. We can trace our former company's lineage and you can see clear pattern of where one school referred another who referred another who referred another. It's a money-maker for sure.

Outside of asking for the referral, you can create a paid referral program. We won a private school through a paid referral. One day a uniform supply sales person called us to say that a school he serviced needed cleaning services. But there was a catch! He asked to be paid for that referral. Well, I didn't want to walk away empty-handed so I offered an alternative. If he gave us that lead, and it converted to a client, we will pay him a fixed amount every month for up to 2 years. Deal! We created this new school's price and added 1.5% on top of that. That school was $8000/mo after we added 1.5% on that. We won the contract. The uniform supply person got $120/mo or $1440/year. Times two that's $2880. That's nearly $3000 paid out for a 5 minute conversation and introduction. BTW, we held that contract for over a decade. That's nearly $1M in revenue for a simple introduction. Wow! Do you think that uniform supply person wanted to refer more to us? Heck yea!

Affiliations:

Aside from state and regulatory associations, they are also affiliated with others. for example, within cleaning, we have affiliations with ISSA and BSCAI for cleaners, right? Well, schools have the same type of affiliations. Instead of talking about cleaning, they're talking about school stuff. NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) is one such example with over 1000 schools listed. The US Department of Education has a pretty good list of other associations.

Best Of Lists:

These are great. Companies are always looking make a buck and one way is to create an aggregate list of locations people already search for, like schools. Now they can create AdSense and monetize these lists. Google "best private schools" and you're bound to run into one of these lists:

School Closure lists

If you live in a cooler climate, like what we have here in the Dc Region, we have the occasional snowfall that necessitates a school closure. Now growing up in Florida, we did have similar but for tropical events (they didn't close our schools for anything though). Our local radio stations through their websites, and TV included, publish school closure lists. If we need inspiration on a school lead, they'll list out which schools are closed and which are delayed. 

The above is a simple screenshot of a past weather event locally. Check out your local news sources during significant weather events to see if they publish a list of schools.

I hope the above helps you find your next big school to clean. Build out a list and begin marketing to them.