How Do You Find Commercial Jobs?

"How do you find commercial jobs?" I see this question daily on various Facebook groups. It's a simple question without a simple answer. The premise of the question is comes from wanting more business and more income. How do you find more commercial clients. This post is the guide for you if you're wanting more business going into 2024. 

Let's begin with the steps needed to win a new client. Let's go backwards...

In order to win a new client, you need to deliver new proposals/contracts to that potential client. 

How do you get a contract and proposal in front of them? You need to do a walkthrough first. Yes, some people, mostly in residential, skip this step. However, it's a great way to build trust with that potential client and it's a great way to learn their needs and challenges. In fact, with some commercial clients, this step is mandatory. You won't win some commercial clients without that walkthrough. 

Well, how do you get a walkthrough? You need to market to them enough times to get invited for a walkthrough.

Well, how do you market to your prospects/leads? There are many ways, and I'll cover some below. 

Ok, then how do you find your leads? I started covering this is the Ultimate Lead Guide. More content is added regularly. Be sure to check it out.

So as a recap...

Step 1: Find Leads

Step 2: Market to your Leads

Step 3: Get an opportunity to do a walkthrough

Step 4: Do a walkthrough

Step 5: Deliver a proposal/contract

Step 6: Win a new commercial client

It's that easy. 

But let's go back to Step 2: Marketing to your Leads. This is the step that hangs most people up and it's so early in the process that it leads to frustration if no implemented correctly. Know that there are two types of marketing: inbound and outbound marketing. I'm going to cover both in broad strokes and do a deeper dive in segments in later blog posts. There are also well over 100 different marketing channels you can take here to market your cleaning business. In fact, I cover some oddball marketing tactics in another post. I'm going to focus on the most popular and most practical ones.

Some Inbound Marketing Tactics:

Website/SEO

This is probably 90-95% of our success in recent years. When someone needs a product or service, what do they do? They google. They'll google "Cleaning services near me" or "church cleaning services" or "office cleaning services" or whatever. They don't look in the phonebook. They tend not to ask their friends. They definitely don't wait around for your call or email. They buy on Impulse and that means reaching out to the first 2-3 cleaning services they find on the web. If you don't have a website, and don't engage in SEO, they won't find you in a google website search.

Blogging/Social Media Marketing/Online directories

Continuing with the broad strokes here with this category. There are several tactics you can take to improve your SEO. One blogging. You can create a blog about anything, and reference back to your cleaning company. Google will pick that up thinking you're an authority figure in the cleaning space and rank you better. 

Social Media Marketing is another example. You can repurpose pages from your website, blog posts, client success stories, and more. If pages on FB, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and more reference your cleaning company, Google will see that and you'll climb the rankings.

Online directories are everywhere. Examples are Yellow Pages, 411, Better Business Bureau, NextDoor, Angi, Yelp, and more. Get added to these directories and, like with the above, you'll climb the web rankings.

Sharable Content

Make your content sharable. Create and share blog posts. Create and share infographics. Create and share ebooks filled with content on cleaning guides, checklists, etc. The more your content gets shared, the more you'll rank and the more likely you will to get your phone ringing off the hook. 

Video series/YouTube

Do a video series. One of my favorite books is They Ask, You Answer by Marcus Sheridan. Marcus took a struggling unground pool business from the brink of bankruptcy to one of the most popular pool company not only in the US but globally too. His strategy was through YouTube. He created content around what people would ask.  Basically he created a video with every question he'd receive and made a killing at it. And since Google owns YouTube, it became a win-win in terms of inbound marketing. Another example is by my good friend Jerad Spencer of Spencer Real Estate Company out of Vidor, TX. He makes his rounds about town offering reviews of local restaurants and keeps everyone up to date on the latest business deals. He doesn't sell but people reach out to him all the time because of his videos. Give, give, and give, and you'll get some requests along the way. 

Podcasting

It's pretty easy to hit record and publish your next podcast. You can create a podcast around the community, sponsored by your cleaning company. Or a podcast about cleaning tactics, sponsored by your cleaning company. 

Ads

Ads are everywhere. You can do AdWords through Google. You can run ads on FB (not recommended for commercial). You can run targeted ads on LinkedIn. You can take out ads in local publications with a good readership. There's so much you can do here.

Some Outbound Marketing Tactics

Calling

Yep, that phone weighs 500 lbs. But it works. I build my business on cold calling. When I started in 1997, I did a lot of calls as we didn't have a website, I'm not sure if I had email, and certainly SEO wasn't a thing. I get it. I hate it too. But if you make 100 calls in a row, you'll get really good at it. Unfortunately most people give up after 1 "no".

Email Marketing

Some people put this in the inbound column, but I prefer to consider this an outbound tactic. You're physically reaching out to prospects to try to win them over. We send this in 4 different tactics more described in a future post. Email works, provided you're monitoring open rates.

Sales Letters

This was my jam in terms of tactics. I sent out thousands and thousands of sales letters. Simply would tell them their problem, provide a short solution, offer up 2-3 things that make us unique, offer some references in their area, and post a very clear call to action (what do I want them to do after reading this letter). And I'd sign off and sometimes include an irresistible offer in the Post Script. I'd stuff it in a branded envelope and mail it out with a stamp. Easy peasy. With templates, you can easily knock out 200-300 per day.

Networking

Network. Attend your local Chamber of Commerce or some other networking group like BNI and meet people. It's not uncommon for them to refer people to you or use you themselves. In the time I focused only on sales between 1997 and 1999, I brought in over a dozen new clients and the combined lifetime value (LTV) was over $2,000,000. Not bad for a few hand shakes.

Targeted Ads

You can specifically target new prospects. You can create targeted ads through any medium and that prospect will always see your ad if your advertising on that medium (assuming your settings are correct).

Referrals

More than half of our business, over or previous company's 45 year history, came as a result of referrals. It's not what you know; it's who you know. There are several ways to go about this, including asking your clients if they'd spread a good word about your business, asking others who do business with your prospective client to give a good work about you, or at least to make a connection, or you can even create a paid referral program. With the latter, you can offer a commission to anyone who refers business to you and pay them a percentage of that business if that referral turns into a paying client. 

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The above is just a sample of what you can do to drive either leads into your business or compel leads to reach out to you. View each as a tool in the toolbag. If you built a home, you would probably use a hammer, some sort of saw, levels, measuring tape, drill, etc. But you wouldn't use just a hammer to build a home, or a saw. You'd use a combo of things to get the job done. Well, it's the same when marketing for your cleaning business. You wouldn't want to use a website only or email marketing only or social media marketing only. You'd use multiple things to get the results you need. Diversify your marketing tools. Measure the success. And hone in on the 3-5 tactics that work the best for you and your business.