Ultimate Lead Guide - Finding Places of Worship

Places of Worship are our 3rd installment in our Ultimate Lead Guide series. Aside from our Winning With Marketing series, be sure to also check out:

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

I call it a place of worship so as to encompass every faith-based facility or building. As a primer, I'm classifying churches to include different denominations like Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Unitarian, Non-Denominational, Baptist, and the dozens of other denominations out there. Then there are are broad-reaching faiths like Judaism, Hindi, Muslim, and their many faiths and branches, including non-religious facilities like meditation rooms, spiritual centers, and so on. Each of these locations do have their own rules and practices, even when it comes to cleaning, but if they're being used they do need a cleaning service like yours.

Places of Worship are a niche for us. We found our church leads through these methods:1) Google, 2) Lead Magnets, 3) Referrals, 4) Affiliations, 5) Aggregated lists, 6) Closure lists, and 7) Networking.

Before diving in, know that due to the economy, COVID's impact on church attendance, and more, there seems to be more facility-sharing. This is purely a guess but I bet 1/3 of our local churches not only share their facility with another church, but they also share the facility with different denominations in many examples. For example, there's a Christian church up the road that shares its space with a Buddhist group. I recall we served a Unity church that shared half of their space with an Islamic school. It's a way to split costs when prices aren't going down in the foreseeable future.

Google:

Remember the Google exercise in the School Leads post? Search the same way. Search "Churches near me" or "Synagogues near me" or "Temples near me" or "Mosques near me" and you'll find plenty of examples depending on your locality. From this list you have the church name, address, and phone. So at the minimum you can call, mail, or visit them. And with some crafty googling, you can find emails too, especially on lists through Seamless or Hunter. Even on their own website they'll list email addresses sometimes.

Pro-tip: Unrelated to finding leads, go on their website. Some (not all) of these places of worship will list out their budget. You can find data like how much they spend on cleaning services. This is a good way to prequalify your lead.

Lead Magnets: 

Like with our School leads sources, we did the same type of lead magnets for churches. We simply created a cleaning checklist from our typical SOW for churches. We focused only on churches because that's what we were familiar with, but we have bid synagogues and mosques in the past. In these lead magnets, a pop up would appear on our website enticing them to fill out the form so we could capture their contact info. It worked well.

Referrals:

Worked like a charm. Everywhere we went we asked for referrals. It's not what you know but who you know. In our experience, churches reached out to other churches to ask who they used for a cleaning company. We had multiple churches referring each others' services over the years. And it didn't stop there. There are people we worked with in other facilities, like office buildings, who referred our business to their church for consideration. Never be afraid to ask and always do a great job.

Also, in some denominations like Catholicism, the pastors are routinely moved from church to church. When you get in with one, and they move, it's not uncommon you get to spread to their new location too. Keep that relationship going and do a great job.

Affiliations:

Affiliations were more clear with school, as in our previous guide. Schools were regulated and they had to keep each other accountable. It's not the same with churches. However, some still carry affiliations with their denominations. Examples include the Southern Baptist Convention, the Roman Catholic Church, Unitarian Churches, etc. Yes, these are more denominations but some churches belong to multiple affiliations. If you look on their respective websites, sometimes they will list these out. For example, the screenshot below is for the Southern Baptist Convention. Not all churches have "baptist" in it:

Aggregated Lists:

Just like in the Schools section for Aggregated Lists, churches have the same. People create websites with churches name and contact info and with traffic, they get paid. These lists are heavily promoted on line. Yelp is a good example of this. Google "Churches near Me" and Yelp will appear as a top result:

Closure Lists:

Just like Schools, your local weatherman will share church closures if they have a program set up for that (and assuming you're in that type of client where it could snow/ice). Our local radio station publishes this list every time is snows. It's a great memory jogger of what churches are in the area and always I cross reference this list to my church lead list. 

Networking:

We found 2 of our churches through our local Chamber of Commerce. No, they weren't members, but their members were members of our chamber and they needed cleaning services for their church. Never discount the power of relationships.

I hope the above helps add leads to your lead list for places of worship. All of them need cleaning services. As a side note of interest, I see comments from time to time saying that churches are cheap. Nope, not in our experience. We charge full price and they're more than fair in receiving that pricing. We don't gouge them but we proudly do make a profit like we do other locations. We won't work for free.