What are the cleaning industry's greatest challenges this year?

25th of May 2017 Article by Michelle Cachucho
What are the cleaning industry's greatest challenges this year?

Michelle Cachucho, director at Best Minds Marketing, has compiled a guide entitled The 7 Biggest Challenges The Cleaning Industry Is Facing In 2017. In her first ECJ blog she outlines what those challenges are.

Too many cleaning companies are trapped in traditional business models, using out-dated, simplistic business systems that are losing them money and ultimately threatening their longevity and the legacies these (often family) business owners hope to leave for their children.

This is the cost of a fear of change, technical overwhelm, shortage of staff, sheer procrastination or any combination of these challenges which is stopping them from growing their business.

More recently I spoke to a prospective cleaning company. They had contacted us through our website with the initial request to help them grow their business. Every time I take calls like these, it seems to be a similar story every time. These same challenges keep coming up again and again and it's usually the case that the business just doesn't know where to start.

Having conducted a survey with commercial cleaning businesses in 2016, it became clear that the cleaning industry is massively underserved by any companies to help educate cleaning business on how to better market and grow using well architected strategies and technology.

This is exactly why we decided to write our Guide, The 7 Biggest Challenges The Cleaning Industry Is Facing In 2017.

These businesses often spend significant amounts of money and time on acquiring new prospects, but lack a systematic follow up process to monetise prospects. Whilst regularly searching for new leads is a good thing, it's only worthwhile if those leads are being converted into buyers. The trouble many such businesses face is that they're just not converting as often as they should and are throwing away contracts or leads worth hundreds, thousands - and in some cases even millions - of pounds. We call this 'leaky bucket syndrome'.

Imagine using a bucket of water to wash your car, but the only bucket you have has lots of holes in it. To keep it full of water you have three options:

1) Keep putting more water in
2) Fix the holes
3) Get a new bucket

Option 1 requires too much effort and is highly inefficient.
Option 3 is too expensive.

So how do you go about fixing the holes?

Based on our research conducted by our team, the seven challenges (read holes in the bucket) commercial and industrial cleaning companies are facing in 2017 can be summed up as follows:

1. No systematic follow-up process
2. Spending excessive amounts of money on costly ad campaigns
3. No formal customer referral programme
4. Poor, inconsistent customer experiences5. No Measurement of Customer Satisfaction
6. Limited - often manual - business, sales and marketing processes
7. No effective way of managing or analysing customer data

Our guide covers each one in more detail so click here and complete your details and you'll receive a copy straight away.

 

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