Solution
How to be remembered better than the competition
When clients choose a supplier, it often comes down to gathering multiple offers to pick the one with the lowest price; there is little room to showcase one’s advantages. Therefore, it is crucial to learn as early as possible what concerns and expectations the office manager has when searching for a cleaning company. The best way to do this is by asking the proper questions at the beginning of the sales conversation. We have identified questions that should be asked during a mystery shopper test and a trial sales conversation.
It turned out that one of the salespeople:
- reacted quickly to the inquiry,
- asked for the information needed to prepare a quote (size and type of area, type of cleaning),
- quickly sent the quote.
The question that helps to understand the potential client’s attitude better and thus accurately highlight the suitable advantages of the offer is:
Why did you discontinue services with the previous cleaning company?
It was essential to ask this at the beginning – even before a more extended meeting at the potential client’s office. Companies look for another cleaning company mainly because the previous one discouraged them. If, for example, client noticed strange streaks after someone from Fresh Facility was washing the floor, the salesperson needs to know about them as early as possible. This way, they can show why neither the client nor their floor needs to fear strange streaks. Fresh Facility uses better cleaning products than the rest of the market, and a dedicated coordinator also checks the results.
When caring for the cleanliness of clients’ offices and exceeding market standards, it’s crucial during negotiations with a potential client to avoid sounding like “just another cleaning company,” – which means saying as little as possible about the features of the service and as much as possible about how the client’s office will look after Fresh Facility has cleaned it. It’s also essential to convey that employees will stop complaining that “the floor smells strange after the last wash” and “someone moved my mug again!” During the sales audit, it became clear that there was room in the sales conversation and PDF offer to leverage that the client does not want to buy a hammer – they want a nail hammered in. For example:
- Instead of stating that Fresh Facility uses equipment from brands like Karcher, Numatic, and Ecolab during cleaning, the client is more interested in the fact that they won’t have to worry about excessive noise, about a vacuum filter that doesn’t catch harmful dust, and that the machine will clean the floor but will only remove a small percentage of the dirt.
- Instead of mentioning eco-friendly cleaning, the client is more interested in the fact that the cleaning will not generate unnecessary waste and that the company will not inadvertently harm the environment.
The insights gathered during the mystery shopper test not only improved the sales team’s work but also set the direction for the first marketing efforts. Based on these insights, we defined the brand’s communication style and prepared guidelines for creating new content for the Fresh Facility website that highlights the company’s offer against the competition.
Data Order
Even the best sales and marketing tactics can push a company in the wrong direction if teams are acting without the support of data and an adequately configured CRM. For example, it’s essential to know which type of client has the highest average monthly subscription revenue. At the beginning of the collaboration, we indicated which layout of funnels, stages, custom fields, and reasons for losing potential clients was easy to implement. We then helped the company independently answer the question, “What do we need to change to acquire clients more effectively?”.
Team Hygiene
During the collaboration, we added two people to the team: a remote salesperson and a pre-sales representative.
Fresh Facility found itself for the first time in a situation where one of the salespeople worked outside the office daily. During the collaboration, we’ve recommended hiring a salesperson who spent most of their time in a different city than the rest of the team – to be closer to clients, visit their offices faster, and present the offer as early as possible. Therefore, we developed good practices with the team to minimize the difficulties arising from the fact that hundreds of kilometers would separate the employee from the rest of the company. These included:
- Remember that someone not working daily in the office with the entire team may feel left out. This is natural, as they will miss out on many kitchen conversations and spontaneous desk chats like, “Hey, listen, I have a question. Do you have 2 minutes?”,
- Conversation > video call > phone > Slack/email. It’s good to keep this in mind and discuss the most challenging topics during conversations while trying to have phone and video calls with such an employee as often as possible.
As the number of leads increased by about 15% in the second half of the year, the need arose to hire a pre-sales representative, whose role would be to handle the first contact with potential clients and assist salespeople in focusing on critical negotiations. During recruitment, it’s about more than just collecting many CVs from people you don’t even want to invite for an interview. It’s crucial to capture the attention of the strongest and currently available candidates. Therefore, together with Fresh Facility, we focused on:
- Promoting recruitment in channels with the most excellent chance of finding strong candidates – namely through the network of contacts and job portals dedicated to specific professions.
- Creating a job advertisement that indicates more than just “we offer work in a dynamic team and the opportunity for continuous development.”
The shortened version of the advertisement on Facebook looked like this:
The section typically called “we offer” in a standard job advertisement for Fresh Facility looked like this:
The proven recruitment practices we suggested, such as searching for candidates in the right places and standout job advertisements, helped Fresh Facility to be in a position where the selection was about choosing “the best of the best.”
At the same time, we worked on establishing a marketing department and hiring the first specialist with that profile. Until then, marketing activities such as SEO and SEM had been in hands of external partners coordinated by the CEO of Fresh Facility. By continuously supporting the optimization of ongoing campaigns, we began the recruitment process for a marketing specialist, which ended with the hiring and onboarg of a new employee.
