When Should I Call Back – Part 1

These are two of the most common questions we hear from janitorial businesses. Here’s why:

1. After so much work has gone into preparing a commercial cleaning bid or residential cleaning proposal, people don’t want to make a careless mistake right at the end that… costs them the account!

2. They worry about being too anxious, too eager and possibly… scaring away the prospect.

It’s understandable.

But, you shouldn’t feel ashamed of being eager to follow up and please your cleaning prospects. To the contrary, it’s actually a very good thing that you feel this way, because it shows… you care!

And that is important.

The only thing is… we need to know how to present that caring attitude to our prospects in a way that ATTRACTS them, rather than scares them away.

So let’s try to come up with a good rule of thumb to help us schedule our follow ups – for maximum results!!

To do that, let’s think

back to another timing question, you had to answer before you even got to this point:

How long did you wait after you completed your final walk throughs of the building… before you arranged to deliver the janitorial bid?

The answer I hope is – an amount of time, a number of days, that not only gave you the time you needed, but also reflected the kind of careful thought, effort and attention you wanted your prospect to KNOW went into preparing their bid.

Put it this way, have you ever seen an office cleaning quote simply scratched on the back of a business card… saying something like.. “$285 for 2x/ wk”?.

And you know, that card was simply left there on the desk after they took, maybe 5 minutes to quickly look around!

Well, you know by now, that’s not the message you want to be sending to your prospects.

No, you want to wait a few days or more, before you come back with a professional cleaning proposal for your prospect.

Well, it’s the SAME idea deciding when to “call back” after delivering a janitorial proposal.

You want to give it an APPROPRIATE amount of time to allow your building owner or property manager to go over it carefully.

They may need to review it with others in their company as well.

So, what’s appropriate?

Well, it depends. If it’s a large project, it may be appropriate to wait a week, or more, before calling back.

It may easily take that long for them to get to it, get through it, and put together their questions.

If it’s a small building, scheduled for cleaning only 1 or 2 times per week, you may be able to call back in as little as a couple days.

And of course, you should always listen to your prospect for CLUES as to to how urgently they want to review your bid.

As you can imagine, you should plan on “following up” a lot sooner with a building that just let their current cleaning company go, and are suddenly faced with having to cover the cleaning themselves, versus one that is simply going out to bid, to see “what’s out there”.

So, let’s not ‘dodge the bullet’. What’s a good rule of thumb?

In general, you should wait between a couple days to a week depending on the size of the bid.

And, before I forget, if all else fails, there’s always the secret, mystical, hidden strategy of … simply asking the prospect!

YOU: “Well, Steve, typically I give a client 2 or 3 days to go through everything before I call back. Do you think that would give you enough time.””

PROSPECT: ” Sure that should be fine.”

YOU: “Ok then, if you have any questions in the meantime just give me a call, otherwise I’ll check back with you in a few days.”

When you wait a while to call back your prospects to check on your bid you show them respect by giving them time to thoroughly review everything, while at the same time showing that you’re a busy professional too. Win – Win.

You Can Do This, You Really Can!
Dan

P.S. By the way, I didn’t even address the BAD ideas either waiting a long time to follow up with a prospect or not getting back to them at all…. because… well, because their both bad ideas. nuf said.