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Why You Should Have a System for Selling in Your Carpet Cleaning Business

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Why should you have a system for selling in your business?

Well, have you ever had this situation?...

You arrive at a prospects home to give them a quotation for cleaning carpets or upholstery. As you pull up outside the home you know instantly that they will not be using your service.

The front garden is overgrown. The house needs painting. And there’s an old car in the drive in a state of disrepair. You ask yourself “What on earth am I doing here?”

It’s a situation I have had many times until I put in place a system for selling to prospects. Including most importantly, disqualifying those I don’t want. I only want to deal with high-probability prospects. That is, those who have a very good chance of using us.

Nowadays all our interactions with prospects and clients are written down in our Operations Manual and we are always in control, even if it appears that we aren’t.

So when a prospect phones us to ask “How much do you charge?” we have a scripted reply. We don’t just wing it. Even the way, that is, the manner of how we answer is documented. It’s a system and it works.

Selling is a process that begins with making sure we’re dealing with the right person. The attitude we want to have is not one of hard selling...trying to beat the prospect into submitting to our proposal. After all no-one likes being ‘sold’ to, but everyone does like to buy.

Our view should be "How can I help this person get what he wants through the use of my service?" That means that first we must be speaking to a qualified prospect.

But what exactly is a qualified prospect?

They are someone who:

  1. Must be able to buy
  2. Must be able to enjoy a benefit
  3. Must be the decision maker

So if you’re a high-priced, high-quality service, you don’t want to be wasting time going out and giving in-home quotes to tenants wanting their deposit back for instance. Or those who clearly can’t afford you. You will probably close one out of every hundred. Asking them if they could borrow the money off their brother so they can pay you is a lot harder work than simply finding the right person to start with. It’s simply not a good use of your time.

There are four steps to a selling system:

Step 1: Build trust and rapport.

Step 2: Find the need.  Probe to isolate needs, opportunities and wants. Isolate the dominant buying motive.

Step 3: Fill the need.  Present products and services that fill the dominant buying motive.

Step 4: Close.  i.e. Motivate them to take action.

Each of these steps needs to be carefully thought out and written down. Many small business owners have no earthly idea what they are going to say next to a prospect. Step 2 involves asking a lot of questions to find out what the prospect wants rather than us telling them what they should have or talking about ourselves and how great our company is. It’s also helpful to have a systemised way of dealing with ‘common objections’.

So how do you answer that question when a prospect phones to ask...”Can you give me a price for cleaning our carpets?”

Our answer is always “No.” Well not quite like that. Here’s what we do and it’s written down on a scripted form. Our target market is high-end residential who can pay our prices for high quality work. We are not interested in price shoppers or tenants wanting their deposit back...so we have a script so that we don’t waste our valuable time with them.

Our system is very simple: we first try to disqualify them!

In other words, we ask them questions to make them jump through a few hoops to prove that ‘we’re made for each other’. And we tell them why we are asking these questions. We don’t want to waste each others time. Every week we turn away many phone enquirers because we tell them that “we are not the company for them.” After all, there’s no point in walking into a BMW dealer with £5000 to buy a brand new 3-series. We will just be wasting each others time.

In fact, a failure to target a market (high end residential, budget or whatever) and qualify them, is one of the biggest time wasters that most carpet cleaners make and the reason why many are exhausted and frustrated by the end of the week. Our systemised scripts mean it’s not a problem for us.