How Many Brochures Should My Cleaning Business Send Out?

I understand why people are always asking how many brochures to send out per week – I really do.

But the question of whether to send out 100 brochures a week or 100 brochures a month, isn’t really the right question.

(By the way, I wish they would ask, “How many strong, direct-response sales letters should I send out each week?”…but I won’t go down that road again today!)

Anyway, the right question, or at least, the better question, isn’t really one question at all, but rather a series of several questions.

Here are a few of the most important ones:

1. What is our

cleaning business’ monthly sales goal?

2. What is the average monthly price of the cleaning jobs we bid on?

3. How many marketing pieces such as a sales letters or brochures do we typically have to send out to building owners and property managers to get a request for bid?

4. How many of those bids turn into new janitorial accounts?

Can you see how simply asking how many marketing pieces to send out is putting the “cart before the horse”?

Instead, try this…

Start with a sales goal first, and then work your way backwards to figure out how many accounts you’ll need on average to reach that goal AND how many bids you’ll need to submit to land that many accounts AND how many letters or brochures you’ll need to send out to get the necessary number of requests for bids.

Get the idea? Now, that’s a better way of coming up with a strategy that will get you where you want to go!

Let’s look at an example…

Let’s say, we wanted to add on about $3000/mo. in new commercial cleaning business.

By watching the response to our marketing, we might learn that it takes 50 marketing pieces per week to get 3 bid requests per week, which produce 4 new accounts per month, which add up to to a total of approx.$2,500 – $3,500/ mo. in new cleaning business.

So, we might plan on sending 50 pieces per week as a strategy to get us to our monthly sales goal.

But plans have to be ‘watched over’ – and this is no exception.

If you find your strategy isn’t producing enough requests for bids to get you to your goal, or too many requests for you to keep up with, you always need to be prepared to make adjustments

But your better off making a few minor course corrections to a well thought out plan, rather than a big overhaul-like changes to a strategy that wasn’t thought out well in the first place.

Whoever the cleaning business owner was who asked me this question may have been asking the wrong question, but at least they knew enough to ask so hey could find out the right ones!

Our teachers were right – there are no dumb questions!

You Can Do This, You Really Can,
Dan