Can anybody chime in on their sales pitch? I'm talking commercial mainly.

Do you convince restaurant owners that filth is bad for business? Do you mainly sell a high traffic lane cleaning for businesses?

I'm interested in building a clientel, and right now I'm just pounding the pavement.  If y'all could save me from reinventing the wheel, well this forum would definitely be a big help.

Hokie

The best sales pitch is a Free Demo

Always show your goods man show your goods !!!!

Hokie,  not sure if you just do carpets or what- but I a good commercial sales pitch is that you offer a specialized cleaning system developed to meet the needs specific to their industry.  You have to be able to back it up though.  If you have experience getting rid of the type of dirt made by a certain industry, you can honestly say that you have a "specialized" program for that industry because you will be using the methods that best work for those types of stains etc.  If you are going after restaurants, build the pitch for them, if its offices, build a different one for them. 

  If your after commercial accounts than you probably want regular contracts, like once a week/month/quarter/year.  It can help to dangle the first service for free so long as they sign a locked-in contract for x amount of services over x amount of time. 

  Commercial accounts also like to hear that you will save them money.  This works well for janitorial because generaly outsourcing to a good company DOES save money over having in-house cleaning.  Not sure how well it would work for carpets though, considering most places don't do in-house carpet cleaning. 

  Put these three ideas together into a concise package and my opinion is that you'll have the begining of a fairly solid marketing plan.  Just be sure to target your market with market specific advertising- it makes you stand out from the pack. 

  When you are putting together your actual speech or what it says on your flyers or whatever- you want to show and not tell.  That is, rather than saying, "We will do the best job on your carpets", write something that will lead the reader or listener to that conclusion on their own.  Last but not least when writing this stuff, remember that less is more.  Cram as many hooks as possible into as few words as possible.  People have short attention spans.  I just have to work on writing fewer words when I make posts on this forum

Thanks for the feedback.

I was thinking mainly of restaurants--do these typically go monthly? Clearly you'll need to clean more often than a residential--and  then how often for an office--full clean once a year with traffic area maintenance every month or so?

  You didn't answer the question in the original post.  Are you the clown-heckler of this forum, or are you actually a serious carpet-cleaner here to listen to peoples ideas and give some of your own?  If your the clown-heckler than your pretty good at it, but if you are serious than I am concerned about you.  

   You said yourself that carpet cleaning isn't for everyone, and if your so miserable that you gotta post this negative stuff all the time, maybe carpet cleaning isn't for you.  It definitely doesn't seem to be making you happy. 

  Guy says, "Whats your sales pitch?"  Doug says, "TomR blah blah blah TomR".  If the comptetion in my area is anything like you, this is gonna be alot easier than I ever imagined. 

just my opinion.