Meeting with Carpet Cleaner Tomorrow... Any Advice for Me?

Its kinda hard to say, I have worked in real estate rehabbing/renovating houses and have used my fair share of carpet cleaners. My advice (in regards to charging them for your services) is the get a flat fee for what your doing, because a lot of the people they deal with want to spend the least amount of money as possible and I dont see them wanting to give up there hard earned money for a "time/cost" basis. (If that makes sense).

As a carpet cleaner I can say a few things:
What type of biz are they? High end or do they advertise 3 rooms for $xx? How many vans? What type of cleaning system? Other services - area rugs - tile and grout cleaning - flood and fire clean up?
Google places is key. Some guys use PPC (I have never tried it but I am in a small town).
QR code on all their vans linking to a coupon.
Give me more info on the company and what they do and I will help you out (been in the biz over 20 years). PM me if you want.

Look at video marketing strategies too. Works great for local and lends itself we'll to demo type services such as cleaning. There have been a bunch of threads covering different aspects of this.

Thanks all! Good advice.

LocalVSEO - Yes, this whole meeting is predicated on my video services. I met her at a BNI group and she came right up to me after the meeting and wanted to get together and talk about how my video product could help her company.

Today I want to learn more about the business to see if my product truly can help them.

Rugman - I'm don't know the answers to those questions, but I hope to learn that in this meeting. You've given me some good questions to ask. What is the lifetime value of the average carpet cleaning client?

Netguy - It does make sense. I know if I were to buy carpet cleaning services, price would be a determining factor in my decision. It will be interesting to learn how they deal with the bargain hunters.

Thanks again!

Thanks Jason. Yes. I only work with clients in two ways currently. One is as a business growth consultant. No prepackaged solutions, no one off projects or shotgun marketing. I only work with clients who want to grow their business and know they need my help to do it.

The one exception to that is my video service as a product which is a lead generation system and billed as a premium product. I am ok with this exception because it it is a fully self contained end-to-end solution to generate new leads for a business. It's also a great conversation starter and helps me get my foot in the door with new businesses.

I'm not sure if I can help them in any way, but it'll be nice to get to know their business regardless.

If anyone is interested, the meeting went really well. Didn't close a deal, but I really didn't expect to in this meeting. Learned a lot about them. They have 16 trucks, do carpet, rugs, furniture, tile/grout, flood. Their staff marketer is doing a decent job with what she's got.

I asked a lot of questions, complimented the areas they were doing well... offered advice in the areas I felt they could use it (my advice was well received). Didn't talk about me or my services until she asked.

She invited me to talk about my video product so I described the system to her in detail. No selling. I'm not a good salesman anyway. She asked me how much and I told her. She flinched a little bit and then I kinda talked her out of it, explaining that my system was created for professionals with high value clients like doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc. I said that my system may not be right for their company. That made her seem to want it more.

Finally, towards the end of the meeting I made it a point to tell her that if they chose to go with me on my video product, that my product would be exclusive to them (due to the SEO component), that I couldn't go to one of their competitors and sell the same thing to them.

I said that as a scarcity play. She got it. She told me to give her a chance to get the budget approved, that she's really interested.

Now, I know this is not guaranteed, but I felt the meeting was successful. I developed trust, I was low pressure, I provided value.

I'm optimistic about this one.

PS- I still have this nagging feeling I need to come up with some kind of risk reversal.

2nd that, Joe Polish is the man in carpet cleaning marketing...save your client the money and tell him to buy his package.

Sounds like it went well, I know I am dealing with 2 larger companies right now, of which both have common themes: The person you deal with cannot make a decision, it has to run through numerous people to get "approved".

This is what I just dealt with last night matter of fact: "Sounds good Ryan, I have to get this over to my CFO, she makes these decisions, I just find the right guy/interview then they take my recommendation usually."

For the other, last week, was "Well I need to sit down with my sales manager, see what is selling the best, that is what I want to target, then I have to talk to the director of *something*, we are all going to get on a conference call next week, we are moving forward with you"

So, I hope it works out for you, as two of these sorts of clients can cover what 5-10 "small business owners" would cover, and you have less stuff to manage. On the other side, the decision making is longer to take, as you are not talking to a dentist who owns a small practice and makes his decision on the spot. I guess there is more red-tape there.

I have never had an in person meeting, always on the phone, so it sounds like you did a good job there!

It's crazy, because these two I mentioned were my first two!

So you are just offering video marketing (ranking) as your foot in the door?

Do you mind if I ask your pricing point? what you were offering? I just started the video ranking angle to test the waters,and I have ranked 2 videos already..

If you do not want to share on the forum, could you pm me? (not trying to solicit pms)..

Congrats!

>.< Ask, when you're setting up the meeting with your prospect, "Is there anyone else that's involved in making decisions like these, who should sit in on this meeting?"

That way you don't have to sell twice.

16 trucks is a big company in the carpet cleaning world! Lifetime value of customers is huge! average person gets carpets cleaned every 8-12 months plus has furniture - tile etc. many of them have pets and quite a few will have a flood (big $). Again - depends on what they charge. Referrals and repeats are HUGE also - make sure they are offering referral rewards.
Joe Polish is the man for cleaners and they probably know about him anyway.
I might try and get them a site for "carpet cleaner city" - set it up and have the ph # go to them. that would give them a another heads up. Maybe even buy the domain - SEO it - get it ranked and show them what you can do for them (or another company).
Any more q's -ask away.

Get the prospect to figure out how much NOT having your services working for them is costing them. $ customers spends on average X # customers they believe would be brought in by your service in a month (you can suggest modifications if they guess too high or low, but let them come up with the number) = Total $$ they're missing out on without you per month. They said it, so it's true.

Then compare with the investment they have to put into little ol' You to get there.

Still flinching about the cost? I hope not.

Whenever I hear "That's too expensive," I know I need to back up because I forgot to get the prospect to calculate the lost business or price of not changing (Hint: this hardly ever happens to me).

And you can always ask, in a nice, nurturing tone: "Compared to what?"

I believe you could have sold during this meeting, but missed the opportunity. Fortunately, you can go back.

I had a landscaper as a client before I became a landscaper myself. Charged them per week and per job.

After you have got them to acknowledge that they are experiencing a serious problem. Before you discuss any sort of a solution.

Of course I may be wrong but I'm a skeptical New Yorker so I wonder if her interest was actually in picking your brain to see how she could make the videos. Because it seems to me that if I'm the marketing person at a company I sure wouldn't want the boss to see their marketing can be accomplished by outsourcing to another person and not me. Was it her idea to chat over coffee?

Yes, giving prospects a free education merely allows them to disappear and go source whatever you offer at the lowest price. Sell first, educate later. Don't tell prospects How you do what you do.

Tell them you know how bunch of hotel owners i can land you a huge contract, get the hotel owners name and tell them they will get a huge discount on carpet cleaning. Talk to 10 hotel managers and ask them how much they pay on carpet cleaning and tell them i can beat that.

is there a new meeting plan for this year?looking forward on it.

Remember that you're leading the conversation. Not them. Make sure you control where the conversation is going.

At some point in this meeting you're going to hear something that is a pain point to the company and you know you can help with...

That's when you need to ask the question "What will happen to your business if that doesn't get fixed?"

Then shut up. With any luck they will tell you a doom and gloom story about what will or won't happen in the next 6 or 12 months that will cause serious hardships in the business.

That's when you ride in as the white knight who can solve that problem. And since they've already told you what it's going to cost them not to fix the problem, your fee will be a no-brainer to pay you to fix the problem.

Ideally, that's the conversation you want to have.