Sales Optimization: Reducing Time in the Sales Cycle for Commercial Cleaning Companies

Introduction

Reducing time in the sales cycle is one of the fastest ways to accelerate the growth of your commercial cleaning company.

Long sales cycles lead to situations outside of the salesperson’s control that don’t often align in their favor. Deals can be ready to close when a decision-maker gets a job with another company or a competitor throws their metaphorical “hat in the ring” with a lower offer.

There’s no other way to put it: a long sales cycle kills deals.

So, how do you build a sales process that eliminates as many of these factors as possible? Let’s explore this concept in today’s topic. I’ll show you how you can optimize your sales cycle to boost your win rate, close more deals, and eliminate factors holding your sales team back.

Understanding the Sales Cycle

Every sales cycle has steps. Traditionally, they would look something like this):

• Prospecting: Research potential buyers and create a list of qualified prospects. 
• Outreach: Make contact with the prospect. 
• Qualifying: Deepen the relationship with the prospect and ensure they qualify for the product or service. 
• Proposal: Present the product or service to the prospect. 
• Objection handling: Answer questions and alleviate concerns to help the prospect overcome hesitations. 
• Closing: Confirm the transaction with the buyer and complete the sale.

Did you know that the average sales cycle in the commercial cleaning and janitorial industry takes about 160 days—over five months? That’s a long sales cycle, and it can be a major obstacle to the successful growth of a cleaning business.

Understanding why your sales cycle is so long is the first step to overcoming this problem.

For many property owners, managers, and tenants, the buying process requires a commercial cleaning service to jump through tons of hoops, involve multiple decision-makers, and follow steps that can cause delays and lead to lost opportunities and revenue.

Identifying Pain Points and Opportunities to Optimize

To streamline the sales cycle, start by pinpointing pain points and bottlenecks to overcome. Common pain points for customers include:

• Team reliability: Concerns about the dependability of cleaning staff.
• Ancillary services: Issues with specific services like disinfecting or window cleaning.
• Company ratings and reviews: Potential clients often look at your reputation before making a decision.
• Decision-makers approval: Navigating through multiple decision-makers who need to approve proposals.

Addressing these concerns up-front and building trust with prospects is the first way to overcome these challenges. But they may not be enough to close the deal.

You need a solution that actually eliminates steps.

In this situation, choosing a lead generation platform that helps you connect better with decision-makers and simplifies the sales process can make a huge difference. Or, bringing in a sales leader, manager, or owner who isn’t stuck in the sales cycle can help identify bottlenecks and patterns that cause lost deals. Sometimes, having that fresh perspective from a higher vantage point can really change the game.

I would begin by identifying customer pain points. These are the easiest to overcome with sales messaging, website content, and social media content. If your brand is built on solving common customer pain points up front, and your customer testimonials prove it, you’ve all but solved this issue.

Second, leverage data and feedback loops to pinpoint additional opportunities for improvement. Commercial cleaning services can be standardized based on square footage for many customers, but most will request an additional ancillary service. Hood and kitchen cleaning, post-event services, window cleaning, and floor or hard surface care are just a few of the added services that can create complexity but also profit to the bottom line.

Following up on lost deals to determine whether your sales methodology and services align with your customer’s needs is the next place I would look. By recognizing these issues, you can lower barriers to sales and help your team close more commercial contracts.

But this requires you to build a great foundation.

Building a Strong Sales Foundation

A strong sales foundation is key to building trust and credibility with your prospects- I don’t think anyone would argue this point. However, sales reps who win identify pain first and then provide solutions. Sales reps who lose only focus on features and price.

In your new rep onboarding, be sure to showcase a clear and concise pain centered value proposition. This helps your sales team communicate the benefits of your commercial cleaning services effectively and highlights how your services address specific pain points which can make your business more attractive to potential clients.

Next, create a culture of empathy for customers, listening first, and then offering to help can lower sales anxiety especially in new reps. This builds a solid foundational relationship with potential customers where the focus is nurturing key accounts rather than hard-selling decision-makers who can quickly deploy gatekeepers and filters to stop communication.

It’s all about building relationships with key accounts and decision-makers. When you create a direct line of communication, it opens the door for real engagement. This way, you can really get to know the unique needs of each prospect.

Streamlining the Sales Process

Now, eliminate unnecessary steps. Optimizing the sales process can reduce your sales cycle time by more than 50% if you do right. Most sales cycles have 6- 8 steps. See if your team can cover all their bases in three or four.

Think about the impact of accomplishing this. Imagine going from an average sales cycle length of 160 days to 80 or even 40 days without missing any key steps.

But how, you may be wondering?

Easy, with the right tools. Today’s sales intelligence, property intelligence, and estimating tools are better than they’ve ever been. Tools like Convex can help you find decision-makers and property data, while tools like PropertyIntel by Aspire can help you automatically estimate the cost of services.

With these two tools in tandem, you could literally identify someone who’s ready to buy based on buying signals and intent data, use Generative AI to send a personalized outreach email, and use PropertyIntel to attach a quote.

In other words, you could literally send a proposal on the first touch- not that you’d always want to move that fast, but it’s possible and could save you 4 or even 5 steps in the sales process.

If they don’t respond on the first touch, you can use Hubspot or Salesforce to add them to your pipeline and then use customer segmentation to add them into nurture campaigns that fit their needs.

Which brings us to our next topic:

Filling the Sales Pipeline with Qualified Leads

A strong sales foundation begins with great leads. If your team doesn’t have qualified leads that are ready to buy, your sales cycle will struggle to generate results.

Sustaining a full sales pipeline can be difficult using traditional inbound and outbound marketing and sales tactics, which is where you’ll want to leverage property intelligence software by Convex.

Convex stands out from other sales intelligence tools that just rely on outdated name databases. Instead, it uses machine learning and AI to help you find decision-makers in your industry who are actively looking for services like yours. This means that with Convex, you can focus on key accounts that already need your commercial cleaning services, saving you time and resources for prospecting.

Convex equipped the team at Comfort Systems with the tools they needed to double revenue over a four year period. Highlighting not only the benefits of using the platform but also the power of keeping the sales pipeline full of leads.

Effective Communication and Negotiation

The art of communication and negotiation is a 100-billion-dollar industry. All the best business schools, law schools, government agencies, military, and more teach negotiation mastery. Why? Because it’s one of the most powerful skills for getting anything done, especially sales. Negotiation and communication in sales really shape everything, from how each conversation starts to the important details of closing a deal. Sales reps who are strong negotiators often know how to establish a direct line of communication with decision-makers, connecting with them at their level, while those who are less skilled might struggle to do the same.

Building these lines of communication with everyone on the buying committee can help cut out unnecessary steps, keep things organized, and tackle any concerns or objections right away. This creates a mutual action plan for both the potential customer and your company, aligning your interests and shortening the sales cycle through a collaborative approach.

Creating this open line of communication makes the contract feel more like a partnership than a “hard sell.”

Now that you have the decision-maker’s attention, how do you push the deal over the line?

Creating High-Converting Sales Proposals

High-converting sales proposals are key to closing deals and speeding up the sales cycle. Sales reps should focus on crafting personalized and relevant proposals that really hit home with the prospect’s pain points and needs.

In this case, we would recommend that you use a tool like PropertyIntel by Aspire to do this for you. Plus, using tech to design and manage those proposals can really simplify things, helping your team whip up professional and engaging documents in no time!

North by Northwest uses Convex and PropertyIntel to find and estimate properties in minutes, and this combination has increased their win rate by more than 13%. But they’ve also scored a ton of new business, so much so that they’re scheduling more than three quarters ahead! So far, they’ve landed $1.8M in new deals during that time.

If you’d like to learn more, check out their Case Study here.

Closing Deals and Managing the Sales Cycle

Closing deals and managing the sales cycle require a deep understanding of your prospect’s organization and their decision-making process. Sales reps should focus on building trust and credibility by addressing concerns and overcoming objections immediately and effectively.

Implementing a structured sales process that includes regular check-ins and follow-ups can keep your team top of mind with prospects. This proactive approach helps reduce the sales cycle and ensures that opportunities are not lost due to a lack of communication.

Now that the deal is closed, how do you constantly improve the sales process?

Measuring and Optimizing the Sales Cycle

Measuring and optimizing the sales cycle is key for identifying areas that need improvement and increasing overall efficiency. Sales leaders can use data and feedback to uncover potential blockers and implement changes that enhance the sales process.

Regularly reviewing and refining your sales process ensures that your team remains competitive and continues to shorten the sales cycle. Continuous improvement helps your business adapt to changing market conditions and maintain a strong position in the industry.

Implementing Changes and Improving the Sales Process

Implementing changes to the sales process requires a clear plan and strategy. Sales leaders should communicate these changes effectively to the sales team and provide the necessary training and support.

By regularly reviewing and refining your sales process, your team can stay competitive and continue to reduce the sales cycle. This ongoing effort ensures that your business remains agile and responsive to both market demands and customer needs.

JAN-PRO has seen the benefits of implementing technology and making the necessary changes to improve the sales process; you can watch their transformation here.

Conclusion

Optimizing the sales process is super important for cutting down the time it takes to close deals and boosting efficiency in commercial cleaning services. By spotting pain points and opportunities, laying a solid sales foundation, and simplifying the sales process, your sales team can close deals more easily and manage the sales cycle with a lot less hassle.

But it doesn’t stop there. Regularly measuring and optimizing the sales cycle will help your team stay competitive and achieve your business goals.

Ready to take your sales process to the next level?

Schedule a demo of Convex and chat about how we integrate with other tools to accelerate your commercial cleaning and janitorial sales.