The Exact Lead Management System I Use in My Cleaning Business

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Introduction

From your first dollar to your first million, welcome to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast, presented by ZenMaid. Join your host Stephanie Pipkin, founder of Serene Clean, as she shares proven tips, tricks, and hard-earned lessons. Whether you’re just starting out or ready to scale, get ready to discover how to build your own cleaning empire. Let’s roll up our sleeves and dive in.

The Common Communication Mistake

Stephanie: Hello, everyone. Welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host, Stephanie Pipkin from Serene Clean. This week’s episode is going to be all about a mistake that I am seeing again and again with everybody that I talk to.

I’ve been talking to a ton of you guys, having a blast meeting with you, doing one-on-one calls, or just emailing back and forth. This week’s topic is going to be all about having your communication with potential clients all over the place, and you guys having absolute chaos in managing everything. This was absolutely something that I struggled with in the beginning as well.

Here’s the scenario: you are potentially in the field, or maybe just out of the field, still going back and forth. You’re kind of hybrid, or having to fill in, of course, as we all have to do for however long in our business. You are getting leads from word of mouth. You have people calling you. You have people texting you. You have people Facebook messaging you, Instagram, smoke signals, I don’t know, letters in the mail.

However people are reaching out to you, you are then communicating with them about pricing. You’re asking them all sorts of questions and going back and forth on all of these different channels. This is a mistake that I made early on as well, where I was literally texting them or messaging them on Facebook, off of my business page, and communicating all of these things. It just was sheer chaos and pandemonium. There was no streamlining of this process.

The Solution: Streamlining Your Lead Process

This is something that you guys can absolutely improve on so quickly, even if you are just a solo cleaner right now. However small or large your company is, streamlining this process of managing all of your leads as much as possible in one central location is going to ensure that you’re not leaving money on the table because you’re not following up or knowing where to find the information that you’ve communicated.

It’s also going to make sure that you are screaming professionalism to these leads. Even if you’re still in the field, you can still scream professionalism. We don’t need a big company. You can be a professional service of one and really impress upon them that you have your shit together, even if maybe you don’t, but from the client’s perspective, you do.

Fixing Your Systems

This was actually kind of prompted by our wonderful guest, Chris Schwab, who was on an early interview on the podcast, one of my first ones. He was such a great guest. I know that you guys loved him. He posted on Facebook earlier today about basically the concept that if you are under $500,000 a year, and you’re working 30 to 40 hours a week managing the business, something’s wrong. You don’t need to be adding more system softwares or people in the form of a VA. You need to fix what you currently have going on.

Seeing that post and also experiencing these conversations this past week with some of you guys, and thinking back to my own experience, that’s what prompted this whole conversation right now. I am seeing that this particular process, the lead management process, is a total mess for most of you guys, or it simply does not exist. There is no structure at all.

I want you guys to think about getting structure where there is none, and streamlining and fixing this. The goal really is to minimize where we are communicating with leads and where we are gathering information.

Using an Intake Form

If somebody reaches out—they see your business page, or you clean for their friend, and they reach out to you on text or however—and they say, “Hey, can you give me a price for my three bedroom, two bath house?” This is where we need to pause and not do this over wherever you’re doing it. Because now all of a sudden, by communicating with them in this channel, the follow up is going to be harder. You’re going to have a much bigger struggle to keep everything organized.

The solution I really want you guys to implement is having some type of intake form that you push every single lead to fill out. This is something that I had in place from day one, but I just didn’t use it to the fullest. I would have saved myself a lot of headache.

For us, I’ve used ZenMaid since day one. Their booking forms are fabulous. We treat the booking forms truly as an intake form where we’re gathering information. I do not have pricing on my website because I’m a big fan of actually selling. Our prices are going to be scary to some people. They need to be sold to. They need to be wooed and wined and dined.

We don’t just want to say, “Oh, your house is this big, $500-$1,000 for the first cleaning,” because it’s going to scare them off. I also am not going to get their email information, their phone information, so I can’t continue marketing and trying to sell to them. That’s why I don’t have pricing on the website.

If you’re wondering if you should do that, I think that you shouldn’t have pricing on your booking form. I know that they have that as an option in ZenMaid. I just don’t like to do it. I want to get that contact information. Because if they fill out your booking form and it calculates the price for them, and they’re like, “Ooh, no,” and you haven’t had a chance to really sell or get that contact—there they go. So that’s why I have that option turned off.

Send Everyone to One Place

We send everybody to the booking form. I had this from day one, so anybody who found my website would fill that out. But what was happening is a lead would come in, especially on Facebook. That’s where most of our leads were coming from, even if they were word of mouth. They would look up our business Facebook and message me there, and there I was texting like a fool, asking them all of the questions, and then giving them a price and going back and forth, which is just not efficient at all.

It just made it so I had people all over the place, and I was communicating on all of these different platforms. It makes it feel like you’re always forgetting something, because you probably are, because you’re communicating on all of these different platforms.

The goal is, on every single way that people have for communicating to you, set up channels to push them to our intake form. For us, that looks like on the Facebook Messenger for your business page, go into the settings, and if you are not tech savvy, you can do this through ChatGPT and have it explained to you how to do this.

What we do is have the autoresponders turned on, and in that auto response message—so somebody messages our business page—it automatically responds to them with the link to our booking form. It basically says, “Hey, so glad to hear you’re interested. If you are looking for a price or an estimate for cleaning your home or business, go fill this form out,” and it pushes them to one place.

If somebody texts the business, we’re going to send them to that form and say, “Please fill this out, and we will email you an estimate.”

Email Your Pricing

This is the other side of it—we want to be emailing pricing as much as possible. We don’t want it to be texting it. We don’t want to be saying it verbally, if possible, or if we do say it over the phone, we want to follow up with an email so that it’s in writing. Again, you remembering, or you taking notes properly, probably not happening right now, which, no shade, it’s just really stressful. So that’s why we want to leave ourselves a paper trail.

It also gives a paper trail for the client, so in three months, if they decide to come back, they have something to come back to, and it’s not them trying to remember. I really enjoy having an email. That way, we can also attach our cleaning checklist, our sales sheet. It’s not just a price email. It really is a sales email that includes the price.

So all of the different channels, we want to be pushing them to the booking form. Even if they call in and we’re answering the phone, we are going to be asking the same questions that are on the booking form. That’s basically our sales script, because we’re gathering information. The intake form is for gathering information so that we can effectively sell.

Make Your Form Work for You

If you go look at our booking form on our website, serene-clean.com, click the Get a Quote button, you’ll see we have a really robust form full of questions. It’s not just how many bedrooms, bathrooms. A lot of you guys, your intake forms are really basic, so you still are unable to properly give an educated price because you don’t know enough about the home or the space yet. You need to ask them more questions.

For example, one of the questions that we have on ours is, “What area of the home is stressing you out the most?” That gives us the ability to sell and empathize with them. When we do get them on the phone or we are emailing, we can say, “Oh my gosh, yeah, the kitchen is so hard to keep up with. I see you got kids and pets. Totally understand. That’s what we’re here for.” It allows you to empathize and allows you to sell better. So that’s why we’re asking those types of things on the intake form.

Make Your Voicemail Work for You

Additionally, on one of my consulting calls this week, actually yesterday—she is a fellow Wisconsinite, so you know who you are. I’m not going to call you out, but you know who you are. You are killing it. You are such a hard worker. Oh my gosh, you describing your schedule—I literally, it blew my mind. I’m like, “I don’t know how you’re alive right now.”

This is a great area we can streamline. She mentioned, “I’m missing so many calls because I’m out in the field. What should I do? Should I get an office person?” Clearly, I think she does need help on the admin side for answering the phones and things. But what we can do if we are unable to answer the phones is make your voicemail message work for you.

Just like we do in our Facebook message, in our voicemail—if you call Serene Clean right now, 715-204-4270, you will hear the following voicemail message: “Thanks for calling Serene Clean. We can’t wait to help. If you’re looking for an estimate for cleaning your home or business, visit our website, click the Get a Quote button and fill out the brief intake form, and we’ll get back to you within one business day.”

Again, they may leave a voicemail, but they also may go to the website and fill out our booking form, just so that all of our information is consolidated. A lot of times they do both, actually.

So no matter what, we are channeling people to one place, and for us, because we use ZenMaid, then all of that contact information is already there for us, so we’re not having to retype information. It’s all in one place. And if they do book, they’re already in there. Now we just have to add them to the schedule and do our onboarding process. So that just helps streamline everything.

Simple Follow-Up Process

Get your booking form. Or if you don’t use a scheduling software yet, you can absolutely do a Google Form. Google Forms are absolutely free and ask them all sorts of questions and have it linked to that.

Obviously, I’m partial to having a scheduling software even when you’re just a cleaning company of one, because it allows you to scale really well and allows you to know when you’re cleaning and have other cleaners cleaning at other appointments. Then you can see that their GPS clocked in and clocked out, which is exactly what I was doing when I was still in the field. But I had staff members at other appointments I could psychotically check and double check to make sure that they were where they were supposed to be.

As for the follow up process, this was something that I mentioned in a episode in the past week or two, and you guys had asked about that. I know Hannah, you had mentioned that you would be interested to see this, and at least a couple other people did too.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. It truly can be as simple as this: what I did in the beginning, I had a daily reminder for myself that was in my calendar, and it would just pop up every day and say “follow up on the leads from the past two days.” So that any estimates that I sent out the day before, I was calling and texting and emailing them to do my follow up, and any leads that came in the previous day, I was sending my estimates out.

So in that half an hour chunk of time every single day, early morning, late at night, whatever, I am doing this and I’m following up. Because so many of you that I talk to are like, “I need to bring in more leads. I need to bring in more leads.” And I’m like, “How many leads are you bringing in so far?” And you’re like, “I don’t know, like, 30 or 40 a month?” This is not a lead problem, guys. This is a follow up and closing problem.

If you are not doing proper follow up, especially if you’re paying for leads, you’re leaving money on the table. Your money is right there. You just gotta work them.

Don’t Be Afraid to Sell

I know a lot of you are so scared to sell. If you can’t sell, your business is going to die. Selling is absolutely a necessary skill, and it’s a beautiful thing. Don’t be scared. This is not slimy. You’re not pestering them. Last time I checked, they reached out to you. They want you!

So what exactly is pestering by communicating effectively and giving them what they desire? All you’re doing is helping marry what they want with what you’ve got—they want you. You’re going to provide value. So remember, we are providing value to our clients. And they asked. They called you, they filled out your form.

So if you only call once, and they don’t answer, and you’re like, “Well, I guess that’s it”—do you pick up the phone when a number calls? No, right? Do you answer emails if they go to spam? No.

Follow Up Until They Say No

What we’re going to do is we are going to call as quickly as we can, or if that’s not possible, we are going to be sending estimate emails. I prefer to always have an email with our checklist. I just find it helps us sell better.

And then what we do is we send the estimate, and then we immediately send them a text, because texts are opened a lot more often than email and a lot of times our emails can go to spam because it has attachments and we’ve never emailed them before.

So what we say is, “Hey [name], we just sent you your estimate for cleaning. Please check your spam if you don’t get it. Let us know, and we’ll resend it.” Since implementing that, our response rate has skyrocketed because people are actually going and checking their email, and it’s not getting lost in the chaos.

And of course, calling! We’re going to want to follow up. I would suggest, literally, you follow up or die guys—until they tell you, “No, I am not interested,” you don’t know. You need to give yourself the benefit of the doubt—until you hear from them, you simply don’t know if you are even getting to them, so we need to keep trying until we can get a hold of them and then doing the follow up.

Tools for Lead Management

So literally, just set yourself a reminder. Every day we use ClickUp, as I’ve mentioned before, for a lead management process. You can use plenty of softwares for this. ZenMaid, of course, is a kind of basic CRM, but I like to have a bit more robust system in the form of ClickUp, or I know a lot of people like Go High Level, and I know ZenMaid is working on an integration with Go High Level, and they work really well together.

So I would suggest a little bit more robust of a CRM. If you don’t want to do that, again, you can just use a spreadsheet, and every single week, just put all the leads that come in that fill out the booking form. Put their name down, put the last time you talked to them, and put the due date for your next follow up, and did they close? Did they not? That’s as simple as it can be.

For us in our ClickUp funnel, basically we’ve connected it so that when somebody fills out our ZenMaid booking request, it gets zapped over via Zapier, which is an automation software, and they get added to our lead funnel, and then we can follow up from there and watch how many follow ups.

And as for how much do you follow up until you hear back from them? Just keep going. And if it’s been 10 times that you’ve called, okay, just make sure that their email is on your email marketing list, so that you are reaching out to them via your newsletter, via any openings or whatever.

So that’s another example of how we have ZenMaid connected to our MailChimp, so that when somebody fills out the booking form, they get added to our mailing list. So there’s that automation there.

Automate and Simplify

These are things that streamline the process. I am never going to sit down and manually upload all of the emails of people who filled out the booking form in the past month. That’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen for you either. So these are the types of things that we do to make our process easier and automated.

You may have the time for that, but you shouldn’t be doing that. Just because we could do something doesn’t mean we should. I really want you guys to be looking at every single aspect of your business and saying, “How can I make this smoother? How can I make this easier to do?”

For example, every time you sit there and text back and forth with the client and you’re asking them all these questions, you’re wasting time when they could fill out that intake form, and you could use your templated email estimate, and you could fly through 10 estimates because you just copy over.

So anytime we’re having to text or manually type out the same things over and over, that’s the red flag of saying, “I should just save this as an email template. I should just have this so I can copy and paste it and change the numbers as I need to, or change the dates that I’m offering so that we can make things as fast as possible.”

There’s a lot of great softwares out there. This is the process that we’ve gone through that has been very easy to manage, and it feels very streamlined to us.

Fix Your Process Before Adding People

So if this resonates with you, that you are just super chaotic, and you are just constantly in the back of your mind thinking “I’m forgetting somebody,” or, “Oh shoot, I need to reach out to that lead,” or “I need to call her back,” or “I never got pricing here,” okay, this is the signal right here: Stop giving pricing all over the place. Because you’re never going to remember.

Especially once you do introduce some type of admin person, now they’re not remembering. You’re not remembering who talked to them. This is where, before you start adding more people, as Chris mentioned in his post, you need to fix this situation, because if you add another person, we just made this problem way worse. Because now you’re having to play this crazy telephone of like, “Hey admin person, what price did you give them?” if there’s no paper trail or the paper trail is all over the place. “Well, I know I texted it to her, so let me go hunt down that text.” That’s just not good.

So we want to have it all in one place. We want to have it searchable. That’s why I like email for that, or ClickUp or whatever, and just utilizing the systems that you already have and the softwares that you already have. You’re probably not using them to the fullest, or having something as simple as a spreadsheet, for those of you who are not using any type of software. That is a great place to start, because you are leaving money on the table by not following up.

I know that there’s a lot more advanced systems, but for the most part, a lot of you guys just don’t have anything in place right now. So this is where I would start: stop leaving money on the table by not following up.

Sorry, I’m not smiling this whole time, guys, I have like a crack in my lip. Does that ever happen to you? I’ve been using my humidifier, so every time I smile, it hurts really bad. So I’m just like, it probably looks like I got Botox, which—all natural, so no Botox yet. So if I have like resting bitch face in this episode, that’s why.

But this is what I would suggest for follow up, guys. Let me know what you have for questions or any suggestions to clarify on this topic, put them in the comments below, and I will be sure to answer them. I’m trying to do a Q&A at least once a month with your great questions from the comments.

Otherwise, I’ll see you on the next episode—hit that like, hit that subscribe. Tell me what you think and how you guys are handling your lead management process currently, and what you think if there is a particular software that you’ve been enjoying for this. Otherwise, I’ll see you on the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Bye, guys!

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• ZenMaid
• ClickUp
• Go High Level
• Zapier
• MailChimp
• Google Forms
• Serene Clean

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