As our industry continues to suffer the ravages of Covid, working from home, sharp decline in demand, there are pockets of opportunity as well as some serious out of the box thinking. That’s one of the amazing things about capitalism is the creativity business owners display as they rise to challenges.
At the last Clean Show I attended, I was invited to a meet up organized by a group of like-minded cleaners joined together by what I thought at the time was a radical concept, on demand pick-up and delivery.
Many cleaners offer pick-up and delivery services with the industry norm being to offer a regular scheduled route with set scheduled pick-up and delivery days. As an example, you may have a driver out with set pick-up/delivery day of Monday and Thursday meaning you pick up and order on Monday and the order delivered would be delivered back on Thursday, orders picked up Thursday are delivered back on Monday. Basically the customer is serviced twice a week.
But how often does your typical route customer have need? How many ‘two bagger’ a week customers do you have (Customer has an order on both pick up days during the week)?
A twice a week customer is very rare. Typically, less than 2 percent of your entire customer list would fall into this category. While it would be a beautiful thing to have a customer trained to put more work out when you are coming any ways to deliver an order back, still, half or more of the stops on your route are simply picking up only, or delivering orders back only, or half your driver’s efforts are simply driving.
I’d like to propose something to you. Do we really need to accept that half of your driver’s drive time is simply wasted? I don’t think so. Some of this ‘down time’ could be utilized or invested to grow the route. I create a marketing product that I’ve designed so you can have ‘blitz’ days where you use your existing route customer stops to create a prospecting process. I’ve developed a sales piece that promotes the convenience and lifestyle of professional cleaning and wash dry fold. Your counter staff can assemble this marketing piece during their down time, and then you give a supply of these units to your route driver to deploy as he works his route.
Basically, every stop on the driver’s route becomes five prospecting calls. As the driver does his pick-ups and drop offs at each stop, he delivers a marketing piece to the house on the left, the house on the right, and the three houses across the street. Because customers tend to congregate together like fish school up, each one of your current route customers likely has a neighbor that could use or would be interested in your service. If the marketing piece is effective, and customers start to sign up, you increase the concentration of customers on your route. As customers sign up, you may find that where your driver was making one stop, he now is picking up from two, three or more customers at one stop. This adds a lot of profit and efficiency to your routes as you fill in more customers per stop.
Now, keep in mind, in some cities and jurisdictions, you may not be able to leave a marketing piece behind. Some cities have bylaws against such practice because it may signal the home is empty and invite break-ins. Some communities like a gated community may not allow any sales calls of any sort at all. Still, one of the best ways to still promote your route, even in gated communities, is to have your van or truck wrapped and branded up. It’s well worth the money to turn your truck into a rolling billboard emblazoned with eye catching graphics, convincing and appealing copy selling your service, and clear concise call to action complete with phone number and web site so prospective customers can reach out and contact you.
Promoting your route services should be happening daily. Far too often I find many cleaners simply accept that their drivers are clothes chauffeurs, driving orders from point A to point B and back again. Granted, many drivers prefer to drive and only drive because the rejection of making sales calls is not for everyone. But then again, there are ways to promote route services without having to ring a doorbell and make a face-to-face sales call.
One can set up Google Ads to promote route services. One can create posts on social media selling route services. Heck, one can build out complete sales funnels complete with landing pages, videos, audio, and lead capture processes.
These days more and more of my time is setting up campaigns that do most of the selling online for you, and your route manager and driver simply must deliver the ‘welcome to route services’ new customer kit of a couple bags and door hook to the new customer.
Ah yes, the new customer follows up. Therein lies another secret to creating and building a successful route, you need to follow up with every new customer. You need to have a built in process to follow up with every new route customer sign up designed that not only do you get the first order, but a second, third, fourth, and fifth order. It takes at least THREE orders from a new customer to lock in a new habit with you and break the habit of going to the other cleaner. If you are not following up with every new route customer, you may have a serious leak in your sales funnel and end up wasting a lot of effort as customers slip back into their old habit with their previous cleaner.
After meeting up with this group of cleaners in New Orleans, I found there is another new market out there entirely: on demand. On Demand is a service designed where one combines the on call features of Uber taxi service with a pick-up and delivery service. On Demand is designed for customers who have an immediate need, not necessarily a regular weekly, or even every other need for service.
The way on demand works is, a customer calls you requesting a pick-up of their order. You dispatch a driver, and this is where it gets interesting, it may not necessarily mean it’s a driver you have on staff! That’s right, you OUTSOURCE the pick-up and delivery to a company or individual who has a vehicle and specializes in simply picking up and dropping off. The driver is not on YOUR staff, the driver is an individual private contractor. No need to invest in vehicles, no need to carry staff on payroll, you simply create a GIG for someone who specializes in package pick-up and delivery. Your costs are locked in and contained, you can add an army of drivers when you need and shrink down to nothing when you have no demand of services, talk about best of all worlds because you can expand and contract as market forces demand and dictate.
Now, one of the concerns is the wild swings of unpredictable demand. When you get busy, you need to be able to maintain quality and service as customers demand quick turn-around. You need to have a plant designed to handle swings in capacity, and frankly, that is not so easy to do.
But this is a whole new market. As millennials move through society’s levels, they are used to on demand service. They tend to have infrequent need of dry cleaning and laundry, but when they do, those orders will introduce and bring them into our fold. Again, it will be up to us to educate and grow these customers. It will be up to us to follow up and grow these customers into our regular weekly and every other week need customers. Not to mention, every piece, every order, every extra dollar matters so much right now.
