Lead Generation for Cleaning Services: Full Clay AI Workflow

Client acquisition for cleaning services companies can be incredibly challenging. The market is competitive, and cleaning businesses often struggle to differentiate themselves from the myriad of other service providers. One of the most effective channels to reach prospective customers and start meaningful sales conversations is through cold emails. Cold emails allow businesses to directly engage with decision-makers, showcase their value proposition, and build relationships. 

According to HubSpot, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. In this article, we’ll explore how to start lead generation for cleaning services with AI-powered outbound systems, providing detailed, actionable insights backed by relevant statistics. 

So let’s get started. 

What Are Commercial Cleaning Leads?

Commercial cleaning leads are potential clients who have shown interest in janitorial services. These leads are essential for cold outreach because they represent individuals or companies that may need your services. Typically, these leads exist across various niches and industries, from small offices to large manufacturing plants. 

Understanding the significance of these leads is crucial for your cold email campaigns. They are the foundation upon which you build your sales strategy, aiming to convert these interested prospects into loyal customers.

Using Cold Emails for Lead Generation for Cleaning Services: Best Practices

To successfully start lead generation for cleaning services via cold email, it’s essential to follow certain best practices. These strategies will help you maximize the effectiveness of your outreach and increase the likelihood of converting prospects into clients.

Here they are: 

1. Reach Out to Facility Managers & Decision Makers

To maximize the impact of lead generation for cleaning services, you need to target the right individuals and decision-makers. At cleaning businesses, the likes of facility managers & property managers are the ones responsible for hiring cleaning services. 

According to the Cleaning Management Institute, facility managers are often the primary contacts for commercial cleaning contracts. By reaching out directly to these individuals, you bypass gatekeepers and ensure your message gets to the people who can make decisions.

2. Time Your Outreach Properly

Timing is crucial when doing lead generation for cleaning services. Research by Yesware indicates that emails sent on Tuesdays have the highest open rates, while those sent between 10 AM and 11 AM are more likely to be read. Aligning your outreach with these optimal times can significantly increase your chances of engagement. 

Make sure to avoid sending emails during holidays or weekends when business activities are typically lower.

3. Personalize Your Message

Personalization is key to capturing the attention of your prospects. Use their names, mention their company, and address specific pain points they might be experiencing. According to Experian, personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates. 

For example, if you’re targeting a warehouse, highlight issues like “spills and debris disrupting safe and efficient logistics operations.” This shows that you understand their challenges and can offer tailored solutions.

4. Use case studies & testimonials

Including relevant case studies & testimonials while doing lead generation for cleaning services can significantly ramp up its effectiveness. It not only builds trust & credibility, but also reassures clients that you’re an expert and can be relied upon for delivering optimal results. 

According to Nielsen,  92% of people trust recommendations from individuals over brands. By providing real-world examples of your success, you make it easier for prospects to envision similar results for their own companies.

5. Clean your lists for better deliverability

Maintaining clean and up-to-date email lists is essential for ensuring high deliverability rates. Having high bounce rates can negatively impact your sender reputation, leading to emails being marked as spam. According to a report by MailerLite, a clean email list can improve deliverability by up to 98%. 

Therefore, it is important to use any of the email verification tools to verify and update your lists – and remove invalid or outdated addresses. 

6. Follow-up regularly

Persistence is key when doing lead generation for cleaning services through cold email. It’s crucial to not give up after just 1 or 2 attempts. One must follow-up and re-engage with prospects who haven’t responded to the initial emails. 

As per Hubspot, 80% of all sales requires a minimum 5 follow-ups  post the meeting. Having a structured follow-up strategy increases your chances of getting a response and moving prospects further down the sales funnel. 

How to Start Lead Generation for Cleaning Services with Cold Emails? – AI Outbound Workflow

To efficiently start lead generation for cleaning services, companies can leverage a combination of strategies and AI tools like Clay  to automate the process from start to finish. 

Here’s a detailed, step-by-step guide on how to automate lead generation for cleaning services using AI.

Step 1: Identifying Target Audience with OpenStreetMap and ChatGPT

To start lead generation for cleaning services with AI, we’ll first identify our target audience and the kind of companies we want to work with. For this, you’ll need to use the OpenStreetMap and GPT to extract relevant local data & personalize our outreach accordingly. 

The OpenStreetMap-turbo API allows you to target specific geographies by inputting specific coordinates. Once you do that, you can identify all the towns and cities within a desired radius. This ensures that your outreach is highly targeted, focused only on areas that you can serve or have a team in. 

ChatGPT can further streamline the process, where you can write a custom query to extract relevant data from OpenStreetMap – eventually converting it into JSON files for platforms like Apollo. Doing this saves significant time and improves data accuracy before you move to the next step. 

Step 2: Data Extraction and List Building 

Once you’ve figured your target audience, the next step around lead generation for cleaning services is list building. With the extracted data, focus on targeting specific job titles such as facility managers, property managers & groundskeepers. 

To do this, you can leverage Apollo by applying relevant filters and then enrich your contact list by cross-referencing company descriptions with LinkedIn. Doing this ensures you have the most accurate and updated information about each company and contact. 

Step 3: Crafting personalized cold emails 

The next step around lead generation for cleaning services involves crafting highly-personalized cold emails. To ensure maximum responses, you can leverage ChatGPT or AI scrapers like Claygent to generate specific cleaning issues relevant to the prospective company inside Clay. 

For example, you could highlight issues like “spills and debris” disrupting safe & efficient logistics operations for warehouses. The prompt for this could be something along the lines of: 

“You are a cleaning expert with over 20 years of experience in the field. Your job is to identify a numbered list of 3-4 major cleaning related issues being faced by a company. 

Using the input provided in the company description, can you create 3 bullet points of different ways that a company, their staff and their clients might be running into cleaning related issues at the workplace. Be specific & give examples that are most likely to occur based on what the company does. Keep each bullet point under 20 words.

Here is an example of 3 bullet points highlighting different cleaning-related issues: 

1 – Unclean dishes in the office kitchen/pantry 

2 – Cleaning staff cleaning during work hours 

3 – Lack of supplies for the office bathrooms.” 

Based on the above insight, you can then map the issues as per each prospect and company. The final email would look something like this: 

“Hey John,
Was driving past your building on Fifth Avenue earlier and figured you might be dealing with any of these issues:
– Spills and debris in warehousing areas disrupting safe and efficient logistics operations
– Unclean transportation vehicles affecting your image
– Cluttered workspaces reducing productivity

How’s your current cleaning staff handling these issues? We’re XYZ Cleaning Solutions, a local cleaning business dealing with similar challenges for our clients every day. Can I give you a call today or tomorrow to see if we can be of any help?

PS: Is this phone number the best one to reach you?”

Here, the content for the issues will remain dynamic (can be mapped in the lead list as {{Cleaning Issues}}) and you can also map the phone numbers dynamically for each prospect. 

Alternatively, you can also generate a list of 3 ways your cleaning business can help the prospect’s building or office maintain sanitation & a clean, germ-free environment at the workplace – all you’ve got to do is tweak the prompt based on the company description. 

Step 4: Automating follow-ups 

Once you’ve written the first email (either with the 3 creative ideas or cleaning issues), it’s important to optimize your follow-ups as well. 

By automating follow-ups and a focus on nudging multiple cleaning-related pain points in each email, you’re ensuring that no lead is left unattended and that you maintain persistent engagement with your prospects.

Step 5: Setting up & launching campaigns 

The final step to automate lead generation for cleaning companies is to set up the campaigns and launch them. You can simply integrate your Smartlead or Instantly account with Clay & directly launch campaigns inside the tool. 

One can also download the spreadsheet with the relevant columns mapped and then uploaded manually to the email sending software. Post that, all you need to do is monitor the campaign performance & make adjustments based on the data available. 

This ensures that your campaigns stay effective & deliver better results. 

Final Thoughts

By following these steps, decision-makers can significantly ramp up their lead generation for cleaning services. Leveraging AI-powered tools and personalized cold email outreach, companies can efficiently reach and engage potential clients. 

At Cleverviral, we’ve helped companies generate the best leads for cleaning services using highly-personalized cold email campaigns.

If you’re looking to ramp up your demand generation efforts using the power of AI outbound, simply write to us on [email protected] or simply fill out the form on our website. 

Until then, happy prospecting!!

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