Window Cleaning Lead Collection
Absorbing information to provide estimates is time consuming and hard to keep organized. After 8 years in business I finally got smart about this and it was revolutionary. I pointed 100% of my marketing, social media sites/content, and review sites to my website. My entire website pointed to a "Get Started" button. The button pointed to a page that sent customers to a page that asked if they were new or repeat customers. From there it sent them to one of two different forms. This process simplified all of my marketing, streamlined data collection, enabled quick accurate estimates, gave me accurate customer data and most importantly emails to keep in touch for a lifetime.
Let’s go over all the questions I asked potential clients. Keep in mind you might set a form up like this completely different to bid jobs, but you can use the same principal to collect data to create estimates. Another point i'd like to make is that there are a ton of situations where you can’t put out an estimate collecting this data. You might need to do it over the phone or meat a customer at the job. If you’re not confident in this process then do what you’re comfortable with to provide accurate estimates. Keep in mind that when your company grows you run out of time and driving to jobs for free estimates significantly eats into your time as well as profit margins. When you’re at a customer’s house to provide an estimate you’re making yourself vulnerable to the fact that you’ve already invested into this job with nothing in return, the customer’s know that. By collecting information like this you can control the estimate by the accuracy of the customer’s input. If they put 20 windows and they have 35, you have record of them providing inaccurate information, making the estimate invalid. You can politely adjust the price because you’re providing information based on their inputs.
Basic Information
Company
First Name
Last Name
Property Information
Address
How many square feet?
How many stories?
Job needs to be done…
What kind of roof do you have?
Service Information
How many windows do you have?
When was your last professional cleaning?
Is there any construction debris on the glass such as paint, stucco, glue, etc?
Are your windows french windows with dividers on the outside of the glass?
How old are your windows?
Is everything accessible in regards to knick knacks, furniture, landscaping and other personal property?
Do you have any skylights you'd like cleaned on the exterior only?
Is there anything else we might need to know?
Most of these questions had dropdown menus with answers in them to make it simple for prospects to answer. I would use google maps as well as real estate sites to look up the house and confirm information before pricing. Like I said above, if I didn’t feel comfortable providing a price I would arrange other means to get the customer an accurate estimate but this seemed to work great for 90% of our work. I’ll break down each section to show you how I would bid the jobs.
Basic Information
This information provides basic contact information and will let me know if I’m dealing with a residential or a commercial client. The email is especially important because it provides our company an automated way to keep in touch with the individual whether they hire us or not. I can send updates, coupons, and more with minimal effort. I’ve had tons of people not hire me the first time around but call back later after being dissatisfied with a competitor.
Property Information
This section provides us information on the property itself. This is a good indication of the effort that might go into a job. For jobs over 4,000 square feet, over 3 stories, etc. I would want to visit before providing an estimate. I might need to include the cost of a lift in a job this size or find something else I need to include in an estimate.
Service Information
I kept this separate from property information because we offered other services. So property questions pertained to the property where these questions were specific to the service the customer was interested in. So they only checked their interested services and answered questions specific to that service, which in this case is window cleaning.
We broke down jobs into 5 different categories. Over the years I realized I could find similarities across the board based on the houses square footage. I would call this a typical house. A typical house usually has 1 window per 100 square feet. This was always my starting point. So a house that was 1,000 square feet would typically have 10 windows. If I were charging $10 per window then I would quote this at $100 window inside, outside, screens, tracks, and sills. If someone filled out a form and said they had 12 windows on a 1,000 square foot house, I would quote it for $120. If someone filled out a form and said they had 35 windows on a 1,000 square foot house I would immediately know that someone has either input wrong information or this is some kind of job that isn’t “typical” and I should look into it more. This also goes the other way. If someone put in a house that was 3500 square feet and only put in 10 windows, I’d know a house that size has at least 35 windows typically. I could confirm this before sending someone out to do a job. As the questions progressed I would either raise the price or keep it the same based on answers. I found this method of bidding to be incredibly efficient and accurate for our company. It allowed us to estimate virtually and keep accurate records if the customer didn’t fill out the form correctly.
You can also use real estate sites and google maps to confirm what the home might look like. Beyond these questions there really wasn’t much we could run into that would cause us to not be able to do the job within the estimate. If that did happen I could eat the cost and raise the price for them next time. More often I was able to charge more based off of inaccurate information like missing a few windows, saying they’re not French windows, not realizing there’s paint overspray, etc. and our crew would simply show them the difference before they started work. Once we had customer’s in our database we start keeping track of the job duration. This allowed us to adjust prices based on how long it took our crew to do it and it kept great detailed notes on the property.
Now I’ll go over each answer option to help our prospect fill in their form quickly.
Property Information
Address
Form autofills their address.
How many square feet?
0-1,000 SF
1,001-1,500 SF
1,501-2,000 SF
2,001-2,500 SF
2,501-3,000 SF
3,001-3,500 SF
3,501 + SF
How many stories?
1
2
3
4+
Job needs to be done…
in no hurry.
within 1 week.
within 2 weeks.
within 3 weeks.
ASAP.
What kind of roof do you have?
Asphalt singles.
Flat concrete tile.
Rounded concrete tile.
Rounded clay tile.
Slate.
Metal.
Wood.
Other.
Service Information
How many windows do you have?
Enter a number.
When was your last professional cleaning?
Less than one year ago.
Over one year ago.
Over two years ago.
Over three years ago.
Never.
Is there any construction debris on the glass such as paint, stucco, glue, etc?
Yes.
No.
Are your windows french windows with dividers on the outside of the glass?
No.
Some.
All.
Most.
How old are your windows?
0-5 years old.
6-10 years old.
11-20 years old.
21-30 years old.
31-40 years old.
41-50 years old.