Lead Generation for Commercial Cleaners
A daily office contract is worth £145 a day. That’s around £36,000 a year, from one customer.
You don’t need a hundred enquiries. You need three good contracts, and a way of keeping the ones you’ve already won.
We’ll look at how you win work now, and where you’re quietly losing it.
Three contracts is a business. Three hundred leads is a headache.
Put the numbers side by side and the whole strategy falls out of them.
A daily office clean at £145, running roughly 250 working days a year, is £36,250 annually. Hold it three years and that single customer is worth around £108,750. A regular domestic clean at £80 a week is about £12,480 over the same period. An end-of-tenancy clean at £535 is £535, once, and then they’re gone.
One commercial contract is worth roughly two hundred end-of-tenancy jobs.
Most cleaning companies market as though those three are the same business. A phone number, a price list, a bit of Facebook, and hope. Then the budget gets spent chasing one-off domestic work that costs more to win than it returns, while a contract worth six figures churns out the back door because nobody noticed the site manager had changed in March.
That’s the thing worth sitting with. Losing one contract undoes a year of winning new ones. Any marketing that only points outwards is solving half your problem and probably the smaller half.
You’re not selling to a homeowner. You’re selling to a facilities manager.
A plumber’s customer has water coming through a ceiling and rings whoever picks up. Yours has a procurement process, an incumbent supplier they’re broadly happy with, an insurance requirement, a budget cycle and a boss who’ll ask why they changed contractor if anything goes wrong.
That changes four things completely.
You have to look like a company, not a bloke with a van and a Henry. Facilities managers are, sensibly, risk-averse. They want to see employer’s liability and public liability cover, DBS-checked staff, COSHH sheets, a supervision structure and a real address. Most cleaning company websites show none of that and get filtered out before anyone picks up a phone. This isn’t about looking flashy — it’s about looking like an organisation that won’t become their problem.
You need to be visible when contracts come up, not just when someone searches. Commercial contracts turn over on a cycle, usually annually. Being findable and credible in month eleven of somebody else’s contract matters far more than ranking every single day of the year. That’s a different campaign shape to the one most agencies sell.
You need something to send. This is the one people miss. A proper capability pack — how you staff a site, how you supervise, how you audit quality, references from comparable buildings — gets forwarded internally to people you will never speak to. That document does more selling than your homepage ever will, because it’s what’s in the room when the decision actually gets made. If your follow-up to an enquiry is a price and a phone number, you’re relying on being cheapest.
You have to protect what you’ve already got. Quality audits, visible reporting, and a relationship that survives the site manager leaving. That’s marketing too. It’s just pointed at customers you already have, which is where your money actually is.
What’s a contract actually worth?
- Contract value: £145 a day
- Days per year: 250
- Expected retention: 3 years
£108,750 per contract. One contract pays for Flat Out for forty-five years. Losing one costs more than your entire marketing budget for a decade.
Now drag the retention slider from three years to four. That’s another £36,250 from a customer you already have, without winning anything.
Contracts either run themselves or they don’t run
Every enquiry from your website lands in your Gaffer inbox with the site type and size already attached, and the follow-up goes out automatically — your capability pack, within the hour, while they’re still comparing.
Once a contract starts, the recurring visits schedule themselves, staff get assigned, and sites and rounds are mapped so cover doesn’t fall apart when someone’s off. Monthly invoicing raises itself rather than being someone’s Friday afternoon.
Two things matter more than the rest for a business like yours. Churn-risk flags a contract that’s gone quiet or had a missed visit, while there’s still time to do something about it. And job surveys get you a quality score from each site every month — which, when the contract comes up for renewal, means your argument for keeping it is evidenced rather than asserted.
It runs alongside your payroll and accounts. It sits over the top rather than replacing anything that already works.
Questions commercial cleaners actually ask
We get work through tenders and word of mouth. Does a website really matter?
It matters precisely because of that. Every tender you enter, somebody looks you up. The website rarely wins the contract on its own — but it absolutely loses them, and you’ll never be told that’s why.
We don’t want domestic enquiries.
Then we won’t generate any. Commercial and domestic cleaning are genuinely different businesses with different buyers, and we’d build the site to attract one and politely repel the other.
Our margins are thin. £199 a month is real money.
It’s about a day and a half of one contract. If it stops a single contract churning, it’s paid for itself for the next decade. If it doesn’t do anything for you, drop to £29 or leave — there’s no contract at our end, which we appreciate is an unusual thing for someone selling contracts to say.
Can you help with recruitment?
Not directly, but the same site does both jobs. Cleaning companies lose contracts through staffing more often than through cleaning, and a careers page that makes you look like a decent employer is worth more than most people in this trade realise.
We’ve been burned by an agency before.
Common in this sector. Start on £29, see what turns up, move when you’re ready. We’d rather earn the upgrade than sell you one now.
Find out what your contracts are really worth
Tell us roughly how many you hold and what they’re worth. We’ll show you the churn maths and where the next three are most likely to come from.
Multi-site or national? Framework agreements and TUPE situations — we build bespoke. Talk to us