You are the expert.

When you arrive at the job, you are the only floor and fabric care professional the customer will be speaking with.

It is your responsibility to solve the cleaning problem for which you were hired, but it is also your job to educate the consumer on any other ways in which you might be able to improve their quality of life with the services you provide.

The pool service guy and the window cleaner are not going to explain the importance of proper upholstery maintenance or the value of restoring carpet protector. If you don’t make sure the customer is aware of all of the services you provide, who will? If you don’t provide this important information, they will lose out on the opportunity to avail themselves of the other valuable skills you possess.

Their lives can be better if you just let them know what you do.

Try some of the following five ways to better inform your customers, and you will increase the value of your job tickets in the process.

#1 List of services

The easiest way to inform your clients of the services you offer is to provide a printed list. This can be done using a company brochure or a stand-alone menu of services.

Consumers focus on the specific job which they call you out to perform. They do not memorize all of the services mentioned on your website. Even if your van, business card, invoice and uniform logo clearly state that you provide upholstery cleaning, the customer simply may not be paying attention. To ensure they know, present them a printed list of those services they can hold, read and possibly show their spouse later.

It is then just a matter of pointing to the menu and saying that these are the services you provide. It helps to highlight any specific ones you think are especially relevant.

#2 Reminder cards

The most powerful tool for increasing customer repeat frequency is the reminder card. But it also is effective for increasing the invoice size for jobs. The reminder card, along with encouraging the next job, should also highlight the top secondary services offered by the company.

I suggest reminder cards have a space dedicated to placing the date of the last cleaning followed by checkboxes encouraging the top two secondary services.

For example:

• Recommend restoring carpet protector
• Consider cleaning upholstery

You should check the boxes when appropriate.  Other options might be “area rug cleaning” or “tile and grout cleaning.”

#3 Relevant questions

It is your responsibility as a cleaning expert to ask questions concerning each job along with its relevant history. The answers you receive can help you better solve the customer problems, but they should also lead you to offer other services.

Two powerful questions are:

• Have you ever had your _____ [family room sofa, tile, and grout, area rugs, etc.] professionally cleaned?
• Were you aware that we clean _____ [fill in the blank]?”

It is then critically important to listen to what the customer says. If the response is positive, the next natural question should be “Would you be interested in a price for doing that?”

Consumers expect to have this type of conversation with a professional service provider. When presented correctly, these do not sound like pressured sales requests. Instead, they should come across as your attempt to improve the quality of life for your client. You are the only person in the position to help them with these issues.

#4 Clean auto floor mats

Almost every consumer has removable carpeted car mats in need of cleaning. Who is better equipped to provide this service than you? Let’s just say that you charge $15 per pair (adjust according to your pricing) and clean four pairs per day times 200 days per year. That would come to an additional $12,000 income per year! This has to be one of the easiest upsells.

The import detail is to make the customer aware of this service before you arrive for the job. They need to plan ahead in order to collect all of the mats from their various vehicles. A single-family could provide three pairs of mats from just one vehicle.

This service needs to be offered when scheduling the job and again at the time of the job confirmation (the day before the appointment).

#5 Invoice line items

Secondary services such as upholstery, area rug and tile cleaning, along with restoring carpet protector, should be printed as individual line items on your invoice. It is then easy to point to and mention these services while reviewing the invoice with your customer prior to the job.

I suggest actually calculating and filling in the amount for restoring carpet protector as if assuming the customer was planning on including it. If the client hesitates with the item, ask if they are aware of its importance for restoring the “like new” condition of the carpet. Provide that information if the customer is interested. You can easily remove the service fee from the invoice total if the customer is not interested.

It’s your job

Remember, the customer is dependent upon your advice on how they can best maintain their flooring and upholstered fabrics. They usually don’t know all of the service options you provide unless you educate them on what these are.

These easy tips describe some of the best ways for you to explain your services and get the added bonus of increasing the size of your invoices. Distributing a list of your services, creating service checkboxes on your reminder cards and working secondary service items into your invoice template provide consistent, printed means of improving communication about services with your customers. And offering auto floor mat cleaning is a simple service addition that can also increase your ticket.

Asking relevant questions positions you as the expert and can have the same result. When this is done right, your customers will credit you for being highly professional.

Source: http://www.cleanfax.com/business-management/increase-your-invoice/