How to Upsell Cleaning Services

Do you know the cheapest and easiest way to increase your cleaning business revenue and profits?

No, it’s not acquiring new clients. It’s to upsell cleaning services to your existing clients.

Not only is upselling more affordable and cheaper than acquiring a new client, but it also increases your business revenue by 10-30%. Most successful cleaning business understands this. They know how to hack their customers’ psychology to sell them additional services.

Today, we’ll tell you exactly how we upsell to more than 80% of our clients at our cleaning business, Maid to Glow, without ever speaking to them and how you can do the same to increase your business revenue.

So, let’s get started.

The Basics

Whatever technique or tricks we share today will only work if you have the basics sorted out. And what are the basics?

Be excellent at what you do.
Make customer satisfaction your top priority.
Build trust and credibility with your customers.

What is Upselling Cleaning Services?

Let’s quickly define what upselling really means before we dive into the why and how of the topic.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of upselling though both hold the same meaning to some extent:

Cross-Selling: When you sell another cleaning product or service with the original one, it’s called cross-selling.

For example: upselling to clean the inside of the oven to someone who originally only booked you for bathroom cleaning.

Upselling: When you upsell a more premium version or package of the same service, it’s called upselling.

For example: converting a one-time booking into a recurring one or converting a standard cleaning service into deep cleaning.

Why Upselling Cleaning Services is Important?

We briefly touched upon the importance of upselling. It’s the easiest and cheapest way to increase your cleaning business revenue.

It’s easy because once you’ve already sold something to a customer, they are much more open to buying more from you since there’s already an established relationship based on an exchange of value and trust.

It’s cheaper because you’re spending $0 on acquisition.

How to Upsell Cleaning Services?

When upselling cleaning services, ask yourself, is this fulfilling the customer’s needs in any way? Sometimes, they will not tell you what they need or don’t even know what they need. You have to figure that out.

But how do you find out what your customers need?

Whatever is valuable and relevant to your client is what they need.

What you’re selling should add value to the customer’s life. But value alone is not enough. It should also be relevant for them.

For some customers, it could be saving time or money, while for others, it could be a better deal or a better outcome. You have to find out what the customer values and if it’s relevant for them at that time.

When to Upsell Cleaning Services?

The timing of upselling is as crucial as the method of upselling. Sometimes, upselling at the time of booking is the most optimal option. Sometimes, upselling after the work has been completed is most effective. To maximize your results, you should try and upsell both before and after the cleaning.

We upsell to more than 80% of our customers at the time of booking, and we’ll show you how you can do the same in a minute.

But first, let’s talk about the dos and don’ts of upselling after the cleaning.

Upsell if –

Only upsell once the client is 100% satisfied.
Upsell if and when they say something positive about your work. This could be right after the cleaning, after a few days or even weeks.
Once they have shown interest in what more you offer.

Don’t upsell if –

The client isn’t satisfied with your work.
You made a mistake.
It adds no value to their lives. Prioritize long-term trust and credibility over short-term profits.
In general, don’t upsell when the customer has a negative experience with your work.

Training Cleaning Staff How to Upsell

All your employees should have extensive knowledge and experience in every single cleaning service your business provides. You can either hire experienced cleaners who already know this stuff or train them. Read our guide on training cleaning staff to know more.

One of the best ways for your employees to find out what the customers need is by asking questions. More importantly, the right questions.

Other than that, they may also require excellent observation skills to look for opportunities to upsell.

Understanding the customer by asking them questions and finding out what they might need is the overall gist of it. If your cleaning staff can do that, your business revenue will grow exponentially.

Otherwise, you might need to hire a salesperson who can do this on-call. Or you can do it yourself, but it might not be the best use of your time.

How We Upsell in Maid to Glow?

In Maid to Glow, our cleaning business, we have an excellent checkout page that suggests extra/additional cleaning services that customers might like halfway through the checkout process.

Once they are in the checkout process, we know they have shown interest, so they are more open to adding the extra services. This is how the page looks:

Not only does it allow us to upsell to more than 80% of our customers, but it also automates the entire process of upselling. The customers are basically upselling themselves.

But unless you have a highly-effective and pursuable checkout page like us, you might not see the same results. We created ours with Maidily.

With Maidily, you don’t need any designing or copywriting skills to create a powerful checkout page. Maidily will do it for you.

Or you can do it yourself if you’re good at it. Nonetheless, the bottom line is – you need an effective checkout page that converts and lets your customers pick and choose different services and extras to add to their cart themselves.

Final Thoughts

Upselling on the checkout page is a great hack to increase your sales and revenue. But that doesn’t undermine the importance or effectiveness of upselling in-person after or during the cleaning.

As for what to sell, you can sell extras and add-ons, bundles, subscription and recurring plans and seasonal offers and discounts.