[Cleaning Resource]

Hi I`m thinking of employing a salesman working on a self employed basis payed commission.

This would be to help grow the commercial contract cleaning side of my business.

What I would like to know is:  A) does anyone else do this
                                                B) how much commission do you pay
                                                C) do you supply leads or do they coldcall
                                                D) is it working

Any advice on this subject would be apreciated,  Thanks

[The Great One]

Hi

Careful with cold calling through yellow pages, that can lead to a £5000 fine.

I was going to try this at one stage but decided against it for that reason

Regards

Martin

[Cleaning Resource]

why will you get fined for using the yellow pages,  its a directory if the people in it did not want they details to be public info, they would not advertise in it

[Customers4u]

Hiya Gleam Services,

Its Paul Bass from Doorknockers, attracting commercial is a much harder proposition than domestic, due to catching the right person to talk to mainly.

Commercial seems to be a much more cut throat avenue than domestic, as oher window cleaners in the same line of work try to undercut the price you have agreed with the customer.

Quite a lot of the window cleaners i have worked with have gone for higher dem domestic properties, ie £20 a month and over, to top up their commercial round.

If you employ someone, you would need to pay them fairly well to try to attract the right kind of salesperson, maybe the minimum wage hourly rate, with a percentage of commission, perhaps x.5%
So if they worked 8 hours they could earn £44.16 at 21 plus any commission set, rates for min wage below.

(The government says more than a million workers are in line to benefit from a 17p increase to the national minimum wage.

Following recommendations from the low pay commission, workers over 21 can now expect to earn at least £5.52 an hour from October onwards.

People aged between 18 and 21 will earn at least £4.60, a rise of 15 per cent, while the minimum wage for 16 and 17-year-olds has gone up to £3.40 from £3.30.)

 

I had never heard of the Yellow pages clampdown either!! so its not very well publicised!

But thanks to Martin on that for the info.

Alternatively, i pay my salespeople a flat rate of x1 on Commission only

All the best,

Paul 

[keith b]

gleamservices,

Im not sure if door canvassing is good a thing for finding commercial business.

Last week we had a canvasser door knocking in our street to offer new guttering and pvc facias, looks like he had some success by the amount of time/people he was speaking to, he didn`t do any price quotes, but just booked appointments for a survey.

Im not entirely sure, but i believe you can obtain a "peddlers license" from the police which may allow you to trade within the law!

Might be worth you checking out the police or go to your local council to see what licenses they cover.

[newbroom]

Hi all,

Perhaps i reading this wrong but didnt gleamservices originally post asking if a salesperson was a viable option for increasing his/hers commercial contract cleaning operation.

I would have thought a salesperson would have been ideal for getting foot in door of commercial clients

[drivewasher]

I think Paul may be refering to the Caller Preference Service This is a database of phone line subscribers who don't want or are sick of being mithered by cold callers, You know double glazing, re-mortgages sales etc, etc;
Anyone cold telephone calling is required by law to check the number they are about to call is not registered on the cps list, and if it is you can get fined for calling it
PS it cost's nowt to be added to list as a line subscriber just takes a couple of days to get your number on the data base. I think telephone sales people have to pay a few grand for the data base, or to at least use it

[Cleaning Resource]

Thanks newbroom,  I had to read my own post again, twice, I was sure I asked about a sales man to help build my commercial contract cleaning business.....

But thanks for your input anyway all be it a bit of course : : :

Paul bass, I was thinking of paying commission only, in the form of either a one off payment of a percentage of the value of any new contracts they bring in, or a lower percentage ongoing monthly payment. I think the second is worth looking at as it would, over time, give my self employed sales team a regular monthly income which would be topped up by the commission they earn selling toilet consumables, tea and coffee, linen hire etc etc etc........................

I`ve done lots of selling to domestic customers, and I realise commercial is a completely different ball game, but I do have alot of good contacts and my foot is in the door all over the place, but I got described as "another london wide boy" the other day so I don`t want to spoil a potential sale.

do you think I`m heading along the right lines and whta percentage would you suggest???

[cruciblecleaning]

Regarding CPS, that only applies to residential lines, if your salesperon is coldcalling businesses then they are fine to use yell.com or whoever.  (I've recently bought company lists from experian for sheffield so I'll check out what quality it is over the next couple of weeks)

Rgarding a salesperson, you need to look at a number of factors.  First, what net profit are you making per hour.  Lets say it's £2 an hour after all fixed and variable costs are met, that makes a 20 hour a week job worth £2,080 in profit to you.  So if you paid commision at 25% of first year value and your salesperson can bring in a 20 hour job a week (which is certainly doable) they make just over 27 grand.  However first year this would be less as you will be paying them over 12 months.  Depending on your cashflow you might want to pay half up front and half after 12 months.  The other thing to consider is can you handle that much axtra business (1,040 extra hours a week).  If you can't then you might want to take someone who is looking for part time sales work rather than full time as i don't think doing it fulltime with much less than 20 hours/week target would be worthwhile..  Also consider that you need to be very specific in how you target them.  For example I don't touch anything much over 40 hours a week because of both credit risk on taking on large jobs (and the larger contracts always want it on tick and tend to be bad payers) and the fact that the bigger the contract the less they want to pay per hour so it squeezes margins.  I do my own selling but if I were to outsource it I'd want a very clearly defined structure and an agreement only to pay out on deals within that structure.   Ditto on pricing, we're not exactly a high margin business so you'd need to be careful you didn't end up with someone who was always wanting to discount to be the cheapest quote as yhou can end up with a lot of business which isn't makinjg you any money but takes up all your time.
The alternative is to do the appointments yourself but get an upscale telesales firm to do the appointment making for you (they are not cheap, £20-£25 an hour)  Don't touch the battery farm telesales ops, they charge less (£12-£15/hour) but they'll just p of all your potential customers in no time.

Hope this helps.

[Cleaning Resource]

Thanks for that its much appreciated, 
it has given me a bit more to think about :

[cruciblecleaning]

Thanks for that its much appreciated, 
it has given me a bit more to think about :

No probs, the other thing to bear in mind if you're going to have a self employed salesperson is that if they don't work for anyone else you need to be careful they don't get IR35ed by the revenue. (reassessed as employed).  How you set the contract up, especially with regard to what freedom they have to work in their own way is important to this.  If they do get reassed it's retrospective and not only are they liabvle for extra tax and NICs you have to pay retrospective employers national insurance

Lots of info here - http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/selfemployed/tmaemployed_or_self-employed.shtml

[Cleaning Resource]

cheers, my sisters a corporate solicitor, thats one for her to sort out