CLEANING SERVICES: Organize Your Sales Pipelines Like This to Win More Clients
Messy sales pipelines are COSTING you money
When your sales pipeline is a mess, your team ends up spending more time chasing “maybes” than winning new clients.
That’s why we built a simple structure to bring clarity, speed, and results to the sales process.
Whether you’re a cleaning company, HVAC service, vet clinic, or any home service provider—this pipeline structure will help you move leads from cold to closed without wasting time or letting hot opportunities slip through the cracks.
Table of Contents
Messy sales pipelines are COSTING you money
The Pipeline That Keeps Sales Flowing
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FULL VIDEO: How To Organize Your Sales Pipeline
The Pipeline That Keeps Sales Flowing
Most sales teams struggle because they don’t know what to do next. With this setup, every lead has a clear place—and more importantly, a clear next step. Here's how we structure it:
1. New Lead
Every inquiry—whether it comes from a phone call, form submission, text, or email—drops into the New Lead stage. This is your processing bin. It's not where leads sit long; it's where they get triaged.
2. Contacting
If you've reached out and are waiting to hear back, move the lead into Contacting. This is your call list. It’s full of people who’ve shown interest, and you’re working to re-engage them.
3. Waiting
Once they reply and you're now the bottleneck (they’re waiting on you), they move to Waiting. These should be high priority—no one should be waiting on you for long. Clean it up daily.
4. Following Up
After you’ve responded and the back-and-forth continues, leads go into Following Up. Maybe you’re waiting on more details or trying to get pictures or videos to finalize the quote. This is an active nurturing stage.
5. Estimate Scheduled
If the lead requests an in-person estimate, you move them into Estimate Scheduled. It’s a real opportunity—don’t miss the chance to show up on time and close strong.
6. Estimate Delivered
This is your hottest stage. These leads have gone through the full process and have your quote—but haven’t said yes or no. This is where most sales fall apart because people wait. Don’t wait. Push for a reply. A “no” is better than silence.
Pro tip: Add a specific follow-up date for every estimate so you’re never chasing ghosts. If they say, “I’ll think about it after vacation,” mark that date and follow up on that date.
7. Pending
Once they say yes, they move to Pending. This is for clients who’ve accepted your quote and are simply waiting for their first job or service to be completed.
8. Won
After the job is done and the invoice is paid, mark the deal as Won. There’s nowhere else to go. They’re now a paying customer.
Bonus: Lost or Abandoned
Avoid the Abandoned stage unless the lead was totally bogus. If they say “not right now” or ghost you after quoting, mark them as Lost—because we’ve got automation for that.
The Power of Project Rescue
Here’s where it gets fun: even “lost” leads aren’t lost forever. In our system, we use Project Rescue—an automation that re-engages cold leads 5–6 months later. No ads, no extra cost. Just smart follow-up.
To activate Project Rescue, Nurturely+ users can apply the "rescue" tag
“Hey Mary, just checking in—do you still need help with your home cleaning?”
You’d be shocked how many come back around.
Why This Works
This pipeline helps you:
Stay on top of follow-ups.
Avoid wasting time on dead leads.
Know exactly where each prospect stands.
Train your team to always push for clarity: YES or NO, never MAYBE.
And once someone’s in your CRM—with a phone number or email—you can continue marketing to them until they buy or unsubscribe. That’s long-term leverage.
Set It Up in Minutes
If you’re using Nurturely+, you can get this exact pipeline snapshot loaded into your account instantly.
Using something else? This setup works just as well in:
Try Nurturely+ for 80% Off for Life
If you don’t already have Nurturely+, go to nurturely.io/plus, click “Claim Discount,” and use the code FOUNDERS80 to get 80% off for life as part of our founding members plan.
This replaces $1,500–$2,000/month worth of software. With over 25 tools in one—reputation management, CRM, automations, texting, forms, estimates, and more—it’s all built to help you win more clients with less friction.
Need Help?
If you’re not sure how to recreate this pipeline in your CRM, just comment below or reach out. We’ll point you to a resource or walk you through it.
Let’s simplify the chaos—and turn more of your leads into long-term customers.
FULL VIDEO: How To Organize Your Sales Pipeline
AUDIO: How To Organize Your Sales Pipeline
Transcript
00:00:00 So, keeping all of our opportunities organized is how we kind of keep the peace of mind. Uh, when we've got, you know, over a hundred active open opportunities, this number was at like 280 at the beginning of the year. Um, but we had been cracking down on our follow-ups and, uh, basically forcing an answer. So, I don't really love when there's a ton of opportunities in here because that means there's a lot of may. And what we are after is either a yes or a no. And a no is not bad. It just means
00:00:32 not right now. And if it's not a yes, it needs to be a no so that we're not wasting any time. So we organize it in a couple different stages. We've got new lead. As soon as one comes into our CRM, it it gets dropped into here for processing. Basically, um they can come in if they if they call us, if they text us, if they email in, if they fill out the form on custom-maids.co, um or if I guess they'd be calling in if they're adding them manually. Um from there, they start the processing. We're contacting them. We're trying to get
00:01:03 back in touch with them and uh ask a few more questions to help us dial in on what their actual quote will be. So, what we're doing is trying to get them a price um to let them know how much it'll cost to clean the place. home, office, business, whatever it is. So, after we've contacted them and we don't hear back from them, they get dropped into the contacting stage. These are all the people that we can call every day trying to get back in touch with them. If we've gotten in touch with them and they've
00:01:33 replied and they are waiting for a reply from us, they go into waiting. So, then these are the the higher priority ones that we get back to and we make sure there's no one waiting on us. um following up. These are the people that now we have replied to that waiting on us message and we are digging a bit deeper. So the conversation has progressed a little bit. Now we are trying to figure out when we can deliver that estimate or we are uh getting pictures to to give the quote over text or over the phone. Um some people prefer
00:02:06 the in-person estimates so they will get dragged into estimate scheduled. But if we get images, if we get pictures, videos, whatever, and are able to send them a quote over text message, they skip estimate, estimate scheduled and go to estimate delivered. This stage, all of these people are your hottest leads in your entire CRM. These people that have gone through the entire process and they've gotten a quote from you and up until this point, they have not said no. We don't want them to stay there,
00:02:36 though. We want to get an answer. So getting a yes or a no is is much better than just letting it sit here. Even though you might be a little bit afraid of getting the no from them. Um the truth of the matter is in this game you're you're only going to close like 20 30 40% of these. So most of these people are going to say no anyway. So make it part of your sales culture to get a reply as quickly as possible. If you know Christina has said, "Hey, we're going out of town. Let me get back with you in a week and a half. Great. You
00:03:09 have a specific date now that you can pend this task for. What we want to avoid is any gray area, any may. Christina has given us a date for that we can look forward to for an answer. That's good to keep in here. Now, once we've delivered the estimate and they said, "Okay, great. We want to be put on your schedule." They get put into pending. Anyone who has accepted the estimate and is waiting for their first clean is in pending. After they have been cleaned and they paid their first invoice, that likely means that they are
00:03:41 satisfied client. We consider them one. Now we will take this and mark it one. There's nowhere else to go after pending. We change the status to one. I bet it would be easier to show here. So we've got our pipeline here under leads. We've got stage, new lead, contacting, waiting, following up, estimate scheduled, estimate delivered, and pending. Pending is the furthest you can go. So now we change it from open to one. You should almost never have anything abandoned. And it's okay to have a lost opportunity because we have
00:04:12 project rescue that will come in after that. And five or 6 months down the road, it will reach out to Mary automatically and ask her if she is needing help with any house cleaning services or anything like that. and you're going to be able to generate leads that way without spending anything on ads. Furthermore, once you've got their phone number or email in here, you're going to be able to market to them until they uh one become a paying client or two say, you know, get away from me until they say, "Knock it off."
00:04:40 So, once they're in their your CRM, it's pretty well game over. If you've got Nurturly Plus, these are the stages, your pipeline stages you should set up. The stages here you can take anywhere. You can use it in pipe drive for example. You can use it in HubSpot. Um anywhere that you can create stages. Uh break it out in this way and your sales team will be able to stay much more on point and much more organized that way. Um but if you have Nurturly Plus, I mean you can get the snapshot of this and
00:05:08 have this loaded into your account straight away. Uh if you don't have Nurturly Plus, you can go over to https://nurturely.io/plus Plus P Lu S and you can learn all there is to know about Nurturly Plus. Uh you can create your account. um scroll down and see all of the uh different benefits, the different features that we've got. We've got over 25 different softwares that you have all into one. Uh and so if you were going to basically piece all these together with your own softwares, it's going to cost like $1,500 or $2,000 a month. And then
00:05:38 you're going to have a bunch of siloed a bunch of individual platforms that you have to connect together basically. Whereas Nurtury Plus here is one platform that has it all. um serves any different industry here, any service based, especially home service uh industries, but we we have been rocking for a vet clinic um as well. So, we've got auto repair, towing, pressure washing, cleaning, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, vet clinics, fencing, painting, chiropractors, travel agents, all that good stuff. We've got our
00:06:08 different use cases here, so you can kind of see what the software is all about and what you'll be able to do with it rather than just seeing what the features are. And then when you're ready, you can grab 80% off for life. Uh while these coupon codes last, there's a hundred of them and you can type in where does it have? Oh, I think you got to click claim discount. Type in founders 80. Click create account. You'll be able to go to the page where you set up your account and make your payment. Put this in here because you'll
00:06:36 get 80% off for your the entire life for your entire life. As long as that account is kept open, you'll get 80% off as part of our founders founding members plan. This is called Founders 80. So, if you don't have Nurturely Plus, go over to https://nurturely.io/plus and get that all taken care of. If you need help setting up your pipeline stages in any other CRM, please comment below. I will try to find any knowledgebased article or any any resource that can help you set up your stages this way or or similar even
00:07:09 something. so that you can organize all of your your sales leads and you can stay on top of it. You know who to follow up with, when to do it, what to say, all that good stuff. If you need help, let us know. We'd be happy to. Great rest of your day. We'll talk to you all soon.
