How to Make Smarter, Data-Driven Decisions

Hey everyone. Welcome to CleanTelligence Software's April 2017 webinar. Thank you for registering and jumping on with me today. In case you were wondering, this webinar is being recorded and will be available to view on our website next week. You can then review anything that I have discussed. Of course, the benefit of attending this webinar live is the opportunity for interaction with me via chat. And as you may remember, all registrants of this webinar will receive a free ebook. You can expect to see that in your email inbox within about a week. Once again, those of you who are attending this webinar live may ask questions through the chat feature of your viewer. I will also give my contact information at the end in case you would like to reach out to cleantelligent or me directly. As a reminder, all our previous webinars are available to view at www.cleantelwidget.com. i encourage you to check them out before we get started, I just wanted to take a minute to introduce myself. My name is Connor Cox. I am a software consultant at cleantelligence Software. I've worked in the sales department for about two years now. During that time I've spoken to hundreds of cleaning business owners and showed them how technology and data improves or cleaning business results. Today I wanted to take some time to talk about how to make data driven decisions. This is a very broad topic, so I wanted to focus on a few key points to use that data effectively. The main points that I wanted to speak about is why you need to track data, how to make data driven decisions, and then four key ways to put the data to use. Then at the end I did want to touch a bit on cleantelligence business intelligence modules and some of the key benefits of that. I did want to start with a story before I delve into the PowerPoint too much. So the specific scenario that I want to talk about is how a major TV channel has used data in making decisions. So they use viewer and other data to create a highly detailed list of its viewers, core values and benefits. This list is central to everything that it does and even when developing concepts for new shows, this company weighs almost every decision it makes against these values. Whenever something doesn't fit, it won't get the green light to continue even if it has terrific commercial potential. Understanding the target market and the needs and wants of those individuals allows them to make smarter decisions of how they move forward with their company and ultimately reach success. So the first key point that I wanted to talk about on how to use data to increase your business was why you need to track data and how crucial that is to making data driven decisions. So the first thing is the first key point of why you need to track that is it allows for greater business awareness. Having the correct reports within your business allows you to become more aware of the real problems that you and your problems are facing. You will be more aware of the processes that are going well and the problems that need fixing. If you see a negative trend, you will know sooner. If there is a need to provide more training for a custodian or to send your team to clean a certain location more often, there will be less guessing when it comes to knowing how your cleaning company is performing. Data gives your company more empowerment by knowing why your operations are effective and not simply that they are. The second point I want to talk about is for why you need to track data is it allows for more effective decision making. Now facility managers and cleaning business owners must make countless decisions ranging anywhere from purchasing supplies to hiring employees. They must also determine if the technology they are using is worth the company dollars. If you are tracking data such as how much money your facility management software or cordless vacuums are saving you, you will have the proof to justify your spending choices. And then the last key point that I want to talk about on why you need to track data is it allows for increased competitiveness. It gives your company a strategy for the future and how to have the edge in such a competitive market. If you want more long term success over your competitors, you will need to be efficiently using and tracking data. Put technology to work by using it to take corrective actions for your business and to cut cost. A recent article from CIO.com talked about a study done by Price PricewaterhouseCoopers, a leading accounting company. In the research it was discovered that 75% of North America and Europe lacked effective strategies for using data to get ahead of their competition. Sarah White, a senior writer for CIO.com said that data strategy is the biggest resource in gaining a competitive edge against other companies. According to that study, by ignoring data or treating it as unimportant, business leaders do their companies a huge disservice when it comes to staying ahead of the game. The next topic I want to touch on is not why it's important, but how to make those data driven decisions. And the first step to doing that is setting a business goal. Now when setting a business goal, you want to sit down with your managers and establish a business goal for where you want the company to go and what you're looking to achieve. Just deciding that you would like to base your business decisions off data can be very daunting. Sitting down with your team and establishing a business goal or strategy can eliminate a lot of the stress towards getting the answers that you guys are looking for. So I've listed out three ways to make sure that we can get those clear results and make sure we have an effective strategy. So first one is make your goals as clear as possible. It's very important when setting goals, not just throw out a goal and be done with it. Rather, when setting goals, make sure you know exactly what you want and visualize this exact goal with your team. The second one should be setting reachable goals. A key part of goal setting is to make sure that your goals you are setting are achievable. Having a realistic goal allows for planning and excitement of working towards something new. Having an unrealistic goal is exactly the opposite and no change will occur. And then the last key point when setting effective goals is to set a time frame. Setting a time frame allows you and your team to track the progress of your goal and it is crucial for any goal in life. I can't just say that I want to be able to run a marathon tomorrow. I have to set a time frame and work towards that goal every single day. The next key point of how to make these data driven decisions is to determine questions to answer. So once you've established a goal, you need to look closer into how you can get there and what important business questions need to be answered. So with any goal in life, if you don't take a hard look on how exactly you can get there, then the goal may never be achieved. Working with your staff to determine exactly what questions need to be answered helps you and those in your company be able to sift through and find exactly what data you need and to future the growth of your business. Some key questions that you may want to ask is what is our plan to get our prospects into clients? And what's our track record or retention? Another key question you may want to ask is why would someone choose to buy from you rather than your competitor? One of the last key points towards some of the questions you should ask is how effective is our marketing plan and do we need to make any changes? The last topic that I want to talk about underneath how to make data driven decisions is choosing the right metrics. Getting metrics is not something that's hard to do and anybody can make a business decision from data. Although if the data you get is not directly geared towards the goal and you and your team establishes, then we need to take a step back and make sure that we use the right data. I did want to use another example and this one is about Google. So Google is synonymous with data driven decision making. The company's goal is to ensure that all decisions are based on data and analytics. In fact, part of the company's culture is to discuss questions at meetings. Google created the People analytics department to help the company make HR decisions using data including deciding if managers make a difference in their team's performance. The department used performance reviews and employee surveys to answer this question. Initially, it appeared that managers were perceived as having a positive impact. However, a closer look at the data revealed teams with better managers perform best and are happier and work at Google longer. The next question that Google tackled was what makes a good manager? Google created the Great Managers Award to encourage employees to nominate managers they felt made a difference. Employees were required to provide examples of good manager behavior in the nomination application. Google also interviewed managers about their practices. Using this data, Google established eight behaviors for good managers as well as the top three reasons managers might struggle in their roles. Google then used this data to measure managers against these behaviors, enact a twice yearly feedback survey, and revised its management training program so they were able to use that data to come to a decision to help them grow as a business internally. The next thing I want to talk about is four key ways to put that data to use. The first thing is evaluate your performance. Getting the right data allows for you to take a step back at how you're currently performing as a company and gives you that edge on how to better target your clients. Many customers are willing to spend more when you do provide a better service. The next key point is to add new services or products. So with your newfound data, you're able to build on your already successful products and as well create a need for new products to be developed. Doing this with the data as the primary reason allows for you and your company to move forward with these projects with confidence. The next key point is to examine your budget. Getting data does make for some easy and hard decisions to be made. One of the harder decisions is looking at where you're wasting money and to cut those expenses out to allow for new growth to happen. The last key point that I want to go over today with how to put that data to use is to increase levels of productivity. Another thing that you should do with your data is to see how you can apply this within your company. For example, see where you can improve your training methods to reduce repetitiveness, which is costly. Also, make sure that your staff are well prepared for any changes so that you can deliver the best experience to your customers. Don't just implement changes and then inform your team later. Take them through the process. When it comes down to it, you want to be able to use these metrics that you've gathered to tailor your business strategy towards the client and that way you're able for growth and to allow for new business kind of wrapping up here, I did want to focus on a couple key points of what I've talked about so far. So I have touched on reasons why we need to track data and then how specific examples, specifically the TV channel and Google, use that data and how it's been successful for them. And then I've introduced some key part points and ways that we are able to use that newfound data and metrics to better grow our business. So as we wrap up the webinar here, I wanted to issue a challenge, but before I do that, I wanted to go over reasons why you should accept the challenge. And as you can see on the PowerPoint here, the most successful cleaning businesses use data. And then as well it does eliminate a lot of the guessing and allows you to be more proactive. The challenge is to, like I discussed in the first section, is to set goals with your business, sit down with your team and set goals that you want to reach. And that way you can set goals for the future and allow new growth to happen. One thing I did want to also mention is with cleantelligent, we've actually just released a new feature and it's the Clean Intelligent Business Intelligent Module, which allows you to gain or have access to all of this information in the software. So I want to take a few minutes and actually show you a bit of how the Business Intelligent Module works. So this is clean intelligent, and this is kind of a brief overview of what the Business Intelligent Module looks like. As you can see with cleantelligence Business Intelligence Module, you're able to have access to all of these different reports and features based off the specific clients or locations that you're cleaning. For example, if we were to look here by default, it's showing me my last 180 days, but I can come through here and I can see that over 75 specific inspections at 19 locations, my average inspection score is at 91.95% and that's pretty good. If I wanted to get more information, I would be able to go to a client. So let's just say that I wanted to go to Al's Toy Barn here, my client, then I would be able to get some more detailed information for that client. And I can see my top service locations. I only have one service location underneath this client, so it's only showing me one. But if I had several, I'd be able to see my top and my bottom clients and how they're performing. But if I click on one, let's just say this specific client, then I'm able to run down here. And I can see from the last 180 days, I've only done three inspections, but my average inspection score is a 79.58%. And I can even drop down and see my average score and number of inspections over time. So we can take a look and we can say, oh, was it 84% here? 85. And then it dropped down to 68. And then if I wanted to get more information and I wanted to see why it scored a 68%, then I could. And it goes back to tracking that data and having access to all of these specific reports and data at your fingertips to allow for changes to happen and to allow for growth. So let's take a look at the specific inspection that scored a 68% and we can see exactly what happened here. So if I come down, I can see some information, so I can see my top area scores, my bottom area scores, I can even see the inspector signature and the clients. And then let's just say I did want to get more detail and I wanted to view exactly what was wrong with this specific inspection. Then I could come down here and I could see all the chairs and other furniture. It failed. And if I want to pull up the picture to see exactly why it failed, then I'm able to pull up that picture here. So that way there is really no dispute on what needs to be fixed. And I have this data. So that way we can go back and sit down as a management or as a team and establish what needs to be fixed so that we can allow growth in our company there. So wrapping up the webinar here again with cleantelligence and the Business Intelligence module, there are a few key benefits. It does allow you to save time, view the most important data. If I wanted to go to a specific location and I wanted to see exactly why it failed and when it failed, I'm able to have that at my fingertips. I can find these problem areas faster. It's all in one place, since we're doing all of this in one software. And then from that and from what I've talked about today, understanding these metrics, understanding this information does allow you to go through and make more effective data driven decisions. So again, before I wrap up here, I did want to finish off with a few key things. What a Customer say it says, when two of our major accounts were on the verge of not renewing their contract with us, we presented cleantelligent to them. They have been thrilled with the inspections and the charts and the graphs are in quarterly reviews. These same reports have helped us to know internally what we need to do to keep our customers happy. So again, having access to these reports and having access to all this information not only is pleasing for you and your customers, but allows you to improve your company and improve or allows you to open up new growth opportunities. So I have linked my sources as well for you to review and then like I mentioned at the beginning, all registers of the webinar here will receive a free ebook, Tactics for Eliminating Time Traps. As I finish up the webinar, I wanted to go over a few final thoughts. The main point that I wanted to get across is that making data driven decisions is key to business decision making and crucial to growing your company to the next level. I hope that understanding why you need to track data and how to make data driven decisions and how to put that data into use will help your business in reaching that next level of success. Understanding what we do at cleantelligent Software and we are dedicated towards your success in providing the tools that you need and we're proud to be the software industry leaders. If you do have any questions, feel free to reach out to me directly or to cleantelligent and then of course please follow our social media pages including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks so much.