Make Your Cleaning Company More Competitive

Hello everyone and welcome to the March webinar of Clean Intelligence Software's 2017 webinar series. I would like to thank all of those who are listening today, particularly those who have registered for this webinar and are listening live. As with all of our webinars, this one is being recorded and will be available to view on our website within about a week. 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 based off my presentation points. You can expect to see this in your email inbox within about a week or so. 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 to me directly. As a reminder, all of our previous webinars are available to view at www.cleantelligent.comwebinars. i encourage you to check them out as you will find valuable content and helpful tips to your cleaning business. My name is Bradley York and I am the Director of Marketing at cleantelligent. Today we'll be talking about how to make your cleaning business more competitive. As many of you may know, increasing the competitiveness of your cleaning business can be an incredibly broad topic of discussion, so I will focus on a few core principles. I hope that my presentation will be useful to all of you, regardless of your position at your cleaning company. Before I begin, I would like to relate today's topic to the topics from the previous two webinars. Some of you may remember that in January, our public relations specialist, Adam Mears talked about growing your cleaning business. He mentioned three steps, including making a plan, finding a target market, and creating the right message. If you haven't seen this webinar, I highly encourage you to do so. In February, our senior software coach, Randy Anderson, talked about employee retention. She said the best ways to do this were to have a good company culture, the right hiring and onboarding process, effective communication, and the necessary technology. I encourage you to watch this webinar as well, if you haven't already. If any of you have visited our social media sites lately, you may have noticed this graphic with the hashtag growtelligent. We want to help your cleaning business succeed. Grow, Retain, Compete. This has been the theme of our marketing campaign so far this year. These three words in particular were chosen from responses to our cleaning business owner surveys. In the January webinar, we focused on cleaning business growth in February employee retention and now we're going to cover competing or how to make your cleaning business more competitive. In this webinar, I will discuss how to use your competitive advantages as a company, including how to define your competitive advantages, how to showcase or market them, and how to keep up with your competitors. I'll also briefly discuss how cleantelligence software can help. Now you'll want to differentiate yourself as a company and stay one step ahead of the competition, but your goal shouldn't be to snuff them out, as I'll explain later. And as you all probably know, healthy competition is essential to a thriving industry. Let me first talk about the scope of your competition. About a year ago we published a post on our blog with tips for building a successful new cleaning company. This has been, incidentally, one of the most popular articles and I highly encourage you to read it if you haven't already. In our blog post we gave a few interesting statistics on the janitorial sanitation industry in the United States in 2015. This is from a market report from IBIS World. In the United States alone, The industry made $51 billion in revenue and grew by 1.4%. There were over 850,000 cleaning businesses. The latest marketing report from IBS World with data from 2016 shows significant growth in the Jansan industry. Revenues are now at 53 billion. Annual growth is now at 1.6%, and there are over 900,000 cleaning businesses in the United States. I show you these statistics to emphasize that there's money to be made in this industry and there are jobs available as well. The industry currently provides almost 2 million jobs in fact. So with this many people and this much competition, how do you stand out? And how do you make a splash if you're just getting started in the industry? Let me give you an example that some of you may be familiar with. JetBlue Airways was founded in 1999amidst an already saturated market. Initially, JetBlue portrayed themselves as a low cost travel option, but eventually they became better known for their amenities and customer service. The last few years, in fact, JetBlue has ranked first in customer satisfaction. And when other airlines have been losing business, JetBlue has successfully made a niche for themselves. So how do they do it? Clientheartbeat.com says they did it by focusing on company culture like Randy talked about last month, by offering service that is friendly and personalized and by exceeding customers expectations. Those of you who have flown JetBlue know that they don't have baggage fees like many other airlines and that in flight, entertainment, movies and TV are standard on all flights. Who doesn't like that? You'll notice in this example of JetBlue, the main differentiator over their competition was not price. For JetBlue to grow and become profitable, they had to ditch the notion of being cheap. I won't harp on this for long, but you should never consider price as your cleaning company's main advantage over your competitors. Sell your benefits sell on quality, not on price. Of course, you can still be competitive on price, but ask yourself, would you rather have your potential customers think of you as the cheapest option or the best let's talk about how to utilize your company's real competitive advantages. In case you're not familiar with the term competitive advantage, it is the one feature advantage or benefit that your company has that your competitors don't. Put another way, it is the reason a customer will pick your company over your competitors. To properly utilize your competitive advantages, you need to do three things. Define, showcase and keep up. I will explain each. The first step is to define your advantages. If you can't think of any off the top of your head, go back to your SWOT analysis, which Adam Mears talked about two months ago. What are your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats? For more help as you brainstorm your competitive advantages, here are a few suggestions we found on startupnation.com has your company won awards for its quality or service? Have you been recognized for any particular achievement? Clean Intelligent Software, for example, has won two ISSA Awards for Best Customer Service and in addition, four Issa Awards for Innovation in Services and Technology. Awards like these are a great marketing tool. If you haven't won any awards yet, are you active in community service or causes? These are great things to talk about too, as long as you do it tastefully. Does your company have a niche? Are you an expert? Are you good at something difficult? Play that up in your advertising. It may not get you a large customer base at first, but it might get you more loyal customers in the end. Remember JetBlue Airways? They were among the first airlines in the United States to offer in flight entertainment on all their flights. What better experiences can you provide your customers? These are becoming increasingly important, especially as we comparison shop online. Would you buy an Item with consistent 1 star reviews? While it can take time and effort to get good reviews and testimonials, these can prove incredibly valuable to your marketing. Good reviews and testimonials can build your company's credibility. The quickest way you can do this is to contact your loyal, satisfied customers and ask if they would be willing to write a short review for some of your online pages. It might be hard to find something unique about your company, especially if you're just getting started. For many of you, the best thing your company can offer that other companies can't is a janitorial software solution such as cleantelligent. I'll talk more about cleantelligent in a few minutes. Obviously, janitorial software is a compelling advantage over pen and paper, which many of your competitors may use. Once you've identified your company's competitive advantages, you'll need to market them. But given the limits of time, distance, and your budget, how do you market effectively? What media? What advertising channels do you use? How do you reach your target, your preferred prospective customer? These are great questions that I will not be able to answer entirely in this webinar, but I will give you a few tips to consider. As the Director of Clean Intelligence Marketing Team, it is my job to find ways to market clean intelligence products and services. It would be ideal if your company also had a marketing team with the time and resources to devise strategies, create ads, and track the results. But if your company's marketing falls to you as an owner, manager, or other employee, you'll have to keep these marketing principles in mind. Before you do any marketing, you must first determine your target market. Adam Mears talked about this two months ago as well. Who are your preferred customers? Where do they live? How old are they? What are they interested in? Once you identify your target market, you need to find out where they can be reached. I don't mean to say where they are located, but rather where your advertising can find them. If you're targeting a specific age group, like Millennials, for example, you need to advertise in the places they frequent, like social media. Now ask yourself, who are your competitors? For many of you, your competitors may simply be the companies you compete with for the same accounts. But do these competitors offer the same products and services as you? Is there anything they do that you can improve on? To do a true competitor analysis, you'll also have to find out who is their target market? What is their market share? How and where do they advertise? And of course, what is their competitive advantage? As I mentioned in the beginning, the goal of a marketing company, or excuse me, the goal of marketing a company isn't necessarily to drive your competitors out of business. Healthy competition is in fact essential to a robust industry. Competition will help you innovate and grow your business. It will keep you on your toes, and in the end, your customers will get better products and services. But how do you stay ahead of your competitors? Once you know who your competitors are and how they're different from you, you need to differentiate yourself further. Develop a unique selling point or unique selling position, or usp. A USP is kind of like a competitive advantage in that it's something you offer that's unique to you. What do you want your company to be known for when you decide that? Build your company's image around it. Make your branding, business cards, website, even employee uniforms reflect your unique selling proposition. Another way of staying ahead of the competition is to always be thinking of the future. Think of ways to expand your services. Keep up with trends in technology and invest in your employees. Give them training and raises. Treat them well. If you don't, you may be competing with other companies for your employees as well. Finally, if your company can afford it, don't try to do all of your marketing without professional help. Whether you need help building a website, managing your social media accounts, or creating ads, don't be afraid to ask. Good marketing can mean the difference between a growing business and a failing business. So if all of my suggestions seem daunting to you, hire a marketing consultant to help. The final step of using your company's competitive advantages to succeed in the cleaning market is to keep up. As I said a minute ago, you have to keep out innovating your competitors. But in addition to that, you need to be constantly evaluating your efforts. Let me give you an example of what I'm saying. If you had a yearly marketing budget of $10,000, including 2000 for print ads, 6000 for SEO and web ads, 1500 for referral bonuses, and 500 for other activities, My first question is, how do you know you're getting your money's worth? Simple answer, of course, is that you would need to break even on sales. $10,000 in new sales for the year would cover all of that, right? Well, maybe. The point I'm trying to make is that you need to evaluate the performance of all of your marketing activities to determine your return on investment. Did any of you gain new customers as a result of your print ads? That can be hard to determine, although there are ways. How about your web ads? How many people see and respond to those? With each ad you place, you need to be able to track its performance and use the data to determine next year's budget. So if you get no new customers as a result of your print ads, for example. Maybe you should devote that $2,000 to SEO or web ads the next year. This sounds like common sense, but it's shocking how many companies dump money into advertising and then do nothing to gauge the effectiveness of it. Know your numbers. I don't have time to go into how to track your marketing campaign roi, but know that you need a plan to make your marketing truly effective. Now, I'd like to talk for a few minutes about cleantelligent software and how it can help your cleaning company be more effective. In case you're not familiar with cleantelligent, it is a suite of tools designed to help your cleaning company run more efficiently, cut costs, and be more competitive. Our tools help you perform quality inspections, send and receive work orders, schedule jobs, and prepare proposals for new accounts. Now, out of all the tools that can help your business be more effective, among the best are bidding and estimating tools. If you're a building service contractor, one of the hardest and most stressful things you'll have to do is compete for new jobs. As I mentioned earlier, having cleantelligence software can be a valuable selling point or competitive advantage for you, and it has already resulted in many cleaning companies winning new accounts over their competitors. But did you know that we can even help you prepare professional proposals with highly accurate rates? To show you how this works, let me share this brief demo video.

Bidding and estimating new business is complicated and time consuming, but with cleantelligence Proposal Wizard Professional accurate proposals are just a few clicks away, and they're so easy to use, anyone can create them. Let's see how this works. I need to create a new proposal for a potential customer. I start new proposals with the Proposal wizard. Cleantelligent builds a customized proposal template for each new customer. This means my Proposal wizard is customized to my business based on our services and costs. To complete the proposal, I simply perform each step in the wizard. This includes basic information about the site and specific information about what exactly will be cleaned, and much more. This makes it easy for anyone to create an accurate proposal. When I have finished filling out the survey, cleantelligent reviews the entire estimate with me, and I can make manual adjustments if I'd like. When I'm ready, I merge this estimate with my standard proposal and within seconds, cleantelligent creates a professional proposal document ready to print and send to my new customer. So take the hassle out of bidding and estimating new business by using cleantelligent's Proposal wizard and get fast, accurate proposals every time.

But once again, this is a brief overview of our tools here and our proposal wizard. I'll show you a screenshot right here. Basically, as I said, simplifies the process of preparing a proposal and the rates for your company. You can either use the suggested production rates that we provide or you can put those in yourself as shown right here. Now this is something that of course, we at Clean Intelligent would be happy to show you more about. But competing for bids can be a tricky thing and I'll leave it to a future webinar to go into that process. But cleantelligent can help you as it has helped many of our customers before. Here's an example of one of our customers, Sandy Merritts at Busybrooms, who was able to reap great benefits from our bidding and estimating tool. She said cleantelligence bidding and estimating module has helped us win $5,000 in new business already. I might add that this was within three months of them starting to use, is easy to use and saves me so much time. I know my estimates are accurate and the production rates you gave us as examples come within minutes of the exact time it takes to clean our buildings. Now, if you're not a cleantelligent customer and would like to learn more about how the software can help your business, Please go to cleantelligent.com demo to request a free consultation. Our team of software consultants will help you find the right solution for your needs. If you're already a cleantelligent customer and would like to learn how to use the software better, don't hesitate to contact the customer support team@support supportleantelligent.com. As I wrap up my presentation, let me list a few items that you should remember. The first is don't be afraid of competition. In a free market society such as ours, competition is important to growth and innovation. Even though there may be many other cleaning companies competing with you for business, you still have opportunities to succeed. Second, whether you're starting a new cleaning company or well into running one, you need to find at least one competitive advantage what sets you apart from other cleaning companies, and make sure that lower prices aren't the only thing. Third, make a plan to market your company. Find out who you're marketing to and how to reach them. Find out who your competitors are and how to stay ahead of them. Finally, constantly evaluate the success of your marketing. Track data on how people respond to your ads. Reassess your marketing plan at least annually, if not quarterly. I've covered a lot of ground in this webinar and I've used a lot of references. If you're interested in learning more about some of the concepts I've covered, here's a simple list of my resources and As I mentioned earlier, nothing beats professional advice. And if you're ready to take your company's marketing to the next level and you want help, hire a marketing consultant. The best ones for you would be those in your area and who have had experience working with cleaning companies. As a reminder to those who registered for this webinar, you will all receive our free ebook, how to Profitably Analyze youe Cleaning Competition. You will want to spend time reading it because it will expound on what I've covered today. Expect that in your email inbox within the next week or so. If you are interested in reaching out to me directly, here is my contact information. Feel free to call, email or connect with me on LinkedIn. I've also included contact information for clean intelligence, sales and support teams. Again, thank you for listening to this month's webinar. It's been my pleasure to talk to you today. Please visit cleantelligent.comwebinars to view this and our other webinars and please follow us on our social media pages, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share the latest, best industry best practices, management tips and discounts. Good luck in your business and in all of your endeavors.