Three Powerful Steps for Increasing Business Growth

Hello everyone, and welcome to our first webinar of our 2017 series for cleantelligence software. So I hope you guys are as excited as I am for our webinar today. The title of our webinar is Three Powerful Steps for Increasing Business Growth. My name is Adam Mears. I am the public relations specialist for cleantelligence Software. And I am so grateful to Clean Telligent for giving me this opportunity to speak to you. And thanks, of course, for giving me your time today. For your convenience, this webinar is being recorded and so you can go back and refer to it later. But so glad to have you all here today. So we're just going to jump right in and talk about the things that we are going to learn today that I'm going to discuss. So there's three things in particular. The first is to talk about the importance of a target market. Now, some of you might be thinking what I thought we were talking about business growth today, but trust me, I'll bring the two together perfectly. The second thing is I'm going to talk about the actual three steps to help you achieve greater business growth for your cleaning business. Clean. Because I put together some steps that can be kind of overlooked sometimes with businesses that I hope that can really help you. And lastly, I'm going to do a brief introduction to cleantelligent, the tool that we offer, and talk about how it can contribute to help you with your cleaning business growth this year. But in case any of you, some of you might be wondering, why should I be listening to this guy today talk about business growth? Why should I be spending my time with this webinar? Well, just to talk a little bit about my background, my degree is actually in public relations and I've been trained very specifically on how to help businesses form relationships with potential and current customers that are profitable and to really help companies narrow their focus on who they should target their efforts to and who they should go after as a business. I'm also a content marketer. I do content marketing for cleantelligent. I help manage the content for our website, our social media, and to the right here, this image here, you can see that this is our company blog. I also write content for this blog and if you haven't ever checked it out before, I highly, highly recommend it. It's a great resource for cleaning business owners. And we just published a post about New Year's resolutions, so you can check that out@cleantelligent.com so I encourage you to do that. That's Also what I do here. And lastly, I am also an entrepreneur. I've started a personal business last year, my own. And I have personally experienced the pains and the glories of growing a business from the ground up. And so I am very sensitive to the magnitude of this topic today. And I again have tried to gather things that I hope can really help your business today and throughout the year of 2017. But before I get into target market and the steps for business growth, I want to start off with a personal story, if that's alright, about something that happened to me back in September of last year. I ran my first marathon of my life. It was a great experience. I learned a lot of great things. And actually this picture in the background is me crossing the finish line. I don't look very tired or sore in this picture, but trust me, I was. I was super exhausted. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, but it was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, without a doubt. And I learned a lot of things from this experience. But there was two things in particular that I wanted to share today that I think relates to the topic that we're going to talk about. There's two lessons in particular, and the first thing is you need a course. You need a course. Let me explain what I mean by that. So as I was thinking back on my marathon experience, you know, they already had a set path for me. They already had a course for me to run and I didn't have to figure out where I needed to go. It was already there before me and it made running a lot easier because I just had to run the course. So it's important because how crazy would it have been if these marathon event organizers would have just taken the group of us that were running and just stuck us in the middle of the wilderness and said, okay, we're going to see you at the finish line. Good luck. You got to find your way there. You know, that would have been insane without a road or a trail to follow. The second thing that I learned from this marathon experience was that without this course, it would have taken me a lot longer to finish. I would have been in a lot more pain, I would have given a lot more effort, been more tired, and I probably would have gotten lost eventually running this thing. So I would have wasted time and effort running all over the place. So for all of us listening in today and watching this, don't do this. Don't waste any time and effort. We really need a course. We need a set direction for ourselves, especially as cleaning business owners, it's super important to know where you're going to sell and market your products and services, where the potential customers are to effectively grow your business. So let's get right into the importance of target markets, because it's not just about the sale, is it? It's not just about the numbers. It's important to know and understand your potential and your current customers, because that's how businesses truly thrive over time. Because marketing to just anyone in your industry or really doesn't work anymore. So just to cover my basis, just in case people aren't really familiar with this term, I want to answer the question, what is the target market? And basically what it is. It is a specific group of people who are most likely to buy from you or show interest in your product or service. So again, it's people who will buy from you most likely or show interest in what you have. And if any of you today haven't really figured out what your target market is, I highly, highly encourage you to start today doing that. And as a side note, you can have several target markets as a business, but if you don't have one that's really defined, I highly encourage you to do that. So what are the benefits, though, of having this target market in mind? What are the benefits? So there's three in particular that I thought of as I was preparing this webinar. The first is to save you time and money, just like I talked about in the marathon examples. Save you time and effort knowing where you need to go. The second benefit is it increases your opportunities. Because if you have a set direction and you don't have to be wasting your time figuring things out, you're going to find a lot more opportunities for your business. And the third thing is review, review, review, my friends, because if your target market profiles that you've determined that your business is going to go after haven't really been analyzed or looked at for six months or more, you really need to continually review and refine who your cleaning business should be focusing on. So you need to keep reviewing those over and over. Because if you thought for one second during this webinar, oh, I already have a target market. I'm good. I actually challenge you to review what you've already put together and to really take it apart. Because I'm telling you, you might learn something new that's going to help you increase your business growth and profits even more in 2017. And I really like this quote at the bottom of the slide here from Chris Anderson, he's from Wired magazine, and this is what he said. He said, increasingly the mass market is turning into a mass of niches. So basically what he's saying here is that, you know, the mass market, everyone out in the world is a giant mass market. And increasingly, especially today, it's turning into smaller groups of people that have different interests. And back in the day, people could market to more of a bigger audience, but today that's just not the case anymore. They're turning into smaller groups. And it's really important for businesses to know who they should be targeting. So that's the importance of target markets. Now I'd really like to get into the three steps for business growth that I talked about earlier. And that's really the main portion of this webinar. And the first step that I would like to talk about today is starting over again. Start over again. Now, don't worry, I'm not asking you as cleaning business owners to start everything over from scratch again, but simply I'm trying to say that you need to take a step back and get a clear picture again, especially as we're starting off the new year. And the first thing that can really help you start over again to get this clear picture again to help with your business growth is to do a SWOT analysis. This is a really important part of my PR training in public relations and I'm actually going to be pulling from investopedia.com as a reference here. They had a lot of good things that I found in my research. But for those again, who are not really familiar with what a SWOT analysis is, it's basically a process for management teams to measure the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for their business. So as you can see here in these four boxes on the side of the screen here, as a public relations specialist, this is actually encouraged in training to do something like this, an exercise where you draw four boxes like this and then you list all the strengths, weaknesses and so on in each of these boxes so you can kind of see it in one place. It's really effective. And the thing to remember here, also with a SWOT analysis is that strengths and weaknesses are internal. And what I mean by that is they focus on anything that pertains to your company and things that go on inside your company and some examples with this. So an example of a strength would be that your company has cutting edge technology. That could be an example of a strength. An example of a weakness could be that your company has a high customer turnover rate. So that's a weakness. And moving on to opportunities and threats. Those things pertain to anything outside your company that might involve your competitors or things out in the market. So an example of an opportunity would be like that you should be doing a new product launch. That's an opportunity out there. A threat would be competitors dominating local media attention. They're dominating it and taking it over from you. So that's an external threat there. So the last thing talking about a SWOT analysis is to this is the one question I would ask after you gather these things together. And that question is, how well does your business address them? How well does your business address all these things? You know, are you taking advantage of the strengths that you've determined? Are you eliminating those threats that you see out there? So just take that time to really analyze that, that point for yourselves. Alright? So moving on to the second step for business growth this year is to revisit your potential customer. Revisit your potential customer. Now, to explain this, I have a story for you. So I recently came back from a holiday trip to North Carolina, where I'm from. We went there for Christmas just a couple weeks ago and I hadn't been back home for a few years and it was just awesome, amazing for my family to go back. But the lesson I really learned when I went back is I found that I missed so much information about other people that I knew in the area when I was younger because as we were going around visiting, revisiting people again, there was a lot of things about their lives that I did not know because I hadn't talked to them for a while. And I got thinking about that, my friends, because the same thing goes with companies and potential customers. Because if you as a company, don't revisit and review who you care about as a company and who you're trying to go after, guess what? Your details are going to be quickly outdated. And if your idea of the ideal customer for you hasn't been reviewed again, it could need some readjustments. So you need to go back and revisit who your potential customer is. And the first two things that you need to look at when you're revisiting and reviewing these things is demographics. Psychographics. Now demographics are they explain who buys from you, the who. So it explains their age, their income level, their gender, where they live, things like that. And the psychographics explain why people buy from you, the why. And that explains their personality types, their values that they have, their interests, those kinds of things. So those are the first two important things to look at. And the other two things that I would have you look at as you're reviewing who your potential customer is is look at your existing customers. Look at who buys from you right now. The second thing on this slide is to look at your competitors, see who buys from them. Because you might find that you need to be going after people that you haven't thought about before, or most importantly, they might be ignoring someone or a type of people completely that you should be going after. So watch your competitors. That's also another important step here. So don't forget demographics, psychographics, looking at your existing customers and watching competitors. So that's an important part with the second step and the third step for helping you increase your business growth is to watch your language. Watch your language. Now, this isn't a personal attack about how you talk or communicate. This simply means to focus on how your company content and your messaging communicates to potential and current customers. So it's focusing on your content and your messaging. So watch your company language. And the first part of this is that you need to look at how your messaging is going right now, how your content is going. So look at your current messaging. And some important things to think about is determining what is your chosen tone of voice and personality that you give off when you communicate, either in your content or in person or whatever it might be. Because those are the real things, my friends. If you haven't really thought about the tone of voice and the personality that your content and messaging gives off, I would encourage you to determine that this year. Another thing to determine with your current messaging is to see how frequently you communicate. You know, are you communicating enough? Are you communicating a little too much? Kind of annoying people. So it's an important thing to consider and also to decide on. And the second thing here is to then determine what needs to change. What do you need to change? Because you can really, if you go back, you're going to see where there's some cracks in your content strategy that you might have and you might determine, like, hey, maybe we need to do some more video content this year, etc. Like other things like that. So go back and really answer the question, what needs to be changed then? And do something about it. And the third thing that I would highlight here in this third step is answer the question, where else should your company be? Where else should your content and messaging show up? And I would advise you actually to go back to psychographics that I talked about in the second step, which is talking about behavior, people's behavior, their interests and things like that and see where they hang out. Either if it's online or in the community, the psychographics are going to help you determine where you need to be. Who knows, that might be social media if you haven't done that before. Or it might be something like online forums where people go online and ask industry related questions perhaps about cleaning. You really need to answer this question and look at psychographics. Don't just go back to things and just say, oh, we're going to choose this channel and this channel and go here without really knowing what you're going to do because you can have a great message prepared, right? But if no one's around to really hear it or read it or watch it, it's pretty useless. So make sure that you really determine where else you should be. I could uncover some hidden opportunities for you. And I would also add with this to make sure that if you really haven't been following or interacting with industry, cleaning industry leaders, or tried to get into local or national media as a company, please consider that I've had a great time this year interacting with cleaning industry leaders as a public relations specialist and there's just a lot of mutually beneficial relationships that you can form. So I encourage you to do that as well. So those are the three steps that I wanted to cover for business growth. So just as a quick recap of what we learned today, first, please clearly define a target market if you haven't done that before. Second, start over again. Do a SWOT analysis for your business. Look at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that are there for your business and really talk about that as a team with your management team. The third thing is to again revisit your potential customer. Look at things like demographics, psychographics, your existing customers, your competitors, really make sure and clearly define that you're going after the right person this year because if you make some little adjustments, it could be a huge payoff for you. And the fourth thing is to watch your language, see how your current messaging is going. What do you need to change and and determine where else you need to be as a cleaning company? So my friends, but here's the question, why should you take action on the things that I've discussed today? Well, you know what, simply to put it simply, marketing to everyone and anyone is not going to cut it. Like I said before, if you think you're just going to go out into the cleaning industry around where you are, either locally or nationally or internationally, and just think you're just going to market to Anyone, it's just not going to cut it anymore. If you really want to see great business growth, the more you define and narrow things down, you're going to find some things that you might have missed. Because the less time for review that you make for yourselves, the less time you take for reviewing these things is going to equal less business growth. It's just as simple as that. It's worth the time to go back and do these things that I've talked about. And so a challenge that I want to extend to you today is to do a team exercise. So please pull your management team together for at least 30 minutes to an hour and do a SWOT analysis for your cleaning business. Yeah, at least an hour. Just sit your management team down, go through those four things, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for your cleaning business. Because you know what? It's going to get the ball rolling for you and help your entire team learn about new things. So awesome. I challenge you to do that. But now I'd like to introduce just briefly the tool that we offer at cleantelligent. And one of the things that we do offer with the software is our cleantelligent inspections app. And this software, my friends, is really going to help your business grow. Your cleaning company is really going to grow this year. And here are the following benefits that this inspections app is going to do for you. First, it's going to help you track negative cleaning trends that your cleaners have as they're cleaning buildings. You're going to be able to go back and identify the common problems that are happening so that you can better train your cleaners and make your clients happier. Another thing is that it's customizable to your client needs. And thirdly, there's no more paper and pen. It's on the go, it's on your phone, it's in the palm of your hand. It's. It's simply amazing. It's awesome. And here's a quick screenshot in the inspections app of the top 10 deficiencies page. And as you can see here, with these different things, you can see like, oh, one of the things is your cleaners aren't removing enough trash and debris enough. So it's just an amazing app, Amazing technology that we offer highly, highly encourage you to look into that and learn more if you haven't done so already. And we have 31,000 cleaning users throughout the world. And I wanted to pull this quote from one of our amazing customers, Victor from Service Management Group, and this is what he says about our software. He said each time we introduce cleantelligent in our bid presentations, clients are immediately impressed. And so he said, so far, eight out of the last eight presentations have resulted in new business. Wow. 100%. Isn't that awesome? Then he said, we attribute much of this success to cleantelligent. So my friends, cleantelligent is going to really help your potential clients, your clients be really impressed as you come and present this to them. And I know that you're going to see what Victor has explained here. So here's some helpful resources, my friends, based on what we talked about today, about target markets, about the steps that you need to take for business growth, I would really encourage you to look into these different articles online and to search these out because it's going to explain even more in depth of what I've talked about today in the limited time that I had available with you. So please go back and review those. And as we advertised before as a special offer, as a thank you to all of our registrants, we want to give you a free ebook from us and it's called three Powerful Steps for Defining your Target Market. And it's going to kind of recap some things that I went over today, but also have a few new things that's going to introduce. So please look for this in your email inbox from us in the next week or so because it's going to be really helpful for you regardless if you've chosen target market or not. So we're really happy to give that away to you. And thank you again, my friends, for listening today. It's been an amazing opportunity for me to talk with you and to chat with you about business growth and I really hope that these things help you and I encourage you to take action. So again, my name is Adam Mears and if you want to contact me about anything that I've talked about today or about our software, please email me there with my email adam.mears and you can watch this webinar again later on our website and you can find it at cleantelligent.comwebinars cleantelligent.comwebinarS and follow us on social media as well. We have a lot of great content that we share there, so please go on there and do that as well. So my friends, it's been amazing time being with you and I hope you have a great day. Thank you so much.