"Winning in the Fourth Quarter" by Caden Hutchens

Hey everyone and welcome to the October webinar of the Cleantelligence Software 2018 webinar series. I'd like to thank all of you for listening to this presentation today, especially those of you who registered for this webinar and are listening live. It is being recorded though and available for those listening at a different time other than live up on the screen, you will find our immediate near the future schedule for webinars. We have one last webinar of the year after this one done by our public relations specialist, Heather Seifert. Special shout out to Heather if you guys are enjoying our content blog Social media following the webinars. She joined our staff replacing our former public Relations specialist this summer and she's been an awesome asset to the team. Go ahead and follow her on LinkedIn. Great person to be connected with. Feedback. We also welcome feedback. We are open to suggestions, so feel free to email us@webinarscleantelligent.com Looking forward to what you guys have to say and what content is going to be important to you coming into the new year. I also have sitting next to me Samuel Clayton. He joined our staff. He's actually the newest member of cleantelligence Software. He joined our sales team. He's our sales software consultant and he will be kicking off 2019's webinar series on February 21st and I've actually decided to have him as a special guest for the beginning portion of this webinar today. Welcome Sam.

Thank you Caden. It's good to be here, my friend. And yes, if you want something good in February besides those chocolates from Valentine's Day, you're going to want to visit our website to see that webinar done by myself who is a sales software consultant. And what does that mean? That means I sell software and I consult with you. So if you didn't know that, now you know. But I am excited to share some information, some good stuff for you on February 21st.

Awesome. Looking forward to what that content will bring. Sam so as far as today's webinar, this webinar and previous webinars can be viewed at www.cleantelligent.com webinar. You can also subscribe to be notified of future webinars and ebooks. And for all those who have registered today for the webinar happening right now, you will receive a free ebook as well. Again, I've already mentioned that. But as a reminder, this is being recorded and will be posted shortly on our website. So go here to the link that I've just mentioned above, and you'll be able to find it there shortly. Well, today's topic is winning in the fourth quarter. Now, I love this. Ever since marketing came to me and said, hey, we'd like you to do a webinar right before Issa, which real. Pause on this. Those of you who are coming to Issa, please come by our booth. Issa, every year is one of my highlights. It happens in the fourth quarter, which is why I love the fourth quarter of the year, because it is not only our busiest time, but some of our most successful times. And going back to today's content, I'm going to draw an analogy, actually, with the help of Sam here. He's still with me. He is a sports fanatic, so I'm going to let him take this portion to give you an insight of his personality and how you might look forward to the webinar in February.

But, Kaden, we got to introduce yourself a little bit. Who are you before you go on?

That's right, Sam. So for those of you who don't know me, I am the executive vice president here at Clean Intelligence Software. I've been with the company for about five years now, moving from the director of sales and marketing a few years back. I've been in this role for a while, and I'm loving every moment of it. So that's who I am. Sam, he always says that he doesn't.

Like to toot his own horn, but I keep telling him, you sometimes have to toot your own horn.

Alrighty. Thank you.

Yes.

So today's webinar, though, is all about winning in the fourth quarter. We're gonna start off with something special.

It's something spectacular.

Something spectacular. Talking about an actual football analogy before we get into business.

So here it is. So this is Sam telling you a little bit about the Miracle bowl, okay? In 1980, it was called the Holiday bowl, and it was BYU versus Southern Methodist University, also known as SMU. With four minutes left, SMU led the game 45 to 25. And if any of you are sports fans, you know that that is crazy. 45 to 25. Okay? So with the fans leaving the stadium, you. They think the game is over. They're walking out of here. All of a sudden, BYU scores a touchdown, making the game 45 to 32. Okay? But then when they kick the onside kick, they recover it, and an onside kick is the short kick that they then receive. So they get the ball back, they score another touchdown. 45, 39. Now they block a punt with 13 seconds left with the score being 45 39. And then they complete a Hail Mary. And this is what happened next.

Down by six now three seconds left, third and ten at the SMU 41 yard line. McMahon all the way back at his own 46, throwing for the end zone. Receivers are there, defenders are there. It is in the end zone. Who has the ball? Touchdown. Touchdown. Brigham young.

With the game tied 45, 45. After that hail Mary catch and touchdown, they complete the extra point and they win the game 46 to 45. So what does that mean for you? Why does, why does that even matter? Well, we are going to tell you how you can win in the fourth quarter and not, not me, it's going to be Kaden. Kaden has a knowledge of this industry and he knows what it takes and he's going to share it with you today. So thank you so much for joining and Caden, thanks so much for having me.

Sam, appreciate you giving that sports overview that you definitely have that sports commentator voice. Thank you, man. Watching that.

If only it makes your hair stand up.

It does. If only BYU delivered kind of that today.

Well, we can't expect that much from them all the time. However, the point of it all is that you right now with your business can win in the fourth quarter if you do the things that Kaden's going to show you today. So let's get right into it.

Alrighty. Thanks Sam. And we'll hear from you in February, in February 21st.

Check it out.

All right, thanks, Sam. Alright, so this next portion, I'm just going to give you a quick overview of what's going to happen today during the next 2022 some odd minutes, however much time we have left for our committed 30 minute webinar. But we're going to do an honest inventory. 2018 progress. Our team focus we're going to talk about during the holiday season. Obviously the comeback of this fourth quarter. The first three quarters haven't been to the best start and successful tips for taking a start in 2019. So let's start with the honest inventory of your 2018 progress. We've talked about smart goals in the past, how success is measured and so I'm just going to give you depths in understanding how success is measured. Not today though. So if you would like to take an in depth look at using this process to retain your company's customer attention, visit the following links. These are names to articles that will be at the end of this webinar to the actual links but increase customer Retention and Commercial cleaning the first article looks at setting smart goals in terms of our industry and customer retention. Evaluating customer retention in the commercial cleaning industry. The second article this distinguishes between the CSFs and the KPIs and help each employee understand how their work impacts the bottom line and helps to improve working smarter and using metrics in your commercial cleaning business, if it isn't already, build this into new employee training. Because customer retention is directly connected to your bottom line and with our industry rates on a standard of 15% turnover rates, getting standardized training can help save your company time and money. And who would not enjoy that? So first off, I'm going to talk about how this relates to football. So setting and measuring your team's goals, the smart goals. An example would be during the 2018 season. We're going to earn 22 first downs per game. That's a smart goal. Again, we've talked about smart goals before, so I'm not going to go into that. But identify your CSFs for the defensive in football, it's defensive turnovers on the offense. You're going to reduce your fouls, things like that. For example, you need to say, hey, I need to average 4 yards down. The CSF's are important. And then decide your KPIs. Count the number of first downs earned by the team each game. You have to collect data because I've said this before, but the first step of powerful change is becoming aware. And the only way to become aware is to actually start tracking something and measuring the information so that you can actually change. And that's adjusting. So adjusting over, adjusting under. You can increase your team goal if you adjust under, adjust the team's strategy. And so that's how it would look like if I were to try it out for a football team. But we aren't here to talk about football. That was just an analogy. What we are going to do is talk about how this might look like or what this would look like for a commercial cleaning business. So smart goal. For example, retain 85 to 90% of your customers who are renewing their contracts. That would be a huge goal and I'm sure your business would love some of those numbers. So identify some CSFs for cleaners. It's going to be your work order response time and then how well do they prepare for inspections? The five step process, which is what I'm doing outlining, can be applied to other vital business functions. So even though I have this example up, it applies to sales, it applies for consistent employee training, performance, et cetera, things like that and the same things come down. You got to decide on KPIs, count the number. But KPIs in a business is, for example, measuring. You have to decide on what your customers or if it's not a customer and you're just facility management, what does management want to know about the status of the facility? You have to decide what key indicators KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators. You need to have again collect that data. And data, especially in the commercial cleaning industry, has been something that has probably been overlooked for a long time. And there's, there's many companies that adopt and are accepting it, but there's a lot of smaller companies that don't provide it. And so there's no way to measure of how well you're doing. And honestly, your clients may not be asking. And if that's the case, your clients may not be asking for that data. And if they aren't, it's because they don't know how to ask for it. And so for you, especially as a commercial cleaning company could come in and figure out how to measure that data and then it's just showing them. That's impressive. When a service contractor comes in and says, hey, you know what, here's how we're doing, here's how we measure our performance, here's the average inspection scores over the last two quarters, and here's how we're improving in the fourth quarter. Like that's impressive. So anyways, set and measure team goals. Can't spend too much longer on that, but moving on to keeping your team focused. So let's start by talking about stress. It can be extremely stressful in high intensity, but it's important to keep momentum going. So I'm not going to talk about that today. That could be a whole other webinar. But keep your team focused. The game is not over until the whistle blows. And today on October 18, we aren't close to December 31, so don't believe that the game is already over. I know with a lot of holidays stacked at the end of the year of Q4, it can be hard to keep your team focused. But there are, quote, unquote, there are countless football games won and lost in the last two minutes. Right, we saw that. So don't fumble the football, don't over exaggerate what the fourth quarter can be for your business. But just keep a steady pace going and still play full out. Communicate work expectations early. This is important. You can't ask Christmas Eve or December 23, the day before Christmas, to have things prioritized and done don't wait till then. So ask your staff to schedule their holiday time early, create prioritized lists, do self evaluations, and look forward to new projects and budgets at the beginning of the year. And these are just some things that are going to be crucial to playing full out in the fourth quarter. And start it now. This content is coming from a Forbes article. The links there for you to read more about it, but those are just some highlights so next up is planning your Q4 comeback. I'm gonna strike a balance between holding your team's feet over the fire and then letting them completely off the hook at the end of the day. They are professionals and it is their job to hit specific performance numbers. However, you gotta remember if the task is too big then they will probably give up. That's a balance for you to figure out. That's both sides of the spectrum that you can count on happening. It's never fun to feel like you're being about to be burned. So you know the balance. You know your employees. But don't forget to analyze that. Alright, so next up is don't stuff your quarter. Resist the urge to stuff your quarter with tasks. This will leave you feeling overwhelmed and burnt out before reaching even quarter one of 2019. This technique also makes it easy to give up after missing due dates. In this instance, you'd be so far behind, the mindset would be like, why should I try now? However, as your momentum changes, your team may find they can take on more. To start the fourth quarter behind, decide what actions will move the needle the most and then go from there. Let momentum carry yourself naturally. It's a lot easier than kind of feeling like you're stuffed. And then the next step is to identify quick wins. Identify a succession of quick wins. This will change momentum in your favor. If your team starts to feel like winners, they will have more energy and drive throughout the end of the game. Consider what things your team can control and what they can't. In some cases, you may have to switch up your team's critical success factors so that the overall KPIs the results move. Some examples include, you know, ramping up closing ratios in your sales departments. Make a short list of warm prospects that are interested in your service offering. Don't talk them into something that they don't want. Sometimes we forget that when we try and oversell something and it's not something that's solving one of their needs. That can really kind of be a turn away. Also, another opportunity is to engage prospects with knowledge. The Issa value of clean video is a great place to start. You know, having having education and knowledge passed along provides opportunity and it could stack up even the first quarter of next year. It might just take a while to educate during the fourth quarter of the year. So those are just some quick wins. The example of ramping up the closing ratios in your sales team, that's just one other example. Another quick win example. Work order response time. If you are behind on work order response time, start by cutting your response time by 10%. It's a whole different story if you aren't even measuring or have a way to measure response time. Cleantelligent has a way, but there are many platforms out there that have a way to measure response time. But that's something that's sellable. That's something that your clients will love and appreciate you measuring. So as your team meets the target, whatever you may set, recognize and celebrate it. If the team wins and it's appreciated, there's more energy that exists and you can expect your team that they're going to start delivering more results and increasing these goal lines even further. Again, going back to that momentum that I was just talking about, momentum picks up as you continue to see that success. Here's just an example. If you started in Q1, you know that's decreasing your response time. I'm going to talk more about the powerfulness of Q1 here in a second. Don't wait till the fourth quarter to make changes. So if you've had goals in Q1, Q2, Q3, and you haven't stuck with them, this is a lineup of how 2019 can be successful going into it. Another thing I want to point out your bottom line cleaners that are actually out doing operations, they're the ones that are on the front lines of what's going on and they need a way to be heard. And they may have some valuable insights. For example, a way to reduce amount of cleaning products without sacrificing quality. You know they're going to have something happen when they're out cleaning or or servicing a facility. That may be an aha moment. Just as a side note, figure out a way to capture those aha moments. Because some of those aha moments can be crucial to the success of your team. Let's talk about a successful action plan and what they have. First off, it's easy. It's not overloaded. It's not a United States tax document. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of long. It's a one page easy document. And Then a vision of where you want to go as leaders. If you are a manager listening to this today, if you don't have the vision, it's really hard to create action from something that doesn't have a overarching 30,000 foot view imagery. And that's all I'm going to say there. I'm really passionate about visions, but I won't go there right now. And then only focus on sections of your business in each quarter. If you start the fourth quarter and we're already guys, we already started in the fourth quarter. This webinar is not October 1st starting a quarter. It tends to if you don't. But if you start a quarter and you say everything just needs to improve, that's going back to stuffing. Stuffing the fourth quarter. Too much magic number is three. Focus on three areas of your business per quarter. That's not my own advice. There's again links to as, excuse me, I'm saying these things and go for you. Feel free to check those out. Outside of the webinar, the next thing is about timing. Be honest with yourself. What can you accomplish in 90 days? Realistically, you have to be able to be honest. There's a certain point of just setting expectations. But if you set up a timeline of what's going to happen in 90 days and you build an action plan, your team is going to be a lot more likely to believe it and it's going to be a lot more exciting because it seems achievable. If you set the mark way too high of what can happen in 90 days, the 90 days might just go to waste. And that's how many days you have in a quarter. And so again, if you're listening to this webinar, right now you only have 72 days left in the fourth quarter, not 90. It's not October 1st. You might be questioning why do we place so much focus on the quarter? The quarter is the perfect unit of time to bridge your big picture goals, which probably have a two to five year timeline or longer. But it's just important to break it down into action steps. The five most important action steps though that you need to take is going to be up to you. Like you have to determine that. And if you want to move the needles on your CSFs and most importantly your KPIs, you need to determine actions that will move the needle. So what tasks will help you make that progress is important to identify and then assign people. Assign people to take ownership over each of those tasks. Each of the things I've talked About today, we need to take these lessons into 2019. Here's what I'm going to point out and what I've just already kind of led into is breaking things up into the chunks of the quarters. And here's how it's going to look. So I'm going to give you some examples. So set your overall sales and customer retention goals early. Focus on that here in the fourth quarter for 2019. But break up your yearly goal into four targets, an overall goal for each quarter. Okay? Then break up those targets into roughly 12 subtargets, one for each week, you know, and by doing so, each quarter has about 13 weeks in it. And to measure something if you need to. For example, I've given this illustration. To close 20 contracts in 13 weeks, your team needs to average. There it is, one and a half contracts per week. And so break it down that way, if your team continues to make the same mistakes as a leader, it is important that you help them practice and get it perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect. Making sure that practice time is allocated to ensure that Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4 of 2019 is going to be a success for you guys. Another thing that I want to point out is that targets don't have to be equal. And what I mean by that is if your 2019 goal is going to be increase the number of closed contracts by 25%, it's going to probably be at a different rhythm per quarter. And so how do you identify those quarters? I'm just going to give you some quick insight from our perspective. What happens more deals close in quarter one because customers have new budgets and can take on new office amenities and so forth. In quarter two, June is a tough month because majority school's out, people start going on vacations, it's time to party. And so we see a dip. Doesn't mean it's unsuccessful, just we see a dip. In Q3, sales pick back up. Excuse me. As school starts and in Q4, with both business and personal end of year activities, it is hard to schedule sale visits. Ideally, the work has been spaced out enough that you should try to hit your end of year sales goals before Thanksgiving. Realistically, you could use a holiday discount promotion as a Hail Mary to hit your sales number. But it's a proven method to close sales to give them a reason to buy. And so that's why you see sales come and go throughout certain times of year is because they're trying to, they're trying to help control this up and down. However, if your Sales team knows that they have a quota to hit and then they hit it early, you might not need to discount your services at all. So just again going back to the importance of measuring and just having a knowledge of what's happening. Play it by quarter. Because if you start advertising and making plans for a Q3 or excuse me, a Q4 sale because it's end of year and things aren't where you want it to be, but in Q3, by the end they actually do hit their quotas and you didn't need to do all those discounts. Just watch out for that. So for example, I've outlined kind of what happens. Here's what numbers might look like. The chart shows up at Q1, 25 contracts, Q2, 19 contracts, Q3, 20 contracts and Q4, 17 contracts. But at the end of the day, if all those goals meet up to 25% increase in closed contracts, then you've achieved your goal and you were just aware of which quarters to do it in. The next thing I want to talk about though is reaching smaller targets, hitting the targets consistently. Going back to football, if an offensive line continually gains 4 yards on every play, then they never have to worry about converting on the fourth down. Hopefully that resonates with you. But identify the taxing, the tasks you need to make to get the numbers moving in the right direction. If there becomes a problem your team is regularly battling, is there a different, more efficient way to approach that issue? You know, that's something to figure out and then talk as a team on a regular basis to find out what is working well and what you could do better. Have your top performing employees share their best practices. This will lift the whole team up. I want you guys to know that clean intelligence software can help with a lot of the things that we've talked about today and how we can help is by one is by tracking trends and becoming aware. I talked about that towards the beginning of the webinar. But specifically I'm going to go into what quarter four can be done to be improved upon Quarter four, especially if you're looking at clean, intelligent, looking to buy now or if you are a current customer, we're already in Q4. And so if these are things that are currently on your mind, here's what you can expect in in the Q4 and then at the end of Q1, using Q4 to build your experience is important. And just like in football, it win or lose, you need to play full out in the quarter. You don't need to give up because it's towards the end of the year. And the reason is is because at the end of Q1 in 2019, it's going to be based off of how much effort and experience you learned at Q4 and 2018. And we all want 2019 to be a success after finishing out a 2018 strong or soft. Excuse me, at the end of Q1 in 2019, after you've put in the effort to learn from experience, play full out. If you don't use cleantelligent, you're gonna need that time to learn how to use cleantelligent in your business and understanding the best strategical way to implement it into your business. You gotta prepare for that. And so you can expect though that if you play full out again, win or lose and you gain on that experience in the fourth quarter, whether you're a current customer or not, figure out how Clean intelligent is going to play in your game strategy on offense. You need to play the fourth quarter winning in offense and so try out figure out some new plays. Figure out how to change a sales pitch and where you can improve in Q4. Because at the end of Q1 in 2019, you're going to want to see some awesome things happen. Increased customer retention, landing new contracts and increasing employee productivity. All all can happen with clean intelligence. And honestly, all of it can happen with increasing your usage of technology in general doesn't even have to be Clean intelligent, but at the end of the day your ability to grow your business is important and if you aren't growing, you're going to end up dying. There's no stagnant when you think about what barriers need to be overcome. And if you want to see increased customer retention and and winning new business and becoming more efficient, then figure out what needs to change. In today's world, technology can help change that faster than almost any other process. So that is the end of the content that I have today. I hope each of you will take time to make an action plan off of what firehose content I gave you today. I know there was a lot there, but I do know that we can help our staff and Sam, who we talked about and who was with us during the beginning portion of this webinar is eager. Our staff is eager to reach out and figure out how they can help you win win at business. Just so you guys are aware in ending this webinar, here is their contact information to reach out to our sales or customer support staff. As promised, here are the resources pulled from different portions of the webinar today. If you guys wish to take a look and dive further in of how we pulled our content together? As a reminder, all those of you who registered will receive a free ebook. For those of you who again want to be notified of webinars in the future, subscribe to our webinars at the following link. And if you aren't listening live, you can still get a copy of this ebook by subscribing to our winners, by the way. So again, email us or visit this link above. That's it for the presentation today. Again, my name is Kaden Hutchins, the Executive Vice President at cleantelligence Software. Here is some of my contact information. You could follow us as a company on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and also what I started out mentioning at the beginning of the webinar today. I am super excited to meet a lot of you guys at the Issa show in Dallas. Again, please come by and Visit. We are booth 1533 what is not up on the screen which means you have to be listening to this is we have a thousand dollar cash prize for a winner of a game so don't miss up or pass up that opportunity to come by and play and get a chance to win $1000. Appreciate everyone joining today. Thank you.