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OK, I Have A New Commercial Cleaning Business. Now What?

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  1. Build a website: A professional website is a must-have for any business in today’s digital age. Your website should have information about your services, pricing, service area, and contact information.
  2. Claim your Google My Business listing: This will help your business show up in local search results when potential customers are looking for commercial cleaning services in your area.
  3. Create social media profiles: Social media is a great way to reach potential customers and build brand awareness. Create profiles on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and post regularly to showcase your services and expertise.
  4. Network with other businesses: Attend local business events, join your local chamber of commerce, and reach out to other businesses in your area to build relationships and generate referrals.
  5. Offer promotions: To attract new customers, offer promotions such as discounts on the first cleaning or a free consultation.

By taking these initial steps, you can begin to build your brand and attract new customers to your commercial cleaning business.

Marketing Automation and CRM Case Studies Reveal An Average Revenue Increase Of 175.5% Following Implementation

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I recently read the book,  “Marketing Automation – Automate Your Business through Marketing Best Practices such as Email Marketing and search engine optimization,” by George Pain.  It’s not a long book but it provided some great insights and everything covered in this book can be implemented using SuiteCRM.

 

Pain detailed several case studies to illustrate how implementing CRM and marketing automation processes can dramatically improve business operations and profitability.

Of the ten case studies examined, six cited the impact to the revenue of the business. Four were expressed in percentage of revenue increased; one was expressed in a dollar increase in revenues to the business; one was expressed a percentage of company revenue attributed to the new CRM campaign.

Four Businesses Average 175.5% Increase in Campaign Revenue

1. One stationary specialist wanted to provide a more customized and personalized response based on customer behavior on their website. Their automated email campaign directed to landing pages with customized triggers realized a 244% increase in click rates and a 330% increase in revenue per mailing.

2. A software company utilized a lead scoring system to distinguish which leads to push to the sales team and which to cull. The volume of quality leads to the sales department increased by 55%, pre-qualified leads went up 30% and revenue grew by 178%.

3. A company that sells creative and artistic lifestyle products online to university students used CRM automation to better segment its young and diverse clients based on behavior.  An customized email campaign brought a 42% increase in duration of site visits, 20% more site page views and a 19% increase in email revenue.

4. An international news outlet saw potential leads lost from its sales funnel. The implemented an automated lead management system that better qualified leads, leveraged intelligent analytics and enabled a higher conversion rate, yielding a 23% increase in quality leads, a 72% drop in conversion time and a 175% increase in revenues attributed to marketing leads.

$2 Million Increased Revenue

5. A specialist in online registration, payment management and ticketing service implemented an automated lead nurturing solution to increase its visibility. Their email campaigns directed leads to customized landing pages cut marketing costs by 70%, time by 60%, netted a 350% increase in marketing ROI and a 100% growth in the automated sectors and an increase in gross revenue of $2 million.

$2 Million Increased Revenue

5. A specialist in online registration, payment management and ticketing service implemented an automated lead nurturing solution to increase its visibility. Their email campaigns directed leads to customized landing pages cut marketing costs by 70%, time by 60%, netted a 350% increase in marketing ROI and a 100% growth in the automated sectors and an increase in gross revenue of $2 million.

Percentage of Company Revenue

6. One mobile software company that provides B2B cloud mobile solutions, SmartBear Software, implemented an automated campaign that was scalable, integrated with the CRM program and easy to use. With email campaigns launched and lead management in place to handle the increasing volume, they cited a 200% increase in lead volume and 85% of revenue was generated by the downloads in the campaign.

There Are No Excuses: Get The World’s Number 1 Open Source CRM Today

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Everyone in business knows that a website is a key marketing component, and most also understand that they should also have a customer relationship management system of some kind.

The fact is, businesses should have and integrate both into one seamless marketing system.

Everyone in business, regardless of how large or small their business is, should have a Customer Relationship Management system.  There is no excuse.

  • I have been told that staff won’t use a CRM system.  They like to do things their way and a CRM interferes with their process.
  • I have been told that a CRM system is too expensive or takes too long to learn.
  • I have been told that they have tried CRM and it just sat there.  They paid their fees but never got anything out of it.
  • I have been told many things but when it comes down to it, those are just excuses because CRM is not difficult to implement and it doesn’t have to be expensive.

So what exactly is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is designed to manage your organization’s relationships and interactions producing greater control, predictability and profitability.

CRM began with a focus on relationships with leads or prospects and customers with the simple goal to improve customer relationships. But CRM has evolved to encompass much more. Now, more comprehensive CRM programs support several business areas, including:

  • marketing and sales management,
  • inventory management,
  • personnel management,
  • supplier/vendor management,
  • marketing and business intelligence management.

You can select which area(s) are the most suitable for your business.

Automate Communications and Processes and Increase Profit

An effective CRM system assists in staying connected to customers, automating and streamlining processes, and ultimately improving your bottom line.

SuiteCRM is at its heart a tool that handles contact management, sales management, productivity, workflows and automation of processes more efficiently and effectively than humans.

I specialize in the world’s number 1 ‘open source’ product, SuiteCRM because it is equal to or better than any branded products and it’s FREE.  SuiteCRM enables you to focus on your organization’s relationships with prospects, customers, service users, colleagues, friends and family, vendors or suppliers, as well as business processes.  If they’re people, SuiteCRM can manage your relationship with them.

Christine Ely – WordPress and SuiteCRM Consultant from Christine Ely on Vimeo.

There is a cycle that is at the heart every CRM system.  It’s your life-cycle with people and that includes all aspects of the relationship from finding new customers, winning their trust and business, to providing support and additional services throughout the relationship. Every interaction is recorded and logged so the whole relationship from the first contact is in the system.

SuiteCRM serves everyone in the organization.

From the person at the top to the new recruit, SuiteCRM serves the sales department, marketing, customer service, opportunity management, business development, personnel, recruitment, dispatch and every other area in any business.  It also serves external interactions through customer portals and ticket management.

SuiteCRM is vast but so intuitive.

It is the place where you store customer and prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, manage and record service issues, and of course automate and manage marketing campaigns.  Every successful business has a system in place and most of those systems are just manual practices.  SuiteCRM puts those practices into one place and it makes available all of that information to anyone in the company that has a need for it.

SuiteCRM is the ultimate collaboration tool. 

As SuiteCRM stores all interactions with your customers, and everyone in your company has access to the information they need from it, collaboration and productivity naturally increases.  When a customer calls, no matter who takes that call, he or she can see how the customer has been communicated with, see their previous purchases and when they purchased, whether they have had prior support tickets, whether they paid on time and so on.

SuiteCRM helps your business drive growth.

If you want a business that will grow and last, you need a sustainable strategy; one that can handle growth.  You need a system that will run the business whether you are there or not. You need a system that will take your business into the future.  You need to set goals, sales targets and business objectives and of course, you need to ensure that your business makes a profit.

SuiteCRM system features reports and dashboards’

SuiteCRM offersa clear overview of how your business is doing and again, all that information is in one place.  You’ll see the status of leads, orders, customer service issues, the sales pipeline, notes, outstanding tasks, status of projects and much more. You’ll be able to simultaneously monitor multiple campaigns, know where your prospect is in the funnel and what’s coming next.

SuiteCRM’s Superpower! Automated workflows.

Workflows schedule series of events to take place when certain actions are triggered.  A SuiteCRM workflow can take action whenever a contact form is completed on your website.  When a lead is created SuiteCRM will trigger actions. These could be to email back the potential customer thanking them for their contact and informing them that someone will be contacting them soon (as well as suggesting areas of the website to review) but then also emailing the relevant department, creating action tasks for appropriate personnel.  That lead will be managed throughout the workflow from first order and every interaction in the relationship into the future.

Website and CRM Integration – Your Organization’s Super Power

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software is arguably the most valuable software your company can utilize, but it is also the most misunderstood and under used.  A CRM system (such as SuiteCRM; which I specialize in) implemented correctly and used by all relevant departments has a dramatic influence on the company’s revenue and profit.  Increases in revenue, after just a few months, of well over 200% are commonplace.

Although the term CRM is now synonymous with software it is a concept that has been utilized for decades by companies that operate customer centric policies. It basically involves the processes and methodologies employed in managing the relationships between the company and the customer.

Anyone in business, and especially in sales, knows that customers are fickle creatures. They want to be looked after, nurtured, and made to feel special. A typical customer’s basic instinct is to be loyal. It’s like any relationship. It may not be everything you want but it’s familiar and comfortable. But just like a relationship, if you ignore and neglect your customers, they may get a roving eye… and your competitors are always out there trying to snap them up.

Startup companies  only have a few customers, so it’s possible for staff to remember and manage them with a minimum of technology. They will provide a good service, keep track of their orders, call them every now and again to see that they’re happy, send them thank you cards and so on. That’s effectively Customer Relationship Management.  But what if you have ten customers, fifty? Will you remember every aspect of every transaction? Will you remember to follow up on every call?

Just about every company, organization, club or group will have some kind of web presence.  For some, that may just be a Facebook page but for most, it will be a website.  Over the past decade, one web technology has dominated all of the others.  It is open source and free.  That system is WordPress and it’s a technology that anyone can learn in a single day and one almost every business should employ.

Most websites have a contact page and most of those contact pages have a form that visitors can fill in; which will send an email to the company behind the website.  If the company has any marketing savvy, they will take the details of that email and enter them into a database.  Sadly, many will just respond and then forget that contact.

 

If the website is integrated with a CRM system however, the contact form will trigger what is called a ‘workflow’ which can put into motion a whole series of events.  For example:

  1. The CRM system will send a personalize email back to the potential customer
  2. A copy of the contact request will be sent to the relevant department to respond
  3. A record will be created in the CRM’s ‘Leads’ module
  4. A call will be scheduled to follow up with the potential customer
  5. The person making the call to the potential customer will log against the record the interests of the potential customer and then either convert the ‘lead’ to a customer or mark the lead as potential for future business
  6. A follow-up email will be sent to the ‘lead’ to ensure that the customer received the best possible service
  7. A new workflow will then take over the management of that lead/customer based on the information from the follow-up

The point is, that lead will never be forgotten. The system will automatically pick up that lead based on the data and act upon it time and time again.

The purpose of CRM software is to enable your organization to manage multiple customers personally; to automate processes that ‘touch’ customers on a regular basis and then to remember every instance of every conversation, email, appointment, or transaction of any kind. All of these transactions are stored directly in your customer’s unique record so that your total relationship with that customer is always available.

Good CRM systems feature ‘Campaign Managers’, which can automatically create a sequence of tasks and events.

Let’s say you meet a bunch of people at an event who express an interest in your service. You’ll enter them into the CRM system and then allocate them to a specific campaign. A typical campaign (series of tasks and events to be posted to the person’s record) may be:

  1. Send an email to express how happy you were to meet the person
  2. In 1 day: Send a flyer or brochure of your services by mail
  3. In 3 days: Make a phone call to reconnect and confirm that your flyer was received and is there anything more you can do at this time.
  4. In 10 days: Send eNewsletter (and add to monthly newsletter mailing list)
  5. In 21 days: Invite to your own network meeting

And so on…

Multiple activities can be created and applied to existing customers, new prospects, network partners or anyone else in your database. The whole series of events is immediately applied to the customer record and the system updates all the relevant task lists, to-dos and appointment schedulers.

No matter how many customers or prospects you have, the CRM system will be managing the relationship, sending out reminders and thank you cards, emails, scheduling phone calls, remembering renewal dates and much more. And all of these events and transactions will be neatly filed against the individual customer records.

Good CRM systems are now ‘cloud based’; which means that the data is stored ‘online’ and accessible at any time via desktop computers, wifi enabled tablets, and mobile phones.

You may be a great networker and try to keep in touch with your customers, but no human can match the power and persistence of a CRM system.  Where, in the past, you may have neglected to follow up, thank, send out renewal applications, cross sale and up sale notifications, special offers, anniversary cards, newsletters and so on, your CRM system will methodically churn out personalized materials and your customers will continue to love you and do business with you.

CRM software has become an incredibly important category. How well you know your customer will determine how much business he or she will do with you. As Sir Francis Bacon once said, “Knowledge is Power”. That knowledge can be contained in your CRM system.