Cloud-Based Access Points to Profits
Security integrators seeking to stabilize and grow their revenue flow do their prospects a disservice if they disregard the potential upside of hosted access control services. Discover which tactical decisions to make in order to make headway in this burgeoning market.
Prospect Case Study: Property Management 
Taking a closer look at one particular prospect type, namely property managers, we can start to connect the service we want to offer to the needs they may have. The ideal profile for a property management prospect is a company that owns or manages higher-end buildings (class A or B). These firms generally must manage multiple properties in a competitive environment. They are highly concerned with tenant satisfaction and also reducing their own risks, workloads and ultimately their costs. A hosted access and video solution will assist in these objectives by providing high service levels with optimum scalability and flexibility at the lowest possible operational costs. In addition, since hosted services are generally billed on a monthly or quarterly basis this aligns well with the property management business model, where rents are collected on an incremental basis.
Once we have made it in front of the prospect we have to focus our sales approach on the benefits and business value of the hosted solution as opposed to touting technical capabilities. This can be a difficult transition for many security salespeople who invest a lot of time learning the “speeds and feeds” of various products. To get you started, below is a short list of the basic positioning statements that will appeal to our property management prospect:
- One “key” for multiple properties/doors
- Simple to activate and deactivate access rights
- Access rights granted by time and location
- Built-in audit trail and reporting
- System grows with their needs
- Eliminate rekeying expenses
Once we have our prospect’s attention, it’s critical to be able to answer some simple IT-related questions. If you don’t have the answers then your sales process will stall. It’s also important to demonstrate your solution. If you are claiming to have a simple, Web-hosted application, then be prepared to logon and show your prospect how simple it is. Let them have a demo account and play with the system themselves. This is what they have come to expect from other IT SaaS services. So just like the technical benchmarks established for cloud service providers, your salespeople will be facing sales benchmarks established by the wider SaaS provider community. Be prepared to give them the tools needed to compete and win.
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