Do you concern yourself about your competitors much?

REHMAN: I think everybody concerns themselves about the competitors. That’s why they’re able to survive where they are. We have a company that does 50% commercial and 50% residential. At the end of the day we’ve steered away from the typical alarm system. We’ve gone the custom route.

We’ve gone to a certain part of the market share that cannot be met with a simple alarm installation. The clientele we deal with are looking for more than just what an alarm system is. Yes, they want the connected home. They want all this and that, but they want a solution that actually works fully integratable. They want to be more involved than just a door lock. They want to have the tracking on the door lock to itself. You have manufacturers already providing that.

The problem is there are a lot of companies out there, like Collin said, their technicians may not know the full capability of [the systems they are installing], which we excel in. A lot of our technicians are in-house trained by a lot of our senior managers. More importantly, they’re also given the opportunity to take certain pieces of equipment home.

In a family-owned business, there’s a lot of flexibility when you’re doing coaching or teaching. You can do many things as far as being able to give a technician an NVR and four cameras, and say take it home. Do what you have to do with it. Figure it out. Break it, we don’t care. Learn it, so you don’t have to learn on the customer’s time.

More importantly, like I said, as a small company we don’t have the budget for X amount of advertising dollars. We do the best we can with the local ads and whatnot, but more than anything word of mouth and reviews online. Social m
edia has really taken off as far as LinkedIn. My salesmen, their cards have scans on them, so the guy can go on LinkedIn and scan them right in. That’s the thing that’s moved us.

Because we’re also a small company, we only operate in our own state. Connecticut being a small state, it works pretty well for us. As far as other than our competition, we have our in-house central station, which does kind of help us out. We can control the cost of monitoring and keep it at a lower rate than an average company that has to farm it out to a third-party central.

The product lines we’ve chosen have been pretty solid as far as not causing the cost of recurring revenue that they’re charging us to increase at any moment. More than anything, they’ve actually decreased the charge of recurring revenue for us. It’s worked in our ballpark, and we’re able to offer some competitive prices. Our techs are very well trained. We don’t do the ‘lick ‘em and stick ‘em’ panels. I’m sorry, if that’s what you’re looking for, we may offer it in a certain flavor for you, but we don’t have a wide range of that.

If I’m going to be coming in as a salesperson in your home or business or school or municipality, the first thing I’m going to do before I even think about a product line is find out what your needs are. We’ll get that figured out and then talk about the different options that we can provide, and how we can customize them.

DePREE: I think the way we approach the competition is different, depending on which segment of our organization you’re talking about. In the residential side, we’re paying attention to the competition because we need to know how to outsell them. They have a product very similar to ours. We can preach the service that we provide is better than the next person all day long, but it only matters if they believe it or not. We have to understand how is the competition pricing, how is the competition going to market?  What is the competition’s approach in the home versus what our approach is in the home?

In that market, we’ve got to understand so that we can sell against it, explain the pros and cons of what they’re offering versus what we’re offering. But we’re looking at competition because we know it’s going to be there and we’ve got to figure out how to be better than them in that market.

The other side of it is in our small business, large commercial enterprise, whatever you want to call it, we want to figure out how we don’t have to compete with anybody. What can we provide, what can we do that nobody else can? So if somebody wants it, they have to come to us. What technology or product line or approach or what is it that we can do to avoid competition on that side of the business?

We don’t want to get in a bidding war on a $400,000 project where margins can go and go. We want to figure out how we can sell that same thing for $450,000 because nobody else can do it, because of what we’re providing. So looking at competition, you have to, but you have to understand what are you trying to get out of the competition.

That large market, if I’m just looking at, ‘Oh, they bid it really well, how do I beat that bid?’ You’re not going to win in that market. In that market you have to figure out how to avoid the competition so you’re the only person. Whereas, on the residential side there’s no way to avoid anybody. You have to figure out how to beat them, how to sell against them, understand their stuff, provide pros and cons. ‘This is what they do really well. This is what they pride themselves on, but this is what you have to watch out for.’

If you know what you’re talking about and teach the customer about your competition, not just you, you gain some credibility there as long as you’re not outright badmouthing your competition. There are very few really bad companies that are still in business. That’s our approach.

Robert, as national marketer how do you approach competition? You’re already in the home. You’re going to try to bundle. So is AT&T, etc. How are you dealing with it?

FEW: We look at competition; we know who we’re competing with. We know the national players. We don’t know what every alarm company in each of our municipalities are. We’re in 28 states. We don’t know everybody, but we keep our finger on the pulse of the industry.

I don’t care if you have a billion-dollar marketing budget. I don’t care if you’ve got the best training and best products. I think every company needs to know what their product is. Whether it’s residential, commercial, government, schools, you have to know what your product is. You have to know your customers for each of those segments.

Then you deliver better than everybody else. You go in and, ‘This is our suite of services. You’re going to be very happy with it. This is our price point.’ I agree with Colin; don’t get in bidding wars. Respect yourself enough to know that this is my value. This is what I bring to the table. I’m going to make sure that you are protected all the time. I’m going to make sure that you’ve got the convenience of every product that’s out in the industry. I’m going to make sure that I communicate with you all the time to make sure about any changes there are. I want you part of our company.

We’re getting away from the whole service provider/service user. We want that marriage in the middle somewhere. We still want you to pay us, but we want to bring that relationship closer. We watched customers say, ‘It would be great if I could have my doggie door opened every morning at 7 a.m. or every Saturday morning at 7 a.m., so I don’t have to get out of bed.’

Let’s figure it out. Let’s call some manufacturers. Somebody is doing something. So it’s getting that product in-house, understanding it. You’re always going to have some variety of products. Make sure you know it. If you know your product, and your people know your product, they’re your best salespeople.

We have salespeople, telephone salespeople. They do contests. They win our systems. Our best salespeople are the ones who subscribe to our services. They know it, use it, live it. When you live your system, you can sell anything. To Faraz’s point, send them home with it. Here it is. I’m not going to teach you how to use it. I want you to break it.

Know that panel. Know its ins and outs. Make sure that it’s good for your customer. The worst thing you want to do is put a piece of equipment in your customer’s home that you can’t fix in a second. The customer calls at 2 a.m. Nothing happens all day, but it’s 2 a.m. The smoke detector dings, the panel starts beeping, whatever it is. You want your people to know. Oh, no problem, Ms. Smith. Go to your keypad and hit command 4. Or hit your code and press 1 twice.

It’s tough sometimes, because with a lot of acquisitions out there you can all of a sudden have five or six different suites of services. But at the end of the day you want that frontline employee, whoever that customer is interfacing with, whether it’s a tech, the owner, a customer service rep, answering service rep, they call that person and get an answer right away.

Then they don’t look for competition. Most security customers look for competition, it’s like your car insurance. We all say we’re going to call every year to see what the best price is, but it’s usually event driven. They had a bad experience. It opens the door. You don’t want to deal with competition, never let that door open. If the customer has a service event, you call them the next day. ‘Mr. Smith, is everything OK? Great. John did a great job? Great. Thanks. Have a good d
ay.’

That way the door is never opened because they’re going to go through four or five companies after you to find what they wanted. It’s going to be a new relationship and it’s hard to do that. The third-party business, one of the hardest things to do is get somebody to leave one central and come to another. You’ve got to show them why. Then you have to treat them like gold so they never open the door.

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