Drilling New Ideas Into Sales, Ops and Management
The security technology solutions you offer are highly converged; your sales infrastructure should be as well in order to best serve customers’ needs. Here’s the first of a two-part look at consultative selling.
Professional security consulting is a time-consuming, detailed and complex task that requires many skill sets and experience. We also get paid by the hour or project, which can take months or even years to complete. We are constantly interacting with our client stakeholders at all levels to gain perspective, guide choices and challenge assumptions. The role of selling is different.
In the real world, salespeople are paid to sell solutions and services their companies provide at a profit. They are paid to bring home the bacon and not spend too much time in analysis paralysis. They can get lost in the details of their work and lose sight of their objective. Your sales team can learn to design like a consultant and sell converged systems more methodically, faster. Work from the outside in. Physical security principles apply when you start at the edge of the network and work your way inside to the back of the network, or even the cloud if that is in the solution set. This discipline helps both sales teams and their customers work together while doing facility walkthroughs. I often see teams get lost on the complexity of network-centric solutions when there are so many pieces, IT parts, product selection and pricing budget issues to factor into a successful proposal.
Piecing the Proper Process Together
If you assume or overdesign one part of the solution, you are comparing apples and pineapples. Apples and oranges would be a walk in the park in comparison. So work from the edge backwards … what’s next? You have to align your valued suppliers in the right sequence to gain maximum impact, and we certainly had the right partners involved at PSA-TEC. I have to thank the vendor partners that participated in the TLaM session. I made them jump through hoops without them really knowing why. I think they do now.
When you challenge the status quo, some unique results can be achieved. Here’s the magic part of the equation in this experience: PEPCOM (you knew there would be an acronym coming). Essentially this is an abbreviated version of my step-by-step security consulting method. Consultative selling is great; security consultative selling is even better for our industry. Think about application-specific design. With so many technology choices, where the heck do you start? It’s hard enough if you have been around the block several times, but what if you haven’t? Overload can occur as well as burnout. So let’s go to class.
This PEPCOM process has served me well for years of security consulting and here is the condensed version that can be broadly applied with different levels of experience in the security industry:
Physical facility characteristics
Environmental variables
Performance requirements
Cost and budget variables
Operational requirements
Migration or green field solution
Some explanation will help you, your team and your customers understand why this approach makes so much sense. Leonardo da Vinci once said, “The ultimate sophistication is simplicity,” and I really like simple – in a complex way. Let’s start exploring the PEPCOM system.
Physical facility characteristics … you must look at the physical frailties of the building you are protecting for the realities your products and installation technicians will have to address. One of the fundamentals of security design is designing around the fundamentals of a physical security design pyramid. The essence of the pyramid is delay, gain awareness and harden your target based on vulnerability, criticality and reality. This model changes when we add or consider the logical security component of convergence. Some principles of physical security still apply, but in different ways and with different techniques. The lesson is your product application will depend on the physical characteristics of the facility.
Did I grab your interest? Good, because we will continue the PEPCOM process and explanation next month.
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About the Author
Paul Boucherle, SSI Contributor
Paul C. Boucherle, Certified Protection Professional (CPP) and Certified Sherpa Coach (CSC), is Security Sales & Integration’s “Business Fitness” columnist. A principal of Matterhorn Consulting, he has more than 30 years of diverse security and safety industry experience including UL central station operations, risk-vulnerability assessments, strategic security program design and management of industry convergence challenges. Boucherle has successfully guided top-tier companies in achieving enhanced ROI resulting from improved sales and operational management techniques. He is a charismatic speaker and educator on a wide range of critical topics relating to the security industry of today and an accomplished corporate strategist and marketer whose vision and expertise in business performance have driven notable enterprise growth in the security industry sector.
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