By Ashley Willis
ROMEOVILLE, Ill. — Continuing on its quest to build an IT-centric company, Protection 1 has purchased certain proprietary IT assets from summer sales model company Pinnacle Security. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Last year, Pinnacle Security earned the 2012 Best Practice Award at the Electronic Security Integrators (ESI) Forum for its Dashboard and MySales Web sites that offer employees instant access to real-time data as it relates to sales and installations. Those sites, coupled with Pinnacle’s other IT infrastructure and software appealed to P1.
“Pinnacle invested a significant amount of time and money to develop a very sophisticated customer relationship management [CRM] tool along with other reporting and training tools,” P1 President and CEO Tim Whall tells SSI. “These are tools that Protection 1 has been looking at developing or in progress of developing, so we will certainly leap frog our delivery by some 18-24 months.”
P1 will also acquire Pinnacle Security’s Orem, Utah-based facility, plus several members of its leadership team will join P1, including founders Jarred Chappell and Steve Zolman. After researching Pinnacle, the P1 executive team realized that Chappell and Zolman had built a solid sales organization, prompting the company to assign the pair with leading P1’s new residential division. The new department, which will focus on personalized, one-to-one selling of home security products and services, will integrate Pinnacle's seasonal selling model with P1's "brick-and-mortar" approach, according to Whall.
Although many door-knocking sales companies have been heavily criticized, P1 is confident that Pinnacle’s seasonal selling model will prove to be successful for the firm. Whall notes that the strategy has helped Pinnacle grow significantly in the past 10 years, as well as demonstrate the ability to recruit and develop sales leaders.
“Together, we believe we can bring a new approach to both the summer sales model and the traditional sales model. We are excited about the quality of sales representatives the program brings to the industry,” Whall says. “The opportunity to provide a year-round lifetime career path, we believe, will benefit both organizations as they come together. It’s another approach for P1 to bring new talent into our industry for a career versus just a summer job.”
This the second time that a portion of Pinnacle Security’s assets have been acquired within three months. In October, Pinnacle Security sold 93,000 subscriber accounts to Monitronics for $131 million.
Ashley Willis is associate editor for SECURITY SALES & INTEGRATION magazine. She can be reached at (310) 533-2419.
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