5 Ideas to Increase Surveillance Sales

There’s no job too small and other tips to help ignite your surveillance sales.

Not all smaller opportunities are created equal, and, in today’s highly competitive marketplace, it’s easy to push as hard as we can to sell as much as possible, as soon as possible, to a potential or current customer.

Many have also been known to deprioritize smaller opportunities to pursue the biggest fish possible, which is understandable.

However, one of the best pieces of advice is to slow down and do your due diligence to best understand the strategic opportunities smaller installations can offer.

That and four other surveillance selling tips are detailed here.

1. Try “Land-and-Expand” Strategy

Smaller installations provide some of your best opportunities to do boutique work, show off your talents, knowledge and capability, and create raving fans who will serve as ambassadors for your brand.

When a smaller installation impresses in the right kind of environment (a franchise, chain location, section of campus, or part of a system), the resulting buzz can open doors to larger, more lucrative opportunities quickly.

These installs are perfect for latest total surveillance solutions that deliver proven high performance with exceptional modularity, scalability, seamless integration, and generous backwards compatibility.

In fact, when approaching such projects strategically, installing a solution with known quality coupled with inherent flexibility and scalability over time is a must.

2. Show Surveillance Delivers More Than Security

Video surveillance has become a starting point for capabilities that extend beyond security.

But it’s human nature for our customers to see things through the lens of their existing understanding, and so even an integrators’ most vivid and technical description of the latest technology may conjure up mental imagery across the table of “fancier” analog cameras hooked up to fancier monitors and VCRs.

This is both the challenge and opportunity for the systems integrator.

It’s up to the integrator to take a meeting out of the limited confines of the most immediate security requirements and opening up the customer’s understanding of what modern video surveillance can do to support their total mission, not just security.

Retail is an obvious example: modern surveillance technology includes analytic data, fully realized as business intelligence, including footfall analysis, heat-mapping, queue management and POS integration.

Think of the industries you sell to. What are the similar opportunities?

3. See the Synergies, Exploit Them

Many types of installations offer unique opportunities to get a newly designed system for one customer right in front of a potential customer with minimal effort.

Always be on the lookout for these opportunities and, when you find them, stand ready to exploit them.


RELATED: 4 Areas of Surveillance Innovation to Watch in 2017


Great examples can be found with municipal customers, where simply getting the capabilities installed for the local school system or even library in front of local law enforcement eyes can mean larger sales.

In the case of law enforcement, once familiar with an installed system, they may very well bring up the synergistic possibilities themselves, requesting an additional camera to provide more street coverage or access to footage as needed to better execute their mission.

Those kinds of small gestures can turn into big business.

4. Be Familiar With Latest Tech to Sell

We know end users can get complacent – relying on what they know best and oft resistant to change – but what we rarely admit is that we in the industry do, too.

This is an incredibly exciting time, with innovation on several fronts driving performance and capability, exceptional storage, user experience features, enhanced redundancy, and a number of key differentiators that can make the sale/no sale difference.

The integrator who isn’t up to date risks losing out to the one who is. With the explosion of technology and rapid advance of innovation, flexible, scalable, total solutions with low total costs of ownership and powerful performance exist to meet customer needs.

Gone is your customer’s cost vs. quality conundrum, and many of their traditional video surveillance gripes, when the full breadth of innovation is tapped to find what works for them.

And it’s not just technology. Look for innovation in customer service and pricing from a manufacturer to be able to meet and exceed customer requirements.

While traditional recurring revenue models have done well by our industry, end users are increasingly seeing those as recurring costs and rejecting them.

Know more, sell more. It’s that simple.

5. Lean on Your Manufacturer

The word “partner” gets thrown around a lot in the manufacturer-systems integrator relationship.

The better manufacturer partner programs provide opportunities for training and certification at low or no costs, and deliver convenient, comprehensive customer service support for all partners and projects, large and small.

But too many integrators still treat the manufacturer relationship like a purely seller-buyer one. Don’t do that. See yourself as the valued partner you are and demand your manufacturer sees you the same way.

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