Forget the Good Old Days; the Best Is Yet to Come
For serious security and integration businesses this may be the most exciting time in the history of our industry. I’m talking about unprecedented opportunity to create our own economy in terms of sales, recurring profit, customer retention and solutions that make life better.
Market penetration is growing toward an all-time high. End-user awareness is flourishing thanks to certain mass marketers and telecoms all pitching various interactive services that employ reliable, user-friendly mobile security technology for residential as well as commercial verticals. With all this exciting energy out there what’s stopping us from gobbling up a much bigger slice of the pie?
How many interactive services are your customers not buying from you only because no one in your company is talking about them? How often do field technicians, central station employees, front office staff and even managers fail to come back with intel for salespeople on customers they spoke with that day? Let’s be perfectly transparent here, “it” always rolls downhill. With very few exceptions, unless company leadership energetically stimulates every member of the organization with education to help them recognize and harvest opportunity, it typically will not happen by itself.
While everyone’s working hard putting out fires and doing the daily routine, you and your employees are likely walking over hundreds of dollars many times each day on telephone conversations, at service calls and even right outside the front door of your office. On new leads, salespeople who feel apprehensive about competitors’ low prices and fail to mention added-value services are costing you thousands! Multiply this by overlooked opportunity with existing customers every day of the week, month and year and the amount of money being left on the table is beyond belief.
Either your organization is enthusiastically engaged or it’s not. No excuses, no defense, no justification. Every single employee has great opportunity today to pitch in and grow the business. They do not have to be salespeople or field techs. All they have to be is enthusiastic, educated and aware. Does the culture at your company harvest opportunity or apathy? The choice is yours.
Common examples of missed opportunity often stem from not initiating any contact with existing customers. Sending a bill each month with a little printed message doesn’t count. I can usually tell which companies are not “all in” just by looking at those old beat-up, faded yard signs or window decals in close proximity to the alarm company office. The amount of brainstorming on ways to boost business and restore organizational enthusiasm often dictates the amount of money field techs, salespeople, office staff, managers and owners either pick up or leave on the table. Unless you’re actively stirring the pot, obvious ways of recognizing low-hanging fruit will continue to be overlooked.
If your team is enthusiastically stepping up their game to capture your fair share of abundant opportunity it is because you and your managers intentionally invigorate employees with a strong sense of urgency and awareness that imparts specific ways of converting much more opportunity into cold hard RMR. You have created a culture of enthusiasm and passion. Those of you who are capitalizing on this most exciting time realize that education is the key to getting in the game of harvesting great big chunks of good business.
With nearly countless ways to give consumers unprecedented control over their residences and businesses why do so many continue to grumble about whether or not the telecoms are in the game for keeps? Who cares? These guys see us as a smaller and financially weaker group of adversaries. What they haven’t yet figured out is that scrappy, well established local and regional security professionals that educate and stimulate their employees with the “whys, hows and ways” to repel, discourage and vigorously compete against the Goliaths of today can never be defeated.
Bob Harris is President of Attrition Busters security industry seminars, consulting and workshops. He can be reached at (818) 730-4690.
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