Why You Should Be Upselling Integrated Systems to Your Loyal Customers
It’s great to keep looking out the front windshield, but if you safely want to drive the sales results car, then periodically peering at the rearview mirror is a great idea.
Let’s talk about selling multiple integrated solutions to your best, most profitable and easiest-to-close sales opportunity. Any ideas as to whom that might be?
Think repeat business … because the answer lies with your existing customer base. Sales teams are always hunting for new customers, or should be, and they often lose sight of the customer relationships that were previously established.
It’s great to keep looking out the front windshield, but if you safely want to drive the sales results car, then periodically peering at the rearview mirror is a great idea. In addition, using your side mirrors during the selling process will help you spot opportunities on the systems integration side of your hot rod.
Let me elaborate on some reasons why I said your existing customers present your easiest sales opportunity.
Salespeople, Call Home!
Home is where your customers live. When was the last time you proactively called on loyal customers? How many times in the past month? Customers who are ignored may consider a dalliance with a new beau who drives a flashy red convertible of new technology!
Translation: a competitor’s eager salesperson with a shiny state-of-the-art technology and integrated product offering is courting your customer. They may not initially be displacing the service you are providing, but they most certainly will begin displacing the relationship.
Let me ask, have you ever visited a faithful, reliable old customer only to discover they bought a new access control or video system that you didn’t sell them? Ouch!
When you tearfully asked why they didn’t call you first, they may say the most stinging words to a salesperson: “We didn’t know you sold access control or video systems”or worse yet, the gut punch “We would have bought the system from you if we had known!”
The slightly less painful but still embarrassing scenario is getting called in late to the party when that customer has a competitive bid and now you are in a defensive sales response mode … it’s not death by a near miss of a sale, but painful nonetheless, as well as less profitable. You get the point.
Make sure your existing customers, all of them, understand all of the security products you sell all of the time. To continue with your customer romance, shower them with your own shiny new solutions!
Everyone Likes a Compliment, or in This Case, a Complement
Curry favor with your customers by making sure you provide complementary system solution sets to deliver greater security coverage through layering. Today’s systems can feed off of one another to fulfill your enhanced value proposition to clients.
An access control system should never be sold without some video coverage of crucial portals. The bane of access control since its infancy is unauthorized tailgating, either intentionally through social engineering deceit, or unintentionally through good old Midwestern politeness — let me hold that door for you!
Having a recorded video of an access control that is even periodically reviewed will help supervisors or managers enforce access policies while providing a safer work environment. If this makes sense, where do you start?
Multiple Systems Impact Multiple Contacts
The reality in sales is that you should have more than one contact under your customer’s roof. In my sales training program, I preach five under the roof. Translation: If you want to sell multiple or integrated systems, you will need different contacts with different responsibilities and at different levels of influence with those who hold the purse strings.
Just like Jon Lovitz from the “Saturday Night Live” of years past who, exaggeratedly in his character’s style, would admonish viewers, “Get to know me!” Who should you get to know?
Obviously, the IT manager who controls all things on the network, or the operations manager responsible for all things fulfilled, or the facilities manager responsible for all things bolted to the building have different priorities and needs.
Taking time to familiarize yourself with them opens the door to integrated and layered security solutions. So where is the big win for your company? The win is blended revenue streams and most importantly a “sticky” customer who depends on your company to safely “run” their company.
Integrated systems deliver data points that can be used in many different ways. When you add in new RMR or MSP services, you can reduce a customer’s work load while gaining financial resiliency and strength to grow your company more profitably.The moral to our tale — integrate or disintegrate!
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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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