Every day I work with sales people in the security industry – integrators and manufacturers. A common exercise I perform is understanding their week to week activity, and how focused their practice might be. I’ll ask this question about specific accounts: “What have you done with XYZ End-User lately?” When working with integrators, the sales people almost always answer with something like: “I haven’t been there in a year or so, there’s nothing going on there right now” or “they’ve got an expansion planned for this summer and I’ll be bidding on the access control”. Those statements lead me to share with them one of the most common mistakes made by sales people working for security integrators…
As sales professionals, we tend to focus on projects or sales opportunities more than accounts and people, and that’s a huge mistake. When there isn’t an active project, we stop calling on the account. We might pay a visit to see how it’s going and check on any opportunities, but we don’t really impact our customers or the people within those accounts. The fact is … if we focus on the accounts and the people, the opportunities will come and we won’t have to chase them anymore.
Take Friday afternoon, list your top 10 accounts and think about something valuable you can bring to your contacts within those accounts. Maybe it’s a new reporting scheme for their access control, maybe it a white paper on the future of hosted video, or maybe you’ve got a great piece on biometrics for their particular type of business that you’d like to share.
Whether they’ve got an opportunity or not, get in front of them and position yourself as their security expert. Your competition will continue to chase opportunities, but the opportunities will start coming to you because you focused on your accounts and the people within those accounts.
