There are dozens of reasons that security integrators want to grow their hosted and managed services business, and there are even more reasons that explain their struggles with achieving this goal. Although each integration company has different explanations to their disappointing hosted and managed services numbers, there is one challenge that everyone shares… and overcoming this one obstacle is the core to succeeding in this space.
When most security integrators create an initiative to grow their services, they don’t think about the significant change it will cause their customers. To us, it looks the same – the same video, access control, or whatever – it’s just hosted and/or managed by someone else. We see the benefits and think it should be a no-brainer, but whether our customers see the benefit or not doesn’t matter – what they really see is change. Whether it’s a small business moving from no access control system to a hosted system, or a larger business moving from an on-premise system to a hosted set-up… these scenarios present change and no one likes change.
So, the one common obstacle every security integrator has in selling hosted and managed services is that it’s not about selling benefits of the system, it’s about managing change with your customers’ personnel. If you can do this, you’ll have an advantage over your competition and will begin to own your customers.
