How Retooling the Site Survey Process Helps You Break Through
- Understand the customer’s problem
- Gain the customer’s confidence and trust that you are the best option
- Act in a timely and responsive manner to serve the need
Blocker #1: Ability to Show Value and Professionalism Quickly and Easily
In slow-burn sales (and physical security systems certainly qualify), customers care about both how you look and what/whether you can deliver.
That said, prospects can see how you look long before they put money on the line and find out whether you can deliver. So, while both are important, looks are often what get you in the door.
System integrators that don’t have a way to easily improve their look — to show value and professionalism from the moment of contact — face their first growth blocker.
We hear time and again that one of the main user takeaways from System Surveyor is how it helps them look more professional and shows more clearly the level of value they can deliver compared to the competition. And these integrators are significantly improving their win rate as a result.
But don’t take our word for it — let’s hear from Dan.
Dan’s perspective: “Back when I was with a large MSP who had an emerging Physical Security practice, I was reaching a point of crisis: the company was used to fast, easy sales cycles, which just isn’t how physical security works. The long process of creating, proposing, and then closing deals didn’t fit the company’s pattern, and it was up to me to find a solution. I was getting 140+ leads a month personally and couldn’t possibly process them all. Moreover, I had a team to help support who were not as experienced in the field.
At the time I was using Visio, Word, PDFs— whatever I could get my hands on, really. I’d spend maybe 20 hours on a design for a proposal before sending it to the client only to have the entire thing rejected and having to start again from scratch.
Then I found System Surveyor. It solved everything I was struggling with. I could easily spot and dot projects, even remotely, and it cut down my prep time in a stunning way. Now I could qualify a prospect in a single 45-minute video call, with system designs prepped ahead of time even before conducting a site survey.
And because I was coming into those meetings far more prepared than the competition, I won something like 80%+ of the time with less time spent on each customer.
Best of all, System Surveyor freed me up from manually building proposals, letting me focus on my business leadership and demonstrating subject matter expertise as an overlay to several other sales people who had less experience. This served as a real breakthrough to a common growth blocker.”
Blocker #2: Labor and Staff Shortages
It’s tough to grow without the right people (and enough of them). This is an industry that’s growing quickly, but has perennially been a challenge to attract as much staff as it demands. As a result, a common growth blocker is hiring in sales, operations, and other areas—most system integrators struggle to find experienced hires, so the people they bring on tend to be less experienced (and therefore less effective).
It’s easy to point to the labor shortage as an impediment to growth that’s impossible to solve, but it really is possible to break through this growth blocker. It just takes some creative thinking (and the right technology).
Two key changes to break through:
1) Consistent, streamlined processes:
The answer here is twofold. First, simplify, streamline, and automate processes so that they don’t require so much experience and industry knowledge. When every veteran system integrator does things their own way, it’s tough for a new integrator to know which process to follow. But when everyone’s following a documented, repeatable process, this part of the problem goes away. This is true in every business and especially important given this growth blocker.
Dan’s perspective: “Because there is new talent coming in that has more limited experience, you’ll need more sales overlays and experienced estimators and collaboration with manufacturer partners, but the key is making sure that one resource does not become a bottleneck—they need to be able to support a good sized ratio of sales people. I did not have my team email me designs; I had to demand that they use a more dynamic, collaborative tool – every time.”
2) Digital tools that make everyone more productive:
Second, equip your team with tools that cut down how long they need for core tasks. If it takes the average system integrator 11-20 hours to create a system design using manual processes for a proposal and more than a week to deliver a decision-ready proposal, the impact of streamlining that to half the time (or less) and delivering faster is a huge opportunity to improve topline sales—and to do more with the team you have (i.e., get into more proposals to build topline revenue). If a sales rep and estimator gain several hours back per week, they can use that time to serve more clients. Download our Customer Impact Study for System Integrators to learn more.
Dan’s perspective: “Yeah, there are never enough personnel, and they’re never as trained or experienced as I’d like. But if I can cut down the complexity of the work, shave off unique processes and inefficient workflow quirks, then the ‘training bar’ is lower. I love giving my new hires access to System Surveyor because the tool is so intuitive they can pick it up almost immediately. Then, as they need visual collaboration, they can invite me in or a vendor partner for a quick gut check and precise guidance. Those who figure this out realize it is a game changer.
I even like to get the customer involved: I invite them into the call and even the design process, invite them to collaborate: ‘I know you want this turned around fast; if you can go grab a few pictures of this area I can speed this up for you.’ Now the client is invested—and I avoided rolling out a truck.”
Real-World Success Story
“I’ve personally experienced this at multiple companies now, but my favorite example is a friend of mine. He runs a growing system integrator business in a major midwestern market, and he’s pulling in some major contracts compared to the size of his firm. He called me in a panic one day – he had a meeting in less than an hour with the state’s prison system and needed a solution that would allow him to quickly create surveys, map camera locations, and generate designs on the go.
Over a video conference and while my friend was at a coffee shop with his engineer, I gave a crash course in System Surveyor. Within minutes, I was able to show my colleague how to:
- Create a survey: We started by quickly creating a layout for the site, even though we were both working remotely. The software’s ease of use made it seamless.
- Spot and dot camera locations: Using the drag-and-drop feature, I showed him how to place cameras on the floor plan. This gave the design both flexibility and precision, even though we were working in a virtual environment.
- Draw boundaries for camera field of view: One of the standout features was the ability to draw accurate boundaries for each camera’s field of view. This gave the client a crystal-clear visual of what to expect from the surveillance system.
In no time, we had a detailed design ready to go for the meeting, and my friend felt confident presenting it to the client.
When my friend presented the design during the meeting, the client was immediately impressed. Not only did the software provide a detailed, professional design, but it also automatically generated a budgetary quote. The client was blown away by the level of detail and how quickly the proposal came together.
The real kicker was how the client could immediately see the potential value and clarity of the design. This made all the difference in the sales process. Thanks to System Surveyor, my friend left the meeting with a signed proposal and a notice to proceed. The client approved the budgetary quote on the spot and began working on securing funding.”
Pro Tip: If you are serving prisons or highly remote or sensitive areas, you likely will not have the ability to be Internet connected during a site survey. With a native tablet app from System Surveyor, you don’t need to be connected and can do the work and sync with the cloud when you are off campus and at a WiFi point.
Blocker #3: Motion Inconsistency and Manual Collaboration: Too Much Time to Design
It’s common in this industry to engage in manual collaboration with clients: inefficient back-and-forth emails about designs, often sketched by hand and the like.
There’s also a great deal of motion inconsistency, a lack of standardization from one salesperson to the next. Each person uses their own methods and tools, and details get lost in translation (or lost in transit, obscured or forgotten by the time a rep gets back to the office). Most sales teams have an estimator, manufacturer vendor or engineer review a design that goes out for proposal so if this is not shored up and consistent, it becomes a big growth blocker.
In terms of the direct growth problem, one customer and one design is taking the lion’s share of the week. The average system integrator salesperson that uses manual methods is spending 11-20 hours on a design for a proposal. That is time that they are not serving other customers and working on more proposals to build topline revenue. So, there is a big reason it is a problem.
When projects get handed off to estimators or engineering, you can’t afford any details to get lost. If that’s happening, growth probably isn’t.
The solution here is again twofold: speed and accuracy. Manual designing, email back-and-forth, and undocumented processes are neither quick nor accurate.
System Surveyor delivers value on both fronts, enabling integrators to create repeatable processes and accessible, stable documentation. It also eliminates inefficient manual collaboration, bringing all parties into a single cloud-based collaborative design. And our new System Surveyor Boundaries feature increases accuracy even further, giving you the ability to share possible device blockers for video surveillance cameras or motion detectors. It shows the true field of view or coverage.
Dan’s perspective: “What’s so valuable here is that, well, everyone has their specialty. I’m a decent writer: I could probably write the blog post you’re interviewing me for, but it’s not what I’m best at — and if I spent my time on the post, that’s time I can’t spend doing the stuff I’m good at. System Surveyor enables everyone to add their own expertise to the process, without having to try to do the other stuff they aren’t as skilled in. And because the platform is so intuitive, it lowers the barrier to entry: people don’t need to be quite as skilled or experienced to get excellent results, because they’re using the right tool.”
Blocker #4: Inaccurate or Incomplete Estimates
Our final growth blocker is something that many integrators live with, assuming it’s the status quo and just part of the process: inaccurate or incomplete designs and estimates.
Common or not, incomplete/inaccurate estimates are costly. Designs that are missing devices and accessories lead to rework, increasing costs and dragging out project timelines. You also risk losing credibility or damaging client confidence, which can lead to churn.
Worst of all is the upside-down project where you’re losing money on a job due to a poor estimate that you can’t adjust. You can sell all day long, but if your margins aren’t right, you won’t grow.
Dan’s perspective: “Scope creep is a huge problem in our industry. But with System Surveyor, you can make the scope of work both concise and complete, even including visual documentation from the start. The level of precision in the documentation is fantastic. Plus, when you’re collaborating with the end user, they don’t have a place to duck anymore. You’ve got it documented — permanently. And I’m not talking about just quantities or vague placements. You have detailed drawings going straight into the SOW.
Another advantage is the kind of buy-in you create with the customer. The customer gets invested and can see that you aren’t just another integrator trying to sell them stuff they don’t really need. Now it’s their design, too. They take ownership in and feel pride in their design, and they understand more thoroughly what the various components are doing.”
Start Unblocking Growth with System Surveyor
Overcoming growth blockers is possible and System Surveyor is the key: Our cloud-based platform on desktop and tablet transforms your system integration business into a modern, lightning-fast, responsive, and collaborative team that’s primed for growth. And with System Surveyor Boundaries, you can create even more precise designs that account for walls and other line of sight limitations.
