A Few Growth Hacks to Optimize Your Practice
At System Surveyor our goal is focused: to deliver wildly effective, easy-to-use system design software that results in a big impact. In my experience, companies that stay laser-focused on a specific goal do a great job of turning people into very loyal customers.
On a daily basis, power users in our community say things like:
“I use System Surveyor a lot, it’s perfect for what I do. I keep needing to get more iPad’s into my guy’s hands cause we use it every day!” – Damon, Advantage Security
“We have greatly enjoyed using System Surveyor and I thank your team for building such a powerful tool, especially for physical security system integrators. We look forward to more enhancements based on our feedback.” Brandon, Dresner Group
“My closing ratio has drastically improved using System Surveyor.” – Ben, PRO AV
It’s gratifying to hear these comments and suggests that we’re achieving our mission. They are using the software to make their work and life easier.
But Wait…There’s More Opportunity for Value
While our user community often relays the value of the software, many of them know that there is more potential. The common refrain is: “I know it can do more for us. I am probably not using everything.”
It is human nature to adapt to change in phases and it’s not unusual that there is a continued need for education and adoption of new use cases. Therefore, we probably should not characterize these next few things as “mistakes” but more as missed opportunities to unleash even more value from the software.
Whether you’re considering a new security system design software solution or are one of the veterans, look out for these mistakes or missed opportunities. We’ll show you how to turn those missed opportunities into sustainable growth hacks.
Mistakes or Missed Opportunities:
1. Skipping the Mobile App: Are you wasting a few hours each week?
In electronic security, technology has significantly moved to the cloud and AI has arrived. But, that doesn’t mean that the physical aspect and integration isn’t as important as ever, in fact – maybe more so. Devices including video surveillance cameras, sensors, intrusion detection, access control, cabling and more need to be properly designed and placed in order to work effectively and deliver on their promise.
That’s why many pros will conduct a site survey or site walk in person to gather the requirements. There are literally thousands of devices, mounts, lighting and technologies to choose from. It’s garbage-in, garbage-out to design-in the wrong device and system.
So, what’s the mistake here? It’s missing out on taking the easy-to-use System Surveyor companion, mobile tablet app (on iPad or Android) on site to conduct the site survey with the prospect or stakeholder. Of course, many of our users are hip to this but not everyone. So what are they doing instead? Some continue to do site walks capturing everything on the paper floor plan,on cell phones, in their head or bringing along their engineers (probably too early in the process). This causes double entry and a big missed opportunity.
Why? Probably because they simply do not know about the app! In other cases, they may not have an iPad or Android tablet yet.
3 reasons it’s a mistake to miss out on the mobile app in the field:
- Inaccuracy: Info gets missed when captured on paper floor plans, in your head or with photos on a cell phone. Stop making this mistake and see accuracy skyrocket.
- Inefficient: Those who use the mobile tablet app are capturing data at the first point of the customer journey and save hours of time back at the office doing data re-entry at the next stage of design or by collaborating more effectively with engineers, ops and estimating teams.
- Lost opportunity to make a great impression: If you want to improve your sales close rate, start using a tablet with the app with customers and show and engage them as you go! You build confidence and have them pre-sold before the design and proposal are delivered. Don’t address it and find your competition winning the bid.
Let’s paint a brighter picture. What happens when you use the industry’s favorite site survey tool on a mobile tablet?
You’ll be able to:
- Capture or import a floor plan or satellite image and set the scale
- Drag and drop actual physical security products onto the floor plan (even showing area of coverage and field-of-view for devices such as security camera or wifi access point coverage)
- Take photos and immediately attach to devices
- Automate a bill of materials
- Show the budget impact of using specific devices
To sum it up: using System Surveyor’s mobile app during site surveys is a powerful tool for growth. Skipping the app, on the other hand? For most users, it’s a missed opportunity.
No tablet? Do some back of the napkin math to consider the investment. If you saved 3-4 hours this month re-entering details that you could have captured real time, would it be worth it? If you closed one more deal that you invested 10 hours in, would it be worth it? I assume your time is worth $100 at minimum (probably 5-10X that).
Sonitrol relies heavily on System Surveyor’s tablet app, cutting multi-day site visits into 30-minute collaborative sessions.
2. Exporting to PDF for Engineering & Operations: Costly Loss in Translation
Another mistake that we see are organizations that use our software for a sales team or only part of a team with a handoff that ends up in emailing a PDF to estimators, engineers or operations. When it’s time for a project to head over to engineering, ops and techs; the sales team exports their dynamic design to a flat PDF.
See the problem? We just went backwards! Where sales had a dynamic collaborative software design platform that could zoom in on: photos, attributes, area of coverage, context, metadata, notes and dimensions tied to specific device locations, engineering gets none of that. They get a flat PDF with minimal information, and then chances are they start re-entering and rebuilding the system within a different application.
Engineers, design, estimating, and ops personnel get less information and more work — not an ideal situation, much less a value-add! Not to mention, this setup is like a game of telephone — with the core information changing formats three or more times, more information is lost at each transition. Feel this pain? Check out our Webinar about Scaling Your Sales and System Integration Business.
The growth hack here: don’t just open the door partway. Instead, invite engineering and others into System Surveyor to tap the full potential. It’s not CAD and was not meant to be. It’s a purpose-built system design software that’s easy for everyone to use, not just if you have a CAD operator.
During a camera placement project, photos and other details can be attached to the camera element and all users (including guests) can drill down into that information. PDFs are just flat files, maybe with some hard-to-read markup.
Once the engineering team can see everything our collaboration design software can do — all the detail, metadata, imagery, and all of it truly collaborative — the benefits are both immediate and obvious. They get to benefit from the eyes and ears of the sales team without having been on site. It is true that the estimation and engineering team would ideally get together with sales to guide them to what they need to have captured. Those who do this consistently are in a better position to scale their business and leverage their top engineering resources wisely. It is NOT scalable to send engineers to every site walk.
Why does this missed opportunity occur? Sometimes it gets mischaracterized as just a sales tool. While our platform certainly is a sales tool, it’s much more than that. It’s also a place where engineers and ops can create and maintain a living digital as-built. The entire team can see:
- what the building’s physical security system will look like (during the design phase)
- what it’s supposed to look like (during implementation)
- and what it looks like (both at completion and over the system’s life cycle)
We’ve heard people characterize it as their “single source of truth”. That sounds pretty good and requires more of the key roles to be truly included into the software. No more loss in translation.
3. Underutilizing Guest User & Collaboration: Slow, Ineffective Communication
Have you ever shared a Google Doc or Sheet with someone to work on a project? Boy, does it beat emailing around a document that gets edited and sent back, only to be sent back and forth multiple times. Who knows which version is the latest?
That almost seems like an old-school example but it illustrates this mistake. It’s time to stop expecting that emailing a PDF and using markup tools can be effective given the pace of the industry and customer expectations.
Today, we see a few constituents more deeply involved in planning, design and system life-cycle management.
This includes securely inviting in:
- Various roles on your team (sales, ops, PMs, techs, engineering etc)
- Manufacturer Partners
- Subcontractors
- And, Customers!
The missed opportunity is not engaging them again to drill down further into the design and planning. Some people may feel uncomfortable inviting customers, but if you are looking for a long-term engagement that is precisely the opportunity to create trust. With System Surveyor, it’s possible to securely invite people as a Guest into the Site and Survey and provide the right privileges, either read-only or as an editor and for a certain period of time that will expire.
One of the most exciting collaboration opportunities is for an integrator to invite their manufacturer vendor partner to help with a design, maybe of a new AI camera or cloud-based technology. The best sales engineers will appreciate the more efficient, collaborative nature – not a sloppy PDF. You’ll get their best advisor which is what you need. We estimate that at least 200 sales engineers around the country use System Surveyor – so it may not be a surprise to them to be asked to design together this way.
Big mistake to miss out.
4. Using a PDF as an As-Built versus a Digital As-Built: Projects suffer
One of the biggest weaknesses of using PDFs as an as-built is that they are instantly, immediately out of date. The millisecond you create that PDF, it’s locked in. Yes, there are fiddly markup tools available, but they aren’t an effective way to update an as-built over the life cycle of a security system.
System Surveyor provides the opportunity to do as-builts differently. When you use System Surveyor for every phase of the project, that system design takes on multiple “lives” for you and your client. It starts as a sales proposal, then evolves into a technical roadmap. Post-install, it becomes the dynamic documentation of the system as it is at installation. From there, organizations can easily update their system designs to reflect replacements, upgrades, and any of the other changes that naturally occur over the system’s life cycle.
It’s a true living digital as-built and that “single source of truth”, one that can continue to be updated all the way to end of life, where the data in the as-built becomes a rich foundation for the next major system upgrade or replacement.
See how Prosegur Security cuts design time in half and performs everything from sales to lifecycle management in one easy-to-use all-in-one platform
What’s at Stake? Efficient, Profitable Growth & Scalability
It’s time to get a few hours back a week by avoiding these mistakes and capitalizing on the opportunity. In every article that I read on physical security, the message is that there is a great opportunity this year and heading into 2025. In fact, according to a Harris poll, 7 out of 10 physical security leaders anticipate that they will increase spending on physical security in 2025.
Many of them are looking at upgrades to their cloud-based solutions and new AI-based technologies. Of course, those require some new expert-level design, and in many cases, organizations will need upgraded infrastructure to support the new tech.
Read between the lines: 2025 is bringing great opportunities for integrators! The ones that stand to benefit the most are those who have efficient, scalable systems powered by the next generation of security system design software. Design high technology systems with better tools.
Simple Changes with Easy-to-See Benefits
Trying our powerful, easy-to-use digital security design software is the most effective way to start winning more deals and achieving efficient, profitable growth. As you do, be sure to learn from the predecessors and avoid these mistakes so you can unlock the full potential of the platform and achieve even more consistency, value, and professionalism.
