Business Development | Risk

6 Simple Steps to Win More Security Clients in 2019

January 17, 2019 | 5 min read
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It’s the start of a new year, which usually means setting annual sales goals and finding new ways to win more customers. For physical security consultants, January can be an exciting time full of potential. But it can also be a stressful month as security professionals try to find more effective ways to increase their sales.

Sometimes it’s the simple changes that bring in the greatest results. Want to boost your security sales in 2019? Try these simple steps.

Handpicked related content: Top Things Your Physical Risk Assessment Customers Wish You Were Doing

Update Your Website

You’ve got 50 milliseconds to make a good impression. After that, your prospect has already formed an opinion about your security company.

Even if you don’t get new customers from your website, your prospective clients will check it out. It’s part of the vetting process—your website says a lot about your business. If your site looks like it was built in 2003, or if it appears thrown together in a couple hours, it will throw up all kinds of red flags.

Your clients are looking for a top professional they can trust their business to. If your website doesn’t communicate that, they’ll turn-tail the other direction and never look back.

Surprise Your Customers

Go the extra mile. Under-promise and over-deliver. Go above and beyond. The phrases have become cliche, but the concept behind them hasn’t. Customers notice when you go out of your way to give them more than they expect. It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture or costly to you. It just needs to be thoughtful, helpful and valuable to your customer.

Little gestures like this can make all the difference when a company is choosing a security consultant.

Be Client-centric

When you’re trying to win a sale, it’s hard not to think about winning the sale. But that’s exactly what it takes if you want to boost your contracts in 2019. Your customers are thinking about themselves, and they want a security consultant who will address their pains. They don’t want you to address your own pains.

Customer-first security professionals will win more sales, because they’re the ones who place the client’s needs as the highest priority.

That means that you actually care about the customer. You’re looking out for their best interests, even if it means you pass up on upselling an add-on service. Spend your time educating your customers, not selling them.

Once they see you’re an expert in the industry that takes the time to understand them and look out for their best interests, they’ll be crazy not to hire you!

Be Professional

It doesn’t matter how much knowledge you have, how much experience you’ve got under your belt, or how great your customer service is. If you don’t appear professional, your entire business will look cut-rate.

Business-to-business (B2B) clients are very careful with their money. They’re not going to give it to someone they don’t trust. And presenting yourself as a professional is one of the greatest keys to building trust.

But what are we talking about when we say to be professional? Here are a few pointers:

  • Dress like a professional. You don’t need to wear a tie, but you’d better not look like you came in off the street.
  • Come fully prepared.
  • Show up early. Early is on time, and on time is late.
  • Don’t talk negatively about other clients or competitors.
  • Don’t share confidential information about other clients.
  • Show respect to everyone, no matter what their role.
  • Don’t swear.

Those little extras will go a long way in winning contracts. You may even find that clients are willing to pay you more!

Use Current Technology

Business is about keeping up with the competition, and for your clients that means keeping up with technological advances. They’re starting to use the internet of things (IoT) and building automation systems to protect and manage their facilities. When they hire you to assess their premises, they want to know that you’re at least as familiar with their technology as they are.

Using paper checklists and hard-copy reports raises doubts that you have the expertise your clients are looking for.

Many physical security consultants still prefer the old pen-and-paper method of risk assessments. If you adopt digital technology, you’ll have a leg up on the competition. And with a tool like Circadian Risk, you’ll cut your operating costs drastically—giving you greater profit.

Protect Their Data

B2B customers aren’t just cautious with their money—they’re cautious with their data, too. Unfortunately, most physical security consultants don’t do a great job keeping customer data secure. If you can show them what you do to safeguard their information and how it is different from the competition, you’ll score a big win—and win more bids.

What should you do to protect your clients’ data? Here are some starting points:

  • Store electronic data in the cloud, not on your own server (or hard drive). Use a secure and compliant service provider that undergoes third-party audits.
  • Stay up-to-date on anti-virus software and firewall protection.
  • Have a data security policy in place that is followed by all.
  • Use encrypted methods whenever you share information with your clients.
  • Keep hard copies of information physically secure.

It may take some time to implement all of those measures, but any time you can cross one more of them off the list, you’ve made your security consulting business more competitive, and more attractive to prospective customers.

Go deeper: We’re Cloud-Only—And That Makes Your Security Business More Valuable

Earn More Sales in 2019

If you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to win more security sales in 2019, these simple steps can make a big difference. Get started this week—choose one from the list and make that your focus for January. Tackle another one next month, and so on for the first two quarters of the year. Spend the next two quarters making tweaks to fine-tune your sales efforts.

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