How to Build a Security Company That Actually Closes New Deals

Hosts Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble get practical and tactical on winning new logos in security & life-safety. They break down how to niche your ICP, keep your message consistent, split lead vs. sales process, and get multithreaded so you close more deals—without wasting budget on broad, unfocused marketing. From anchor pricing and social proof snapshots to CRM must-haves, this is the field guide to predictable pipeline and higher close rates.

✨ What You’ll Learn

• Niche to win: How vertical focus (e.g., K-12 & universities) sharpens messaging, improves ops, and raises credibility.
• ICP, not guesswork: Turn real customer interviews into a usable Ideal Customer Profile that drives copy, offers, and outreach.
• Lead vs. Sales process: Why separating them boosts qualification, reduces time vampires, and increases conversions.
• Multithreading that matters: Get beyond one facility manager to influencers and power—so you don’t lose single-threaded deals.

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• Collin Trimble 
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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Digital Marketing
• 2:20 Challenges in the Security and Fire Industry
• 6:08 Effective Marketing Strategies
• 29:14 Effective Lead and Sales Processes
• 32:39 Understanding the Importance of Qualified Leads
• 42:10 Leveraging Technology for Sales Success

Transcript

E&E EP 4 Transcript

Stephen Olmon: [00:00:00] If you are not actively marketing, you are not building a business, you're building a secret, and also kind of from a hyper-local perspective and not be too broad 'cause you're gonna light money on fire. I 

Collin Trimble: think we can also agree we're gonna need digital marketing. So I would encourage anybody that's out there, Hey, try it again.

Because it does work. And once you really find the unlock in digital marketing, you're gonna want to double down. 

Stephen Olmon: People will go look at you online. They will go check you out. And I think hearing some of this may sound like it's super in the weeds. It's kind of overkill. No.

Collin Trimble: Hey y'all. Welcome to Entry and Exit. My name is Colin. This is my co-host Steven. We are gonna unpack the security and fire industry to give you actionable advice to help you grow, scale, and ultimately exit your business. 

Stephen Olmon: Last week we talked about sales, marketing, technology, really more in [00:01:00] broad strokes and heavily oriented around farming your existing book of business to fuel your growth and.

Today we're going to really dive into more practical tactical elements on the new logo side. The, the core focus really is in niching down, um, having a consistent message for marketing, defining your ideal customer profile, um, and really defining and differentiating between your lead versus sales process, which ultimately all should equate to improving your close rate.

And, and that's also gonna be driven by. Uh, being multi-threaded, deepening relationships, um, with the prospect and preach and having better information to, uh, yeah. Better information to go off of. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, we're gonna get practical and tactical. I like that p and t we're gonna get practical and tactical, baby.

[00:02:00] We're gonna get it going. With the tactical and the practical advice, uh, I think we're gonna kick it off with where are we today? What does the industry look like today? There are some unique challenges in this industry. Um, I'm gonna name a few that I have experienced, um, and I'll give you a couple real quick.

Number one, this industry is typically characterized, especially in the sales process, by being single threaded to a single point of contact at your customer or prospect. So what that means is you get a phone call, they call, you know, into your mainline, it's the facility manager. You go out, you do your site, walk with the facility manager, you present some pricing to the facility manager, and you follow up with the facility manager and you never talk to anybody else in the organization.

That could be the facility manager's boss. That could be the facility manager's, peers, or the folks that work in or around the facility manager. You're single threaded, you're gonna have [00:03:00] a low, lower likelihood of closing that deal. Another unique challenge is, and this is I think maybe the biggest one that I've experienced.

Particularly around what we would call retrofit or renovate or customers where it's not, uh, ground up construction, which is this, you're not always comparing apples to apples. Your customers are gonna get two, three. Four bids, and very rarely are those bids gonna be apples to apples. It may not even be the same number of cameras.

So if you go in, they say, yeah, I wanna, I need new cameras. Well, you may go in and say, okay, well let's replace all your existing cameras. We're gonna replace one for one for 20 cameras. Your competitor may go in and say, oh, you don't need five of those. Let's just do 15 cameras. Your other competitor may say, ah, we're gonna do 22 cameras.

Um, you're not comparing apples to apples, not just on the scope of work, but a lot of times on the technology, even most commonly on the technology, you may provide one manufacturer, your competitor may use another, and that makes it really [00:04:00] hard for your customer. Or potential customer rather, to actually make a decision.

And guys, we're gonna talk today about how to overcome that problem. That is going to be the single biggest deal killer for you, is not allowing your customer to understand what apples to apples comparison is. So we're gonna talk about that. And then the last thing I think is just, man, there is a lot of competition and it's broad in scope.

You've got everybody from the guy that's an independent operator that works out of his truck. All the way to the mid-sized, uh, independent security and fire providers to the national providers that are, you know, servicing in every major city. And so it's difficult. Every competitor has a little bit of a different flavor of their strengths and weaknesses from pricing to value, to reputation, to social proof.

So there is a stiff competition in the security and sales. Uh. Space, particularly in security. [00:05:00] 

Stephen Olmon: The, the thing that we've, just to double tap on one of those items, which is better information. You're not going to get better information if you're not multithreaded. Mm. If you only have a single source of information.

You're trying to pull things outta different people, whether it is their actual needs, whether it's their, you know, we talked about bant, you know, you always love to talk about bant 'cause you're a nerd. And so on the, on the b on the budget side, like do we actually know what the budget is? Is there a conflict internally of what that budget is?

What is the actual need? You know, we, we've recently had a project going on where. There's, uh, a need. It's inherent. They have to do something, but maybe there's, uh, different thoughts on how they're going to deal with paying for that or financing, or what they can actually afford, right? And so the, the only way that [00:06:00] you're going to actually be kind of superior in that process when you're competing with others is to have better information than the next guy or gal.

Collin Trimble: Yeah, absolutely. And here's what I would say about the, the current state of the industry as it pertains to marketing. And Steven, you can, you can give us some, some nuggets here, some marketing nuggets on what are our competitors doing. Well, the answer is not much, but I will say this, PPC or Pay per click, or Google AdWords and organic, SEO, um, is pretty saturated.

There was a time, I would say, even as early as five to six years, seven years ago, where very few were doing PPC, uh, any type of organic, SEO, any type of social media, very few people were doing it. Now, most people are doing that, and particularly with the onset of AI and enabling you to generate, um, organic content at scale.

The proliferation of SEO [00:07:00] is, it's pretty saturated. So if you're not doing that. You're behind. You gotta start now. That's your foundation, that's your, uh, business card if you will. That's kind of the front page of your business. Uh, is your, is your website, your PPC strategy, your SEO. Um, so if you're not doing that today, you should try to add a little bit of budget, a little bit of time and get started on that.

Stephen Olmon: Yeah, I, I like the business axiom. It's like, um, if you are not actively marketing, you are not building a business, you're building a secret and no one's gonna know. Maybe your mom's super proud of you. That's great. Um, but especially on the local side, hyper-local, you know, a few trucks, you know, you want to grow.

You're trying to cross that kind of one, two, 3 million top line revenue. You have to be marketing and it feels painful, right? Mm-hmm. It's the same thing with hiring ahead of sales and kind of that concept. Uh, and so [00:08:00] being measured in, in starting to allocate budget to those things, you don't wanna overdo it.

You know, you probably wanna live in that four to 8% of top line revenue on your marketing budget, but more than zero. And, and a lot of you probably are at zero, so you have to get started and, you know, to, to drop a marketing nugget. Yeah. If you are gonna go spend, whether through with an agency or someone that you've hired, you think has some marketing chops, they can't be spending on terms that are really vague or really broad, it needs to be.

Tulsa fire alarm inspection as the, you know, uh, kind of keyword that you're targeting. Not fire alarm generically or something like that. Right. Because there's an incredible amount of spend. And also from an SEO perspective, the more specific [00:09:00] and tailored you can get to what you're good at. You know? Yeah.

What, where, what's driving your own GP? Internally? Yeah. Like let's, let's focus on those services. Also kind of from a hyper-local perspective and not be too broad. 'cause you're gonna light money on fire if you're trying to go out in the world and market very broadly. 

Collin Trimble: Well, and one, one thing you just said that I think is really, it's a salient point, um, don't just give up because your first attempt wasn't successful, right?

So we see this so often. Where an owner starts to get a little bit of cash to be able to reinvest in their business, they know they need to do marketing. They give it one attempt. It feels like they lit the money on fire and they don't try it again. Man, that's like trying to hire an ops manager and the first one doesn't work out and you just don't try it again, and you give up on the concept.

I think we can all agree we need ops managers as we grow. I think we can also agree we're gonna need digital marketing [00:10:00] to grow. So I would encourage anybody that's out there, Hey, try it again because it does work. So if it's not working. You should get a better agency. You should reach out to somebody that's doing it well, reach out to us.

We can give you as much advice as you know you want, and we can introduce you to some folks that can help. Um, but I'm telling you, you don't wanna give up on it because you'll just be limited. You're just gonna limit your growth. Um, and once you really find the unlock in digital marketing, um, you're gonna want to double down.

You're gonna want to continue to double down. I 

Stephen Olmon: think it's similar to hiring salespeople. Mm-hmm. It's the same type of risk, right? You're doing something if you've, a lot of these, uh, businesses in the security industry, especially if they're sub 3 million, sub two and a half million top line, it's owner led sales.

And so in the same way of taking the risk and. Spending the time to in, I [00:11:00] can't tell you how many owners I've talked to where they, same thing as the ops side, but they invested time and energy to train a salesperson. It didn't work out. And then they get gun shy. Yep. And so it's, it's true on both sides of the house, sales and marketing, you have to start to allocate budget there.

If you want to kind of break through those revenue ceilings. 

Collin Trimble: Absolutely. So let's talk about a couple things that do work that are traditional methods. These are not mind blowing things we're not gonna talk about. You know, none of this stuff is gonna be highly technical, uh, digital marketing. And then, and then what we'll do from there is we'll kind of jump into the marketing playbook and we'll kind of share some of the stuff that we're doing, what we think works, uh, and yeah, we'll go from there.

So, a couple things that I think that, that still work that you've heard of that, that you should do, uh, would be number one, showing up in person. Have your sales team show up in person face-to-face? Man, that might be, maybe we should have named our podcast face-to-face, 'cause we're gonna say face-to-face.[00:12:00] 

Uh, in person a lot on this podcast because we believe that that is one of the magic bullets. People say there's no magic bullets in sales and marketing. I think there is one of those is, is face-to-face meetings, that's number one. Number two is multi-channel outreach. Don't just do PPC, don't just do SEO.

Don't just do social media. Don't just do cold email outreach or cold calling. Do all of them and it, and Hey, how about this? You don't have to do 'em all at scale. You don't have to send out a thousand cold emails. Why not just send out 25 to three customers, try to make 15 calls to three customers? You don't have to go huge, but you should go across many channels.

And I think that that's pretty universal advice. And the last thing I'll say that continues to work. Is consistent positioning of your brand. If you're gonna roll something out on social media, it better be consistent on your website, on your PPC, on your cut [00:13:00] sheets, you want to have consistent messaging, consistent branding.

All too often we see this new website that's rolled out with a fancy new logo. Then all the social media posts are using the old logo or the old slang or the old, you know, business motto, whatever, man. Try to tighten that up. Try to get consistent branding and messaging across all of your channels, and you're gonna see a little bit more success there.

Stephen Olmon: Yeah. You see the larger regional and national players doing that and. In a, in a past role in a former life, uh, we were, uh, uh, in a software business in a different industry and we had, at the time, 15 or 16 employees and we would go to conferences and people thought we had like over a hundred employees.

And it was for that exact reason, it was. The branding was really consistent. It looked really clean. The copy, the [00:14:00] messaging, what you say matters. So what we said in a webinar or you know, on a social media post or on our website, we use the same slogans, the same kind of catchphrases, the same nomenclature for our services, and it was all really intentional and it just made us look more formidable.

It made us look more credible. And so if you're going, especially on the commercial side, if you're trying to go up market and win larger deals, those things matter. People will go look at you online, they will go check you out and they will listen to the things you're saying. And so it's important to kind of build that consistency because it's, you know, I don't wanna say fake it till you make it, but there is an element I do of that.

Yeah, it, it's true. And so oftentimes, especially on the more local side, you probably will deliver the best service, the best [00:15:00] experience, but larger customers are concerned that, that maybe you, you aren't capable. And so if you can kind of show face and, and show off and be more credible online. It might make that 5% difference that wins you a deal, that gives you an injection of cash that you can then invest into sales and marketing.

Right. You know, it's, it's very cyclical like that. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah. I think the other side of that coin too that's interesting is a lot of operators that we've worked with, and even the, the operator that we purchased this business from would share this axiom. Which is that they believe customers would work with them 'cause they're the local brand and they don't need to invest in their marketing and their logo.

And, and that, that their customers almost found it endearing that they were unpolished. Um, and I think that's a little bit of the wrong perspective. I [00:16:00] think that what your customers valued. Was the personalized touch and service and high levels of communication and what you think that they're actually valuing or looking for is this kind of unpolished?

I'm a local operator, uh, and I think that you can have both. I think you can have a polished brand with consistent messaging and deliver excellent. Customer service with high levels of communication and still be the great local operator. I think you could do both. And I don't think it has to be very hard.

And that kind of brings us over to the marketing kind of playbook marketing foundation. Uh, we're gonna do many episodes on marketing, but we wanna talk about a couple specific things around brand positioning. What does it mean to niche down? We talked about that. Um, and then also how to get multi-channel or how to use multi-channel sales and marketing to develop more leads and ultimately more closed one deals.

Stephen Olmon: Yeah. So let's, [00:17:00] let's start on the kinda niching down and ICP. So for us, one of the things that we've really focused on in the last two years is on on, on K through 12 and university like we've. Our business, we have grown a lot on the school side, and so I'm not taking a client testimonial from some oil and gas company to, you know, a CIO or some, you know, kind of, uh, head of security or whatever it may be on a college campus.

It's not as relevant. Right? Yeah. So. We have, which this is common sense, but it's not necessarily common practice. So let's focus on a vertical or maybe a couple verticals that we feel confident in, that we have experience in, that we know we can do good work in, that's profitable and let's leverage those experiences forward to gain further [00:18:00] credibility and win new prospects over and.

Unfortunately, what a lot of people do is just grasp at any possible revenue and they say, I'm gonna go here and do that. I'm gonna go over here, do this, and just anything they possibly can find. It's kind of disjointed in terms of the work you're pursuing and acting from a place of desperation.

Typically doesn't go very well. Right. So we're talking about having a much greater level of focus in terms of what type of work you're doing, um, who you're doing it for. Um. And that ultimately that will have a compounding effect. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah, there's a, there's a saying that says the riches are in the niches.

And man, we know so many friends who have started companies or software companies where it's like, I am a email messaging platform for plumbing companies that are between five and [00:19:00] 30 million. They blow up these software providers, the ones that are the most niched down, are usually the ones that are the most successful.

And I think there's a fear I'll speak as an operator and an owner myself. It's like, I think there's a fear that if you go too hard on a given niche, let's just say K through 12 and university, that um, you're gonna have customers that say, oh, well. I, I'm a multifamily property. I didn't think you did multifamily because all y'all talk about is K through 12.

That's not been our experience. We have not had the experience where, uh, one industry didn't think we worked in that particular industry because we had a whole bunch of messaging that was targeted to another given industry. Um, and I would say that the more niche down you can get. Um, even, even down, there's some, op Steven alluded to this, there's some operational efficiencies that can be gained from it, but also I think a big mistake people make is they think that their value proposition of their company is the same for every [00:20:00] industry and every type of customer.

And that's just simply not the case. Uh, and I think you've probably experienced this when you're working in a given industry, the things that that industry may value is different. Then what another industry may value. We've had experiences across multiple industries where they're telling us certain things are really important over other really important things.

And I'll just give you a an example. In the K through 12 example, we get told all the time that the most important thing that we do is our speed to service call and how fast we respond when they have an issue, when they're, you know, sta uh, schools are, you know, historically understaffed. So when that fire alarm is beeping and they have to send somebody in there every 20 minutes to silence it, man, it can really drive their staff nuts.

It can disrupt operations. If they need someone out. Today, not somebody [00:21:00] in two weeks. So guess what? We've heard that feedback from a lot of folks. What? What do we do? We message on that. We message to schools and specifically call out. Not, Hey, we are the smartest camera installers. That's not what we've heard.

That we've not heard, man, we're so glad that y'all work with us because you're the smartest camera installers. What they say is, man, we're so glad we work with y'all. 'cause y'all show up same day or next day whenever we have an issue. So that's what we message on. So that's a niche, right? So you would wanna market your social media.

Your SEO, your cold outreach, your sales person, your discovery decks, whatever you're building that the customer's looking at, you would want it to be niched down to those specific value points whenever you're selling. 

Stephen Olmon: So going through, again, you might, you might have heard the acronym earlier, ICP or Ideal Customer Profile.

All of this is tied back together, and again, I would go back to. [00:22:00] What have you done? What, who's your team like, what type of work currently that you can actually go execute on? Are you confident in doing, like, I think we've all, I can think of a specific job where, you know, we were asked to do something and talk about fake it till you make it.

Let's like Sure, we can do that. Yeah. Yes. And then you go scramble mode. Yeah. So. We're not talking about scramble mode. Yeah. You know, so what industry industries do you feel confident in? Were the gps, there were the experiences there. And then let's, let's start to talk a little more specifically about ICP.

Collin Trimble: Yeah. ICP Man, I think that a lot of people, um, I didn't know what it was. People had said ICP, I didn't really know what that meant. Tactically, what is an ICP? Okay, so an ICP. Is an ideal client profile that's in a specific industry. So here's, here's an example, right? So an [00:23:00] ICP for our alarm masters for our marketing would be a director of technology or it.

At a K through 12 district that is in a tertiary market that has, um, many responsibilities that may overlap with facilities that prefers communication to be over phone. And also is responsible for, you know, dictating the rest of security scopes of work in their entire district. So they're not just responsible for video, they're responsible for video, fire access, control, pa, all the things.

And then what we would really look at is we would say, okay, that is our ideal client profile. That is the person we're targeting. So how do we speak the language of that director of technology? What is the pain points? They experience in their job? Well, I'll tell you one pain point, they get thrown all of the facilities stuff that should be [00:24:00] on the facilities manager that ends up on their desk for anything technology.

So they assume, well, if it's plumbing, sure that's facilities, but if there's something wrong with our access control system, that's technology and that really should be on the director of it or whatever. And so they get a lot of pain because. What they don't really wanna be dealing with is service calls they don't want to be dealing with, trying to figure out and troubleshoot things.

So those are some pain points. So how do we solve those pain points? We talk about how we're gonna be out there tomorrow, how we have fantastic phone support, how we don't always have to send a technician out to fix a problem. We will try to get it handled over the phone first to save on that service call.

Those are some messaging tactics that we use to speak to the heart of that director of technology. And lemme just be clear. You should not have to guess. Do guesswork to figure out who your ICP is. Your ICP exists in your current customer base today. It's probably the guy or [00:25:00] gal that sends you a text directly today.

That's awesome. That's a champion that you love working with them and it's a delight when they call you. Generally. That's a good person to call and run some questions. Hey man, do you mind if I take five minutes? To ask you a couple questions about your experience with my business and what things resonated.

Do a quick ICP interview. Or a couple ICP interviews and just write down a list. This does not have to be some really intense exercise. It just needs to be something you spend a little bit of brain space on. So that's that. ICP get as niched down and as specific as possible. This would be the person.

Here's the way that I, I was told this originally, your ICP is the person that if you could put a billboard in front of their face about your business, you, you would, you would know exactly who that person is. So we're gonna try to build that billboard today and we're gonna talk about how you can do that.

Stephen Olmon: Yeah, it's really good. I, I've also heard it said [00:26:00] before, it's kind of pithy, but like ideal customer profile. I've also heard it intentional customer profile. Just like, yeah, we're going to be hyper intentional. And I think hearing some of this may sound like it's super in the weeds. It's kind of overkill.

No, it's not. I promise we have directly benefited from. Being very intentional about this and we're continuing to build out kind of net new ICPs as we grow our business. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah. One thing that works really well too, um, is social proof. And people think social proof. So social proof, is that what they would think?

Social proof is, is a customer testimonial or case study. Those are great. You should get those. That's, that's kind of falls in the category of what everyone else is already doing. Here's a really quick tactical thing that I think rocks, and we've gotten a lot of feedback on it. We call 'em customer snapshots.

Uh, sometimes they happen organically. Sometimes we, we ask the customer to do [00:27:00] this, but what it is, is I get an email from a customer and the subject line says, Hey, and then it, and then it literally is like, Hey, I just wanna tell you, you guys were great. We had an issue, you know. Terry came out, he solved the issue.

We, you know, we were racking our brain. We're so thankful Terry was out here. Thanks for the fast service. Here's what I do. I blur out the customer's information. I screenshot that whole email and I throw it on our website and our ads and our social media and our discovery deck and I, and then I do that three or four times.

There is nothing that screams social proof, like an email from a customer and honestly. I dunno if you've heard the, heard the, the phrase TLDR too long. Don't read. That's what happens with these case studies. A lot of times all these businesses spend all this time and money on case studies and trying to release new case studies every week.

It's too long. I don't wanna read it. Gimme the highlights. Summarize chat, GPT. Summarize, please. Well, I don't think anything summarizes better than a customer email or even like a, a text message. [00:28:00] You know, screenshot that blue bubble, shout out to iPhone and you can get that posted up there too, man. And I'll tell you what, this is what the software business is already doing.

If you go to a lot of these software, new software providers, you'll see all over their website, screenshots of text message bubbles, and email snapshots. Those work a lot. We get feedback on it. This is not just something that we think works. We've heard feedback. Our customers tell us it works, so we're gonna keep doing it.

Stephen Olmon: Especially a testimonial you all have on a website could totally be made up. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah. 

Stephen Olmon: You know, and so whenever you have a screenshot from an email, it just feels hyper credible. So, so let's, um, let's keep rolling. And I, I want to dive more into the kinda sales playbook side tied into some of the things that we've talked about.

Um, because as you build an ICP, you niche down, that starts to impact qualified leads and, and getting [00:29:00] tighter on what you're, who you're selling to, and ultimately leading to a higher conversion rate. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah. I wanna start with the end in mind when we talk about the sales playbook. What is the end in mind?

What's our goal of the sales playbook? Higher volume of qualified leads, and in a higher percentage close rate. That's what you want. That is the whole purpose of a sales playbook. That is the end chapter of your sales playbook. So you want to drive. Sales process and lead process that gives you better qualified leads and gives you a better shot at closing them.

Let's start with the why. Why do you want better qualified leads? And I don't just mean a number so that, let's think through the sentence or the, the phrase, better qual, higher number of better qualified leads. Yes, we want more. We actually want more qualified leads. I am going to submit to you today that it would be more damaging for you.

To have [00:30:00] a lead that is unqualified and ends up not closing at the end of a sales cycle than if you never had that lead to begin with. You can only do to certain amount of time. Your sales team is only capable of working a certain number of hours in a week. There are a lot of time vampires out there that are trying to just get information from you or they were never gonna buy from you or you're not even the fit for them.

One example for ALARM Masters is. We are not the cheapest provider of security and fire services. We're certainly not the most expensive. We're right there in the middle, probably upper middle, and we want our customers to know that before we ever engage with them. And so we wanna make sure that we're disqualifying the folks that are looking for the cheapest one step above DIY solution.

They're not a fit, not an ICP for us. So we want to disqualify those. We also wanna give ourself the best chance. Closing that customer. So we're gonna spend some time [00:31:00] on this today, but how do you give yourself the best chance of closing a customer or giving yourself the best close rate? One, you have the most amount of information.

You have the key information. So that would be you understand the customer's budget. And here's number two. This is one. People forget all the time you have a compelling event. Why? Why are they deciding to do this today? Why didn't they do it six months ago and why are they not doing it six months from today?

Understanding those two pieces of information just as a foundation is gonna give you the biggest leg up on your competition. The second thing that improves your close rate is getting multithreaded. Multithreaded, meaning means having multiple contacts within an opportunity. Um, it doesn't always have to be somebody.

A lot of times people say, oh, get access to power. Go to the decision maker, whatever. Yeah, that's important. But I'll tell you what, I've had a lot of deals that I've won by the entry-level [00:32:00] facilities manager who had no decision making authority, but they were huge influencers on the deal and they helped get it over the finish line.

So getting multi-threaded. And last but not least, people wanna buy from people they like. So what does that mean? You gotta have a good relationship. You, how do you develop a relationship? Time, baby time. The more face-to-face meetings and the more time you spend with that prospect, lead, whatever, they're going to give you a higher likelihood of winning that business.

So we're gonna jump in here, talk about lead process, talk about sales process, and we're gonna talk about why we split out our lead process from our sales process. 

Stephen Olmon: Yeah, I actually really, uh, love the, so we're both parents. We both have three little kids each, and you hear people say, kids spell love TIME.

Yeah. Well, so do customers. [00:33:00] Yeah. It's, it's so good. Yeah. And the, the reality is we've gotten a ton of feedback from people. You spend time with us, you come sit with us. You know, especially the regional, national guys, they don't give us the time of day. We'll be there in three weeks to do a site walk. So a big advantage as you're growing is being a little more nimble, flexible, and being able to, to get out early and often to spend time.

The, it's interesting, I think the higher. Quantity time you spend with a prospect, it inherently is gonna translate to a higher percentage likelihood of closing the deal. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe that's, maybe that sounds overly simple. Yep. It's hard to do. 

Collin Trimble: It's true. It's true. Yeah. I would say, um, I would ask you a question, Mr.

Or Mrs. Listener, how many [00:34:00] deals have you lost where you are on a texting basis with your customer? Versus how many deals have you lost where you only were email relationship with them, maybe a site walk and the rest was email communication. That should tell you something that should help kind of paint the picture of what you need to get to.

You need to get to a texting relationship, but the way to get to a texting relationship is to build a relationship, is to spend some time. So I totally agree. Uh, how do you do that? Um, well, we're gonna kind of jump into lead process. Versus sales process. We talked a little bit about this on our last pod.

Um, and you know, I think people, people think of a sales process as everything from, I'm targeting this customer. They're a prospect versus a lead, versus an opportunity. A lot of different definitions of that. I'll share how ALARM Masters thinks about that. A prospect is somebody, um, that you've not made contact with.

They don't know you or they don't know you Well. You are [00:35:00] trying to develop a relationship within that account. Usually these are, uh, ICPs that you believe are a really good fit for you, but probably they haven't heard of you. Uh, they become a lead when they've heard of you, like when you've made some form of contact with them, whether that's an inbound lead or an outbound lead.

Uh, maybe a prospect is somebody you're sending a bunch of, um, outbound emails to, and then they respond, Ooh, now you've converted a prospect to a lead. Uh, then they respond and they agree to take a phone call. You've got a whole lead process established here. Uh, so what is our lead process? So let's just get super tactical.

You can do this however you wanna do it, but I like to think about, uh, a lead process in the form of a, keeping us on track, holding my team accountable, and also helping me find out where. Leads drop out of the process and go quiet or disqualify themselves. So maybe I can improve that step. So my lead process starts with new meaning a lead has come in, we've made some form of contact with them, um, then it goes to contact [00:36:00] attempted.

So sometimes what that means is like a, a contact will come inbound to our website 'cause we've been trying to target them and then, uh, we try to reach out to them. We make a contact hit, but they haven't responded yet. Once they respond, we say contact made. Then one time, once contact is made, it really goes into one of three buckets.

It's either qualified, we've done some qualification criteria. We'll talk about that on a future pod. Um, you have. Disqualified. They're not a qualified customer for you. Um, sometimes disqualified customer just means they want the cheapest solution. You're not gonna spend your time on it. Or nurture.

Nurture means they're not qualified yet. You should do something with those nurtured leads. Please do something with them. Please, please don't just disqualify them. Your, your nurture is your future qualified leads. Okay? Uh, once. They're qualified. That becomes an opportunity. So your prospect converts to a lead, which converts to an opportunity.

That opportunity has its own sales process. [00:37:00] Step one, um, is discovery meeting. So what's a discovery meeting? A discovery meeting is a meeting before site walk all too often. The sales reps want to go straight to a sidewalk because the customer has an urgency. Many times customers have an urgency, but how many times have you gone with the urgent customer and gotten the pricing to them in 48 hours, all for them to ghost you?

Man, that is frustrating. So I would, you know, argue that a sales process should be a give and take a relationship, just like anything else. And one of those is a discovery meeting where you get to learn about the customer, you get to learn about their project, and you get to share a little bit about the value of your business to them.

This is also a really important step to get. Information from the customer. Every stage of your sales process should allow you to get more multi-threaded, develop relationship, and get you more information. Those are the three objectives of every single step in the sales process. Discovery meeting allows you [00:38:00] to get budget information.

Don't give up on the budget question. When you say, do you have a budget for this project and Steven, what do they say? Typically when I say, Hey, do you have a budget on this project? 

Stephen Olmon: No, not, not specifically not. We're not really sure yet. 

Collin Trimble: No, I, I can't tell you how many times I've heard that, you know, what I've not heard is I have a budget of $18,923 and 66 cents.

And even if they do have that, they're not sharing it with you. At least not initially. Uh, but they might at the end. But a lot of times, I'm gonna be honest with you, 'cause this has been me as an owner of a business, I don't have a budget. 'cause I don't know what it's gonna cost me. Is this thing gonna cost me a thousand dollars, 10,000 or a hundred thousand dollars?

So what do you do? You anchor price them. If your sales reps don't have anchor pricing, get it to 'em. Here's what we would say. Hey, Mr. Customer. Thanks for sharing that. You don't have a budget. You probably have some price expectation, right? Like if I said this was gonna be a million dollars, you'd probably say that's [00:39:00] a little too much.

And if I said this was gonna be a hundred dollars, you'd say Sign me up. 'cause you'd be ready to go. So there's somewhere in between, right? So lemme just share with you, we have a lot of different options. That we can sell you. I'm just gonna give you kind of the ballpark down the middle. For every door of access control you have, I'm gonna tell you it's gonna be about $3,000 a door, roughly.

And so if you've got three doors, you got about $9,000 for that access control. Where does that fit in your expectation? Pause. Don't say anything. Let them talk and let them give you all the information about their budget that you initially wanted. So use that discovery meeting. Also, use the discovery meeting to find out the compelling event.

Why are they doing this today? Did they have a break in? Did their old system fail? Are they renovating their business? Did a hurricane come in and destroy their system? All of that's good information that you should know. So we start with that discovery. Then we go to that sidewalk. Or if you're a pro, you're gonna try to do multiple [00:40:00] sidewalks.

Why would you waste your time to do multiple sidewalks? Well, 'cause it's more face-to-face meetings, TIME, more time with the customer. The next one is the demo. The demo is your technology demo. If you're gonna sell them on a technology, video, access control intrusion, whatever. You should show them what it's gonna look like.

That also allows you to get more multi-threaded. Hey, Mr. Customer, I'm sure there's gonna be multiple people in your business. That are going to be using this technology, would you mind inviting them so they can see this? This is not a sales demo, this is a technology demo. We wanna make sure that this does what you want it to.

And last but not least, pricing presentation. You want to present that pricing in person or over a virtual meeting. Do not email it to them until after you've presented it in person. Don't give in. Stay strong. My friends. Stay strong. Do not give in. That's right. And 

Stephen Olmon: what I want to. Interject here and say [00:41:00] is, and Colin is gonna jump through the screen, you dictate this process to your customer.

The customer does not dictate this process to you if you are letting them do that. You are acting out of desperation, not confidence. You define a sales process, you execute it. You define your sales process and you execute it. You don't get nervous, you don't get desperate, and you don't let them bend your process.

You stick to your process because if you have a good process, it should lead to a good outcome. So if you have no process, then you have nothing to, you have nothing to utilize, which is what we're advocating for. Um, and lots of people, they, they've hit revenue ceilings because there is no formal sales process.

That's right. You just kind of are [00:42:00] reactive. And if the customer says that, the prospect says, no, I have to have pricing today, you just jump. And they say, jump how high? Like. That is not going to lead to any sort of like mature, growing, healthy company. It's not 

Collin Trimble: mature words have never been spoken. We're gonna move to tools and technology that supports both the marketing and sales playbook.

And here's the reason why. We've got so much more to share with y'all on Sales Playbook and Marketing Playbook and sales process, and ICP future episodes. We're gonna cover all that stuff. We're really excited about it. And we can, we could, we could, uh, we could go on each one of those steps to the sales process.

Could be its own pod, but we wanna jump in. Some, just some tools and some tech. We talked about this on the last, uh, pod, but what, what we talked about was how do you get what we would call a customer 360 or a POV point of view of your customer? You want to understand your customer to [00:43:00] provide personalized outreach and marketing.

The only way to do that is if you have one system. All of your customer interactions are stored for us. That's our CRM. Everything. We have, every phone call, text, email, every web form, every single thing we have that is interacted with a customer is in a single place, which means we can derive really strong insights from a customer.

I had a great conversation with a peer of mine at a conference I was at last week. And he said, Hey man, I listened to your pod and I've been needing to do this technology thing for a while, but it makes my head spin. I don't know where to start. I don't, man, it's, it's too overwhelming. I wanna do it. How do I snap my fingers and make it magically appear without spending a million dollars?

That's the magic question. And here's what it starts with. It [00:44:00] doesn't start with technology, it starts with process. If you have technology, but you're not, you don't have a process and you're not holding your team accountable to using that technology, it's not gonna be effective for you. So you gotta build the process.

Spend just a little bit of time developing your sales process and what the goal is and the, the training, and then go for the technology. And the obvious first place is your CRM. Just go find a CRM. Go find one CRM and store every single deal you have and every lead and every prospect. Put it in the CRM and then connect your email.

That's your homework. Your first tools and tech stack is get a CRM. Connect your email so that every time you or your team members send an email, it'll tag against that customer record. If you want bonus points, you can get a phone system tied to it. That may seem like a very overwhelming thing. You don't have to switch out your phone system for your whole business.

You can just switch it out for your sales team. So those are [00:45:00] some bonus points. We'll spend more time on tools and tech, but man, you gotta start somewhere. Starting with process and then going to technology. It's gonna make you a lot more successful. 

Stephen Olmon: I, I actually had a conversation this week with someone at a Fortune 500 company who, like their sales team does not have a CRM.

They do not have pipeline visibility. So it, they're a Fortune 500 company. So I say that to say you're not alone. Mm-hmm. But also, it's not healthy. So it is one of those things that feels a little painful, feels a little nerve wracking if you don't have experience. And yes, there's vendors and there's people consultants and blah, blah, blah.

That can help you. You can reach out to us, we can give you advice. Um, but. You have to do something about it. You can't just let it be that thing over in the corner that you know that you should do something about. You never do [00:46:00] again. If you, if you think about growing your business, it's one of those things that's going to continue to hold you back.

Collin Trimble: Yeah. I'd also say don't stress about finding the perfect CRM or technology. Uh, here's what I hear more often. From my peers in the industry at conferences or whatever is man, I wish I would've implemented or stood up any type of CRM five years ago. What I don't hear a lot is, man, five years ago, I wish I wouldn't have bought this tool.

I hear that occasionally, but not a lot. A lot is, man, I just wish I would've done this earlier. So just start with something, you can grow into a bigger platform, but honestly start with something that seems easy and consumable for you. Because it's gonna show you a whole lot of stuff that you want it to do.

So I'll just give you an example. Uh, when we first, first, first, first, first started, like literally first month, I signed up for a little free online CRM and started using it, putting all of my customer information in there. And I very [00:47:00] quickly, within the first 60 days realized, okay, wow. It doesn't integrate to Gmail, which is what we use for email.

It doesn't integrate to our phone system. It doesn't have a field service app, so I'll never be able to capture the field service stuff. So I was able to start building my dream wishlist of what I wanted my technology to be, only because I started with something that didn't do the thing I needed to do.

But guess what? I was able to take all that information and dump it into my new CRM, and it was not hard. It was not challenging. Did not take a major lift. You could do it or you could hire somebody to do it pretty quick, pretty easy, not super hard. So start making, this is a journey, not a destination. And you're just, you're not gonna get to technology in Nirvana because technology continues to evolve.

So go ahead and set aside money for technology improvements, and I would start with that CRM and start with a process, 

Stephen Olmon: which is a good segue. So let's, let's talk. Challenges. If you're listening to this, we're gonna give you some [00:48:00] homework, some action items. So we just were talking about technology. I think one thing to do is take an inventory of where are you today from a technology perspective.

Um. And if you're at just ground zero, you have nothing. I like what you just said, start somewhere. If you're already along that spectrum, then it's more about assessing what gaps you have. Kind of like Collins V two, what you were just saying. You know, what are the areas that you, you're not currently supporting areas of your business through whatever technology platform you're utilizing.

So that's, that's kind of first part of homework. 

Collin Trimble: Yeah. So let's start, or let's go back to where we were with the marketing stuff. So here is your kind of marketing and sales homework. There's a lot of homework I could give you. I could give you a final exams work homework. It's not, let's not 

Stephen Olmon: overwhelm them.

Collin Trimble: We're not gonna overwhelm you. We're gonna give you something tangible and tactical. 'cause this is where you gotta start. If you're gonna take [00:49:00] anything away from today's call is I want you to niche down. So what is niche down? It means I want you to pick a niche, pick an industry. Do the ICP exercise.

Either write it out or even better write it out and then do a couple interviews from some of your champion customers. Then get some social proof. Get them to just send you an email that just says, you send them the email and say, Hey man, can you send this to me in an email? I'm gonna blur out your name, but I'm just gonna have your title exposed so that people can see that we work with X, Y, Z title.

Get some social proof, get a couple snapshots texts and emails. I would say two or three emails. Two or three texts. Build a list. Go find a list that aligns with your ICP. It doesn't have to be long. Start with 25, start with 25 prospects that fall within your ICP, and then build the value points. What did your ICP say during their interview, or what did you write down [00:50:00] during that exercise that they valued the most?

Write down five to eight. Value props, value propositions, or value points that align with that list. That's it. Start there. If you can do that in the next seven days, seven to 10 days, it should not take you longer than two hours maximum to do all of that. You are going to be tremendously better off for anything you decide to do, whether it's CRM or sales process, or if you're looking to onboard a new marketing vendor.

You'll have your marketing vendors drooling if you could provide them just those simple pieces of information if they're not even asking you for them in the beginning. So that's your homework. That's your homework Niche down, 

Stephen Olmon: we've, it is kind of summarize. Niche down form an ICP sales and marketing. You know, we're talking about, uh, kind of multi-channel, not just one single way to go to market.

Um, [00:51:00] test. Like we've done that a lot. You have to test, especially if it's all new for you, right? And, and do small tests. It doesn't have to be an incredible amount of money that you spend, but. Whether it is, um, an ad strategy, social cold, outreach of various kinds, mail calling, email, get in the game. I think, I think that's actually a big piece of this is if you are on the sidelines from a proactive sales and marketing perspective, it's like time to get in the game.

Yep. Um. And then differentiating between your leads process and your sales process and forming a process if you do not have one, um, is uh, kind of inherently a part of being a healthy, growing company in any industry, in including this one. Um, and, and ultimately, all of those practices are gonna lead to better, higher volume qualified leads to improve your close rate.

Which will [00:52:00] help drive and, and fuel your growth. Um, on the new logo side. 

Collin Trimble: Yep. If you can focus on niching down, splitting out your sales process and developing a, um, you know, kind of a tech stack or starting with a tech stack, you're gonna be in better shape today than you were uh, yesterday. Uh, I just wanna say this as a call out.

Um, you're not alone. There's a lot of folks out there that are trying to build this. We're not perfect. We're still trying to get better every single day. What we're sharing today is not stuff. We're gonna do or we want to do. It's stuff we've done and it's been proven to work for us, and I bet you it's gonna be work.

It'll be proven to work for you. And the last thing I'll say is please reach out to us. We would love to provide answers to questions, give you some strategy. You want to bounce some technology options off of us. You wanna know how to prioritize, where should you but your time. Hit us up on LinkedIn, hit us up on Twitter or X uh, send us a note.

We would love to help out, provide some feedback. That's literally the only reason we do this. So, uh, [00:53:00] let us know if we can do something to help. We appreciate it. As always, please like and subscribe to Entry and Exit. Thank you so much. Hope y'all have a great week.