How to Scale a Sales Team in Security (What Actually Works)

How do you scale a sales team inside a security or life-safety business—without hiring too fast, burning cash, or building a “hope-based” sales org?

In this episode of Entry & Exit, hosts Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble break down the exact framework they’ve used at Alarm Masters to grow from founder-led selling to a six-person sales team—and the systems that make it repeatable. They cover quota math (3–5x coverage), segmented sales roles (hunters vs. farmers), the KPIs that prevent surprises, and why face-to-face wins in this industry.

You’ll also get real-world guidance on hiring, ramp expectations, building playbooks, and how to design your sales process around a clear value proposition—so your reps don’t default to discounting when pressure hits. Plus, they share quick updates on what’s happening at Alarm Masters, including new add-ons and expansion plans across Texas.

What You’ll Learn

• When to hire the next salesperson: The “pay for the next rep” principle (and how to apply it without waiting a full year)
• Quota math that actually works: Why 3–5x OTE coverage matters—and a simple way to think about it
• Segmented sales strategy: Why you shouldn’t expect one rep to do everything (and the roles to hire first)
• Hunters vs. farmers (install base): The difference between new-logo selling and expanding existing accounts
• Leading indicators & KPIs: Pipeline coverage, close rate, average deal size, conversion rates, and sales cycle length
• The gospel of face-to-face: Why more in-person time increases win rate and reduces attrition
• Sales process + value prop alignment: How “we’re the Chick-fil-A of security” shapes the entire sales motion
• Practical ops reminders: Contract audits, customer communication, and why intentionality beats hoping it works

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Stephen Olmon
Collin Trimble

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Chapters

• 0:39 Discussing Sales and Marketing Feedback
• 5:23 Hiring and Managing Salespeople
• 13:25 Segmented Sales Strategy and Roles
• 23:11 Understanding Sales Metrics and Conversion Rates
• 35:37 Building a Customer-Centric Sales Process
• 41:21 Exciting Updates from Alarm Masters

Transcript

Entry & Exit Episode 14

[00:00:00] Welcome to Entry and Exit. My name is Steven Ulman and this is Colin Trimble, my business partner and co-host. We run Alarm Masters, which is a Texas security and life safety business. And we also host this podcast to try to provide practical and tactical advice for people trying to scale in this industry.

We're excited for today. Uh, we actually ran a poll on LinkedIn to see, and we had a resounding 15 people respond, so you could tell people are passionate. 

Yes. 

With that amount of people showing up, they're passionate. 

Hey, more 

than 15 people. 

More than 14. 

More than 14, for sure. I, I'm gonna say greater than 14.

Going forward 

now 

people, 

people are busy. You know, 

people are busy. 

We're, we're recording this in January. It's the beginning of the 

year. 

And 

people are busy. 

Yeah. So they're distracted. That's it. If it was October, you would've gotten like 119 

for sure. A hundred. Yeah. Absolutely. 

Probably approximately. 

Um, what did we hear the results were?

We really liked the sales and marketing stuff, so [00:01:00] we're gonna talk sales today. Uh, and then at the end, we'll go through at the end, we also got some feedback that folks said, Hey, we wanna hear more about some updates from what y'all are doing at Alarm Masters. So at the end we're gonna share, uh, just a few updates of what we're working on and like some cool stuff that's going on, and, um.

We'll give y'all some more insight into that. So we are talking today specifically about sales and how to scale your sales department. This is probably the most asked question that I get, um, from my peers in the industry, is how do I grow my sales team, uh, and, and really how do I scale my sales team? So like, how do I have a sales team that is generating me more business year over year?

Um, and I think there's a lot of segments to that. I think there's kind of five bullet points that we're gonna cover. Um, and I think it, the first bullet point I think is something we want to talk through is sort of our journey to, like, how did we get to a sales team? Now we have six people on our sales team today, full time.

Um, and that [00:02:00] wasn't the case when we started. I was the person doing sales. Um, and I think, you know, Steven, you can kind of jump in here too, but you know, the general rule of thumb we've always heard is, you know, don't hire your second salesperson until your first person is first salesperson is paying for them.

And, and the concept there is to scale. You should have line of sight to your first salesperson should pay for the second. The second should pay for the third because that's an ultimately scalable machine, right? Like, have you've heard that before? 

Yeah. Yeah. And, and by pay for think about, uh, the revenue that someone drives, less the cost of that person, less any sort of like cogs related to that or, uh, direct cost for that revenue.

The gross profit they're in covering that next person. So like mathematically, you're not losing money, you're not bleeding any net new dollar when you bring on that second person because that first person through. The profit that they are driving from their sales activity is covering them fully. [00:03:00] 

Yep.

And I think the number that is industry standard is three to five x coverage. Uh, their quota should technically be three to five x of what they're fully burdened OTE is. And so that would not just be, um. And, and so for us, if you're gonna do the math the correct way, based on our gross profit and all the things like, that's five x for us.

So, so we're five xing, the cost of our, um, their quota is being set at five x of their fully burdened pay, including technology and, you know, all the things. Let's, like, let's work, work through 

the math of an example. 

Yeah, so I would say, um, if you've got a person that you're paying a hundred thousand dollars in salary, OTE, so that'd be 50 K base, 50 k, um, commission.

Um, and then you've got some, we'll just say software and other auxiliary costs. We will just say that's two or three grand a [00:04:00] year. And then you've got some like vehicle. Payroll taxes, insurance, blah, blah, blah. So we'll call that another couple grand a year. So let's just say it's $110,000, right? Sure. Just for simple math, 10%.

It's probably more than that, but it, it actually for sure is more than that because we'll go, I think payroll taxes are, we'll go one 20. Okay. One 20. All in. All in. So, so at one 20 all in, you're the math genius. At three x, it's what, and at five x, it's what? So 360 to 500? Yeah. Right. So that would be the coverage you would want at a minimum.

I'm 

sorry, three six, wait, 360 

to 

600, 

excuse me. Yes. 360 to 600. Yeah. So that would be the math on how you'd wanna look at coverage. You also want to kind of validate that by saying, Hey, if you've got a $600,000 um, quota, and that person generates whatever, 50% gross profit. On that 600, so that's 300,000, and then you're backing out their one 20.

Out of [00:05:00] that 300,000, you're at 

180. 

180, so you got 180 that you can use to pay for the next sales person. Right. That would be the be the concept. We, 

we home, we homeschool, and I'm, I'm helping with the math this year, and if you ever wanna 

join, 

like, 

uh, could you help, could you, you could always, 

you're welcome to come over.

Yeah. 

Could you help? Okay. I, my wife homeschools too. And, and I, I guess I missed it. She know, she never asks me to help my daughter on math day. 

Shout out Singapore math. That's all I'll say. 

Yeah. Right. Um, so I think one thing that's really important is like, I think a lot of folks have heard that if you wanna build a scalable sales team, you've gotta have the first salesperson pay for the second.

I don't think you necessarily have to have, like, you don't have to wait a year, right. To see, okay, did the first person, okay, did the second person. Here's what I think the heart of the intent here is, is that you need to have. It the kind of, uh, burden of proof here of like, [00:06:00] we have a salesperson that we hired, we're running a play in a sales process.

Is this person going to close based on their clip or whatever to be able to pay for another salesperson? And so for us, this is the way this looked. So when we started, it was just me. So I generated my, my goal was basically to generate about a million dollars of incremental revenue by myself in the first year.

Of alarm masters to see, Hey, could I do that? And I was able to do that. So we hired a sales guy. Who came in and for a year, I would say for six months, he came in and he did basically just took over that and was basically on a similar pace. Uh, there was a little bit of a learning curve 'cause we grabbed from outside the, the industry, but instead of hiring the next sales person, what we did is we, we took a little bit of a detour and started on a segmented sales strategy, which we're gonna talk about here in a second.

So we hired some supporting roles to see if that would unlock more of. Productivity from our field salesperson. And it did. Um, and then we hired additional salespeople. [00:07:00] So our investment strategy was, let's get the field first field salesperson done. Let's maximize their, uh, production via hiring some inside sales folks, and then let's scale the field sales sales team from there.

Um, and so we, we didn't wait for the first person. To hire the second. And then we didn't hire, you know, we, so now we're at seven people, right? So like, we're, we're fully built now, um, or no, we're at six people, um, on our sales team. So we, we sped it up a little bit, but that's because we had proof of concept.

We really spent, I'll say, a year and a half to two years figuring out the formula and what the plan was. And I think that's really important. So if you're gonna hire a salesperson. I guess the word of warning is don't hire a second salesperson if your first salesperson is likely not gonna hit their quota.

Right. Wouldn't you say? 

Yeah. And if they're likely not gonna hit their quota, then you need to replace them, not add, 

yeah, replace them or change your process. Right. Or [00:08:00] like, or, yeah. 

Correct. Yeah. 

How are you supporting them? Right? 

Like that's actually a good tangent is how long should I give my first salesperson?

Or, or let's just say the, whether you bought a business, you inherited them or you've hired them or whatever it may be. If you've got one other salesperson outside of yourself, if I'm talking to an owner, founder type, 

yeah. 

How long should you give them if, if you do have a pretty solid process in place?

Like what, what degree of patience, how do you think about, um, what's fair? What's. 

Yeah, I think that this, a couple things contribute to that. I'm gonna give you a long answer. Sorry. 

It's great, 

fir. The first thing I'll say is if your expectation is I'm gonna hire a salesperson and I'm gonna hire somebody from the industry and they've got all these connections, I'm gonna throw them in and they're gonna go find their leads and they're gonna hit a million dollars and their first year, you're gonna spend a lot of time trying to find that salesperson, and you're likely never gonna find them unless you're just giving them every single one of your inbound [00:09:00] leads and you have a robust inbound machine, in which case.

They're not really doing outbound, they're just an inside salesperson closing deals for you. They're an order taker. Right. So my personal philosophy on this is that it is the company's responsibility to build a framework that helps produce demand for my salesperson to close. And that doesn't just mean inbound for us.

We give our inbound to our sales team, but we also force them and, and actually more than. I, I would say now this year, we'll probably o over 80% of our individual salespeople, their leads will come from outbound prospecting in our existing base. Yeah. And so I created the playbook that said, Hey, here's how you're gonna go find leads.

Here's the various ways you can find leads. Here's the list we use. Here's the machines we use, and here is the various sales plays you can run. And then here's the sales process. I think that it's the company's responsibility to design that. And then give that to the salesperson to run on. And [00:10:00] I also think that it's really important to evaluate the salesperson from a kind of, what we always say, attitude, effort, and skill.

Uh, you could really have to have two of those. Um, you gotta have a great attitude. You gotta work really hard and you know, we can try to train you on skill or whatever. Like, we really try to make sure that at a minimum, whoever we're hiring. Has at least two. And really we're trying to at least get line of sight to three.

And we typically hone on attitude and effort, and then we teach skill. That's sort of our playbook. So to answer your question, if I have a fully built process that I know works, a scalable sales process that I've tested, and I know that it works and I have given the playbook to the sales person and they have not, and they're not just, they're not doing it.

Mm-hmm. I'm gonna say three to four months. Uh, if they're not doing it, if they're not having a good attitude about it, if they're trying to do their own thing, what happens a lot of time is you give them the playbook and they want to kind of do their own thing. 'cause it's what they've done in the past and then it doesn't work for them.

And they're like, oh crap, now I want to try to do your thing. But it's like kind of too little, too late. [00:11:00] Um, so you have to kind of really trust, find a salesperson that trusts what your process is, um, and kind of buys in. So I'd say three to four months. If you don't have all that, man, I mean. You're, you're figuring it out.

Yeah. 

Yeah. That's a lot. And if you're hiring a salesperson that you're gonna work with to figure this out, like if you don't know sales and you're an owner out there and you don't know sales, and you wanna go hire a salesperson, and I'm saying a bunch of stuff about developing a sales playbook, and you're like, I don't know how to do that.

Well then you could go hire a salesperson to work together on that and y'all could build that together. But just know that like the salesperson's probably not gonna produce as much and as quick as you want. 

Don't have to have a lot of patience there. I, I think there's also people that might listen to this, and they already have a salesperson in seed and there is no process.

And so they're looking at payroll, they're looking at cost structure, they're looking at quota. They may not even have a specific quota, and they're thinking. [00:12:00] I know I'm supposed to have a sales guy or saleswoman. I have one of those, but I don't feel like this is working. 

Yeah, 

that's, that's also a pretty common thing we see.

We do see that a lot and we see it in usually manifested in one of two ways. It's either they're not really producing anything, but they make my life easier 'cause I don't have to go walk jobs or, yeah, they're kind of producing, but every lead is coming from me and they're not really going to develop their own leads.

And it's like, well. Uh, it depends on what you want. Like there are full salespeople that are order takers that are supposed to handle inbound leads, and that's what they're great at. So, uh, that might be a case to hire another person that's more focused on outbound or that might be the case to say, Hey, I am, you know, not gonna comp this salesperson as high on inbound leads and I'm gonna comp them more on, you know, you know, self-generated leads, if you will.

And so there's ways to kind of frame around that. Uh, it's all in the motivation, right? It's like, Hey, if you want your salesperson to sell [00:13:00] R more RMR, then you gotta comp 'em to sell more RMR and create a quota for that, or they're just not gonna do that. 

Yeah. Let's talk about within the, uh, confines of this conversation, we talked about an example of a total OT of like a hundred K.

Mm-hmm. Well, I think for some people. You know, serving SMBs locally, uh, other PE people may already be or want to pursue larger kind of enterprise type deals and customers and just kind of, yeah. Larger overall contract values. So, uh, how do you think about hiring for who we're expecting to sell to and kind of the delineation between someone who might be a little more of a, a junior or kinda SMB focus versus enterprise?

I think talking to that would be good. 

Yeah, that's a great, I think that's a great, uh, question. And I think that the, that kind of actually kind of sits right into the segmented sales strategy kind of point, which we talked about earlier, which is [00:14:00] you need to find the salesperson. So trying to find a salesperson that is good at everything, which would be new logo, install enterprise deals, SMB deals.

Um, doing their own quoting, making cold calls, uh, closing and negotiating, designing. Uh, you're gonna, you're, you're not gonna find them. Or if you do, it's probably just you. And that's really hard to, to scale. Um, and so we like to take the approach that we try to find a salesperson that's a quote archetype for the role we're trying to hire.

Right? So here's just a, here's the kind of like two very base level examples that probably some people have heard, which is. New logo would be a new customer you've never done work with, and a install account would be a customer that's currently monitored by you or you've done some amount of work for and you're doing more with them.

So install base means you've installed something there tho. The salespeople that sell into those two things are gonna be very different. A new logo [00:15:00] salesperson, theoretically, is gonna be more aggressive. They're gonna be high volume, high energy. They're gonna be competitive. They're gonna be focused on closing the deal.

They're not gonna be afraid to close the deal. They're energized by hunter. Hunter type hunter mentality. Yep. Install base. A lot of people say farmer, and here's the thing, the farmer like rep has like. Gotten a really bad name and said, oh, I'm not trying to find a farmer. 'cause what they mean is that's a bad sales person.

And it's like, no, a good farmer is one of the best salespeople you can have. I agree. Because what they're doing is, is they're, they're getting the second and third dollar, which is the most profitable dollar. 'cause it also creates a sticky customer. And so. There is bad farmers, there's also bad hunters 'cause they're getting, you know, really unprofitable deals for you.

So I think that in an install base, you're looking for somebody that's a little more relationship oriented that's gonna value face-to-face and they're going to value, um, longevity of a deal and getting more of a, what we would call [00:16:00] point of view on the customer. So they're gonna be willing to do the research to say, I'm gonna go call on this customer.

Like, I wanna know a little bit about their history, like. How much r do we have? Do we have any open cases for them? Do we have an outstanding balance? Like have other people tried to call into the account? I think that those are two very different skill sets. Just like I also think an inside salesperson is a different skillset than a field salesperson, right?

Like I think those are two different things. I also think a sales manager is a different skillset. I think an enterprise sales rep, which again that that'd be another kind of third one enterprise is like, Hey, I'm working. Large deals. I, I, I really think of enterprise as anything over a million dollars, but probably for most in this industry it's probably over half a million would be any, it would be kind of the enterprise deal.

Uh, and these are truly large multi-site mul, like multi-state companies, um, that you're doing complex deals. They've got a robust IT and purchasing department, legal department, and they need to learn how to navigate. Those enterprises, [00:17:00] it's you. You cannot be single threaded. You'll never get a deal done.

Yep. You've gotta learn how to map. You've gotta learn to do account planning. Like when I was at sales Salesforce, we got, we got like a whole training on this. It was like, Hey, you need to go download, you know, all of the quarterly K ones from these, uh, companies that you're trying to sell to, to get a POV.

Look at all the management letters that they write. Because those are gonna give you perspective into what their goals are. And then when you have your first meeting with that employee, you need to have more information on that business than an employee that's been there for 90 days. Like you need to know more about the strategic value.

And so that's kinda what it takes to be in an enterprise role. And I think we could do a whole podcast on like how to hunt down enterprise deals. Yeah. Um, but yeah, so that's what I would say is like those would kind of be the archetypes or personality traits of different sales roles. 

Yeah. Big takeaway.

They're not all the same. 

You're right. 

So if you think I just need to hire a sales guy, and like, you need to know, [00:18:00] uh, what you're selling, who you're selling to, and based on that, what your ex what, you know, it's like marriage. What are your expectations? You know? Yeah. Uh, and so based on your expectations and your plan, that should kind of drive, uh, the types of reps you are interviewing and ultimately trying to hire.

Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. I think that kind of speaks to the inside sales role too. A lot of, if you just take a, we'll just call it mid-market sales rep, a lot of people in the security industry, our peers are hiring mid-market sales reps that are selling deals that are 15 to $150,000, and they're expecting them to set all their own appointments, do all their own estimates, move them through the sales cycle, do the site walks, and then do the handoff to the customer and make sure they're profitable.

Because this industry is characterized by. Making the sales person, uh, get comped on gross profit, which I just find so weird. It's like, I don't know. I don't know. I you're motivating 'em in the wrong places. Like I, I get [00:19:00] the concept. The concept is like, Hey, we want to protect the company's gross profit.

Well, for me, then just put guardrails on what they're allowed to go below or go over on from a gross profit perspective and then let 'em rip so we could get into comp planes a whole other time. Our belief in this system is when you have a high volume of accounts, which I'm gonna say each salesperson has a greater than 150 accounts that they could call on, which is everybody in our, you know, in our industry, um, you need some inside sales support.

And so for us, what that looked like was field salesperson first, kind of proof out the concept. Then we hired a person to do all of our quoting. If you haven't listened to our quoting podcast, go listen to it. This person, an international employee, uh, shout out Felix. He's incredible. Um, and he crushes it for us, and he does all of our quoting and proposals and the salesperson knows how to do them and has to do a few on their own.

Just kind of depends, but like it's really like 95% of them are done by Felix. Yeah. And then. That. What that did is that [00:20:00] unlocked our salesperson, so they would go, all they did is spend time doing what they do best, which is being in front of the customer. 

Yeah, 

right. Then what we did from there is we found, basically we hired an SDR somebody that handles and qualifies calls that come in, and they also set some appointments for our sales team.

So really the field salespeople are waking up on Monday morning with a calendar of. You know, six to 10 what we call coffee drops or prospecting appointments to our existing customers, and they run that play. And so that to me is scalable because now I don't, they don't need to focus on those parts. They don't have to be great at that.

They have to be great at interacting with the customer. And that's, that's sort of the thought of, of segmented sales strategy is your, your goal is throughput, right? Like less rep administrative duties, less, uh, you know, less time doing the things that are not high productivity for them. 

Yeah. I think the, the, the general concept of finding people with specific skill sets and letting them just focus on that makes [00:21:00] sense.

Yeah. But that's not what people do a lot of times. That's right. Because it's harder, it costs more money upfront. Yep. Uh, it's more to manage, uh, and overseas it's more complex. 

Yeah. 

But in a lot of ways it is more simple in that this person does these tasks, this person does these tasks. And they are uniquely skilled and, and or trained for those tasks rather than, like, when I was in sales at a software company in my early twenties, I literally did, I did everything you said.

Plus I did the training on the back end. Yeah, that's insane. It was absolute full cycle. And looking back it was like, uh, yeah, it was crazy. But, uh, I did okay. Did all right. 

Yeah. 

Um, but it's. Not scalable. 

It's not scalable, and it's like ultimately that's what you're trying to build as a sales team. If, if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably trying to figure out how to grow your business.

And we don't have all the [00:22:00] answers, but we have a, a few from our experience and a lot of that comes around from sales. I, I want to jump into the next thing that we get asked a lot about, and we talked about that a little bit on the podcast, which is managing leading indicators or setting KPIs for your sales team.

Yeah, we actually talked about it in our last podcast, uh, a little bit. But what the, the concept here is, is um, if you wanna figure if, uh, if you want your team to hit a million dollar quota and your close rate is 50%, then you need to generate two times your quota and pipeline. Uh, and you want to typically draw that down to a monthly or a weekly, is what we do.

Average. So you wanna say, okay, whatever that is. $2 million divided by 52 weeks is some number that I'm sure Steven could do. 50 something thousand dollars, 60,000, I don't know. We'll, we'll get to it another day. And um, and so from there you need to stop. Listen, I don't know, [00:23:00] math. Keep going. Keep going, keep going.

I have an MB in finance. I still don't have math. Um. From there, you wanna look at what is your average deal size and what is your prospecting appointment to, uh, what's your prospecting appointment to opportunity conversion number? And you can guesstimate on this in the beginning and tweak it over time, right?

So here's how that math would work, right? Like, so if you're, if you gotta generate. $50,000 in pipeline and your average deal is $10,000, then you need to generate five deals. See, I can do math. 

Yeah, look at that. 

And if you do, you know, you've gotta generate five deals and you do 10, uh, prospecting appointments and 50% of those convert to deals.

That's five deals. So you gotta do 10 prospecting appointments. But if only two or three convert for every 10, then you gotta do 20. Prospecting appointments to get to your number. And that's just simply how the math goes. Like you've gotta follow the averages, you gotta follow your close rate. [00:24:00] If you don't have it set like that, like there should be no surprises in sales.

If you've got a sales strategy and you've got a comp plan for your sales person and they've got KPIs, one of two things is happening, you can either improve their close rate or you can help them do more activity. And a lot of times you get a rep that's doing one or the other. They're either trying to, they're damnedest to work the deals that are really big so that they can try to improve their close rate, so they have to do less activity.

Or you've got a guy that's just ripping through activity and he is not really focusing on getting the maximum ticket value out of a deal. And so you really wanna balance those two things. Is sales cycle making your close rate go up? I think most of the industry is around 20 to 25%. We, uh, a fully scaled up rep is about 50% for us.

Uh, we'd like for them to be closer to 75%. Um, so yeah, I think that's, I think knowing your numbers is really important and having your pipe coverage. A lot of people say, [00:25:00] Hey, you need to have three to four x quota coverage in your pipe. That's just basically, 'cause they're saying that's a base that, that math is, you are 25 to 30%, uh, close rate.

Right. So that's sort of the general rule of thumb, right? But it all depends on your close rate. If you've got a really high close rate, you gotta have less quota. 

Yeah, that's right. And a lot of this also is predicated on what you're selling and into what market, like geographically speaking. Mm-hmm. So 

yeah, 

if you are a commercial security company in Tulsa mm-hmm.

Versus a commercial security company in Manhattan, that's a different landscape. So Yeah. Uh, you know, adjust accordingly, but. You know, again, just to run back through the math, like let's say you're wanting that rep to do a million dollars in sales closed for the year, that's two on a 50% close rate, 2 million of pipe.

Mm-hmm. So that's 83 KA month closed, or 166 K pipe. Yeah. At that close rate. And so that's, you're looking at like, what, what you were saying, you know, 38, 40 KA [00:26:00] week Yeah. Of pipe generated. And, and so then you look at average deal size and. I think for some people it's intimidating. 'cause like, well I don't know all those numbers.

Yeah. 

It's like, well you need to, and like we've talked about 87 times, you may have to invest in technology, right. That you don't have today to be able to have, uh, better real time updated aggregate, you know, slice and dice, however you need to buy, rep or buy, you know, so that you actually know what.

What's happening in your business, you know? Yeah. And we were not like that day one, you know, we really just in the last 12 months, we've really gotten to a better place there. That out. 

Yeah. So what are the metrics on uh, uh, I would say close rate, uh, average deal size. Um, I would say sales cycle, which we're length of sales cycle, which we're gonna come down to.

And then I'm gonna say conversion, uh, of, we could say lead to opportunity conversion. So a prospecting appointment, which is a lead. To an opportunity. [00:27:00] So lead to opportunity conversion, you can track that without a CRM, it's just a pain in the butt to do. Uh, but Steven's absolutely right. So if I'm you and I'm, you know, if I'm sitting out there as an owner and I don't have the ability to track that, I would go find a CRM and I would go talk to whatever sales rep is either gonna implement it for me or whatever and say, here's the metrics I need to have.

Like, I don't, I'm not even gonna buy this thing unless you can out of the box, set me up with these metrics. So I can log into a dashboard and I can find these metrics, and then from there you could do the math to figure out what the quotas need to be. Right? So, so that would be, that'd be one thing. Just the last thing I wanna say on, on, uh, indicators, then we can move on, is sales cycle is really important because, um, if you have a 60 day sales cycle, you've got front load more of your pipe gen, because if you're gonna go generate whatever Steven said 37 KA month, that assumes.

It's all gonna close in that month. But if it's a 60 day sales cycle, then it's not gonna, and you're doing something [00:28:00] in after November 1st. It's not gonna close till January, which means they're gonna be missing out on, you know, two twelfths, one sixth. Well, 

the real 

point of their quota 

there is the, the way that that works is that just leading into each year, you need to be carrying real pipe into your next year.

That you 

Yeah. Or or front loading your, or front loading your, for the first year front loading your pipe gin. Right. So just, you're gonna have to do more pipe gin earlier in the year and close more deals so that you, by the time you get to December, are gonna close those deals. Right. Yeah. Because especially for first year reps, they're not gonna have any pipe they're carrying in.

Oh yeah. Good point. 

So, um, alright, let's talk about bullet number four. This is my most passionate thing that we talk about on this podcast. I think it's a passionate for you too. Yeah, I totally, although I'm, I'm the, I I am an evangelizer of the gospel of face-to-face. Yeah. Um, you win face-to-face. Um, Harvard Business Review did [00:29:00] a, um, study.

On deals being done. 

Harvard, you know, 

I went to the Harvard of the southeast. 

Okay. Yeah. 

Okay, so it's a sister school. Our sister school did. 

Guys, don't let 'em fool you. No. You see, you're smart. Sorry. Keep going. Harvard business, very serious. 

Yeah. Sam Houston. State's sister School is Harvard Ivy League.

Obviously different type of ivy, but 

keep going, keep going. 

Ivy League, 95% of, uh, decision makers are like executives say deals get done in face-to-face meetings. Um, and, and, and it's not just the, um, in a singular face-to-face meeting, it's the amount of time you are face-to-face is the highest predictor.

So that could be multiple touch points over a series of time, or it could be several long working sessions. Um, I think that it. In this industry, it's kind of like you're not sitting across the table doing like a three hour long negotiation or whatever. [00:30:00] So, and you're not like a software vendor where you're doing like a digital transformation mapping session.

So to me it means there's more appointments to be set. So we have a very robust sales process that basically tries to push all of our sales people to, from five to seven face-to-face meetings per deal. Uh, five, if there's some longer discovery demo. Uh, site walk, like those are longer, you know, we're getting several hours in those meetings, and seven, if they're a little bit shorter meetings and sometimes more on enterprise deals.

We're doing dozens, dozens of meetings on enterprise deals, so. I think that the face-to-face meetings actually make an impact. We've seen them in our, uh, in our bi our business, Harvard Business Review has seen it in their, in their business and findings. And so, um, I think that you can easily implement that.

I think that if you're gonna take one thing away from this call is make your reps have more interaction with your customers. It's just, you know, it [00:31:00] like as a business owner. You have those customers that are only gonna do business with you, that's because you've got a great relationship with them. 

Yeah.

I 

think 

there's, there's also just the, um, like macro reality in our world that people are tired of screens, they're tired of digital, they're, you know, getting promotional text messages and 8,000 emails a day. Yeah. And. Um, I mean, there are entire massive private equity funds that are fully dedicated to in-person experiences, you know, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars like in, in the last couple years because, uh, I think there's a general consensus that people want, um, more real kind of authentic experiences that includes dealing with a vendor in person.

I think it's just like right down the middle. And I, I enjoy that more. Like, I think about people that have come and visit our office like. Those are better experiences than, yeah. Being on the phone. It [00:32:00] just, it is. And so, um, some of it's common sense, uh, and that also there is a real cost to that, or you can feel like there's a real cost to that and you might think that it's inefficient or that there's an opportunity cost.

Oh, they could do higher volume if they were just calling, you know, but lifetime value of the customer percentage, you know, uh, probability to win a deal. All of that is up and to the right if you're doing more in person. 

Yeah, a hundred percent agree. I think it drives the value. I think your sales process should revolve around that.

Um, and I think that you should go see your existing customers. 

Yes. 

Go see them. Um. We've got some kind of cool things that we're doing. The alarm masters thing, uh, universe, and we'll get to that in a second. And, but one of the things that we always are looking through at due diligence, and even when we've done, people have done due diligence on us for various things.

They're looking at, um, attrition as like the largest factor for financial stability, aside from EBITDA and cash cashflow. But, [00:33:00] um, we have found a direct correlation of, with our salespeople doing. Coffee drops and getting in front of them, our attrition has gone significantly down. 

Yeah. 

Because we are surfacing issues while our salespeople are out there.

And you would be surprised, pe like I've had some folks, some buddies of mine in the industry that have been like, yeah, but you know, I don't want my salespeople dealing with customer service issues. I'm like, well, they're not, they're not dealing with them. They're moving them into our customer service department.

But they guess what? They're the hero. So they solve the problem for the customer. So now they've got a relationship with that customer. Customer's, you know, not indebted to them, but they feel like they, you know, that salesperson cares and so they're likely gonna give them more business. And so, man, we use that as a compelling event.

Like that's not a negative, that's a positive all around, or at least for us it's been. Yeah. Uh, if the 

salespeople are the heroes, should we get them capes? 

I think so. I think it'd be good. I think so. All our masters are capes 2026. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think it [00:34:00] would be really funny to start running. I actually talked to a guy who did this.

He used to sell, um, he used to sell lighting into multifamily and he would bring, he had a little fringe bulldog and he would bring his fringe bulldog in on drop-ins to every drop-in. He kept a little water bottle in his truck, and he would bring this dog with him everywhere he went. And he was like, I, I never, not, I never didn't get in the door.

I'm like, dude, that's kind of a smart idea. 

It is. We need, like, we need mascots. Um, 

we do, 

I feel like, I feel like the dog's name was Teacup or something like that. 

Teacup, 

yeah. Just real, real 

potato. I'm gonna start calling you teacup. 

I love that. Um, okay, so the other thing I was gonna say, you said attrition.

The other thing, uh, just while we're talking about things that really matter that you don't wanna think about and drive you crazy. Sign contracts. 

Oh yeah. 

Just, 

yeah, don't say that. It makes me sad. And 

if you could annually just do a full review of all your contracts. 

Yeah, 

that'd be great. Thank you. Um, you're welcome.

[00:35:00] Public public service announcement over, uh, yes. Say yeah, yeah. No, it's true. It's really true. And we're, we're going through our second contract audit right now. Um, and, you know, we do a ton of acquisitions and so inevitably when. You have, uh, every company, even alarm masters, when we purchased it, had some contracts that were just missing or couldn't find them.

And then when you smack together eight other transactions. Uh, and they all have a few contracts that they, it becomes a, it becomes a decent amount of contracts and so we had to go through a pretty significant, uh, process to go get those contracts signed or resigned or whatever. And it's just like a, it is tough.

Some, there's not a super great compelling event for your customer. But anyway, yeah. Super important. Get those contracts signed, um, for your existing customers. Um, alright, last one I wanna work on really quickly, just, I think this is really important if you wanna scale your sales team. You need to build your sales process around what your company's value proposition is.

And if [00:36:00] you don't know what your company's value proposition is, you need to figure it out. Uh, and that's what, what, what do your customers say is the reason why they chose you? Is it price? Is it experience? Is it speed? Uh, what, what is it? Right? And so you can't be all of those things. So trying to advertise to all of those things, or sorry, trying to, uh, represent that you are all of those things, um, is not possible and is also not, um, truthful.

And so you want, and, and customers know that. And so, 

yeah, it's not optimal as like a representation out into the market. 

Yeah, we, here's an example for alarm masters. I've used this before. Our, um, value prop is we deliver the best experience. And here's what I mean by that. We want to be the Chick-fil-A of the security industry.

Thanks, Chick-fil-A. Don't, don't get mad at us for using your name chicken. Eat more chicken. Um, [00:37:00] and so as a result of that. That starts at the front of the sales process. It is very white glove and it's, our whole process is not, we don't sell the highest price in the industry. We're not the lowest price, I would say we're kind of upper middle in terms of pricing in the industry, and that's where we want to be.

We're pretty fast, I would say, but that's not like our thing. It's like we're the fastest. We'll get your system turned around in 24 hours. And, and the other thing I would say that we're not, is. We're not the guys that are like the most highly engineered, like there's been times where customers have said, Hey, we have a lead.

Or you know, a manufacturer will be like, Hey, we've got a lead for this like bank and they want this like lockout tagout thing and they wanna integrate it with this thing and these parking lot and this solar and this point to point. I'm like, that's not us. That's, yeah. And we've actually, I mean, Steven, we've talked to a couple acquisitions who they were like, yeah, I've like, they brag about their level of engineering, correct.

And we're like, that's not what we're trying to be. Mm-hmm. So that, those weren't deals we pursued. [00:38:00] Um, we are trying to pre pursue the deals where customers want a reliable, long-term security system that's priced at a fair rate and that it's gonna be taken and they're gonna be taken care of and they know who they can go to for service.

Um, and so. That's what we do is we build, Hey, your experience with us is gonna go from the sales experience, which is gonna be great to the project experience, to the service experience, and anything post-sale training, everything. We're going to really focus a lot on your experience with ALARM Masters, and that carries over into our service department, right?

So 

even, even recently, uh, one of the largest deals we've closed since we've, you know, owned the business, um. They just recently gave us some feedback that we're their favorite vendor and the way that we operate and communicates just like far and above the way that any other vendor they have, uh, interacts with them.

And it was just like really high praise. And so, um, the way that we are trying to [00:39:00] operate in that manner is working and we're getting real time feedback. Quick feedback on that. Yeah, 

that's exactly right. Um, we. We are really focused on making sure that that is the experience our customers get is we want to be their favorite vendor, not their favorite security company.

We want to be their favorite vendor. 

Correct. 

Um, and we do that by, it starts for us just candidly, like insane levels of communication. So as a result of that, that is our experience. So we've painted the picture of what we're trying to be, we build our sales process around that. Every discovery deck and every sales interaction that we have.

Is, is representing that value proposition to the customer every step of the way. 

Mm-hmm. 

Um, and we are trying to build steps into the sales process, our marketing material, our scripts for our salespeople revolve around delivering a white glove experience. And, and what does the tangible, like, what does that mean?

And so we go through, we have Hypercare and we have ch check-ins, and like, we have all this [00:40:00] stuff, right? So. That's all part of our deal. Um, and so we build our sales process around that. If you want to scale your sales process and do your salesperson a favor, they need to understand, believe, and see firsthand that value proposition.

So if you have a salesperson that comes to you to say, Hey, I'm losing a bunch on price, and you have never said to them, we're trying to be the cheapest, then they don't know what your sales proposition is. Yep. You should educate them on that. Why are you the best at what you do? And you need to educate them on that, and then you need to create your sales process around that.

Amen. 

Any other bullet points that I you're thinking of that relates to scaling a sales team? Anything that you think we didn't cover that was important? Anything from Harvard Business Review that you've read recently? 

Uh, it's intentionality wins here. Like you can't hope that this goes well. 

Yeah, I 

think there's just a lot of [00:41:00] intentionality required to build the playbooks, deploy the playbooks, teach it, manage it, monitor it.

It's, it is, uh, very involved and it is from our experience, the only way that it's gonna work in scale. 

Agreed. Um, let's jump into a quick couple quick updates on Alarm Masters. Um, on the acquisition front, you want to give some updates to the folks? To the people? 

Yeah. We, uh, have, so we, you know, based in Houston and, you know, our, uh, vision has been to be, uh, at a minimum, kind of a full scale Texas, you know, security company.

And we have a couple deals under LOI that will, uh, very much give us kind of what would be called the Texas Triangle. Yeah. Or really kind of give us a, a firm foundation across, you know, all major markets. Um, and so really excited, uh, we [00:42:00] would, you know, dramatically expand our footprint. And the fun thing is, is everything we just talked about, we will have to.

Go execute on it. Go 

rebuild. 

Go rebuild. Yeah. And, uh, redeploy those playbooks and systems and processes. Mm-hmm. Um, and, and kind of plop that on top of, you know, a couple of businesses that are already, you know, solid. Yeah. But lack some, I mean, really what we are really good at for both of those businesses are things that they lack.

Yeah. But they have phenomenal histories and operations applications. Yeah. Ops, talent. You know, tech side, et cetera, et cetera. Mm-hmm. So really excited, uh, hoping that in the next, you know, couple months we can talk about that more as we kind of, uh, try to get those done and, uh, it'll really be a huge game changer and it's kinda like the next big leap forward for us.

Yep. And we closed on, uh, three or four smaller Houston [00:43:00] add-ons, um, right. Kind of towards the end of the year that we're really excited about. There we're just. Yeah, smaller, um, kinda local to Houston, um, 40-year-old companies. And, and every one of them came from our network. Like it was, you know, we worked with somebody that was in our network and we had a friend of a friend and we got connected.

And so it just kind of speaks to the power of talk to your network, talk to your, you know, your vendors and get 'em educated. So anyway, just some cool updates. I think we have some people that have said, Hey, give, give more updates on the alarm Masters front. So we, we wanted to do that. Um. 

Yes, 

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