In today’s business environment, where resources are scarce and sometimes non-existent, how do your customers find answers to the challenges that they face? If they have the time, they might try searching the internet or posting questions on sites such as Quora or LinkedIn—all of which can provide great answers—but would your customers ever consider using your company as a resource? If not, chances are they see you as just a security vendor.
Consider this: you probably have clients that are fairly similar and have faced and solved many of the same types of challenges. So, if your customers aren’t leveraging you as a resource, both you and your customers are missing a huge opportunity. Here are a couple of great examples of how I have seen clients tap their vendor networks to help solve some of their challenges.
Shortly after winning a new security guard contract, the company that I was with had a conversation with that client about tracking and managing incidents at the facility. At that time, they were tracking incidents manually—a labor intensive and very inefficient process. As a result of that conversation, we decided to introduce them to Lauren Innovations. We discovered Lauren Innovations after having a conversation with another client who had also been dealing with the growing costs of incident tracking. After we made the introduction, the client went on to become a Lauren Innovations client. They were very happy with Lauren’s solution and with our company for making that introduction.
Who Goes There?
At one security guard company I worked with, many of our longest standing relationships were with academic institutions. Subsequently, we’d had the opportunity to become well aware of the challenges facing school administrators and their staff. At one point, one of these academic institutions asked how our other clients were tracking student attendance and visitors on campus. Because the customer used us as a resource, we were able to introduce them to Hero K12. Hero K12 had been providing our other customers with a solution that more than met the needs of this client. In fact, the client went on to roll out Hero K12’s software at several of their campuses. Again, that was a win for Hero K12 as well as our company.
Sales Performance International has a very succinct way of explaining what it means to become a partner with your customers. In summary, being a partner means that you are seen as a longterm partner whose contributions and insights are viewed as key to your customer’s long-term success. Although achieving that type of relationship with all of your customers is unlikely, the ability to provide both security non-security-related contributions enhances your value in your customer’s eyes.
So if you have not already done so, begin making a concerted effort to understand your customers’ challenges and how they can overcome them. Sharing that information could make a world of difference when that low-cost competitor comes knocking on your customer’s door because they will see that you are not necessarily interchangeable with another security company.
By showing your customer the value that you are providing them through security-related activities and demonstrating that you can provide value beyond that, becoming a partner rather than a vendor, you can gain a competitive advantage over other companies that might come courting your top clients. So what else can you do to keep your clients and reel in new ones in a competitive market? One of the biggest things is customer service.