It starts with building a great security proposal.
Everyone knows that first impressions are essential, but many companies wait until a prospect books a meeting before pulling out all the stops. If you want to impress your potential customers, you must start earlier.
Start Your Security Proposal With a Personalized Introduction
Buyers receive dozens of offers from salespeople every single week. While they may be interested in some of the services being provided, they are busy. They don’t have the time to “jump on a quick call” or “join a short 30-minute demo” for every person.
The first step in your security proposal is to get your face in front of the prospect—sometimes literally.
Some organizations are using video solutions as a way to introduce themselves. By creating a short, personalized 2-minute video, you can explain who you are and what you are offering in a unique way.
This approach shows that an actual person is behind the message and that you think their business is worth putting in extra effort for. In a world full of automated marketing, these little things help you stand out.
Show Prospects You’ve Done Your Homework
If you want to impress prospects with your security proposal—show them you have an understanding of their business.
Spend time researching their needs or unique challenges and preemptively addressing them. Consider recording a video of yourself at one of their facilities highlighting a specific vulnerability and how your solution can solve it.
The exact way you approach this should be different for every potential customer. After all, their needs will be different. By taking this initiative, your prospects will appreciate your effort to connect. This helps build a relationship with the buyer before even talking with them.
Make the Most Out of Your Time With the Buyer
Once you have made it past the first hurdle and have an initial meeting on the books, it’s time to get into the specifics.
One extremely important note—this meeting is not about you.
Too often, this first meeting turns into one long sales pitch. This approach can immediately turn off a prospect and undermine any trust you may have built with them. It increases the likelihood of misunderstandings, and you might even receive pushback before you completely understand their needs.
You need to get the prospect talking and listen to what they are saying. The key is to keep the buyer engaged in the conversation. By using leading questions, you can determine what is most important to the prospect.
Consider asking the following questions:
- What price point they are looking for?
- What business problems or vulnerabilities are they looking to address through acquiring security services?
- What security services are most valuable for their business?
- What specific use cases do they have for how security services will benefit them?
- What KPIs do they associate with security services?
It can be helpful to include surveys or other forms of assessments to gain a deeper understanding of your prospect’s wants and needs.
Once you have answers to these questions, you can better establish a differentiation between yourself and your competitors.
What To Include in Your Security Proposal
Now that you have all of this background knowledge, it’s time to start building your proposal. Outside of the specific details of the contract, there are a few things you should incorporate in every proposal.
- A brief history of your company’s origin story to help them get to know you better. By this point, you know a lot about their business, so it is important that they feel the same about you.
- Address the concerns you gathered throughout the sales cycle. Show them that you were listening during those conversations and discuss how you will overcome their issues. At this point, it is critical to include proof points, like case studies of customer reviews, to alleviate any potential concerns.
- Express some gratitude. It can be as simple as thanking them for their time and expressing your appreciation for the opportunity. If you want to stand out, create another short video. This small effort can make you stand out from the rest.
Make Sure Your Security Proposal Speaks to the Person Who Isn’t There
When you are finally ready to submit your proposal, you need to remember the other people involved in the buying decision. Key decision-makers often don’t see a proposal until their team puts the final document in front of them. If they haven’t been included in previous conversations and are left to fill in any missing gaps themselves, your proposal will likely be underwhelming.
Find Ways to Automate This Process
By now, you might be thinking this is all great, but won’t all of this take a long time? Simply put… yes. You need to spend time on your proposals to distinguish yourself from your competitors. If you just copy/paste some boilerplate contract, your prospect will be able to tell. What’s worse, they will not feel appreciated.
We know that you can’t devote hours to writing every single proposal. Fortunately, there are solutions that can help speed up this process.
Securitas, one of the largest security guard companies in the world, is a great example of how these solutions can drastically increase the number of closed deals.
Through proposal automation, they decreased proposal creation time from 3 hrs to 30 min. This severely reduced rep procrastination and increased sales reps’ time to sell. By reviewing other analytics and using a proposal management center, they expanded their business by 25% in one year.
Learn more in our Winning the Modern Security Sale webinar.
Brian Koehn
A sales and marketing expert, Brian has been hands-on in the direct exponential growth or turnaround of dozens of security companies around the world. Including his first business which he started at age 17 and sold at age 19 after 27 stores carried his products. Brian’s passion for studying human behavior and neuroscience has led him to produce game-changing strategies for companies all over the world.