Although a scale-up, the RSPNDR team has a long history in the Security and Monitoring industry. Our collective experience spans decades and, as alarm innovation has evolved, so have we by always ensuring that we're building the right products with the best technology for our customers, and by adapting the way we operate and sell. 

This post explores how technology has advanced the "art of the sell" and how new sales technologies are shaping future security and monitoring products. 

Rules and tools: From clipboards to Smart Devices and CRMs

The first rule of sales? Know Your Customer (KYC). This goes far beyond a surface knowledge of them and their business. It means deeply understanding their pain points, needs, and desires. KYC allows you to gather information on customers so you can spot trends and establish customer profiles that will help you better match your product with the market and ultimately help the customer’s business perform better. 

Before the Internet, selling goods and services meant door knocking, cold-calling, or having a brick-and-mortar retail store. Most of the information collected about customers was sourced and tracked manually, meaning the data accrued was primarily high-level. While technology hasn't replaced these activities altogether, it has diminished their role and created more sophisticated sales strategies in the process. 

Customer Relationship Management platforms, or CRMs, have changed the way businesses target and nurture prospects. CRM is commonly cloud-based software that helps businesses collect, organize and aggregate vast amounts of data quickly, producing deep insights in seconds and allowing for a more fulsome KYC database. CRMs like Salesforce can provide data on wide-ranging demographic and behavioural trends that influence the sales cycle, which is priceless for businesses operating in highly competitive markets. Using CRMs, companies can better understand who is buying their product, better communicate with their customers, and build products that meet their needs. 

Advertising game-changers 

Technology has also drastically changed how we advertise. Twenty years ago, TV and radio ads were the advertising channels of choice, with few other options. Today, however, while TV and radio have not disappeared, technology has once again created a new path for brands to seek out customers with the help of three game-changing inventions: Google, social media, and the smartphone. 

Google is now the number one advertising platform globally due to its industry-leading search and map software. Google is such a business driver that it's the foundation of a new marketing category – digital marketing – that uses Content Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics to help businesses rank on Google's first page. 

Social media, too, has rocked the advertising boat. New, or small businesses, that ordinarily wouldn't compete with established brands have thrived by leveraging organic social media tactics across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, tiktok and YouTube. In responding to the power of organic social media, these same channels have created
independent advertising offerings. Now, digital marketers can build advertising campaigns across the social media channels their customers use daily. We need to keep in mind, however, that Google and social media advertising would not be this effective without the entire world's rapid adoption of, and addiction to, the smartphone.

Smartphones are basically tiny computers in our pockets that give advertisers access to customers all day, every day. And Big Tech knows it. Its collective influence on advertising innovation means businesses must engage in some, if not all, digital marketing activities to remain relevant. Today, an online presence means survival. 

Big Tech means Big Data 

While Big Tech has made companies work smarter for their advertising dollars, they've also made advertising much more impactful. The data that is now collected is more extensive and insightful than most pre-Internet businesses could have ever imagined. It is now the norm for a person's information to be sold to companies to help them develop customer profiles and learn who is most likely to buy their products.

Google and Facebook, in particular, have revolutionized data and analytics. By taking advantage of vertical product offerings, they can track behaviour, identify trends, and build comprehensive analytics dashboards into their platforms – something RSPNDR has mirrored in the data analytics of our product. This level of insight has dramatically changed the landscape of what we expect from our advertising platforms and what businesses need to know about customers to remain competitive. Analytics dashboards allow advertisers to more strategically target segments of the public that match their customer profiles with messages and products that will be meaningful to each segment. By working together, CRMs and Big Tech are able to deliver businesses the information they need to capitalize on the sales opportunities available to them. 

Wrapping up  

Recent advancement to sales technology that help collect customer information, identify trends, and target advertisements is helping businesses in all sectors, including Security and Monitoring, know their customers better and more accurately target information and products to them. 

It's necessary for businesses, including RSPNDR, to leverage sales technology to remain competitive in today's marketplace. Indeed, this blog post is, in part, an exercise in digital marketing. But we believe that the information we gather about our customers benefits them in the long run. By collecting information about our current customer base, we can build more advanced customer profiles and better target businesses and customers who genuinely need our services. Similarly, by better understanding our audience, we can more effectively tailor our product to meet their needs. 

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