As part of an effort to help its dealers make greater inroads in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market, Alarm.com last week launched "Alarm.com for Business," a fully integrated security offering that combines intrusion detection, video surveillance, access control, and energy management into a single solution. As with the company's residential security platform, Alarm.com for Business is controlled through the company's app and online interfaces, providing a highly intuitive and easy to manage offering for business owners while at the same time delivering additional recurring monthly revenue opportunities for dealers.
According to Anne Ferguson, Vice President of Marketing for Alarm.com, a large percentage of the company's dealer base is already doing work in the SMB space, however; those same dealers may only have a small handful of commercial accounts.
"It may only happen because a small business owner called in and requested service, not because of intentional outbound sales and marketing efforts," she says. "Our service provider partners are now equipped with a solution where they can start much more aggressively selling and marketing into the SMB space. We've got materials to get their sales team up to speed and we've developed a solution that helps them easily price and bundle a solution that will work best for a quick-serve restaurant versus a dentist's office or an accountant's office."
Traditional Challenges Confronting Dealers in the SMB Space
Historically, Ferguson says one of the biggest obstacles that traditional residential security dealers have faced in trying to also serve commercial customers is that there hasn't been a lot of hardware "purpose built" for the SMB space.
"For example, there weren't a lot of commercially-oriented Z-Wave locks or video cameras that had the IP ratings, dustproof capabilities and water tightness needed for commercial installations," she says. "And a lot of service providers didn't think about going into that SMB market because of that but we are at a place now where that is not the case and we were very purposeful in crafting our solution to ensure that we had hardware components that utilized a lot of the same technology our service providers were already comfortable with but were also created for a commercial installation."
Additionally, Ferguson says they also placed a heavy emphasis on their installation resources and making sure dealers had the best information on where to install cameras and other pieces of security hardware. "You might be looking for a different angle in an SMB installation than you would in walking into a residential property," she explains.
Aside from hardware, Ferguson says that the marketing messages to business owners are also largely different from what dealers are used to in the residential space.
"While there are a lot of similarities in the solution between the SMB and residential space, the messaging points that really resonate with a small business owner are different and so that is one of the things that we've tried to bring along with our solution," she says. "That includes a lot of additional sales and marketing content that can help our service providers speak directly to the small business owner and directly address how this Alarm.com solution can positively impact their business and meet their needs."
For example, whereas in the past if a business owner received an alarm in the middle of the night and needed to identify what was a false alarm versus an actual alarm, Ferguson says they would've had to get up and drive to their business to discover what caused the alarm. However, with Alarm.com for Business, they simply receive an alert on their phone and can pull up any video associated with it to quickly determine whether or not the alarm warrants a response.
Two other common pain points the Alarm.com solution will help business owners with is managing user access codes and having the ability to manage multiple locations in a single solution.
"As you can imagine, the amount of turnover in a quick service restaurant, for example, is pretty significant and the manager of that store doesn't want to have to re-key every time someone quits or try to get keys back when someone is leaving. With our solution, they're able to quickly go online and delete users, add users, change the time frames when users have access, and it really streamlines that process," Ferguson says. "For those that have multiple locations, it is critical for them to understand if everything is running the way they need it to run. Did all of their stores open on time or did they not? Having that awareness into multiple properties through a single interface was a really powerful point to make to small business owners."
Will Smart Homes Translate to Smart Businesses?
Similar to where the residential security market was seven or eight years ago in which connected solutions started to become more mainstream, Ferguson says they believe the SMB market is currently reaching that same tipping point, which could drive increased demand for solutions like Alarm.com for Business.
"For the majority of small business owners, there is still not that great sense of awareness that they can have security and video and access solutions all bundled into one unified experience," she explains. "I think we're reaching that same tipping point where awareness is becoming much greater among small and medium-sized business owners that these solutions are available to them and so we will start to see more interest and sales and revenue opportunities coming out of that space. It's certainly trailing where we are with the smart home interest now but every indication we see is that it is catching up very quickly."
Among some of the business intelligence features dealers will be able to offer SMB owners through the Alarm.com for Business platform, according to Ferguson, include an open and close report which will enable them to see not only day-to-day but week-to-week and month-to-month whether their businesses are opening and closing on time, as well as some reporting around access control to provide insights on the number of new users who may have been added or deleted from the system.
While the company certainly isn't limiting the application of the solution to only certain types of businesses, Ferguson says that they've already seen a lot of traction for it in and around quick service restaurants and small professional offices, as well as convenience stores.