In this episode, we discuss what certificates are, how they work, and what you need to understand about certificates for building automation.
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Transcript
Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito episode 332. Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to episode 332 of the smart buildings Academy podcast.
Phil Zito 0:13
In today's episode, we're going to be talking about sales. Now I know a lot of you have messaged me have talked to me on Facebook, on Reddit, etc. And the general gist is Phil, why do I even have to think about sales? Why do I need to be focusing on enhancing my sales skills right now? Because literally, I can just close my eyes, stick my arm out swinging a circle, and I will run into a sales opportunity. There are more sales right now to be had than there are people out there to execute and people to sell. So why do I need to think about the spill? Well, there's this minor little thing called inflation, there is this thing called a recession. And I hate to be doom and gloom and be like this person who's like putting negativeness out into the universe. But the reality is, is that I've lived through 2008, I've lived through COVID, I've seen their effects on the market. I've seen how it caused people to contract their budgets, and affected the ability of people to bring in business. So what I want to talk about is when this contraction happens, or when people start tightening their purse strings, and not necessarily buying as much, how are you going to identify sales opportunities, because the markets gonna get crowded, there's gonna be a lot of people out there trying to sell, and you're sitting there trying to get them to pay attention to you. So what can you do? Number one, let's bring people free money. Now, I'm not gonna get into the politics of this, I'm not even going to touch that. But the reality is, when things slow down, the government likes to give out money, it's just is what it is. And so if you are able to identify sources of said money, and transfer that to someone who is needing to do a project, or wanting to retrofit or wanting to improve something, well, guess what, my friends, that is going to bring you to the front of the line in the sales world. So tip number one, and this is going to be like a smattering of stream of consciousness tips that you should keep in your sales tool belt, and kind of go with, okay, all right. So you should have a sales tool belt, alright. And the sales tool belt should be filled with all kinds of sales tools, you should have prospecting tools, you should have financial tools, you should have industry specific tools, you should have ability to do problem solving tools, you should have technical, accurate tools. And you pull out these tools as needed when you're selling. So maybe you're sitting there and you're running into someone who is trying to go and purchase something or to enhance their building automation system, but they don't have money. That's where that tip number one, right, you can draw from the potential resources that exist in the market to fun projects. Tip number two is being able to understand the fact that utility prices are increasing. staff expertise is decreasing, people are leaving the workforce, people are retiring. So there is kind of a combination of there's less experienced staff to run and operate buildings, while there's also an increased cost to operate buildings. So having the ability to mitigate those through technology solutions, is going to be able to help you identify sales opportunities, because here's what's going to happen. A lot of people are going to reach out to their mechanicals and say, Hey, you bet on anything or they're going to go into dodge leads, or they're going to go and just look at what capital projects are funded. And that is what everyone is going to be going after they're all going to be going after the same pie. But by going and talking to owners and understanding, you know, I mean, obviously if it's like a hospital or school district or anything that has a fixed operational budget that isn't being transferred to tenants. That's why, in my opinion, actually when the market starts to contract, commercial real estate is probably going to be one of the worst markets to do these strategies in because they usually in their leases have clauses that pass through the cost of utilities. So if utility costs increased, they can usually transfer those through in their leases. But if you've got a K through 12 scenario, if you've got to college, sometimes colleges can pass through to the students, but definitely K through 12. Definitely, healthcare things like that, you will see, especially public health care, private health care, they can usually just pass it through, but public typically has fixed cost. So you will see that the operational costs increase the operational expertise decreases. And you will see that people are looking for opportunities to solve both of those problems. And as a building automation provider, we can definitely solve both of those problems, right, you can go and provide solutions that are ops, op, X based not capital based, but op X based. These are things like analytics, these are things like retro commissioning, these are things like retrofits that can go and decrease energy. Or you can optimize their staff through training, automation, analytics, work order management, etc. These are solutions you can bring to them, that will hit that staff optimization, so you've got staff optimization, or you have
Phil Zito 6:33
potential energy optimization, you can do either of those. So that's tip number two. Tip number three, to identify sales opportunities in a crowded market is to use the circle method. So pick your distance, start at the epicenter of your metropolitan area. And then you know, just go and draw a circle out that's maybe 20 miles, 10 miles, 15 miles out from the center of the city, the further you go out, yes, the the fewer opportunities there will be. But the less competition there will be, I usually tend to find that 15 to 20 miles outside the metroplex, in a circular pattern is going to give you the best results, you're still going to have enough in most large metropolitan areas, you're still gonna have enough density, as far as the the amount of companies, the amount of potential customers, but you're going to be far enough away from the core metropolitan area that your competition is going to be less. And so these are folks that you would go. Oftentimes, they are going to have smaller budgets, but there's going to be less competition for the budgets, the procurement folks tend to be more forgiving of procurement sole sourcing providers. And you can go to these folks. And you can do a double whammy, which is a retrofit sale, followed by a service sale. So you can go and be like, Hey,
Phil Zito 8:08
let's take a look at your existing systems. Let's understand your goals. Okay? Are you having climate issues? Are you having energy issues? What issues are you having? Let's address those. And then let's put in a maintenance plan, maybe remote maintenance, which we'll talk about in just a second. That's tip number four. But let's put in a maintenance plan to go and maintain your systems. Once again, focusing in on op x, because people aren't going to have capex, they're gonna have capital expenditure budget, but they will have op X budget. Now let's talk about things like remote operation centers, remote analytics, remote operating, remote service, etc. Implement remote strategies, these are lower cost higher leverage activities. So what that means is, if I were to send a technician out to a site, yes, I may get three to four hour billing minimum. And that's all well and good. But the problem with that is, is that while I may get that three or four hour minimum bill out, what I'm not getting is any ability to multitask that person, that person is out on that job site, and they are committed to that job site. And also I've lost anywhere from 22 minutes to an hour of travel time for this person having to travel Yeah, and you're like, Well, I'm getting paid, or we're billing out while he's traveling. So that doesn't matter. Well, the thing is, that does matter, because even though you're billing out, once again, that person is a sunk resource. Now flip that around and do a remote operation. So you set up a remote gateway on these customer sites, maybe you give them a discounted rate if they agree to be remotely monitor So you remotely monitor them, you remotely service them, you're going to be able to fix a lot of things just doing that between a customer with their phone camera, and you remotely logging into a system, you can diagnose a lot of issues. Now, what does this do? Well, the likelihood of you being utilized and being committed to a specific person decreases, because you can often remotely fix things much faster. Additionally, there's no travel time. So now you've taken this one person who maybe could get two calls in a day. Now you've taken that one person, and you've turned it to where they could potentially get, you know, four to eight calls a day in. And additionally, you can also tie this to a more passive income, which is a monitoring based income where they're paying you, it's almost like insurance, they're paying you to monitor the system. So that is another sales opportunity in a crowded market that people aren't necessarily going to be addressing. Now, number five, is going and looking at enhancing the customers ability to operate their building by combining technology sets in integrated use cases. Wow, that's a mouthful. But essentially, what you do is you go to K through 12, you go through healthcare, you go into commercial real estate, you go into higher ed, whatever, they all have specific use cases, they want to achieve specific things they want to achieve with their technology stack. And your goal is to be able to tie those technologies together at a low cost amount to reduce the amount of double work they have to do. So the previous tip, tip number four was eliminating, you know, the aspect of us having to commit resources to a single thing and not being able to commit that resource to another thing. While now we're doing that for our customers, we're eliminating the need for them to have a lighting guy, an AV guy, a BAS guy. Instead, by combining these systems going for the Spock single pane of glass, right, or by just simply tying them in and having an integrated use case. What that enables us to do is or enables the customer to do is to run their facilities with less staff, and with less,
Phil Zito 12:32
basically, operational costs. And so how do you do all of this right? Well, that's where we have to draw from our tool belt. So I just give you some tips for your tool belt. But now to draw from your tool belt, you want to draw on both financial and technical and operational axiom. So from a financial perspective, we want to be able to understand the concept of ROI return on investment, we want to understand first cost and ongoing cost. And we want to be able to essentially show the return on the investment based on saying, Okay, this is first cost, this is our continued cost. And this is our savings. And so we have simple payback at X amount of years. So being able to do these equations and show people and these are basic financial equations, like okay, here's your operational cost right now, this is your reduced operational cost. This is the difference. This is going to generate X amount of savings, it costs y. And so you'll have a payback in Z. All right, and we go and do that calculation that is using your financial tools in your tool belt to sell. Then we have our operational tools in our tool belt. This is understanding building operations. This is understanding how people work, how people run their operations, finding inefficiencies, and then being able to solve those inefficiencies either with technology or with augmented service and show you're able to have a conversation and a sale from an operational credibility perspective. So we talked about financial, we talked about operational, and another kind of tool in your tool belt that you want to be able to do besides for the operational and the financial is kind of having that subject matter expertise, understanding the business problems that that market has been able to communicate in that way as well. Like I said, this episode is bouncing all over the place. But over the next several weeks, we're going to focus in even more specifically, we're going to most likely we're going to screenshare on the podcast. I know that like if you're listening is kind of hard, but there will be a recording, but we're going to screenshare and we're going to go through kind of researching customers and we'll just pick random sites and we'll see if We can't find their operational budget. Let's see if we can't find any company reports that go through kind of problems they're facing and challenges and threats they're aware of. And then we'll also see if we can't research any, like utility grant money or economic development grant money to see if we can't help fun things for customers. So we're going to be getting pretty practical in the upcoming Friday sales episodes. As always, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out. Thanks a ton. And please go to podcast at smart buildings academy.com Ford slash 332. Once again, that's podcasts that smart buildings academy.com four slash 332. I encourage you to comment or let us know if you have any questions. Thank you so much, and I look forward to talking to you all on next Monday's episode. Take care
