You have walked the building and you are ready to price the job. Who signs the check?
Often not the person who showed you around. That is usually a facilities manager, a property manager, or a security director. They own the problem. The budget commonly sits somewhere else, with finance or operations.
Each of them reads the same quote looking for something different. One wants the door that gets propped open every afternoon fixed. One is deciding whether this beats the roof and the parking lot this year. One wants to know what it does to the network.
So write it so it works for all of them. Here is what each one cares about.
In short
- Your main contact owns the problem. That does not always mean they hold the budget.
- Name every door, put the list in priority order, and give two or three options instead of one number.
- Ask whether the building is owned or leased. In a leased building you may be writing two quotes for two payers.
The person with the problem
In most commercial buildings this is a facilities or property manager. They carry a large share of integrator work because keeping the building compliant and maintained is their job. In larger commercial and industrial sites it is often a security director instead.
Either way, they live with the problem, so your quote should name the problems they already know about.
So list what you found, item by item, and say what is wrong with each. Not “six exterior doors and camera coverage”, but the entrance that does not lock, the dock with nothing covering it, the badge system nobody can manage remotely.
Then put them in priority order and say why each one sits where it does:
- An entrance that stays unlocked through the working day.
- A reader that fails often enough that people prop the door instead.
- An area with no camera coverage at all.
- A system that works but cannot be managed remotely.
That order is the most useful thing on the page, because it tells them what to do if they only get part of the money. Which is what usually happens.
Give them a one-page version too. They will be forwarding this, and a sixteen-page proposal does not get forwarded.
Who approves the money
This is the part integrators get wrong most often. Your main contact feels like the decision-maker because they are the one talking to you, but the budget commonly sits with finance or operations, and that person has never walked the building with you.
They are not comparing you to another security company. They are comparing this to the roof and the parking lot.
So give them what those projects give them: what it costs split into install and ongoing, what it costs per year to keep running, how long it lasts before it needs replacing, and what happens if it waits a year, said plainly and without drama.
And give them options instead of one number. A single price is a yes or a no. Two or three is a conversation. The doors that do not lock. That plus camera coverage at the dock and stairwell. Everything, phased across two budget years.
If they are responsible for more than one property, add what it would cost to do the next one. Someone with six buildings is looking for something they can repeat.
Get in front of the right name
Abstrakt sets appointments with the property managers, facility managers, and directors of facilities planning commercial security work, so your team spends its week walking buildings instead of dialing. The site survey, the number, and the job are yours.
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IT: the approval that gets missed
Cameras, controllers and access panels usually run on their network. That makes IT part of nearly every one of these jobs, and on some of them they are the buyer, especially where the system is cloud-managed or tied into employee badges.
Give them a page written for them: how many devices and how much bandwidth and storage they will use, whether it sits on their network or a separate one, how remote access works and who gets it, who holds the admin credentials after handover, and what you need from them before install day.
Ask rather than tell. One conversation at the start is cheap. The same conversation after the design is finished can mean doing it twice.
Who owns the building changes the answer
If the company owns the building, the budget question stays inside that company.
If they lease, it splits. The landlord or the management company generally controls the exterior and the common areas. The tenant controls what happens inside their own space. The lease decides where the line falls, and neither side can authorise work on the other side of it.
So ask early whether they own or lease. In a leased building you may be writing two quotes for two different payers, and a single proposal covering both will stall while they work out who is responsible for what.
The code decides some of this for you
Doors in an exit path are governed by life-safety code, and what you are allowed to put on them depends on the building’s occupancy type and the local jurisdiction.
Check with the authority having jurisdiction before the design is final, and tell your customer you are doing it. Nobody in the building can approve their way around a code requirement, and finding that out after installation is the expensive version.
What to ask on the first visit
- Who else would need to see this before it moves forward?
- Does this come out of the maintenance budget, or does it go in as a project?
- Does anything going on the network need IT to approve it?
- Do you own the building or lease it?
- If this works here, are there other buildings it would apply to?
Those are normal questions and you will get normal answers. They also tell you which version of the quote to write.
What gets a quote approved
Name what you found. Priority order. Two or three options. A page for IT, and a clear answer on who is paying. A quote with those sits on a desk for a lot less time than one without.
Where the work comes from in the first place
All of this assumes you are already in the building. Getting there is the harder problem, and it is the one most integrators are quietly stuck on.
Lead generation for security companies tends to come down to reaching facilities and operations people directly, because they rarely respond to email from a company they do not know and they are not searching for an integrator until something has gone wrong. The work goes to whoever was already in front of them.
That is slow, consistent outreach rather than a campaign, which is exactly the part that gets dropped when the install schedule is full.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you get a meeting with a facilities manager?
Call with a reason that is specific to their building rather than a description of your services. A named door, a camera that has been down, an upcoming inspection. Reasons get routed. Services get a message taken.
Is cold calling still worth it for commercial security sales?
It still works for this buyer, because facilities and operations people are reachable by phone and rarely respond to email from vendors they do not know. What has changed is that it takes consistent volume over months, which is where most integrators run out of time.
Should a security integrator hire a salesperson or outsource appointment setting?
The in-house comparison is not a salary against a retainer. It is salary plus payroll taxes, benefits, software, ramp time and somebody to manage them. Outsourcing trades that for a fixed monthly cost and a faster start. Which is right depends on whether you can keep a salesperson busy and managed.
Keep going
- Security company lead generation
- The four-minute prep before a security site survey call
- What to say when you cold call a facility manager
- Outsourced SDR services
- When commercial building budgets are actually set
About this article
Jeff Winters is Chief Executive Officer at Abstrakt. Reviewed by Neil Erker, Chief Marketing Officer. Abstrakt sets appointments for commercial security integrators and the wider trades, and the patterns here come from that calling.
Jeff Winters is the CEO of Abstrakt Marketing Group, a U.S.-based B2B lead generation and appointment-setting company that books qualified sales meetings for clients across the commercial trades, IT and managed services, manufacturing, and B2B services. He has spent his career building and running outbound sales programs at scale, and he breaks down what actually works in sales and lead generation on Abstrakt's podcast, The Grow Show.
