Make An Access Control Sales Comeback

After its access control vendor abandoned its channel program, this VAR/ISV (independent software vendor) bounced back and is projecting a 26% revenue increase.

Business Solutions, April 2008
Written by: Jay McCall

When Business Solutions first covered Ban-Koe Companies in January 2001 (check out “The Big Time” at BSMinfo.com), this VAR/ISV was a $19 million company and growing at a rapid clip. Things continued to go very well for Ban-Koe President and CEO Bill Bangtson up until 2003, when the then $25 million VAR was told by its time and attendance vendor that the vendor was dropping its channel program completely. To make matters worse, in the fine print of its vendor contract was a clause that included a noncompete agreement stating that in the event the vendor canceled its channel program, Ban-Koe could not resell a competing time and attendance product to its existing clients. Translation: 3,000 customers off limits! Even though Ban-Koe scrambled to ramp up its other technology solution offerings and services, the blow to its time and attendance business was too sudden to offset immediately, and the VAR was forced to lay off about 2/3 of its workforce in late 2003. Fast forward four years, Ban-Koe is a $9 million VAR, and it’s projecting 26% sales revenue growth this year and even more next year. There are two keys to Ban-Koe’s comeback: building its own time and attendance solution and learning how to reach new prospects with fewer employees via the Web. The second part of Ban-Koe’s strategy is what every VAR will want to pay close attention to.

Where Do Your Best Access Control Customers Come From?
Just about every VAR relies on multiple outlets for recruiting: cold calling, trade shows, local media advertising, direct mailings, Web advertising, and regional trade publications (e.g. techPARTNER magazine). With fewer feet on the street, Ban-Koe needed to home in on its most effective marketing options. “We discovered that not one customer had ever contacted us as a result of seeing us in the Yellow Pages, but the majority of our customers had visited our Web site before they found us or we found them,” says Bangtson. Ban-Koe had retained its in-house Web talent, which had built the company’s subsidiary Web sites: www.idbadges.com (ID badges and management systems), www.identatronics.com (workplace security software), and www.bankoe.com (includes info about all the company’s products and services). “You can type ‘ID badges’ into just about any search engine, and one of our ID badge Web sites will be listed in the top three results,” says Bangtson. “And, we do this without resorting to pay-for-play advertising, instead relying on our URL word choice, the words used at our site, and linking to other sites.”

Linking to other sites plays a big role in Ban-Koe’s Web site success. According to Bangtson, every time a partner posts a Ban-Koe link at its site, or when Ban-Koe posts a partner’s URL at its site, it helps its search engine rating. (You can find a link to the online version of this article at any of Ban-Koe’s Web sites in the “News” section.) Creating multiple Web sites that link to one another lends itself to Ban-Koe’s SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. This decision has another purpose as well. “We’ve discovered over the years that our Web sites have different effects on prospects, much like advertisements,” says Bangtson. “Some of our Web sites get a lot of traffic, and therefore strengthen our brand [e.g. www.bankoe.com], but others do a better job of generating responses [e.g. www.idbadges.com].”

The Ban-Koe Companies Web site, for instance, has information about all the company’s technology solutions and services broken down by division, and it even is set up so that customers can place orders or contact a sales rep in the appropriate division. However, the company gets more than twice as many prospects from its Identatronics and ID America sites. “Customers typically search a site looking for a point solution such as ID badges or time and attendance terminals — they’re not looking for a suite of products covering access control, physical and logical security, and workforce management,” says Bangtson. “Using our ID America site, for example, we can help a prospect select the ID badges and printers they’re looking for, and through our sales process we can help them see the value in purchasing our vIDix [access control, photo ID badge creation, and visitor management] and/or CeleriTime [workforce management] software suites.”

Use Webinars To Show The Value Of Access Control
The majority of Ban-Koe’s prospects that become customers do so as a result of a phone conversation between a sales rep and prospect. In fact, the VAR finds that if a prospect wants to communicate via e-mail only it’s a sure sign the prospect is just looking for the cheapest products and isn’t a viable candidate. If a prospect is willing to engage with a sales rep on the phone and is open to learning about Ban-Koe’s solutions and services, the VAR has a much higher chance of turning the lead into a sale.

After the initial phone call, the next step involves setting up a Webinar, which entails sending a sales rep to the customer’s site and having a Ban-Koe technician host the online session from Ban-Koe’s headquarters. At the customer site there are typically three decision makers who sit in on the presentation: the business owner (if it’s an SMB)/administrative person, an HR/payroll manager/director, and an IT infrastructure person. “We try to keep the Webinars under 60 minutes because we’ve found that we can get all the information we need and talk about our solution and services without overwhelming the prospect,” says Bangtson. “Keeping our technician in-house and keeping the Webinars under 1 hour also allows us to maximize our technical resources. A technician can often conduct four Webinars in a day as opposed to a sales rep who has to drive to the next customer site.”

During the Webinar, the Ban-Koe sales rep and technician include the three points that differentiate Ban-Koe from an Internet reseller: 1. Ban-Koe owns all the products it sells, 2. Ban-Koe services all the products it sells, and 3. Ban-Koe handles all warranty-related problems with any of the hardware it sells rather than requiring customers to deal directly with vendors. As a result of increased Web leads, Ban-Koe’s Webinar presentations have increased from 4 to 32 per month. According to Bangtson, the Webinars result in three to six new customers per month.

One other technique Ban-Koe has found success with when trying to upgrade a customer from a point product to a solution is to enable customers to purchase individual modules within its software suite and then to throw in a module for free. The VAR did this successfully recently with a hospital customer who purchased Ban-Koe IDvisitor (visitor management) and IDimage (photo ID) modules from its vIDix suite. The Ban-Koe salesperson included the IDaxxess (access control) module at no charge and explained how the customer could use it in the future. “Within a couple of months the salesperson received a call from the hospital IT manager stating, ‘We have your IDvisitor software and would like to have you install access control readers at 23 doors, so we can start using it,’” recalls Bangtson.

Build More Web Sites, Increase Access Control Revenue
Now that Ban-Koe has experienced success via its existing Web sites, the VAR has additional Web site plans in the works, including: www.idimage.info, www.idaxxess.info, www.idvisitor.info, and www.celeritime.com. The first three sites represent individual modules from its vIDix suite designed to reach customers looking for specific access control solutions (e.g. someone looking for badges would visit the IDimage site, someone looking for access control hardware/software would visit the IDaxxess site). “The CeleriTime site is already up and running, and we expect to have the others ready to go within the next couple of months,” says Bangtson. “It takes us about six months to create a new Web site, and we have a five-person team that plans it, produces it, and maintains it.” In addition to Bangtson, the Web team includes the VP of sales, VP of marketing, a Web designer, and a graphic artist. The team meets every Tuesday for an hour to provide an update on their task list, discuss any challenges/new ideas, and plan for the following week. When designing a new site, the Web designer spends approximately 1.5 days per week on the site, and the graphic artist spends between 1 and 3 days per week coming up with the look of the site. “It takes 6 to 12 months to realize a payback on investment,” says Bangtson.

One thing that’s tricky for some VARs when using the Web to attract new business is handling leads that come in from outside the VAR’s geographical reach. For Ban-Koe this isn’t a problem at all. Rather, it’s an opportunity to service its channel partners with its Identatronics branding (it currently has about 50 channel partners), who give the Minneapolis-based company a presence on the West Coast, and even in remote locations such as the island of Montserrat (located in the Caribbean Sea). One selling point in Ban-Koe’s favor, which Bangtson adamantly agrees with, is that it doesn’t have any fine print in its channel contracts that would put its partners in the same position that its former vendor put Ban-Koe in four years ago.

Don’t Forget The Networking Side Of Access Control