More on Pricing Your Services and Using Contracts for Your Sale Presentation

April 15, 2013



    Once you figure out how much you'd like to charge for your services the next hurtle is getting your subscriber to agree to pay the charge or charges.  Keep in mind that your perspective is quite different than your subscribers.  Your starting point for figuring out a charge is going to be your fixed cost, then consider the competition or market.  Your subscriber is probably starting with a budget in mind as well as comparisons to your competitors pricing.  They see advertisements and may have competing bids.  All things being equal, how do you get an edge on promoting your services and pricing the services closer to where you want to be?  There's probably more than one answer, but the one I am going to suggest is, use the Standard Alarm Contracts, particularly the new Commercial All in One and the Residential All in One.  Why?

    Because the All in Ones separate the services you provide and separate the pricing for these services.  And it's done in a standardized form so that the subscriber isn't going to be suspicious that you're trying to add on services that don't belong there or should be included in the price for something else.  A good example is monitoring and ECV.  

    You advertise or quote a price for monitoring, say $20 a month.  When you are selling the service and getting the contract signed you will be filling out the monitoring paragraph and inserting your monthly charge.  You know you're in a jurisdiction where ECV is required and your central station has priced its monitoring service with that in mind.  Your subscriber would not think there would be a separate charge for ECV; it seems like its just part of the monitoring service.  But the Standardized Form has a separate paragraph for ECV and pricing for that service, disabusing your subscriber of the notion that that service is free or should be included in the monitoring charge.  

    The Standard Form Contracts are designed to enhance your selling experience, rather than be something you pull out at the end of a sale presentation and hope you can get it signed.  By incorporating the Contract in the sale presentation you will have an outline of services and separate pricing for those services should come naturally to you and the subscriber.

    While the primary directive of the Standard Form Contracts is to protect alarm companies from exposure and liability, and second, to build company equity and value, using the contract to enhance the sale presentation should not be an inconsistent goal.  The Residential All in One and Commercial All in One can be purchased here:  www,alarmcontracts.com