One integrator's recent LinkedIn comment raised an interesting issue:
Definitely local integrators can get quite competitive with one another, especially if former employers are at the rival company. But how heated does it get? Any experience of you telling someone or being told to stay away from a certain area or account?
Par for the course in the new normal commodity race to the bottom. Everyone is defensive of their market share at the moment.
If you aint pissin competitors off you aint doing somethin right
At my first job we used to have unmarked vans to drive into Philadelphia and New Jersey. If we took the marked vans we'd get calls threats from local shops. I actually got pulled off of a job I was doing once because they called the office and said we had an hour to get out or we were going to have problems. I wasn't even in a company vehicle, I had my personal vehicle there doing a service call.
I also remember a certain salesperson for a competing integrator telling us that one city was "their account" and we needed to stay the eff off it. Except the city had called us. We politely told him that and hung up.
Lets make a new security company can call it MMA-SEC and go to all the public bids and take all their lunch money. Bing Bap Boom!
Who's with me??
Im down.
This seems extreme and we definitely don't have anything that bad out here. I could definitely see this occurring in Chicago, New York, New Jersey (Ethan seems to confirm this), and possibly Las Vegas.
There is always more subtle political maneuvering and handicapping of competitors going on. It has been a while but public bids were a bit Game of Thrones since it required so little effort for sales staff to scan the plan rooms for easy bids to squander time on. Sales quotas, minimal sales effort (laziness), and 20 (also lazy) competitors at the bid is always a recipe for backstabbing.
Many years ago, we had one residential alarm installer in the Seattle area who would offer free "prewires" for security systems to home builders. The hope was that a percentage of the new home buyers would choose the company who did the prewire to install and monitor the alarm.
For a several month period, someone was going around to these homes just after these prewires were completed and sabotaging the wiring. The damage was done in a subtle way so that it wouldn't be noticed until after the home was completed and someone tried to connect the devices.
It was suspected (but never proven) that this sabotage was done by a rival alarm company working in the same area.
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