Screw Your Sales Territory!
Here's a Monitronics Dealer ad that caught my eye:
The take away: Monitronics doesn't care about your territory. If a trunk slammer wants to undercut you, they won't bat an eye... they will get their sale either way, and even pledge to "devote every possible resource" to help them.
As an end-user or potential customer, I would love this. If my current vendor hacks me off, I can just hit the yellow pages.
As a dealer, I would hate this. Think that protected sales territories aren't important to dealers? Who wants to compete against the world? Whether they admit it or not, the 'fanbois' aligned with protected brands are always the most vocal. *cough*Avigilon*cough*
The surprising aspect of this advertisement is that it is being advertised at all. A dealer marketing campaign trumpeting no loyalty to dealers is supposed to incentivise me to sign on?
12/06/13 12:56am
In a lot of major metropolitan areas I am hearing that the commercial burg market is nearly saturated, and profits are low. Monitoring costs have plummeted, there hasn't been much innovation in burg panels in forever, so no compelling reason to the average user to upgrade/update equipment.
In the past year, one of the key drivers of new dealers to us has been the "typical" Monitronics dealer looking for new revenue and new profits.
when it comes to central station monitoring what would the benefits of a territorial dealer agreement be? i can understand it with a product or a marketable service because customer(s) interact with that item or service first hand and may ask for it by name... central stations however, a customer typically doesn't know much about them, especially enough to ask for them by name...
My first thought was, if they have near zero market penetration, any dealer initiative is unlikely to undercut another Monitronics dealer. Is Monitronics a start-up?
No, just the opposite. Monitronics is one of the largest US alarm monitoring companies, with over 600 dealers and 1M subscribers.
I wasn't aware Monitronics ever had territories. For that matter I'm not aware of many Central Stations that have protected territories, unless we're discussing ADT or Sonitrol type Monitoring Centers with formal dealer relationships.
timothy I have never heard of one either... I know in my city there are four dealers who all use the same central station to monitor their customers systems... it just doesn't seem beneficial for a monitoring company to limit themselves based upon territory... even with adt I believ they would be happy to have multiple dealers in a location...
Indeed, many manufacturers and service originators want the largest possible dealer channel. ...more evangelists evangelizing, the better.
However, if your business is reselling and installing that equipment, you likely have a very different opinion. Especially in the alarms industry, which is full of small dealers and razor thin margins. You make your living on volumes... volumes in no way guaranteed to be yours by anything other than offering lowest price... and THAT may not even be enough.
Keep in mind, that's not my point of contention. Rather, it is: "Why in the world is Monitronics attempting to market no protected territories to dealers as an advantage?"
Brian, what criteria (seniority, size, skill, proximity) do you suppose their dealer conflict resolution policy is based onto prevent multiple dealers from pitching the same deal, or do they just let them 'duke it out'?
I'll ask Monitronics this question and report back with their response.
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