I’m always amused at the topics that custom installation pros love to talk about — and those they assiduously avoid. One such frequent line of questioning revolves around the life expectancy of equipment. There seems to be a fever that comes over salespeople in the throes of selling a six-figure job full of audio, video, security, and lighting control with all the bells and whistles. The rep sees dollar signs. Meanwhile, the customer is thinking about total cost of ownership and really wants to understand the upgrade cycle. The integrator wants to focus on the system being rock-solid, future-proof, and potentially never breaking.
Technology lasts forever! You know that’s not true. The customer knows that’s not true. Each system, whether it’s software or hardware (or a combination of both), will die. If the hardware becomes obsolete first, then the software is no longer able to update and leaves the customer frustrated. If the software is left in the dust, the same thing happens. At the end of the day, no matter what, as humans we’re conditioned to understand that everything goes to zero. Think about your last trip to the grocery store. Each gallon of milk (and most other food items) has a prominently displayed expiration date. Our installations are no different. We may not know the exact date of death, but each project has one.
In an effort to turn some of this actuarial mystery into a sales asset, we created a new concept we call Livewire Lifecycle. With every proposal, we are now talking proactively about the life expectancy of each and every large component in the system. We’ve made it easy for our sales team by creating a custom GPT so they can feed any proposal into it and it will spit out a clean report. The customer can now see plain as day that their control system might need an upgrade in three years while their outdoor lighting might go for 10 years with no issues.
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Livewire Lifecycle will now thoroughly address the elephant in the room, label something that everybody knows, and allow for conversations about planning the next upgrade cycle. This is especially relevant for commercial customers.
We’re just getting started with rolling out Livewire Lifecycle with new customers and I’m really looking forward to being able to send it out to our existing customer base as a means of encouraging intelligent upgrades. Down the road, I can see Livewire Lifecycle being a way of offering an easy monthly “Everything-as-a-Service” payment because it’s so much easier to visualize the entire lifecycle of the system; especially when each piece of it might need proactive or reactive upgrading.
When I first thought of the concept, I wanted to keep close because I didn’t want my competitors getting a hold of it. It’s a rare thing for me. I usually operate through an abundance lens vs. a scarcity mindset.
So here I am sharing Livewire Lifecycle with you, hoping that you might implement it in your business. If you do, I’d love it if you’d drop me a line and tell me how it’s working out.
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What are you doing to implement expiration dates and proactive lifecycle communication with your customers?
Stay frosty, and see you in the field.
