The best lead source for your security business might be simpler than you think: get face-to-face with your customers.
In this episode of Entry & Exit, Stephen Olmon and Collin Trimble break down why in-person prospecting has become one of Alarm Masters’ most effective ways to generate project revenue. Service calls, coffee drops, and prospecting drop-ins account for 90% of their project revenue, outperforming the digital and outbound channels most companies focus on.
They explain how to make in-person prospecting scalable by using customer data, public information, and AI to identify buying signals before a salesperson ever walks through the door. They also share how to choose the right prospects, improve your pitch through repetition, and turn a simple drop-in strategy into a repeatable sales engine.
In this episode:
→ Why face-to-face prospecting is their best lead channel
→ How service calls, coffee drops, and prospecting generate opportunities
→ Why salespeople should run 20–25 face-to-face appointments per week
→ Using AI and public data to identify buying signals
→ Finding the events that actually cause customers to buy
→ Improving your script, target contact, and offer through repetition
→ Turning in-person prospecting into a scalable sales system
Connect:
Stephen Olmon — https://x.com/stephenolmon
Collin Trimble — https://x.com/TXAlarmGuy
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Is it meta? I don't think we should give it away yet.
Is it direct mail? Definitely not. Is it radio ads? You know, honestly, we've never tried. So well, I I'm gonna assume. Okay. AI software ads. 2026 marketing modern blah blah blah. People buy from people.
No man, getting your customers out, like we need to find a scalable way to not have to send people out to customers. It's like, no, dude, that's your competitive advantage.
So that was the longest preface of all time, by the way. So congrats on that. There's a little gold medal over there, guy. So I'm sure we lost everyone listening. Um, but uh if you're still here, thanks. Welcome to entry and exit. My name is Steven Ullman. I also have Colin Trimble with me here. He is my co-host and my business partner. And today we are talking about the single best lead source, the number one lead channel that you should be investing in in your business today as a security alarm, life safety, fire, all the things. Yep. Uh business owner, or uh maybe uh key decision maker, leader, whatever title you might have. Yeah, the best lead channel. Uh is it is it meta? Yeah, that's a good question. No, no, no, I'm asking you.
Is it meta? Is it not meta? I don't think we should I don't think we should give it away yet. I don't think we should say.
Is it direct mail? It's not. Definitely not. It's not direct mail. No, no. Is it is it radio ads? You know, honestly, we've never tried. So well, I I'm gonna assume. Okay. You know, infomercials with Colin on there at midnight going, hey. No. It's none of those.
Yeah. But before before we let the cat out the bag, if there's something that you'd like to share that's on your heart, go ahead.
Well, I was just gonna say, um, there's a whole lot of things that you're gonna try for lead sources, and these could be digital marketing style sources, these could be uh organic sales style sources. So digital marketing would be like meta-ads, uh PPC, Google PPC, um, you know, Yelp could be those type of things. Uh, and then on the sales side, it could be high-volume outbound email, it could be bid work through GCs, it could be, you know, whatever. So there's a lot of different lead sources. And um, this is something that I think is really hard for commercial integrators, not alarm companies. Alarm companies probably won't be surprised to hear this, but commercial integrators are gonna kind of cringe and bristle and disagree a little bit.
They are.
And I just want to say I want to define why that is, what why they're gonna cringe and bristle is because there's two different types. And I think that these the commercial integrators, the folks that are pursuing large projects, believe that selling happens in really one of two ways, either through bid work and relationships with GCs or through highly consultative, highly custom solutions. And so they feel like, you know, transactional selling is maybe beneath them or isn't uh effective. And here's what here's what we're gonna we're gonna give it away. The best lead source is to take a salesperson or per or any person in your business and put them inside of a business face to face with the customer. A drop-in is the single uh best lead source. And we have the data to back it up because we have been really building various forms of our outbound. We've talked about coffee drops. This that would be a form of it, is like going into a business. Um here's another one that's sort of like uh under this umbrella, but not really, which is a service call, is technically a person in a business. And so our two biggest lead sources, literally, two, come from service calls and the technician finding data that and and relaying that back to the office and us handing that to the sales team. That's one of our biggest. And the other one is coffee drops, and which is going to visit an existing customer just to say hi, give them a five-dollar gift card, or what we call just a prospecting drop-in, which would be like a new logo. So you're just dropping in. Yep. Those three have that produce 90% of the project revenue at Alarm Masters. Those are the three biggest lead sources. We're not gonna spend a ton of time on the service side. That's a whole concept. You should listen to our building a service department episode because it's all about building the service department the right way that's scalable in revenue, and it also is a flywheel.
Yep.
We're gonna focus more specifically on kind of copy drops and prospectings.
So that was the longest preface of all time, by the way. So congrats on that. It's a little gold medal. Oh, there guy. Um, it's like a two and a half minute long preface. Yeah. Um, so I'm sure we lost everyone listening. Um, but uh, if you're still here,
thanks. Um uh we want you we want you and your team to take your bodies, yeah, then to take your body that's outside of a building and then like move inside of a building that where someone who owns the building or uses the building might be your customer. Right. We would like you to do that. Yeah. Um and AI, software, ads, 2026, marketing, modern blah, blah, blah. People buy from people. That's right. And people are getting sick of all of the overautomated digital. Now, do we use AI and technology to try to help us understand who we should go target? Yeah. Yes, and amen. Yep. But if you are, if you have a low bar, if you have a low standard and really a low view of in-person visit, you're gonna lose. That's my hot take. Like, yeah, that's not gonna work.
It's gonna be a slow, it's gonna be a slow death for you, but you're gonna lose.
Yeah. Yeah, you're gonna lose. And so we are advocating to have a extremely high value for going in person to see prospects and customers alike.
Yeah. I
think this trickles down in two areas. Number one, you need to uh hire salespeople that are willing to do a high volume of face-to-face appointments. I literally put it uh a post out on LinkedIn where we're trying to hire five salespeople by the end of the year. And I said, hey, you don't have sales experience? No problem. What I need you to be able to do is really fundamentally three three things. One is you need to have high energy and be willing to be out and be, you know, you don't even have to be a people person, but you gotta have energy and drive. Number two, you need to be willing to ask really hard questions of your customers. That's part of our sales cycle. And number three, you need to be willing to be in our company car and run 20 to 25 appointments a week. Face to face. And if you are willing to do those things, you will be successful here. And that's because we've seen it, we've done it, like we have a playbook, we've got the scalability, and it's working. And it's really funny because I think that in this industry, for some reason, folks are always trying to limit. I think they think it's efficient, maybe is the reason. Like, let me limit the amount of time we have to be out on the customer site. It's not scalable. We we've heard that a bunch. It's like, no, man, getting your customers out, like, we need to find a scalable way to not have to send people out to customers. It's like, no, dude, that's your competitive advantage. Like, you need to increase the face-to-face meetings. But what I think a fair criticism would be, okay, well, so then I'm just supposed to send my sales guy out, just like go knock on random doors. Random, yeah. Right. And so, uh, no, you will probably have a low probability of success with that. Um, you need to find signal or a compelling reason to go knock on a specific business, right? So let's talk about how to do that.
Well, and this this just happened. So you think what what just happened in your mind probably is you think about residential door knocking. Right, exactly. But guess what? Yeah, I just got door knocked the other day and three dudes, actually. It was kind of like overwhelming. It's like, wow, that's a lot of people.
Yeah.
And um, they I'm a nerd, so I started asking questions, and they are hyper data driven, not even not even zip code targeting, they are street by street data that they are targeting for what they were selling, and so um they aren't just spray and prey. And so there's a smart way to do that and kind of a dumb old school way to do that. Same thing applies here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you want to find signal, but but I want to pause. We're gonna jump into signal in a second. If you don't have a way to do signal, find signal, use technology because it does take some time, you got to kind of build it. Yes, the first thing you should do is find the one vertical that you sell in that you feel like is a base hit for you. Maybe that's schools, maybe that's healthcare, industrial, whatever, and you should start there. You should just go Google it and build a list and go and find these customers and go knock on their door and get the get the uh salesperson's kind of like uh skill or script and get the reps, get the at bats going on really low impact appointments so that when you do get the signal engine built and you're going to visit like some actually high potential leads, it's smooth. They're ready to go, they know what questions to ask. So I would say don't make the excuse, listener. Oh, well, I'll wait till I build the AI stuff and the technology. No, no, no. Get them out in the field. Now expect they're probably not going to create a lot of pipe gin, but they're gonna get a lot of reps. Okay, so I think that's important to start with. Um, so how do you find signal, right? And we've talked about this before. You can use AI to find signal, and really you're using AI to find signal, and you're just automating something that's not scalable. But the best way to think about this is why the honestly, the best way to do is look at your current base. Look at the last all the projects you've won this year, and write down why they had to make a change. What was their compelling event? Did they have a um a grant? Did they have an electrical storm? Did they have uh they get red tagged? And find those, create that list. Maybe it's top 10 list of compelling events of why your customers were even buying, not why they bought from you, not what they liked about you, but like what why? Why did they even do something, right?
Yeah, break-ins, like all yeah, and then you want tools.
You want to take that compelling event and you want to think through, and you could talk to AI about this to shortcut it, but what are the ways that I can find out about those events happening at those particular customers, right? So, like this is just an example of another industry, right? So the single largest compelling event for roofers is weather events, right? So hail, hurricanes, you know, freezing rain, et cetera. And so they will literally use weather data to hyper isolate down, exactly what Steven was saying, to street level to say it is very likely that these set of houses are going to need to buy something versus going to this other town over here who hasn't had any weather events. I'm just kind of really getting a one out of 100. If I go here, I'm getting one out of 10. So you have to think about sales in the exact same way. You need to think about how do I find signal within an ideal client profile, right? So I'll just give an example of one of the things that we do. So we really like senior living, independent living. And so one of the signals that we like is we like to find um OSHA or fire alarm or sorry, fire marshal citations. So these are citations from the senior living facility. And another one that's for senior living is any type of leadership change or property management change, right? So whenever those that's both publicly available data, you can find that online. It is posted, and you're kind of putting together a puzzle, right? So you're gonna get the name of the facility, you may even get the contact name, but you're not gonna get contact information. So you got one half of the puzzle, now you gotta go find the other half the puzzle. So the hardest part about it is getting the contact information to then put them in like an email campaign or a cold call campaign, but you don't have to do that. That's nice to have just show up, walk in. So you're gonna get a list of you can go online right now, sign up for an account, Google it, and you can find a way to find out within whatever industry you're looking for, some amount of public data is available to give you some signal. And then when you have signal, you go walk in. And the the here's the way you're gonna lose. If you walk in and you try the same script and you don't take notes and you're not looking at the data, you're just gonna bang your head against the wall and you're gonna have a you know a hit rate of one to 100. But if you walk in and you find out, okay, I keep asking for the you know facilities manager, but I'm not getting any pipe gin. Maybe I'm talking to the wrong role. Maybe I need to start asking for the executive director. Okay, now I'm gonna walk in and maybe I keep bringing up this fire citation. Maybe I actually need to be talking about just a service call instead of leading with let me replace your fire electricism. So, like you've got to mix up your script, your ask, who you're talking to. And eventually you're gonna find a seam of this is the role, this is the ask, this is the call to action, here's who I'm talking to. And then when you do that, you'll find out, oh, okay, now my hit rate is one out of 15. Well, then I can scale that, right? So now I know I'm gonna get pipe out of one out of 15. So what happens if I do 2000 of these, right? Then you can get to that numerator and figure out how do I actually get to close rate. And and I think that's kind of the way to backward, like kind of walk your way into it. You have any you have any feedback on that?
I'm afraid that people think when we say this sort of stuff, that they discount it and like, yeah, that just sounds like a lot of work. It sounds like um, I don't have enough manpower for that. And that's cool for you guys. Yeah. But we're telling you that it works. So it's all we can give you is say, man, the best, the best channel is in person, life on life, human to human, look them in the eyes, go see your prospects and customers if you would like to grow your business.
Yep. 100% agree. Do the thing that's not scalable and you'll see unscalable results. Um, and I think that that's sort of the takeaway from this whole thing. And if you like this type of stuff, Steven, what can they do to get like more information on these type of tips?
They could, I don't know, like maybe subscribe. Yeah, hit the big button. Cool. Uh, they could comment, let us know what else they'd like to hear about. They could uh like, depending on what platform they're on, or start. Share it with a very distant cousin uh who may need to be inspired by two very handsome, strong jaw line gentlemen.
That's exactly right. Thanks for listening. Have a great week.
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