Early returns seem to validate that take. Sales from the AV Solutions group through the first nine months post-acquisition were up 30 percent. “I think there was some pent-up demand there,” Andy says. “They were excited to take new approaches, and have new offerings and new things to talk to their clients about.”
The success of the AV Solutions integration — which “we absolutely anticipated being successful,” Andy says — empowers Sensory to keep expanding. Indeed, a big part of Sensory’s growth plan is to continue to grow.
“You can see right now that there is an awful lot of maneuvering for companies within our industry to get bigger,” Paquin says. “For us to compete and stay relevant, we feel like we need to grow as well.”
A good growth strategy for a mid-sized integration firm that has well-oiled processes and managed services is to target those mid-sized markets where the industry’s largest firms might have less of a presence, according to Paquin.
“We felt that the bigger cities have an enormous amount of competition, everybody kind of vying for a lot of the same relationships. We felt like other markets were underserved, and if we were able to bring these very innovative solutions to those markets we could really thrive.”
Management’s KPIs
Successful expansion, meanwhile, requires oversight and onboarding strategies — strengths not possessed by many mid-sized integration firms.
A good growth strategy for a mid-sized integration firm that has well-oiled processes and managed services is to target mid-sized markets where the industry’s largest firms might have less of a presence, according to Derek Paquin.
However, many of the key managers at Sensory came from outside the industry, including Santoro, who brings an agency background to his marketing role. One thing these fresh perspectives bring is an emphasis on key performance indicators (KPIs) that isn’t typical in the integration industry.
“A lot of us came from large organizations where those things were in place and they were absolutely necessary to manage businesses,” Santoro says.
“I’ve found it interesting coming from outside this business how dated the industry practices are relative to other technology and more progressive organizations. I’ve been really surprised — there’s so much focus on the technology and not enough focus on internally, efficiency, and externally on what the customer is really trying to accomplish. Customers are looking for an outcome. The outcome isn’t to be able to look at 4K or 8K. The outcome is to be able to accomplish a business mission.”
Embracing KPIs seems to keep Sensory and its employees focused on those outcomes.
Basically, Sensory instituted its KPI strategy in order to get customers to tell them how it did and how it’s doing. A Professional Systems Network International (PSNI) member, Sensory leans on that group’s client satisfaction survey and gets 20 to 25 percent of customers to return completed surveys.
It happened pretty quickly upon launching the KPI strategy that Sensory started to notice a particular trend in terms of a problem that kept occurring, recalls Anne. “That drove our quality assurance program to fix those problems, which drove client satisfaction numbers way up.”
“Customers are looking for an outcome. The outcome isn’t to be able to look at 4K or 8K. The outcome is to be able to accomplish a business mission.”
Marc Santoro
KPIs have also had an impact on individual accountability, Andy says. “It’s not top-down anymore. We’ve got front-line people thinking about what it takes to create happier customers.”
Meanwhile, company-wide embrace of KPIs seem to keep Sensory focused, Anne says. “We set our KPIs at the beginning of the year, they match what our goals are for the company and we really write those in stone. That’s where we measure our success.”
She’s not just referring to big picture success. KPIs are used to target specific but consequential goals like inventory management. “It’s a big part of the control we have over our overheard,” Anne says. “Your overhead has to be a certain percentage of your overall sales and sales go up and down and so does overhead. We look at a few different KPIs in that arena to make sure we’re staffed properly for the amount of sales we have in the door. That really helps our profitability on the bottom line.”
Beyond PSNI, Sensory had help creating its KPI strategy from an advisory board. “I think there’s a bit of a lesson here for smaller integrators,” Andy says. “Several years ago we formed an advisory board of pretty significant business people in the Indianapolis market. We utilized them as if they were a board of directors. I think they had a large part in helping us develop and increase our KPIs or really create the dashboards that we live by weekly, monthly and that our people follow, talk about and understand.”
