A New Era for Integrators & Installers: Today’s 4 Best Practices for Security Partners
The security industry is at a turning point, and integrators and installers who adapt now will have an advantage. As recurring revenue models, AI-driven solutions, and new customer expectations reshape the market, the most successful partners are shifting how they sell, deliver, and support clients. Drawn from our recent webinar with SecurityInfoWatch, this op-ed by Deep Sentinel SVP of Marketing Philip Levinson highlights emerging best practices from industry leaders to help security businesses and partners grow profitably in the years ahead.
Our recent SecurityInfoWatch webinar revealed that while 46% of integrators prioritize recurring revenue, many still struggle to execute the transition to this business model smoothly. Today, the security industry stands at “a strategic inflection point,” as Digital Watchdog’s Patrick Kelly outlined in the webinar discussion, similar to the analog-to-IP transition — but potentially even more transformative.
Today’s most successful integrators have adopted one or more of five key success strategies that are separating them from others, according to Kelly and the other two webinar participants, Jason Tuohy (NCS Systems) and Garrett Stone (Deep Sentinel). Let’s discuss each of these five key best practices.
Best practice #1: Start with customer pain points, not technology
The most successful integrators have flipped their entire approach.
Jason Tuohy, Managing Director at systems integrator NCS Systems in Colorado, describes the fundamental shift: “We’ve asked ourselves not…’What is the product we’re selling?’, but how does this product help them?”
This isn’t just philosophical — it’s practical. Tuohy’s team trains its sales and GTM team members to “go one deeper” with every client conversation. When property managers complain about break-ins, the follow-up question isn’t about camera specifications. It’s: “What happens when that happens?”
The answer reveals hidden costs that traditional security proposals ignore. Property managers spend hours coordinating clean-up, filing insurance claims, and addressing tenant complaints. Maintenance teams lose productivity. Tenant retention suffers, impacting revenue. These “soft costs” often exceed the direct damage costs but remain invisible to product-focused integrators.
“You find out what the issue is, and you say, okay, we’re having people get on our roof and ripoff copper,” Tuohy explains. “One deeper means, what happens [then]? And then they say, ‘Then I have to call the insurance company, I have to call the maintenance guy.’”
This approach led to Tuohy’s most successful project—a 2,023-unit property complex where he provided a complete AI-powered real-time Deep Sentinel solution, which detects and responds to incidents starting in five seconds. The result: crime dropped 75% while cutting security costs in half, from $150,000 monthly to under $75,000.
Best practice #2: Build strategic technology partnerships
Successful integrators understand they can’t solve complex problems alone. Kelly emphasizes, “It’s about partnerships…. Strategic partnerships across the channel, from the integrators to the other technology providers.”
But not all partnerships are equal. The most effective integrators choose technology partners based on three criteria:
- Integration capabilities: Kelly notes that Digital Watchdog’s “open platform” allows integrators to “bring in lots of different technology into our spectrum platform.” This flexibility lets integrators customize solutions without vendor lock-in.
- Complementary solutions: Garrett Stone, Direct or Channel Partnerships at Deep Sentinel, emphasizes this aspect of their philosophy as well: “Our goal to make things easier for integrators is to be able to play well with those other complementary solutions.” Rather than requiring complete system replacement, effective partners are able to leverage and enhance existing installations.
- Shared success models: The best vendor relationships involve mutual investment in client outcomes. Stone notes: “Everything from past the camera all the way up, Deep Sentinel can serve an end-to-end singular solution.” However, he adds that Deep Sentinel can also work and fit within existing camera infrastructure rather than forcing replacement, which the company refers to as its BYOC or 3rd-party camera integration initiative.
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Best practice #3: Create multiple recurring revenue streams
The transition to multiple recurring revenue streams requires more than adding monthly monitoring fees. Successful integrators build multiple revenue streams around client relationships:
- Proactive maintenance: Large installations require ongoing technical support. Tuohy notes that for an installation with “104 cameras and 120 access points, there are often things that will go down, so there’s always opportunities to do recurring revenue on maintenance.”
- Value-added reporting: Property managers lack time to review footage or analyze incidents. Weekly reports with assigned incident values provide clear ROI while generating service fees. Kelly emphasizes that these reports should be “branded with [the partner’s company], reinforcing that to the customer and the service that Jason is providing.”
- Consultation and optimization: As threats evolve, integrators provide ongoing consultation to further update and optimize security effectiveness and add new capabilities.
- Technology refresh: Kelly points out that “we’re really in the early-adopter stage” of AI and cloud adoption, creating ongoing opportunities to enhance existing systems.
Best practice #4: Re-position technology as a business & outcome enabler
The most successful integrators understand that clients don’t buy technology — they buy business outcomes.
As Stone explains, “There’s always a very clear cost of not doing something, whether it be a client that has a fleet of service vehicles or a long-term lot and every catalytic converter that gets stolen is thousands of dollars.”
This requires reframing conversations around business impact, such as those focused on:
- Quantify total cost of incidents: In addition to adding direct damage, include administrative time, insurance impacts, tenant retention effects, and opportunity costs.
- Demonstrate ROI through prevention: Tuohy shared an example of one of his McDonald’s clients paying “$25,000 per month for an armed guard,” but with the value proposition becoming clear now that AI and technology allow Deep Sentinel to provide a lower-cost solution that is provably more effective.
- Connect to business metrics: An example: property managers care most about problems such as tenant retention, insurance costs, and property values — versus simply worrying about details such as camera resolution or storage capacity.
Integrators will need more than strategy — they’ll need to shift how they sell, deliver, and support clients.
Understanding these best practices is one thing, but actually executing on them is quite another. Stone notes a common challenge he sees with partners: “We will often ask them, ‘How are you getting new business?’ And a lot of times it would just be word of mouth.”
According to Stone, Kelly and Tuohy, successful execution requires more structural change beyond just strategizing:
- Sales training: Teams need skills to uncover business pain points rather than just present product features.
- Service delivery: Ongoing client relationships require different capabilities than project-based installations.
- Technology integration: Kelly emphasizes the importance of camera view verification and proactive system monitoring to prevent the “horror stories of not finding out that the camera is down until there is an incident.”
- Partnership management: Stone discusses this point by emphasizing how the team at Deep Sentinel “manages our channel partner program” to ensure “everyone is successful, and everyone’s got what they need.”
The integrators who adapt now won’t just ride the wave of change — they’ll shape it.
Kelly predicts that “2030 is the actual adoption when the bell curve should be at its highest point” for cloud-based security solutions. This timeline gives current integrators the opportunity to build market position before mass adoption accelerates.
The window for transformation remains open, but it’s narrowing. As Tuohy summarizes: “You’ve got to start with customer experience and then work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and then try to form it for the customer.”
Success requires more than adding new products or services — it demands fundamental business model transformation. Integrators who master these best practices won’t just survive industry changes, they’ll lead the next phase of security industry evolution. As the webinar participants each emphasized, the integrators making this transition successfully are finding that recurring revenue isn’t just possible—it’s the natural result of solving real business problems.
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Do you have questions about specific steps you and your integrator or partner business can take to enhance your business and boost recurring revenues, click here or contact us at [email protected].
