Earlier this month, electronics retail giant Best Buy announced that it has entered into a partnership with Vivint to launch a new smart home service that will allow customers to consult with a smart home expert inside their stores, design a system that fits their needs and have it installed and monitored. Customers will be able to choose a wide range of smart home products from Vivint and others as well as pick from a variety of service plans, including 24/7 professional monitoring with emergency response, always-on cellular connection, and 30-day video storage. Customers can also opt for a no-contract service plan.
The service, dubbed "Best Buy Smart Home powered by Vivint,” will be rolled out later this summer by the retailer, which has more than 400 locations nationwide. While consumers have been able to purchase myriad connected home devices at various brick-and-mortar stores for some time, this partnership marks one of the first instances in which a retailer has teamed up with an alarm company to offer a combination of both products and professional monitoring.
SecurityInfoWatch.com (SIW) recently caught up with Colby Winegar, vice president of strategic business development for Vivint, to learn more about the inner workings of the partnership and the potential advantages of this new go-to-market strategy.
SIW: How much more of an expanded footprint do you believe this partnership with Best Buy will give you?
Winegar: We think it will give us significant exposure because in our past sales channels, such as direct to home, we don’t really focus on building a brand in that channel. It’s more of a relationship directly with the customer. And then in our inside sales channel, which is about a third of our business, we do try to build our brand there but it is more of a lead generation model where someone is online, they see something and they are attracted to calling us. But this will significantly increase our exposure to customers and so it should have a really big impact on our brand awareness.
SIW: What can you tell us about the dynamics of the partnership itself?
Winegar: The focus here is that they have a lot of traffic in their stores and they have great “Blue Shirts” that are in there as well who are helpful and can consult with the customer. We bring to the table an industry-leading smart home offering and our own expertise, so we thought when you combine those together, it becomes a great partnership where we can work with them to take advantage of the traffic they have coming into their stores where they have customers going into the connected home area who may not know how everything works together. They may have some existing security solutions in their home but may be confused about the smart home and we can come in, shoulder-to-shoulder with the Blue Shirts, advise these customers, provide consultations on smart home, and give them a solution that’s a comprehensive, integrated system that can give them a complete smart home at a great price.
SIW: What kind of advantage do you believe getting in front of consumes at a physical retail location like Best Buy will give you in terms of being able to sell people on the benefits of smart home technology as opposed to doing it over the phone or an in-home visit?
Winegar: I think the biggest thing is this is new, so to be able to have the equipment there during the sales process is super helpful. If you’re on the phone it is hard to describe to a customer or show them how a smart home works. But in the retail stores at a Best Buy, you have equipment there and it is live and working, so you can show an example of using an Amazon Echo to lock your door, view clips or live video, turn lights on or off, and arm and disarm your system. All those things you used to have talk through but now you can actually show a customer that hasn’t been interested in those kinds of features before and show them how it can be really valuable.
SIW: How much consumer education, in general, do you think still needs to occur as it relates to smart home technology and how will this partnership help accomplish this?
Winegar: There is a significant amount that needs to take place. Most customers come in not expecting to get a smart home. They see the display or engage in a conversation with a sales rep and they have a lot of questions but may not know a whole lot about what kind of smart home offerings there are out there. There’s a lot of education that takes place here. It is a pretty extensive sales experience as they walk a customer through a smart home design consultation, as well as answer all of the questions they have based on their unique needs and the unique needs of their home. It would be nice if customers were coming in saying, “Hey, I saw you guys have a partnership and I’ve been researching this and would love to get it,” but we’re kind of in those early days from when people are switching from touch button flip phones to smartphones.
SIW: Given the entrance of AT&T and other cables and telcos into the residential security market in recent years and the numerous stores they have, how much of a necessity did you believe it was to try and compete on the same level from a physical retail location perspective?
Winegar: It wasn’t a move to compete directly with them. We saw an opportunity to engage with the customer in a new way. We didn’t really feel like there was a threat from them based on what they were doing. In an AT&T store, for example, someone would sell you a phone and then at the end of that sales engagement would say, “Would you be interested in a smart home?” That customer may have a couple of questions, but with a little bit of resistance the representative would just move on to close the phone sale. Our perception was that selling smart homes is not that easy. It’s not as easy as adding it on to an existing sell. That’s the reason we got excited about Best Buy because we felt like in that environment a sales rep could have an extended conversation with the customer and wouldn’t just be an additional question but a consultative sale where you would walk the customer through the design of their home. We thought that was a good experience that would actually help to push more mass market adoption in the smart home space.
