Customer Success Story: How TruControls Boosted Its Win Rate 25% with D‑Tools Cloud

For Austin Lafferty, owner of Dallas-based TruControls, the path to streamlined operations didn’t come from adding more software, it came from consolidating what his team already had. After more than a year on D‑Tools Cloud, the eight-year-old security integration company has replaced a patchwork of point solutions with one platform that runs everything from quoting to service tickets.

“We are a Dallas-based security integration company,” Lafferty explains. “We primarily focus on your access controls, security cameras, intrusion systems, as well as some AV and locksmith projects. We mainly focus in the vertical of multifamily, and we’ve got about five employees.”

With a small team serving demanding multifamily clients, Lafferty needed software that could keep pace without slowing his crew down with training.

“We chose D‑Tools because of the flexibility, the integration capability with suppliers, and the visual quoting templates,” he says. “It’s just a great tool to be able to run your entire business from your quoting to proposals to your service tickets.”

Visual Proposals That Win Jobs

The team uses D‑Tools Cloud across the entire sales cycle — opportunities, proposals, service plans, and subscriptions. Lafferty says the proposal stage is where the platform truly shines. “It’s being able to go in and create a beautiful proposal template — pictures, of course — and it shows where each and every device is going to be located and which area of the property, which is really useful for the client, the end user,” he says.

He also points to the service plans and subscriptions module as a favorite, noting that it spells out ongoing charges “really nicely” for clients and gives them a polished visual proposal to hand off to managers and employers.

“We’ve had many times where it detected that we had not added cost of parts or had the wrong labor attached to certain items." — Austin Lafferty, TruControls

The polish is paying off in unexpected places. “We even do subcontract work for larger security companies, and I can’t tell you how many times they email us back or call us and are super impressed with our proposals and say that they’re even better than their proposals,” Lafferty says.

Beyond looks, the software adds a built-in quality check.

“We’ve had many times where it detected that we had not added cost of parts or had the wrong labor attached to certain items,” Lafferty notes. “It really helps with being a second layer of checks and balances for our proposals.”

30% Less Time Creating Proposals, 25% Higher Win Rates

The numbers tell the rest of the story. “By using D‑Tools Cloud, we’re able to create captivating proposals much faster than we used to... sometimes 30% faster,” Lafferty says. “I think our win rate has probably increased by 25% since using D‑Tools.”

Easier training has also expanded the pool of team members who can pitch in: “It takes way less time and training and knowledge to train employees to be able to use the software. Therefore, now we’re having more people help us out from other parts of the company.”

He adds that having a clear view of where each opportunity sits in the sales cycle has “been super helpful for follow-ups and making sure we’re reaching out to clients at the right time.”

D-Tools Cloud Single Platform Brings Value

For integrators weighing the cost of a unified business platform against a stack of single-purpose tools, Lafferty offers a clear take: “Using D‑Tools Cloud creates a complete solution at a very reasonable cost for companies of our size. Before D‑Tools, we had three or four other solutions: one for proposals, one for client management, one for service tickets, one for product management. Being able to bring all that together in one software has been really valuable to our team and our ability to more efficiently serve our customers.”

For small and mid-sized security integrators looking to professionalize their proposals, sharpen their sales process, and ditch the patchwork of disconnected tools, the TruControls experience offers a straightforward roadmap: consolidate, present better, and watch the win rate climb.