CONSTRUCTION FIXINGS
Do yourself a favour!
In his March article Mark Salmon, writing on behalf of the Construction Fixings Association, tackled the first of these associated subjects, that of ‘order building’ – as featured at their 2011 Conference. Now he moves on to the trickier, but arguably more profitable, subject of ‘up-selling’ (does such a term exist?).
of you a customer who needs to place an order and your objective is to increase your profit potential from that order while at the same time making it a safer installation - which benefits everyone from you (peace of mind, liability, increased margin) and the contractor (liability) to the building user (safety).
T
he only real points of commonality between ‘order building’ and ‘up- selling’ are that our starting point is the fact that you have in front
“…the idea with ‘up-selling’ is to change the product the customer thought they wanted to something better, safer and more appropriate.”
Where they differ is that while ‘order
building’ can be a relatively easy process, carried out by anyone taking an order, that of ‘up-selling’ is harder and demands more knowledge of products, applications and approvals. In short this challenge is one best tackled by companies with technically oriented sales forces. While ‘order building’ is the
straightforward addition of associated products to those the customer already knew he or she wanted, the idea with ‘up-selling’ is to change the product the customer thought they wanted to something better, safer and more
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appropriate. Of course specifications should not be changed without due care. The new British Standard BS 8539* acknowledges that specifications may be changed but points out that any change should be carried out correctly and usually that means by repeating the full selection process to ensure that the proposed new anchor will work every bit as well as the one originally specified. However, as I hope to explain, in the majority of cases we will only want to change a specification when it should be changed anyway or when the original ‘specification’ was not one that had followed a thorough selection process. So, accepting
that we can change specifications, let’s think about when we might do it and how. An obvious
example is when the customer is asking for zinc
plated carbon steel anchors and the application is external. Zinc plated steel anchors are suitable only for use in dry internal conditions (such anchors with ETA [European Technical Approvals] are approved only for use in those conditions). The plating is not a long term corrosion protection and if used externally will rust within a relatively short time. Eventually, and well within the life span of any long term application, the anchor may stop functioning in the way it was intended, (expansion components intended to slide against one another will no longer do that), the anchor will lose strength and
Fastener + Fixing Magazine • Issue 75 May 2012
rust may stain the building. So an anchor better able to live in external applications should be recommended – probably one made of stainless steel - the exact specification will depend on the particular application conditions.
The, currently informal, logo of an ETA which offers reassurance to all involved and is becoming more and more common on packaging and in catalogues
Similarly if the specified anchor has
no ETA then it presents an opportunity to ‘up-sell’ to one that has. This will safeguard everyone’s liabilities because an anchor that has been awarded an ETA can be relied upon to function correctly in a wide range of site conditions and will have performance data that has been independently assessed and can be compared with other similar anchors. Of course it will probably be more expensive than the anchor without an ETA and this highlights the challenge (or what an old boss of mine would immediately say is NOT a challenge but an opportunity!) that of convincing the customer to spend more money on a product which may look for all the world just like the cheaper one. This
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