HOW TO CRACK EUROPE AND QUADROUPLE SALES
Are you looking to expand your business and branch out across Europe? Industrial
flooring manufacturer, Ecotile, shares a reflection on its experience of expanding into Europe and offers advice for those in the flooring industry looking to do the same.
As a UK flooring manufacturer, we have always been vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of the British marketplace. Anything that disrupts business as usual has a significant impact on sales.
So when we increased production capacity of our interlocking floor tiles, by moving into a new manufacturing plant with bigger injection moulding machines, we soon realised that expanding into Europe was a huge priority.
There is good reasoning for this. Despite a booming construction industry here in the UK, the flooring market dropped by 3% in 2015. And whilst Germany and France also saw sales dip by a similar figure, Spain and Holland’s grew by 5% and 8% respectively. As you can see, it makes sense to us to get into as many of these markets as possible to defend against the ups and downs of the others.
FILLING THE GAP We also believed that there was a good gap in the market. Our specialist interlocking floor tile is designed to be easily assembled in a busy industrial environment, with minimal disruption to the facility’s operational capacity. In short, we can lay a floor with virtually no factory downtime.
Our main sellers are our 10mm heavy- duty floor tiles and our specialist ESD anti-static floors. Both of these are ideally suited to heavy industry. We did our research and, barring one competitor in the Netherlands, we felt that we had something to offer that was almost completely unique in Europe.
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So, with this in mind, we first targeted the manufacturing powerhouse region of Germany, Switzerland, France and Austria. Our belief was that the large- scale industrial production of this region meant that anyone with a heavy-duty and anti-static flooring solution, which could be laid while they keep the production lines moving, had to be of interest to buyers.
A LEARNING CURVE What we didn’t realise at the time was that we were facing a huge learning curve. There’s no doubt that, had we known then what we know now, we could have saved ourselves an awful lot of time and money.
With that in mind, we would like to share with you the most important things you need to know if you are planning to export your flooring products into the European market.
ESTABLISHING
RELATIONSHIPS Firstly, and most importantly, you need to get a good local presence on the ground. It took us a long time and a lot of wasted effort to realise this, but the bottom line is that German, Swiss and Austrian factories just don’t want to order their flooring from an overseas firm.
Even though we could deliver our flooring across Europe within six hours, no-one was willing to take the plunge and give us our first order.
The Germans, Swiss and Austrians prefer a German, Swiss or Austrian
German speaker and they want a genuine presence on the ground.
After many disappointing sales trips, we finally decided to open offices in Winterthur, Switzerland (ideally located for all four geographic markets), and found a good local sales and admin support team. Then everything changed.
SPREADING THE WORD It’s worth pointing out that we invested heavily in this. We didn’t just hire a local office, we had the address and phone number printed on letterheads, quotes and invoices. We also built a fully- localised German version of our website.
But from then on it was as if someone had opened the floodgates. Polite words soon became firm orders and we can now place companies like Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, and Siemens amongst our list of highly valued customers.
EXPECT A CHALLENGE Managing a foreign sales operation from the UK can be difficult, as being remote can make some staff feel more vulnerable. You’ll need excellent communication, regular visits and lots of reasons to bring the whole team together to foster that sense of unity.
We are now focussing our expansion efforts in North America where growth is huge compared to the EU markets (24% in Canada last year alone). We hope to come back soon and let you know what we learnt there too.
www.ecotileflooring.com FEATURE | 39
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