VIEWPOINT


REINVENTING RELATIONSHIPS Just as most of the world was retreating into conference calls and remote working,


the new Merchant Team at SIG did exactly the reverse. With a new focus on face to face meetings and building strong relationships, the team is ringing the changes. Director of Merchants, Aaron Frogley, explains.


JUST BECAUSE YOU are big does not mean you get everything right. I joined SIG at the end of 2020 because the company had realised just how wrong it had gone in dealing with its merchant customers and wanted to change things.


It’s a great opportunity to be given a blank canvass to work with, although I have to confess there were a few pretty sticky conversations at first with customers who had really fallen out of love with SIG. The main message I heard was around the need for personal service. In a time when so much emphasis is placed on technology to sort problems out, it was an excellent reminder that actually people deal with people. You can have the widest range of products with the best availability and a competitive price, but if you don’t have trust you can still lose out. So the first priority was to establish a team to build relationships. A team of people with real industry knowledge who were prepared to pick up the phone and go and see their customers.


We now have three national account managers to work


with the central organisations of the buying groups. Just as importantly, they are supported by a national team of territory sales managers whose responsibility is to look after individual branches. And by “look after” we mean regular visits, phone calls, problem solving. We want the branch managers to know that the SIG representative is there to help them and, just as importantly, speaks their language. When I started to recruit my team it was essential that they had relevant industry experience and strong technical knowledge. Our customers are experts in their business and they rightly expect us to be too. If we’re going to be genuinely proactive then our category teams need to really know their specialist product areas. Not just to know the products we stock but also be up to date with the very latest regulations and the trends and influences on the product specifiers. And then there is local knowledge. A good SIG representative keeps tabs on what’s going on locally and should be able to discuss


stock control, our own transport fleet and some newly polished internal processes we can keep all of our customers up to speed with the availability of a huge range of products. We can track supply trends and understand where the pinch points are – finding solutions and alternatives where necessary.


potential opportunities with the merchant, bringing valuable market insight as well as technical understanding.


It was immediately clear that we had identified a really important problem. When we started – COVID precautions allowing – to visit branches or even to call customers, we found some that hadn’t spoken to a SIG representative for months. And once those crucial lines of communication started to be built we could begin to become a business partner in the best sense. Being that good business partner means local relationships combined with a reassuring national infrastructure – and this is where the sheer size of SIG can really bring benefits.


With a smoother group-wide


And then there is good old- fashioned service. We’re in a great position to help out when it comes to tracking down an elusive pallet of a particular colour roof tile or providing the specialist products that no-one holds in stock.


These are the fundamentals. Customer service is state of mind and for our team customer service is front and centre of everything we do.


It’s certainly been a full-on year. The most rewarding aspect has been the feedback from customers and knowing absolutely that we are moving the business in the right direction. We know that we have huge influence through the sheer size of our operation, but without those one-to-one relationships, painstakingly built over time, that size becomes irrelevant. BMJ


16


www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net March 2022


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