Issues 17: New year, new budget?

NEW YEAR, NEW BUDGET?

Everyone seems to agree they need the Housing Specifiers Database. There's a lot of business to be done in the Social Housing sector, and everyone involved in selling to it needs the best resources at their disposal. In other words, lots of people want the data but they also need a bit of capacity in the budget. Anyone who's used the PM Housing Directory - which is what it used to be called - knows that what counts is making use of the data as soon as possible. UP-AND-RUNNING The Housing Specifiers Database contains over 1500 records, containing the latest phone numbers, the right spelling for names and addresses. Try searching a database for Penrith when the name's Penwith! It comes on a disk. It's all there and accessible (literally, since it can be in Microsoft Access) at the touch of a key or a mouse. It's there NOW, when you want it - with a nice three month lead-in to next year's spending. Strike while the iron's hot. Wait until your budget's approved in the middle of March and it can be too late to win a slice of theirs.

ALL YOU COULD NEED

The rest you should know by now . . . you get the name of the organisation and the address of its office - there's several for the bigger housing associations - plus the name, job title and phone number of the person who deals with windows and/or doors. Names are all very well if you like cold calling or if you just want to send out a standard mailing or distribute literature. Anything more specific and you need something more specific. Like…

• How many dwellings in their stock, so you can target big players as a preference.
• What part of the country they're in, so you can target geographically.

You also get:

• Regional maps, showing which are still local authorities and which are now housing associations (important, that!).
• What sort of specification they have, so you can sort sheep from goats. (Sheep are the ones who say something vague about British Standards but haven't got the faintest idea what BS 7950 is.)
• Whether they require fabricators with BBA, ISO 9000 or Kitemark - or whether they think it would be nice but they'll take the cheapest anyway.
• Whether they prefer internal or external glazing beads.
• he types of locking mechanisms they prefer. In this day and age, it's amazing how many are still quite happy with cockspurs.
• Whether or not local authorities have a DLO. Some DLOs really are among the country's biggest installers. Makes sense when you think about it, doesn't it?
  A local authority with 50,000 dwellings and a window replacement programme could be installing THOUSANDS of windows a year. l how much money local authorities have put in their budgets for windows. Sort on that and you get a pretty hard list of targets, to say the least.

  IS IT FOR ME?

  Clearly, if over two hundred active window specifiers still put cockspur handles on their windows, somebody's not doing their job. Sales managers and directors of the top hardware suppliers really should be asking questions. How long has BS 7950 been on the go? The Housing Specifiers Database can be sorted, on the HARDWARE field, and all these beetles can be shaken out of the woodwork. This isn't just about selling or profit. These people need educating. With so many suppliers offering new products, or testing to new standards, the message needs to be on people's desks - NOW. A locking mechanism with the "Secure by Design" logo might be as important to them as it is to you. If PVC-U window system suppliers are as on-the-ball as they say, the tail-off in the retail sector has to be replaced by something, and Social Housing certainly has the dosh. Specifiers become a very real alternative and, if profile's to go out on those lorries, it has to be made into windows for someone. All the fabricators need to know is who. Fabricators can actually get their backsides into gear, if the system supplier gives them something to go at. A list of two dozen names and phone numbers doesn't go amiss.

  TO SYSTEMS SUPPLIERS

  Does the Housing Specifiers Database come out of the Sales budget or Marketing? We can't answer that question, obviously. Try this for size, though... If brand new data costs you £1500 for a year, and the Marketing Department offers information from it to, say, ten fabricators, that's customer support at a cost of £150 a time. Hardly big bucks. If only one of those fabricators sends somebody out to talk to twenty specifiers and comes back with a place on five select tender lists, wins a contract for £200,000 (not a lot, these days), the data has paid for itself a few times over. And it's still working for you! Marketing supports Sales. Marketing provides the tools for the job. If a database of every specifier involved in Social Housing, 1,500 vital records, isn't a tool, then what is? If you haven't a Marketing Department as such, then lo and behold, Windowbase is there to bridge the gap. Sales still has a direct link to the industry's - the country's - leading Research Department. Windowbase.

  HOW MUCH?

  The Window Specifiers Database costs £960 (plus £80 monthly for refreshing the data). It isn't a product. It's a service. What you get, up front, is the complete table of over 1,500 specifiers. While you're using it, we're updating it. To keep prices down, and since the records don't change anything like as often as fabricators or installers, we refresh half the data annually. You can just get on with your job - selling - while we get on with ours for you. Much the same way as the cleaners come into your office while you're not at your desk, empty the waste paper bin, wash your dirty coffee mug up, dust your desk, hoover your biscuit crumbs up etc. It would only take you twenty minutes, every evening, to do that job but it's economic sense to get someone else in, someone cheaper, to do it. So Windowbase are like the office cleaners, in a way.

  NEWS TRAVELS FAST

  ...AND THAT'S A FACT. What you're interested in, surely, is who's hearing it. Put an advert in a magazine read by architects and surveyors, one that's read by people working with Social Housing, and they might see it, as they flip the pages in their lunch break. A bit Hit-and-Miss, isn't it, if the advert cost more than a grand? Put a letter and some technical literature in an envelope, use Windowbase data as your mailmerge data file, and it's going to land on the desk - not opposite some boring article about gang-mowers or street lights - but with a straight-forward attention-grabbing caption. OI YOU! What you do is probably rather good. That's why we're in touch with you. High time, then, that everyone out there knows it. NOW. Not when next year's budget comes through. Give Mike Davis a call. 01706 644308. Come to an agreement. You can have the brand-new update, right now. News travels fast but not everything else does. Wheels that grind, and all that. Anyone on the road, with a job title that includes the word Specification in it, needs all the help s/he can get. If you're not convinced, have a word with them and ask what happened in Chester. 27th November actually. If they don't know, they should. If your head office data doesn't tell you, it should. It's all happening and someone's got to keep up with the pace. Put your feet up for ten minutes and let Windowbase do some of the donkey work for you. Just don't ask us to hoover up the crumbs under your chair, that's all.

  BECAUSE YOU'RE WORTH IT

  Drives you crazy, doesn't it - that smarmy woman's voice at the end of those cosmetics adverts on the box. When it comes to the Housing Specifiers Database, surely SOMEONE's worth it, though. Maybe it's the team who developed your new product, achieved its certification or approval, a fabricator who needs to maintain his figures, or even just the need to shift some good stuff from the stock shelves and out into the big, bad world. If a fabricator takes half a million quid's worth of window profile a year from his supplier, surely HE'S worth it. If you're paying someone good money, plus over-heads, to be out there, getting your products specified, surely they've got a hard enough job on their hands already. Show them THEY'RE worth it. Give them the tools and they'll do the job. Give them the best.

  DLO INSTALLERS

  Not only can we tell you everything you need to know about specifiers, Windowbase data on fabricators and installers now includes the local authority DLOs who fabricate AND INSTALL windows. Our research shows that the number of window companies is shrinking so, to give you something new to get your teeth into, we've added the DLOs - people with spending power and ongoing programmes. They don't just make or fit PVC-U windows, of course. There's plenty who still make softwood frames, and install anything the Architects Department asks them to. If you're not already in touch with these people, your first move is to get in touch with Mike Davis, and ask for a sample disk and any other details you need. Phone 01706 644308. We're not the window industry's main source of data for nothing, you know!