More than products
Caldwell’s sales director Tim Ferkin asks: What makes a hardware supplier stand out from the crowd?
The obvious answer is great products. But the industry has come a long way in recent years. Manufacturers have upped their game across the board, and it’s now genuinely rare to find firms selling shoddy hardware in the UK.
If they’re on the look-out for an extensive selection of quality products, today’s fabricators are spoilt for choice.
When customers expect an excellent product offering as standard, it takes something more to make a hardware supplier truly market leading.
So, if it’s not the products, what is it?
It’s offering a comprehensive service, and becoming not just a product supplier, but a partner – helping customers streamline operations, cut down on costs, and generally doing everything possible to make their lives easier.
At Caldwell, we recently introduced a £50K PAS24 testing rig, which is designed to make accreditation testing a much cheaper and easier process for our customers.
For many fabricators, PAS24 testing can be a major hassle. Sending a product for testing, having it fail, making changes, and submitting to the test centre again and so on can quickly become an expensive and time-consuming affair.
Armed with the new test rig, we can practise PAS24 tests in-house – meaning we can ensure a customer’s product will pass before it goes to an official test centre, saving them time and money.
It’s a fantastic value-added service we’re delighted to be able to offer our customers, and we hope that as many of them as possible take advantage of it.
It’s clear the market isn’t just looking for a company to sell them hardware anymore. Fabricators want to develop a relationship with a business that values them, and helps them remove complexity from their operation. At Caldwell, that’s our focus.
We’re going to expand our product range further in the years ahead, so we can offer fabricators an even more comprehensive service, as well as investing in other services that, like the PAS24 rig, will make their lives just that little bit easier.