A salesman’s contact book is
worth far more than its weight in gold, particularly for the UK
broker market. Fred Crawley meets one broker who wants to know how
to buy this book – but not hire the salesman.
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“A large part of the value of this
business,” says Richard Hall, of asset and motor finance broker
Herts Business Solutions (HBS) “is in my mobile phone, or in
there,” indicating the rack of filing cabinets that line the back
of his office.
He is referring to around 400 business leaders,
many of them in his brokerage’s home region of Hertfordshire, which
each use HBS as a first port of call whenever they are looking to
expand fleets, arrange a new director’s car, or finance a piece of
specialist equipment.
While Hall still regularly meets new clients, it is
this stream of phone calls, each of which represents a deal from a
previous customer of good quality, that forms the bulk of HBS’
income. Needless to say, this is the case for many smaller UK
brokers.
What Hall wants to know is what will happen to
these income streams as British introducers – many of whom left
bank positions in the early 1990s – begin to retire or move back to
the banks, removing one- or two-man brokerages from the map.
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By GlobalData
Brokers seeing success
At present, many growing brokers are seeing success
through picking up veteran staff along with their contact books –
T&L Leasing’s clean-up of the old HBOS transport customer
roster, is a good example, or Associated Commercial Finance’s
expansion across the UK through acquisition of regional
specialists.
But none of these firms seem to have found a way to
pick up a contact book without an attendant member of staff,
leaving Hall to wonder if there is room in the market for a broker
with an appetite for the deal stream of others in a position to
leave the business.
Presuming that such deals could be done, there is
always the matter of who picks up the phone – a factor that might
put these potential gold mines out of reach for funders looking to
build their sales volumes through contact acquisition.
“Our customers range between 30 years old and 70
years old in age, with an average in the fifties, and they want to
deal with people in the same range,” he says.
“They don’t want to talk to a fresh hire working at
a sales desk, and they won’t want to be cross-sold on other product
lines.”
In fact, says Hall, keeping good customer
relationships sometimes means saying “no” to proposals, especially
in the bleaker field of general asset finance.
“If we get a less-feasible request we’ll always
suggest alternatives, but we’re not afraid to say no if there’s
nothing appropriate in the marketplace,” he says.
Sense of trust
In short, it seems like the factor that ensures the
value of contact books is the sense of trust that callers have in
brokers “not to over-promise, and not to under-deliver”, as Hall
puts it.
As such, a bigger problem than finding a way to
sell such a commodity is finding a buyer with the right mentality
to make it worth something.
