Clearview National January 2020 - Issue 218 | Page 4

PROUD SPONSOR OF INDUSTRY NEWS FROMTHEEDITOR THE NEW YEAR AND A CLEAR VIEW There’s nothing like a fresh start and a clean slate to motivate you for the month ahead is there? I love January. I relish being able to enjoy the cold, dark nights without any festive functions or Christmas commitments to drag myself too. I love locking the door, closing the curtains, starting a fire, and watching a film while everything outside carries on without me. » YET, WHILE I ENJOY THE COSY FEELING OF getting wrapped up against the bleak winter, there’s another group of people who love the long nights for a very different reason. That’s why, January is the perfect month for the Clearview hardware extra feature, with the best fixtures and fittings that have been designed and developed to keep the intruders at bay and all our prized possessions – including those exciting and expensive Xmas extravagances – and precious ones safe and sound. Energy-efficiency should always be a priority but with the howling wind and driving rain outside, and maybe even some of the white stuff on the horizon, keeping the elements out and the heating in has never been more important, so pay extra attention to the door and window news or prepare to pay extra when it comes to those utility bills in a few months. It’s not just the weather forecasts we should be taking notice of either, with some of the industry’s top names giving their fenestration forecasts for 2020; both for the sector as a whole and their individual businesses, as well as a few reviews from last year to tide us over from the glad tidings. In between all of these pages – 100 in total this month – we have all the Aluminium articles, industry insight, fabricator and fitter facts and figures, business breakdown, and more movers and shakers to shimmy into the new year. And, if you think this is a slightly different introduction to the issue than usual, that’s because I always think the new year is a new chance to do things a bit differently. So, if you feel there’s something missing from this magazine, or there are some issues you’d like to see covered in the next issue, we welcome your additions to future editions. Just get in touch. Happy New Year, Gemma, Editor 4 » JA N 2020 » CL EARVI E W- U K . C O M LETTER TO THE EDITOR Industry experiences highest rate of change - is your data up to scratch? » IT WILL COME AS NO surprise to those within the industry to hear that we’ve seen a rapid rise in M&A activity in recent years. For some businesses, it has proven to be a fast-track way to scale up, enter new markets and to secure both customers and supply chains. For those who don’t have the appetite for major growth or investment, or maybe approaching retirement, it’s presented an ideal opportunity to exit. By tracking dozens of metrics across our live database, from suppliers and products, to directors and business activities, we can see that the rate of change has increased by more than 30% in the last 12 months. And, with the industry landscape changing so rapidly, it’s now harder than ever before to communicate with new potential customers. The once trusty marketing spreadsheets and one-off data lists are now destined for the archives because they simply cannot keep up. Businesses that use these outdated methods or do not cleanse their data risk wasting their time contacting individuals who have changed jobs, retired, or even passed away and businesses that have ceased trading. Continued use could also result in potential damage to reputations with high bounce rates leaving businesses looking unprofessional and facing the prospect of being blacklisted by email providers. That’s without even mentioning the issue of GDPR, with regulators across the UK and Europe demonstrating that businesses of all sizes fall in their crosshairs. Through updating our live prospect database, which provides real-time business information and contact details for over 70,000 potential customers across the industry, our in-house research team conduct over 20,000 calls and interviews every month. This is just one step of our seven stage verification process which generates over 1,200 changes and updates to our data every month. It’s these important changes which will be missed by out-of- date spreadsheets and lists, and goes some way to explaining why users of our Salestracker platform consistently achieve strong results from prospecting and from their email and direct mail campaigns. Yours sincerely, Jade Greenhow Operations Director, Insight Data [email protected]