“What they come in for is up to them. What they leave with is up to us!”
Albert Arkwright
In his later years and railing against Alzheimer’s disease, my father enjoyed watching box sets of Open All Hours. For those too young to recall, this was a 1980’s BBC sitcom set in a corner shop in Doncaster, featuring the stuttering shopkeeper Albert Arkwright and his nephew and errand boy G…G…G…Granville.
Watching these old programmes with my Dad, I was struck by how relevant the lessons in sales and marketing remain today. Hidden between the laughs were many words of wisdom, not least the line “what they come in for is up to them, what they leave with is up to us!
Adding value to the customer is key to being successful in modern distribution and at the core of BPX’s Help to Choose, Help to Use philosophy. So, whilst “what our customers order” is up to us to influence, unlike Arkwright, we aim to ensure that our customers depart with exactly and only what is right for their application. Offering advice, suggesting alternatives and providing ongoing support is our responsibility and on occasions, our customers may decide upon a better solution than the one they enquired about. That’s BPX doing our job.
Our motivation is excellent customer service and that might be very different to Arkwright’s, but we thank him for the reminder that it is our obligation to use our product and technical knowledge to guide and advise our customer. And that is why you will find the above p…p… p… picture of Mr Arkwright hanging in each BPX sales office.
Guy Collins
Director at BPX Group
