A Collaborative Approach with British Polythene Ltd

“I was very impressed with the Barbour ABI team and what they did for us in our difficult circumstances.  That’s what made us decide to a 3-year commitment to Barbour ABI due to the level of customer service and their desire to work with us. Night and day compared to your competitor.”

-Anthony Goode, British Polythene Ltd

Background

British Polythene Limited is a Berry Global company and specialises in advanced manufacturing that creates high-performance films and laminates that offer effective protection and wrapping solutions.
National Specification Manager Anthony Goode, and Technical Support Manager Ian Thick sat down with us to discuss their 13-year relationship with us, their challenges and how Barbour ABI provides the ideal solution, and how they’ll be utilising our platform for years to come.

The Challenge

Their biggest challenge as a UK manufacturer is securing and tracking specification at every stage of construction. Barbour ABI’s construction project leads platform gave British Polythene Limited the tools they need track their products that were specified on projects from every stage of construction.

Historical relationship with Barbour ABI

Anthony and Ian confirmed that they’ve leveraged Barbour ABI data in two very important ways throughout our 13-year relationship.

1. Tracking specifications from tender all the way through to contract award – the biggest challenge for most UK product manufacturers.
2. Proactively chasing new work and upcoming projects by creating marketing campaigns to email prospects using Barbour ABI contact information.

Moving forward they’ll also be using our data for curating contacts lists and uploading to HubSpot for even more marketing efforts.

Key opportunities for targeting and strategy using the Barbour ABI platform

Anthony explained that they’ll be doing a lot more marketing and collaboration between the teams while using our data. This will contribute to hitting their target of 70% of specification success. Our platform will help them achieve this goal.

In terms of long-term strategy, Ian mentioned that they’ll be using the platform to hunt down contractors, architects, and planners that are constantly working on the same projects so they can build relationship consistency.

Due to our relationship data feature, Ian and the team will be able to execute this strategy in a more logical way and help them build profitable relationships and boost their proactivity.

Success with Barbour ABI

The overall success comes from having the collaborative approach. Anthony explained that if both of our companies are interacting and having the conversations needed to get them the data they need, “Then we’re all improving together.”

The information within the projects themselves, access to bidding data, and FastPlan have attributed to British Polythene Limited’s ongoing success.

They spoke of our quality of data and rated a 75-80% success rate on start dates as well as contact information, this was very important to them as they rated the other competitor at <50%. They use our data to fill their own database with new contacts as well updating their data with things like job roles, email, and phone numbers.

“100% accuracy is impossible, but if there’s inaccurate data, we know we can reach out to Barbour ABI whenever. We send you a message and within 24-48 hours it’s updated. With your competitor there was no apparent way to reach out about project information to get this same level of service.”

Alternative Construction Project Leads Solutions

In Autumn of 2023, Anthony and Ian were curious about other construction data solutions and went to a main competitor of ours.

Anthony and Ian trialled the competitor’s platform for a few weeks and were originally impressed by the interface. However, after signing they realised that the interface disguised the fact that the right data just wasn’t there.

Anthony quoted, “It’s nice to have the interface but if the data isn’t there, if the interaction isn’t there, then you start putting two and two together that what we’re being told and what we were getting wasn’t the same thing.”

Another large pull to switching providers was a link between a major specification tool and the competitor’s platform. This link was promised to improve their specification safeguarding and make their lives easier, however, they were generally disappointed due to the lack of training on this feature and were led to believe that it was ultimately not the solution that was promised.

Anthony and Ian highlighted two main issues with the competitor’s system:

1. Smaller projects below £500k were excluded from the platform:

British Polythene Limited required these smaller projects as they mostly deal with housing, schools and hospitals.

2. Out of date project and contact information:

They experienced out of date information from the competitor’s platform and when Ian or Anthony approached the subject, the competitor was very uncollaborative and showed no interest in providing updates for British Polythene.

On this subject Anthony said: “We contact Barbour ABI and you often come back to us in 10 minutes and assure us that you’ll find the right information for us.”

They both also noted the stress of having a hidden autorenewal clause in their contract, something they were unfortunately never told about. This clause held them to a 3-month prior notice to leave the contract renewal.

Construction Project Leads from Barbour ABI 

Barbour ABI works across the UK construction and built environment to provide the most accurate and up to date project information under our construction project leads platform. If you’re interested in seeing how we can collaborate with your business to better build your pipeline, book a demo today.