After a great couple of days meeting suppliers, friends, clients and prospective clients at Fleet Live this week, TCH Salsa's Corporate Sales Manager, Duncan Howell, has taken time to reflect on our time at the NEC...
"TCH Leasing had its biggest and best stand ever since we started exhibiting at the industry showcase four years ago and boy did we have something on our stand that attracted people to come over and see us!
A massive thanks to Robert Simpson at Marshall BMW for his kind loan of the i8 which caused quite a stir on our pitch! (and a mention to our colleague, Ranjit who managed to drive the car a few yards on to the stand during set up on Monday without crashing it!)
All of the TCH Leasing Sales team were on duty over the two days helping to meet and greet anyone who came on to the stand, offering an insight into many and varied services which we provide into the Fleet market (and some of them even got a bag of sweets for their interest!)
This year we had separate areas of the stand for Leasing/Salsa (Salary Sacrifice)/Public Sector/Rental although to be honest most of the people we spoke to were interested in all areas of our business.
We had a visit on Tuesday from Sandy Rowan of Pointer Limited who had ventured on to our stand in the final hours of last year’s show telling us that he was looking for a new provider to replace one that hadn’t been performing as he wanted. One year later, we are proud to say Sandy and Pointer Limited is now a client of ours having supplied him with a raft of new Peugeot cars and vans over the last 12 months! He summed up the theme of this year’s event by telling us that he ‘made a point of visiting every year because it is the place where he can get up to date with the Electric Vehicles innovation and Vehicle Charging developments all in one place’.
‘Electric’ certainly was the buzzword this year.
We took time out to visit the ‘How to implement an Electric Vehicle Strategy’ seminar on the Wednesday morning and found out some interesting facts.
The seminar was kicked off by Gary McCrae (Urban Foresight) and Fraser Crichton (Dundee City Council) who explained how Dundee became one of the UK’s most successful early adopters of an Electric Vehicle charging infrastructure and how they are encouraging business and the public to move to Electric Vehicles.
One interesting fact they brought up - Did you know that in the last 28 years energy providers in the UK have reduced their Co2 emissions by about 30% whereas the reduction in Co2 emissions in UK transport has been just 3%????!!!! We have a lot of work to do…….
This was followed by an insight on his fleet policy by Simon King of Mitie Group. Simon is certainly an electric vehicle advocate – his policy with his drivers is that they MUST have an electric vehicle unless there is a sound business case not to have one!
He highlighted the two main obstacles that he currently experiences in promoting his policy – namely - availability of vehicles and lack of understanding about how electric vehicles work.
The former problem he feels is going to resolve itself in time, possibly not enough for him to achieve his conversion target as quickly as he would have liked but he is getting there. The latter he addresses by staging employee ride and drive events with the help of manufacturers – very much in the way that TCH Leasing recently provided a GreenDay Ride and Drive event for its clients at Pride Park, Derby.
A really interesting insight in to how the process of going electric was being handled at a large company with a large, varied, fleet footprint.
All in all, a very interesting and productive 2 days for us with lots of new contacts made and hard work to do in order to follow everything up!
AND - TCH Leasing has provisionally signed up to an even bigger stand in 2020, emphasising our commitment to expanding our business! See you all in 2020!"
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