Product Focus

ELEVATED ACCESS CELEBRATES SUCCESS

ELEvatEd accESS New Zealand Ltd is the largest independent supplier of access equipment in New Zealand. In addition to supplying both new and used access equipment, Elevated Access also helps hire companies with offshore machine disposals. Sole distributorship rights for Sinoboom access equipment in NZ have been held by Elevated Access since 2015. However, thanks to the machines’ durable build quality and reliability, the Sinoboom brand has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity over the last couple of years. National Sales Manager Terry Tibbitts spoke with us about the success of the Sinoboom brand in NZ. Prior to signing an exclusive distributor agreement with Sinoboom we were selling a large amount of machines for another well-known brand although we weren’t the only ones in New Zealand selling the same brand, to the same customers. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to predict a race to the bottom with this business model. We’d been supplying Sinoboom machines in relatively small numbers for about eight years. I was contacted by a customer asking for urgent help with his Sinoboom, which had just broken down. As always, we took urgent action and discovered that the Sinoboom was actually eight years old and had never missed a beat until that day. After getting the Sinoboom working again, I called a couple of other companies I knew who had purchased Sinoboom EWPs at around the same time. The response was the same: the machines were all going great with no issues whatsoever. These reports of Sinoboom’s impressive reliability made us believe that the Sinoboom could hold its own against other well-known brands. Six weeks later and with a new shipment of Sinoboom’s 6-metre platform scissor lifts Elevated Access provided potential customers with two brands for them to demonstrate on their site. One was a well-known and respected brand, the other an unknown Chinese product. Without any undue bias It quickly became apparent that there were a lot of things which customers preferred about the Sinoboom machines. As a result, 9 out of 10 customers chose to keep the Sinoboom. This gave us the confidence to give Sinoboom the push it needed to succeed in New Zealand. Today, Sinoboom machines are regarded as some of the best in the world and sales of Sinoboom access equipment in New Zealand and globally have skyrocketed. Chinese manufactured equipment is now the norm. Some of the very best modern technology is manufactured in China. It’s taken some time to address people’s misconceptions about what ‘Made in China’ means in terms of product quality. Fortunately, challenging that stereotype has been made far easier by the fact it’s immediately apparent to any buyer that Sinoboom machines are built to meet a standard, not a budget. As an example, I was contacted by Bill, a rural customer who was looking to buy a scissor lift. I told him that I felt a Sinoboom electric slab scissor was an ideal machine for cleaning his chicken sheds, as it was affordable and could handle plenty of dirt and dust. “Sinoboom!?” he exclaimed in horror. “Never heard of them! Where’re they made? Made in China I bet. Probably bloody rubbish! I told him I’d get one delivered to him anyway so he could have closer look and try it out for himself. A couple of days later I get a phone call… “Terry are you sure these are made in China?” They’re impressive. It doesn’t look like it’s made in China. I’d started off needing to convince the buyer that just because Sinobooms are made in China, it didn’t mean that they were rubbish. Once he’d seen for himself just how good the Sinoboom machine was, I found myself having to persuade him that it really was made in China! Bill’s still using his Chinese-made Sinoboom to clean his chicken sheds, and we’re still using his comments in some of our brochures and marketing materials: ■

For more information, contact Terry on 0800 222 111 or visit www.elevatedaccess.co.nz