“Van operators are a dead interesting bunch, because there’s no such thing in my world as a Van driver. You know someone who works for British Gas for example, they’re not delivering gas – they’re actually a Service Engineer. Someone who works for a local janitor firm, they’re running their own business. So the VanPro facilities are designed to give Van people what they need. So they don’t need the glitzy glamorous gin-palace showrooms that go with the car business, equally they don’t want to be queued up behind some foreign Actross or whatever, that’s quite an intimidating experience. So when you package the whole thing up, the Vito itself will be more of an SME vehicle than a large fleet vehicle – SME is the big target sector.
The only thing we don’t do with this Vito is make it as a chassis cab derivative, but that market is quite limited anyway
“The new Vito is in a competitive segment and no one makes bad vans these days, so to differentiate you on product is something that’s quite tricky to do. What we try to do is to discuss with customers what the right van is for them. For me, if a customer walks into a dealership and talks with a salesman and the customer says they wants a Vito, the first question I would ask is: ‘What do you do?’ ‘What’s your business? What weight do you carry? Because whilst the customer might think they want one of those, in reality they might not. They might be able to get away with a Citan!
“From a consultative selling perspective, manufacturers all need to realise SMEs know what they are doing! VanPro gives our sales people that consultative approach.
“The only thing we don’t do with this Vito is make it as a chassis cab derivative, but that market is quite limited anyway.
“We view SMEs as anyone operating between 25 and less than 250 vehicles and as you can imagine, this captures quite a lot.
“We’re going after particular market segments with the new Vito, the service engineer is one, which would cover anyone that mends anything at the home, place of work or roadside and would include people like Quikfit for example. Food is another segment, parcel distribution is another, facilities management is a huge segment, although finding them is quite difficult – remember there are over 3 million vans on the roads of the UK!”
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