No one knows better than you that today’s tough market requires more than talent for success.  Successful companies use every available advantage to increase product sales. IAPMO’s Uniform ES serves as a conduit for review of your substantiating data and translation of that highly technical and complicated data into the information required by a prudent building department for acceptance.

Recognition for manufacturers can be found in the following ways:

• Have the code changed to indirectly reference your product. Consider that the code provides new editions every three years, with opportunities to make changes twice in that time. They will not allow you to put your product’s name directly in the code. Your product must be referenced indirectly in this method.
• Individually show each jurisdiction the testing documenting that you are an acceptable alternate to the code. Lots of man-hours.
• Obtain an evaluation report from Uniform Evaluation Services. 

When your sales staff makes pitches, would the clients find a third party document summarizing all relevant code issues valuable? Especially if the third party is a group known and trusted by code officials?  If the document also concluded with a recommendation of product acceptance by the code official? More specifically, would that help sales? Would it be easier to sell with or against this advantage? 

Why wait until your competitor has the upper hand? What are you waiting for?

How do you justify spending this money?  Two words: Time Saving
First, let us also talk about the time you can’t measure. How long would it take your sales staff to travel to all the building jurisdictions in North America and convince them your products meet or are an acceptable alternative to the codes? Could this be done by a team of two in four hours? If so, assuming no travel time, the 20,000 departments could be won over once in about 160,000 person hours. If the actual labor cost is estimated at just $10 per hour, the total cost could be as much as $1.6 million. A Uniform Evaluation Report (ER) might save your company $1.6M. The report may convince almost all the departments, but you may still have to visit a few. That allows your sales staff to do what they do best: Sell to people who buy your product. 

Second, let us consider the time required to answer questions. A ER summarizes all the pertinent data for which the code official is looking. So, rather than look through multiple volumes of your product literature, necessary data is right there, where code officials know they can find it. How much money would you spend answering the same question over and over? Your inside sales staff might be overheard saying, “Hey, this fellow wants the answer to question No. 12. I wish I could play a recorded message.”  But with no report and no recorded answer, your staff is left bored answering the same questions all day.  Even at 10 minutes a call for each of the jurisdictions once a month, that is 400,000 hours of potential savings.   

A Uniform Evaluation Report could save money in jurisdiction outreach and in answering standard questions. This savings goes to your bottom line.