Tag: LBM Sales
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They Know Exactly Why You Lost. They’re Just Not Telling You.
I’m a little slow. It took me way too long to understand why builders don’t tell suppliers the real reason they lost the business. Flashback to October 2010. I was in area purchasing at Pulte Homes, managing a few dozen material and labor accounts across seven markets from Cleveland to Denver. Home starts were down…
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From Old Guard to Young Guns: Leading Sales Succession With Clarity and Standards
Today’s newsletter is my April column in the LBM Journal magazine. The “Point God” was in Purgatory. Well, Atlanta, anyway. Chris Paul, the 12-time All Star point guard for the Los Angeles Clippers, was left by his team at Hartsfield–Jackson International Airport. His coaches and teammates had had enough. In the middle of their East Coast road…
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How a Stroke Taught Me Rejuvenation Is a Skill—and Made Me Better at Sales
Like many of you, the first quarter of the year starts with a flurry of activity. For me, that includes a lot of travel. I won’t list the airports, miles, or nights away from home—because you don’t care, and this isn’t a humblebrag about how hard I’m working. This is about what it reminded me:…
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Three Books Your Buyer Is Using to Negotiate Against You
The economic thrashing that was the Great Recession produced one unexpected upside for me: It scattered talented friends of mine all over the country. PulteGroup, like every other builder that survived that period, cut most of its headcount as it slammed the brakes on production. Many of the people I worked with there ended up…
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What Builders Say About You Once You Leave the Room
Like many good sales lessons, this one started over beers. It eventually became the backbone of my book Behind Your Back: What Purchasing Managers Say Once You Leave the Room—and How to Get Them to Say Yes. Denver, Colorado.March of 2013. I was spending a week with a drywall supply company, helping them attract Hispanic talent…
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From Barrels of Urine to Better AI: The Strange Story That Explains Modern Sales Experimentation
There may be no greater testament to marital tolerance than this: Hennig Brand’s wife once allowed her husband to store hundreds of barrels of urine in their basement. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Brand lived in the 1600s during the transition between alchemy and chemistry. He was obsessed with a single idea: turning base…
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Your Sales Team Is in Drop Shock
The Hartmanns of Elgin, Illinois were not a camping clan. That changed exactly once—May 25th, 1988—when my father came home and announced, “There’s a tent in the back of the van. Drag it into the backyard. We’re sleeping outside tonight.” My brother, sister, and I sprinted to the driveway.For non-camping kids like us, this was…
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5 Lessons Learned From Tagging a Top Sales Shark for 30 Days
Imagine a Toyota Sequoia. It’s like a 4Runner on steroids—seventeen feet long, nearly seven feet wide, weighing 5,600 pounds, and as tall as an NBA point guard. Now imagine something bigger.Faster. A predator shaped by millions of years of evolution, slicing through saltwater at speeds that would embarrass Usain Bolt. What I’m asking you to…
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Why Nobody Wants to Read Your/My Sh*t—and What LBM Sales Pros Must Do to Win New Sales Prospecting
In Episode 36 of The Craft of LBM Sales Podcast, I shared a few insights from one of my mentors-from-afar: Steven Pressfield. His book The War of Art has been a reference guide for me throughout my sales career—which is why we recently shipped 100 copies as our Sales Fundamentals Workshop book of the quarter. If The War of Art is…
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The Jerry Jones Problem: Why Sales Managers Who Still Sell Suppress Team Performance
Today’s newsletter is my January column in the LBM Journal magazine. Jerry Jones isn’t a cowboy; he’s a salesman. He’s a dealmaker, a gambler, and a showman. He’s the only NFL owner with a weekly radio show—just one aspect of his omnichannel approach to staying in the spotlight. As he once put it: “The Cowboys are a…
The Craft of LBM Sales 