Tag: LBM Sales
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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…
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How We Lost a Deal Before It Ever Started
One risk of writing a newsletter like this is trying to share insight without sounding like a blowhard who has the sales game all figured out. Because I don’t. I make poor decisions.I pursue deals I shouldn’t. I waste valuable time—mine and my team’s—more often than I’d like. What follows is a deconstruction of a…
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How Smart Sales Managers Replace Gossip With Growth Using the GOST Framework
Sales Manager Question: We sent part of our sales team to a regional LBM show in December, expecting the usual shot of energy and ideas. Instead, they came back with a bunch of pessimism, negativity, and gossip from the event floor. Add in the recent Venezuela headlines and uncertainty, and this negativity seems to be sticking.…
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The $37 Insult I Still Think About Every December
In 2002, I was a 24-year-old construction superintendent in Algonquin, Illinois. The market was hot. Our “new home consultants” were two salesmen my age. Good smiles.Spiky hair.Brooks Brothers suits.$350 Allen Edmonds shoes. They weren’t selling so much as taking orders. It was a fish-in-a-barrel situation, and they showed up at 10 a.m. every day and…
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Dark December: The Month That Separates Sales Amateurs From the Pros
We called it the “Fourth Quarter Push.” That’s the homebuilding equivalent of describing the final stages of procreation as “labor.” Oh, it’s that—and a whole lot more.And sometimes, it nearly kills you. My boss, the VP of Construction for our Chicago division, called me on the afternoon of Monday, October 6, 2006. We were on…
The Craft of LBM Sales 