What’s Your Quickest Route to Sales Growth? Selling the Whole House

Today’s challenging sales conditions are prompting leaders at construction supply companies to press their reps to get out and drum up new business. But too often, sales reps go at it the wrong way, Mike McDole believes.

McDole’s 42 years of experience in LBM sales has taught him that cold-calling customers is the hardest way to generate sales. He believes there’s a richer vein to mine: current buyers.

“The first group any dealer should be looking at is your existing customers,” McDole says. “What are they buying? More importantly, what aren’t they buying? Those customers already have the relationship with you, they love the sales rep, and maybe they aren’t buying interior trim from you. Identify that … go ask for that business. Why aren’t they buying that from you?”

The notion of “Selling the Whole House” has been around for years, but McDole and other sales gurus believe use of the strategy has waned after years in which sales reps had to shift their attention to dealing with COVID- and lumber-related supply chain challenges. In those days, making a sale wasn’t the problem; service was the issue. Now, Selling the Whole House is due for a revival. 

Start With a Grid

First, create a spreadsheet for every sales rep. Add a column for each product you sell: framing lumber, windows, doors, decking, cabinetry, etc. In the rows, list each customer.

The simplest way to use the resulting grid is to put an X and/or color in the block to show the products the customer is buying. The result should look like this:

The goal is to immediately spot opportunities to expand current business. But when you make your pitch, longtime sales consultant Jim Pancero says you should frame it in a way that helps the client.

“Most companies ask ‘What more can I sell to this customer?’” Pancero says. “Instead, it should be, ‘What new solutions and applications can I bring to this customer?’ One way to do that is to bring better solutions and new ideas that they don’t have with their current vendor.”

Ask the customer for a de-brief or evaluation of how you’ve done so far and then match the client’s needs with your inventory, Pancero suggests. Start with your five best-selling products; odds are, if they are selling so well, they probably have industry-leading qualities that top the competition.

And while you’re at it, remind the client that buying more products from you means they’ll have fewer invoices to track and less paperwork to handle. The bigger the client, the more likely this sales note will resonate.

(Don’t have time to create a grid? Service partners might be able to help. Lift & Shift, which runs incentive programs, will segment sales data to identify customers who aren’t buying a particular product. It then can target them with a bonus offer to encourage them to expand their range of purchases.)

Minding Margins

Some dealers go further with the grid by color-coding what’s being sold based on how the gross margin a particular customer pays for the product compares with the average gross margin for that category by all customers. For instance, you could use green for GM margins that are two points above the store-wide average, red for margins two points below, and yellow for margins in between. To make this grid extra valuable, add the total volume of current sales. 

Aside from revealing what the client isn’t buying, such a grid also can help identify your most profitable customers. Some dealers have discovered that their biggest customers are nowhere close to the most lucrative ones.

The grid also works when you’re pursuing McDole’s No. 2 target group: low-volume customers. “Say they’re doing $50,000 with you and $200,000 with someone else,” he says. “So you’re only getting 20% of the $250,000. That’s probably because nobody ever paid attention to that.” A grid, combined with a little knowledge about that smaller customer’s specialty, can tip you off to product categories you should promote.

Only after you’re finished with these two target groups should you start cold-calling, McDole believes. And with the grid, it will help grow your business.