The Craft of LBM Sales Podcast: Sell Value, Drive Builder Profit, and Win More Deals—Without Competing on Price

Have you ever lowered your price before a customer even asked for a discount, only to realize you negotiated against yourself?Successful sales negotiation requires preparation, emotional discipline, and a clear understanding of what a customer is willing to pay. But when you're eager to close a deal, those fundamentals can be easy to forget.In this episode, Bradley Hartmann shares a personal story about a Kevin Maas rookie baseball card, a $9.50 purchase, and the negotiation lessons his father taught him when he was just 12 years old.Through a memorable trip to a local baseball card shop, Bradley explores the difference between list price and willingness to pay, the importance of setting an opening offer and walkaway number, and why caring too much about winning a deal can lead to costly decisions.For lumber and building materials sales professionals navigating price objections, discounting conversations, and competitive sales negotiations, these lessons offer a practical reminder of how preparation and emotional control can help protect profitability.In this episode, you'll discover:How negotiating against yourself can weaken your position before a customer even responds to your opening offer.Why establishing your opening offer, target price, and walkaway number can help you negotiate with greater confidence and protect your margins.How to manage emotions during sales negotiations, understand willingness to pay, and avoid making costly decisions simply to close a deal.Play the episode to learn timeless negotiation lessons that can help you handle pricing conversations with confidence, avoid unnecessary discounts, and close more profitable deals.If you’re ready to stop competing on price and start having the right sales conversations that win business, send us a note at [email protected] or visit our website and click on Increase Sales.In The Craft of LBM Sales, we tackle real-world sales challenges in the lumber and building materials industry, including handling sales objections, improving phone sales, and what to do when you can’t close deals. Learn how to land new business, strengthen your negotiation skills, and build a reliable sales pipeline, even if you currently have no sales process in place. We also explore proven sales techniques, value selling strategies, overcoming sales rejection, hitting your sales goals, and navigating tough conversations around discounting.New podcasts are dropped every Monday and Wednesday.

Do you know which sales reps are driving profitable growth, or are you relying on revenue to tell you who is performing?For LBM owners and sales leaders, measuring individual sales performance can shape decisions around compensation, coaching, hiring, and growth. Bradley Hartmann shares the three metrics he believes matter most for understanding what each salesperson contributes to the business.He breaks down gross profit dollars, return on investment per sales rep, and the Mendoza Line, which measures how much gross profit comes from new customers or new product categories sold to existing customers.Bradley also explains why he recommends a 10% Mendoza Line for LBM sales and introduces adjusted gross margin, or AGM, as a way to give additional weight to profitable new business when evaluating performance.In this episode, you’ll discover:The three sales metrics Bradley recommends tracking to evaluate individual LBM sales performance.How to calculate ROI per sales rep and use it to make better decisions about compensation, coaching, and hiring.Why Bradley recommends that at least $10 of every $100 in gross profit come from new business and how that helps combat natural customer attrition.Play the episode to calculate these three numbers for your sales team and get a clearer picture of who is generating profit, delivering a strong return, and creating the new business your company needs to grow.ROI Fan ChartROI Distribution/Bar ChartIf you’re ready to stop competing on price and start having the right sales conversations that win business, send us a note at [email protected] or visit our website and click on Increase Sales.In The Craft of LBM Sales, we tackle real-world sales challenges in the lumber and building materials industry, including handling sales objections, improving phone sales, and what to do when you can’t close deals. Learn how to land new business, strengthen your negotiation skills, and build a reliable sales pipeline, even if you currently have no sales process in place. We also explore proven sales techniques, value selling strategies, overcoming sales rejection, hitting your sales goals, and navigating tough conversations around discounting.New podcasts are dropped every Monday and Wednesday.

What separates the sales pros who consistently improve, win new business, and attract better opportunities from everyone else?Being coachable requires more than sitting through another training session, nodding along, and going back to business as usual. The salespeople who stand out take good ideas, act on them quickly, invest in themselves, and report back on what worked.In this episode, Bradley Hartmann shares the story of one LBM sales rep who put that approach into practice. After being introduced to new AI tools and workflows, he invested in them, experimented with them, and took the ideas even further.He used AI to role-play an upcoming customer meeting and prepare for difficult questions. That preparation helped him walk into the conversation ready for objections he had not previously considered. Within eight weeks of meeting the prospects, he landed more than $1 million in business.When a mistake cost him another major opportunity, he did not give up. He acknowledged the mistake, went back to the customer, and found another piece of the business he could win.In this episode, you'll discover:How becoming genuinely coachable can accelerate your development and make coaches and managers want to invest more time and opportunities in you.How AI can help you role-play customer meetings, anticipate difficult questions, analyze your approach, and walk into important sales conversations better prepared.Why small acts of differentiation, including investing in yourself, recovering quickly from mistakes, and strengthening customer relationships, can compound into a reputation that attracts more business.Play the episode to learn how one LBM sales rep turns coaching into action and how you can use the same approach to stand out, improve faster, and create more sales opportunities.If you’re ready to stop competing on price and start having the right sales conversations that win business, send us a note at [email protected] or visit our website and click on Increase Sales.In The Craft of LBM Sales, we tackle real-world sales challenges in the lumber and building materials industry, including handling sales objections, improving phone sales, and what to do when you can’t close deals. Learn how to land new business, strengthen your negotiation skills, and build a reliable sales pipeline, even if you currently have no sales process in place. We also explore proven sales techniques, value selling strategies, overcoming sales rejection, hitting your sales goals, and navigating tough conversations around discounting.New podcasts are dropped every Monday and Wednesday.

Ever have a promising prospect suddenly go dark and wonder how many times you can follow up before persistence turns into annoyance?You had a good conversation. There was interest. Maybe you even met face-to-face. Then suddenly…nothing.When a prospect stops responding, it’s easy to fall into one of two traps: keep firing off “just checking in” messages until you become background noise, or give up on an opportunity that might still be alive.In this episode Bradley Hartmann shares a simple “Persistence vs. Annoyance” approach he’s used for years, including the four-sentence email and voicemail strategy designed to make it easy for a silent prospect to respond.You’ll also hear what happened when a listener tried the approach after three weeks of silence and why knowing when to stop following up can be just as important as knowing what to say.By listening, you’ll learn:How to use a short, vulnerable follow-up message that gives a ghosted prospect an easy way back into the conversation without making them feel guilty.Why acknowledging the thin line between persistence and annoyance can create a response when repeated calls, texts, and “just checking in” emails haven’t worked.How to recognize when silence is the answer, park the opportunity, and redirect your time, effort, and attention toward prospects where you can deliver value.Play this episode to steal Bradley’s “Persistence vs. Annoyance” follow-up word for word and learn how to stay persistent without wasting your time or becoming the salesperson your prospects start avoiding.If you’re ready to stop competing on price and start having the right sales conversations that win business, send us a note at [email protected] or visit our website and click on Increase Sales.In The Craft of LBM Sales, we tackle real-world sales challenges in the lumber and building materials industry, including handling sales objections, improving phone sales, and what to do when you can’t close deals. Learn how to land new business, strengthen your negotiation skills, and build a reliable sales pipeline, even if you currently have no sales process in place. We also explore proven sales techniques, value selling strategies, overcoming sales rejection, hitting your sales goals, and navigating tough conversations around discounting.New podcasts are dropped every Monday and Wednesday.

Are you using AI to grow your sales or just to write emails faster?Most sales pros have heard about AI, and many are already experimenting with it. But if you’re only using AI to summarize meetings, create agendas, brainstorm ideas, or clean up emails, you may be overlooking its biggest opportunity.In this episode, Bradley Hartmann explores how LBM sales professionals can turn AI into a strategic thought partner and personal sales coach. Instead of focusing AI on the 80% of activities that produce only a fraction of your results, Bradley challenges you to bring it into the vital 20%. The work that strengthens your pipeline, identifies the right prospects, uncovers wallet-share opportunities, and helps you deliver measurable value to customers.You’ll discover how to:Use AI to pressure-test your pipeline, uncover blind spots, and identify the opportunities deserving your attention.Turn AI into a personal sales coach by having it interview you one question at a time about your customers, prospects, goals, and sales challenges.Combine your knowledge of your customers and market with AI’s speed and analytical capabilities so you can spend less time behind a computer and more time having valuable conversations in the field.Try These AI Sales Coaching PromptsCopy and paste one of these prompts into the AI platform you use and let it interview you one question at a time:“Interview me, asking me one question at a time about the strength of my pipeline.”“Interview me by asking one question at a time about my plan to grow wallet share with these customers.”“Interview me, asking one question at a time about my most important prospect.”“Interview me, asking one question at a time about why I keep losing a certain kind of opportunity.”Play this episode to learn how to make AI your strategic sales partner and focus more of your time on the activities that can drive future growth.Listen to Episode 573 of The Construction Leadership PodcastIf you’re ready to stop competing on price and start having the right sales conversations that win business, send us a note at [email protected] or visit our website and click on Increase Sales.In The Craft of LBM Sales, we tackle real-world sales challenges in the lumber and building materials industry, including handling sales objections, improving phone sales, and what to do when you can’t close deals. Learn how to land new business, strengthen your negotiation skills, and build a reliable sales pipeline, even if you currently have no sales process in place. We also explore proven sales techniques, value selling strategies, overcoming sales rejection, hitting your sales goals, and navigating tough conversations around discounting.New podcasts are dropped every Monday and Wednesday.