That being said, the site is constantly being tweaked and updated, both in its content and navigation, to capture any untapped pros. “There are slight differences among our locations, so it allows a customer or potential customer to see what each of them does,” says Leroy Custer, vice president of purchasing and marketing for BMC West in Boise, Idaho. “The goal is to properly channel the e-mails we get to make sure that person is contacted personally [by a salesperson],” he says, crystallizing why the Web is unlikely to unseat relationships as the critical element in successful LBM sales.
Custer also envisions the company’s Web site as a destination for pros and consumers that establishes BMHC and BMC West as an industry leader. “It’s an image issue,” he says. “The Web site needs to be a professional, one-stop source of information about us and our industry and what affects it,”
That approach fits the profile of contractor computer users. Nearly all builders report having at least one PC and Internet access, according to a 2004 NAHB computer usage survey. More than two-thirds use that capability to find out about building materials or supplies, though 23 percent have never made an online purchase.
In a separate study commissioned by ebuild, the building products information portal from PROSALES’ parent company Hanley Wood, LLC, the Internet shared the top spot with building industry trade magazines as the most-used source of product information relied upon by builders, a third more so than sales materials from a dealer and twice as popular as an actual sales representative. And if builders only had one choice, the survey says, they’d use the Web 3 to 1 over any other information source.
The good news now and for the future is that pros are already online and, among the pages they can surf for building products and services, they primarily rely on manufacturer and dealer Web sites—perhaps giving some hope to the LBM supply channel tapping into $1.4 billion in online purchase revenues reported last year. “It’s coming, we all know that,” says Goebel. “If you don’t get on it, you just won’t be there … wherever ‘there’ is.”—Rich Binsacca is a contributing editor for PROSALES.
E-Commerce: Signs of the Times E-commerce in the narrow sense of online sales may not yet dominate the LBM supply channel, but other online and electronic tools are making their way to the mainstream. Here are a few tech tips to keep in mind if you plan to join in:
