Creating a Winning Building Material Sales Strategy That Closes the Coverage Gap

Why your buyers define your building material sales strategy

Demand is flat, costs are volatile, and 58% of purchases now happen outside traditional distributor relationships.

That number should set the agenda for everything that follows.

If more than half of your buyers’ spending is going elsewhere, the problem is not the market. It is how well you understand the people you’re selling to and whether your systems are built to match how they actually buy.

That is the foundation of any effective building material sales strategy.

Strategy is not just about pricing or rep coverage. It is about alignment between buyer behavior, sales coverage and the digital experience that supports both.

That includes how you approach ecommerce construction across B2B building materials and related segments such as B2B commerce for construction machinery.

If your contractors, specifiers, procurement teams, and DIY buyers are all navigating the same experience regardless of how they purchase, your sales strategy is not fully built for the market you serve.

Modern B2B sales management in construction commerce requires systems that reflect how different stakeholders research, evaluate, and order.

Understanding who buys and how they buy is no longer optional. It is the difference between capturing share and quietly losing it.

What does the 80/20 rule look like in building materials distribution?

When building a scalable building material sales strategy, you need clarity on how outside sales and construction material ecommerce work together.

In practice, revenue is often concentrated among a relatively small percentage of actively managed accounts. These customers receive the most attention from outside sales and typically represent the core of the business.

But that focus creates a blind spot.

The majority of accounts receive limited proactive engagement. Over time, some grow. Many stay flat. Others quietly drift to competitors offering a more convenient buying experience.

Meanwhile, Channel Marketing Group's 2025 research with Prokeep found that distributors rate proactive selling 7.35 out of 10 in importance, yet only 22% actively engage in outbound demand generation.

At the same time, outside sales typically covers roughly 20% of a distributor’s customer base, leaving 80% of accounts essentially unmanaged.

This is where construction materials ecommerce becomes more than a convenience. It becomes coverage.

If your ecommerce website for building materials is not supporting house accounts, a meaningful portion of your customer base is left to navigate purchasing on its own. In many cases, those accounts begin searching for easier ecommerce experiences elsewhere.

A modern building materials ecommerce platform should extend sales coverage digitally. It should support B2B construction materials buyers who are not actively managed by reps, while reinforcing relationships with top tier accounts.

Without that layer, your building materials B2B marketing efforts create demand that your sales model cannot fully capture.

Ask yourself: If you pulled a year over year revenue report on your house accounts right now, would the trend line be going up or down?

If you do not know, your building material sales strategy likely depends too heavily on manual coverage and not enough on scalable ecommerce for building supply.

Who are the four buyer personas that shape your digital strategy?

Building materials distribution does not serve a single buyer type.

The differences between them should shape your building material sales strategy and your construction material ecommerce approach.

If your building materials ecommerce platform treats every buyer the same, it underserves all of them.

The four buyer personas in building materials ecommerce.

A platform that treats all four identically underserves all of them. The contractor reordering framing lumber at 6 AM from a truck has nothing in common with an architect pulling spec sheets for a bid package. 

Distributors serving both professional and consumer segments need a platform that handles both motions without compromise.

How does BigCommerce serve four different buyer personas on one platform?

The coverage gap problem and the persona diversity problem are connected. You cannot manually customize the buying experience for four different buyer types across thousands of accounts. The platform has to do it.

BigCommerce is designed for this level of complexity in building materials ecommerce, offering:

• Customer-specific pricing and catalogs: The framing contractor sees their negotiated price, the walk in DIY buyer sees retail pricing, and the procurement manager sees their organization’s contract terms, all within the same building materials ecommerce platform.

• Multi-user accounts with approval hierarchies: Designed for B2B construction materials purchasing, where 68% of orders involve multiple stakeholders. Buyers can submit, managers can approve, and the audit trail is built in, supporting stronger B2B sales management in construction ecommerce.

• Complete product data and documentation: Give specifiers the technical specs, code compliance data and product documentation they need to include you in a bid and keep your ecommerce for construction materials competitive.

• B2B and B2C on one platform: Serve professional contractors and consumer buyers from a single ecommerce website for building materials, without managing two disconnected systems.

• Quick reorder and saved lists: Support the repeat purchase rhythm that defines contractor relationships in building materials ecommerce, where the same SKUs ship week after week.

The 80% of accounts that outside sales cannot actively cover are where digital commerce has the most immediate upside. A platform built for persona diversity turns passive house accounts into growing ones — without adding headcount.

MKM Building Supplies is a strong example of this in practice. The UK based merchant modernized its building materials ecommerce experience to better serve both trade and consumer buyers. Within weeks of launch, MKM saw significant gains in traffic, orders, and revenue, demonstrating the real benefits business leaders expect when their platform supports B2B construction materials complexity at scale.

Check out the MKM BigCommerce case study to learn more.

The final word

A modern building material sales strategy starts with alignment.

Alignment between who your buyers are, how they purchase, and how your digital experience supports them.

Start by pressure testing your model:

• Do your top contractors see the same site as a one time walk in? They should not.

• What is the year over year revenue trend of your house accounts? If it is flat or declining, unmanaged accounts are quietly leaving.

• How many of the four buyer personas do you serve across B2B building materials and consumer segments, and does your platform treat them differently?

• How many accounts can each rep realistically manage? If the answer is only a fraction of their total book of business, digital must close the gap and support stronger B2B sales management in construction ecommerce.

• Where is your highest margin opportunity? House accounts can carry higher gross margins and represent one of the fastest paths to profitable growth.

As digital marketing for building material suppliers becomes more competitive, buyers are comparing experiences across channels more closely.

That makes your building materials ecommerce platform increasingly important. It will either reinforce the gap or help you close it.

If you’re ready to extend coverage beyond outside sales, strengthen digital marketing for building materials, and build a scalable foundation for growth, request a demo to see how BigCommerce can help.