CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

t probably doesn’t take a rocket scientist—or even a magazine journalist­—to figure out what happens when a building supply yard doesn’t maintain close contact with its contractor customers. (Spoiler alert: bad things.)

But at a time when traditional marketing methods are becoming less effective or have yet to return to their pre-pandemic appeal, and Millennials/Gen Zers are entering the workforce with different interaction demands, smart retailers are exploring new strategies to stay in touch with their lifeblood accounts.

At the heart of this movement is technology, and thanks to investments in the development of digital tools by innovative distributors like Tennessee-based Orgill, advantage of the technological tools Orgill provides is Alf Curtis Home Improvements Inc., a Castle member with yards in Peterborough, Lindsay, and Belleville, Ont.

He says Alf Curtis has employed all the usual methods in this regard—newsletters, contractor events, site visits by salespeople, etc. However, in each instance, these methods have become either outdated or difficult to pull off in recent years.

The latter two, of course, were virtually wiped out as possibilities during the pandemic, but Perry says he does plan to revitalize these strategies over time.

Inc., retailers seeking to better service their pro accounts have some great new additions for their arsenals.

Among the dealers that has taken

Brent Perry, president of the firm, is quite intimate with traditional means of maintaining contact with his contractor customers.

The newsletter method, meanwhile, has become a bit of an antiquated endeavour, he explains. In the past, Alf Curtis included a newsletter when they sent out month-end statements, or via email, but Perry says contractors “don’t look at it.”

So instead of having those marketing materials ticketed for the circular file, Alf Curtis now prints out its newsletters and pamphlets and simply leaves them on the counter so contractors—when they make a physical visit to the store— can catch up on the news from their favourite yard at that time.

“But if you send them out in the mail, forget it,” Perry says.

A New Breed Of Contractors

To his credit, Perry understands that the younger breed of contractors grew up with cell phones in their hands, so employing technology to develop new touchpoints to interact with them is absolutely vital. This is not your father’s builder supply

Once Orgill released the next evolution to its system—fully integrated e-commerce— Alf Curtis immediately hopped on board. No longer run through E-Volution, this new platform is powered by Unilog, and Perry and his staff deal with them directly. Orgill remains a key player in the relationship, providing a support staff that works with dealers to help keep things running smoothly.

DATA ON 1.2 MILLION SKUS

Orgill’s Unilog e-commerce option “is the Cadillac,” Perry says. It’s fully integrated with his point-of-sale system and pulls all the information directly from the distributor.

“I’ve got data on 1.2 million SKUs,” he says, including all his LBM, drywall, shin- environment anymore. Regardless, Perry’s motivation is rooted in timeless good business sense.

Catering to a younger, more tech savvy customer base, “goes hand in hand with my main focus on what we do and how we offer more services and more ways for our customers to deal with us.” gles, etc. “Everything is on our website.”

As a result, about six years ago, Perry’s yards started using Orgill’s e-commerce platform, which at the time was based on a partnership between the distributor and e-commerce provider E-Volution. However, this system was limited given that it only allowed the Alf Curtis yards to showcase whatever Orgill stocked in its London, Ont., distribution centre.

Yes, Perry’s building centres could have added their own lumber and building materials to the system, but “it was a nightmare for maintenance” given that doing so would involve two different databases.

The beauty of the full integration is that there’s no need to reinput any order information, eliminating one of the biggest challenges—human error from data entry.

“So a customer places an order online, submits the order, it gets dumped directly into our point-of-sale system. We don’t have to hand-key in an item,” Perry explains.

This system is fully live, and at the time of our interview, Perry and his team were beta testing an app which is also fully integrated. They were ironing out some glitches before fully launching it, but the app was already posted on Google Play and the Apple Store.

It’s a boon for pro customers that have an existing account with Alf Curtis Home Improvements as they don’t have to pay for their orders online; they can simply link their web account to their in-house account to charge it to their account when placing orders through the site or app.

Sales Capacity Bandwidth

Perry says having the e-commerce site and the app is like adding more sales capacity bandwidth. “I could have 50 customers, 100 customers accessing and purchasing from us at the same time and I don’t have to add any more salespeople.”

He believes that by employing this technology, he’s essentially added another salesperson to help deal with his customers—one that works 24/7. Through the e-commerce website and app, his customers “can place their entire orders for next week,” he says. “Orgill has now freed up my salespeople on the counter to look after our contractors.”

Perry says that these new tools offer a win-win scenario for Alf Curtis and its pro customer base.

Picture this scenario: Mr. Contractor is at home on a Saturday night, working on an estimate for a customer. He needs material pricing for a deck to finish the quote, but now he won’t have to wait until Monday morning to call in or get an email reply from one of Alf Curtis’s sales staff.

Thanks to the new Alf Curtis website and app, “they can log in on their account and get their own customized, unique pricing that’s assigned to them, do their own estimate.” The system is set up in such a way that if the contractor is logged in, they will see their own unique pricing, specific to what touchpoint a contractor uses to interact with this dealer.

Perry stresses this is not about making more money; instead, he’s simply driven to better serve his customers. “It’s to help their account; viewing the site without logging in will only show them retail pricing.

“The pricing they see there is what they would get if they walked (up to) the counter and bought it,” Perry says. Finally, a seamless, platform-independent experience that is the same across the board regardless of offer better services to my contractors. That’s what I want. You’re not going to get rich off e-commerce, no matter what.”

Still, that doesn’t mean that Alf Curtis won’t be heavily marketing these tools.

“We’re going to spend a good amount of money on promoting this.” Perry is not ruling out homeowners as potential users of this service, but he says it’s really targeted, for now, at contractors. Ultimately, it’s going to be especially valuable “to the pro contractors who are busy going 100 miles per hour. And who’s open at 9 o’clock at night to answer their questions?”

ORGILL’S TECH ROLE

For its part, Orgill really understands that it has a responsibility to help dealers serve its pro customers by any means. Grant were already using texting to interact with their contractor customers. Clearly, that presented an opportunity.

“Our dealers need help bringing some productivity and visibility to that interaction, because if we can make it quicker for a salesperson to close a sale, they can be onto helping another contractor or builder,” Morrow says.

“Anything we can do on the tech side to reduce friction in the sales process is money in the bank.” management (PIM), and mobile and loyalty offerings. Last year, Orgill completed integrating its e-commerce platform with ECI Spruce/RockSolid Max and expects to launch sites this summer that will integrate with Epicor BisTrack.

Further, the company holds semi-annual technology symposiums to keep dealers abreast of all new industry-related technological trends and developments, he says.

Orgill is adamant that dealers must have digital as part of their tool belts. “We believe that it’s vital that pro yards and pro dealers utilize technology to compete,” Morrow stresses.

Levelling The Playing Field

Morrow, Orgill’s director of e-commerce, says that a few years back the company surveyed its dealers and discovered that many

The distributor is not resting on its laurels, Morrow says, continuing to develop new e-commerce, product information

With big box stores all sporting programs and robust systems to lure pro contractor and builder sales, smaller retailers need to level the playing field, Morrow told Hardlines. After all, he suggests, even in a relationship-based business, if a retailer makes it difficult for contractors to do business with them seamlessly, the lack of service/relationship with big box stores won’t be enough to dissuade your customers from doing business there.

“Everyone will argue that the pro won’t have the same kind of relationship with a big box, but if a building supply dealer believes it’s a hassle or time consuming to conduct regular transactions with pros, then the pros will go elsewhere,” he predicts.

From the perspective of ever-dreaded paperwork, dealers can enjoy another benefit with these tools in the form of time saved.

Morrow says dealers can set up their system to close sales with a combination of the online site and approval through a mobile site/e-signature to eliminate much of the paperwork back and forth that’s usually inherent in the sales process.

This could open up an even bigger opportunity for dealers to get closer to their contractor customers.

“Use that time to move the relationship to more of a consultative approach to deepen customers are going to buy more from them, which makes them more successful. They get it.”

So that’s exactly why Orgill is investing money and time into developing these tools, Perry says.

While Orgill is a hardware-only distributor, Perry says his yards deal with all the major distributors on the LBM side. That includes Taiga Building Products Ltd., which offers Taiga Now, a digital quoting/ordering system for dealers that is employed by Alf Curtis’s full-time commodities purchaser.

Morrow says that Orgill’s PIM platform includes product data for “nearly everything a dealer sells, not just items from Orgill.” In fact, he says, its Industry PIM system includes 36,000 non-branded wood products and they can help dealers map those to point-of-sale SKUs to ensure pricing is current on their websites.

For dealers that still think of Nintendo or pocket calculators as cutting-edge technology, let’s close the loop on our previous spoiler alert about bad things happening.

“Pro yards have historically been slow to the interaction,” he advises. “That will allow dealers to get into further lines of business with their contractors and builders, rather than just being focused on completing the administrative steps.”

Given that when creating an e-commerce site or application, there are many features you’ll want to include (such as job pricing, quoting, the outside sales process, etc.) and factors to consider (business perception), “it’s very expensive to figure out all on your own,” Morrow advises.

That’s where Orgill comes into play, he explains. They can help with all the changes and integrations necessary to make this work for you.

An Appreciative Dealer

Perry is appreciative of the distributor’s big-picture thinking. “Orgill does it right,” he says. “They know how to treat their customers and by doing that they understand the two-way relationship where, if they help their customers become successful, their adopt new technology, sure, but avoiding e-commerce in particular may be risky because we’re talking about customer interaction and expectations, which gives a competing yard or big box a chance to take business away,” warns Morrow.

Thankfully, he adds, the last three years have witnessed a dramatic uptick in dealer interest in e-commerce—one of those serendipitous benefits of that pesky pandemic— however, it’s not an easy thing to tackle. After all, just because you’re great at retailing does not make you an Internet whiz.

As for the Alf Curtis yards, Perry believes his business is unique among the Castle network in going down this path.

“I think we are the only one, the groundbreaker.”

However, given the success Alf Curtis Home Improvements has enjoyed with these initiatives, it’s clear that you can expect this to spread to other dealers in the very near future.

Oh, and that extra “salesperson” the dealer has essentially added? Well, to date, they have yet to try to submit an expense claim for a round of golf with potential customers.