Your contractors are already buying online. Over 80% of builders and contractors now purchase materials digitally at least occasionally, and by 2030 nearly half of all building material purchases are expected to transact through digital channels, according to Simon-Kucher's construction and building materials study. It is tempting to read that as pressure. The more useful way to read it is as permission. The digital shift is the clearest business case you will ever get to modernize your building materials CRM strategy: the data model, the integrations, the day-to-day workflows, and the pile of legacy data you have been meaning to clean up for years.
Here is the reframe worth holding onto. Most suppliers have known for a while that their CRM could be better organized, better connected, and better maintained. What has been missing is not awareness. It is a reason compelling enough to fund the work and rally the team behind it. Digital buying hands you that reason. Every improvement you make to serve an online contractor also makes your reps faster, your data cleaner, and your reporting more honest. This is one initiative that pays off in four directions at once, and this post is about how to point it at the highest-value work.
Treat it as a chance to revisit the data model
The account structure most building materials suppliers carry was built for relationship selling, one territory rep and one book of contractors at a time. That model works, but it tends to produce duplicate records, accounts shaped around the rep instead of the customer, and end buyers hidden behind a layer of dealers and distributors. A digital channel gives you a concrete, funded reason to model your customers the way they actually exist.
The prize here is a clean account hierarchy: one parent company, its branches, and the individual buyers, associated as a structure rather than scattered across duplicates. In HubSpot that is the company-to-company association with parent and child records; in Salesforce it is account hierarchy plus person accounts or well-governed contacts. Get it right once and everyone benefits. A contractor who buys from three of your branches finally shows up as one customer with one history, which is exactly what a self-service portal needs to show consistent pricing, and exactly what a rep needs to have an intelligent conversation. You are not rebuilding the data model to satisfy the website. You are rebuilding it because it was time, and the website is the reason you finally can.
Use it to reconnect the integrations you have been meaning to
Ask most suppliers where a quote lives and the answer is the ERP, or a spreadsheet, or the rep's inbox. Ask where product and pricing data lives and you will hear the PIM and the ERP again. None of that is a crisis. It is simply a stack that grew one system at a time and never got stitched together. Digital buying makes the stitching worth doing, because an online order needs the same quantities, contract pricing, and availability that today live in systems the CRM cannot see.
Start modestly and let the value compound. Getting quote and order data to flow into the CRM, even read-only at first, means your reps and your digital channel work from one version of the truth, and a salesperson can pick up an online order mid-stream instead of starting over. For manufacturers selling through two-step distribution, the same integration is what finally gives you sell-through visibility, not just sell-in. Connecting the PIM so product data is consistent everywhere means your catalog is trustworthy whether a contractor sees it online or hears it from a rep. Each of these is an integration worth having on its own merits. The digital initiative is what gets them prioritized and funded together instead of one reluctant ticket at a time.
Make the day-to-day better for the people already in the CRM
It is easy to frame digital as something that happens to your sales team. In practice, done well, it happens for them. The same unified account and connected quote data that power a contractor portal also give a rep a cleaner cockpit: one screen with the customer's full history, live pricing, and order status, instead of three tabs and a phone call to the branch. Self-service handles the routine reorders and status checks that used to eat a rep's afternoon, which frees that rep for the high-value work that actually differentiates you, the complex bids and the relationship management that no portal will ever replace.
This is also where adoption is won or lost, so it is worth designing for the humans first. Decide what a rep should see the moment they open an account. Decide which fields are required at each stage and which are noise. Decide how an online order hands off to a person when a contractor needs help, because Simon-Kucher's research found that unreliable data and poor service are exactly what send digital buyers back to the phone. Treating the CRM as a daily tool your team wants to use, rather than a database they are compelled to update, is the difference between a digital channel that sticks and one that quietly gets worked around.
Let the initiative pay for a legacy cleanup you would never fund on its own
Nobody approves a budget line called data cleanup. It is unglamorous, it is hard to celebrate, and it always loses to the next revenue project. But a digital initiative needs clean data to work, which means it will happily carry the cleanup along with it. Use that. Deduplicate the contractor records. Retire the accounts that have not transacted in years. Sunset the custom fields nobody fills in, the old lifecycle stages that made sense for a different sales motion, and the marketing assets and lists left over from campaigns that ended two reorgs ago. Reconcile the overlapping records that arrive every time you acquire another branch, a pressure that is only increasing as 555 Capital Advisors' 2026 building material distribution market update notes the sector keeps consolidating.
The reason this matters beyond tidiness is that clean data is where the margin already is. In the same Simon-Kucher research, one large distributor saw gross margins on digital orders run a full 100 basis points higher than traditional ones, because self-service strips cost out of the order and frees reps for higher-value work. That return is available to suppliers whose data can support a clean digital transaction, and out of reach for those whose data cannot. The cleanup is not housekeeping you do alongside the initiative. It is part of what makes the initiative pay.
What a modern building materials CRM strategy looks like when you sequence it well
You do not have to do all of this at once, and you should not try. The common misstep is to start with the storefront, because it is the visible part, and then discover the account data underneath cannot support it. A better sequence starts one layer down and works up, so each phase makes the next one easier.
Begin with the data model, because a contractor cannot be shown one price or one history until they are one account. Then connect the quote and order data, so the rep and the channel share one record and you can see sell-through. Then turn on the reporting and attribution that let you see how contractors actually move between online research and offline orders, so you invest in the channel with evidence instead of guesswork. The cleanup runs alongside all of it, because every phase gives you a natural reason to retire what you no longer need. This is a recommended order, not the only one. A supplier with a clean single ERP might compress these steps, while a distributor sitting on several acquired systems might need a consolidation phase before step one. The principle holds regardless: build the foundation before the front end, and let each layer earn the next.
The encouraging part is that you are not inventing this path alone. Distributors are already walking it. In January 2026, Richards Building Supply expanded its CRM to consolidate estimating, quoting, and ordering into a single connected platform, adding property-intelligence data so contractors can generate accurate quantities and submit bids faster, as Digital Commerce 360's reporting on Richards Building Supply detailed. That is a supplier using the digital moment to modernize the whole workflow, not just bolt a catalog onto an old system. It is a template worth borrowing.
The Monday-morning takeaway
The digital shift in building materials is the best excuse you will get to build the CRM you actually want. Approached as an opportunity, a strong building materials CRM strategy lets you fix the data model, connect the integrations, sharpen the daily workflow, and clear out the legacy clutter, all under one business case that funds itself. Here is a concrete way to start this week: pull a duplicate-account report on your top 50 contractor accounts and count how many real customers are fragmented across multiple records. That single number tells you where the fastest wins are, and it turns an abstract modernization goal into a specific first project. If you want a structured way to scope the full sequence, a focused CRM readiness assessment is a practical next step, and a genuinely good use of the momentum the market is handing you.