Connecting and Selling to the Next-Generation Customer in the Skilled Trades

There’s a massive demographic shift in construction and industrial markets centered on skilled trades professionals. In industrial B2B, up to 50 percent of skilled tradespeople will retire in the next five to ten years. This shift will obsolesce many traditional buying practices while accelerating new buying preferences and technologies. A shift of buyers into social marketplaces will have profound implications for distributors and will create winners and losers.

Over the last year, I’ve been spending a lot of time working with this new generation of skilled tradespeople. The Trade Hounds app, a division of SPARXiQ, has over 350,000 skilled-trades users. They work across a broad diversity of employer types and industries and directly or indirectly spend over $17 billion per year on materials and tools to do their jobs. About 70 percent of them are under the age of 35 (and 40 percent under the age of 28); depending on vertical market, 20 percent or more of them speak Spanish. Working in construction and factories, they are Digital Natives, with strong preferences for all things digital.

They are part of a large, aspirational movement in America towards embracing a new era of pride in the skilled trades as a great career. Many have experienced the broader societal disillusionment with universities, which many believe are student-debt generators offering dubious access to good jobs. They are proud to be acquiring valuable skills, generating good incomes, and attaining independence in an economy with much uncertainty and anxiety. Happily, this culture also has a powerful sub-current of patriotism, entrepreneurship and the Immigrant Dream, with visible pride in becoming contributors to America’s success. It’s a truly connected community bringing much good to our country.

The Digital-Native buyer generation is highly active in social media, with the preferred platforms being Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and, in the skilled trades, Trade Hounds. They have digital lives where they talk shop, post videos and photos of their work lives, help each other troubleshoot, and share business tips. They search for product information and connect with suppliers.

They are voracious learners, looking for digital resources that help them succeed. They prefer bite-sized, just-in-time, video-first content over heavy, structured, text-based curricular content. In common with their general demographic cohort, they are distrustful of corporate-speak and seek and embrace authentic peer exchanges. 

And of course they buy, directly and indirectly, billions of dollars of product to do their jobs. For distributors, the key implication is that their sales will increasingly be determined by how effectively they navigate critical shifts in buyer preferences. Within 5 to 10 years, up to half of a distributor’s sales may originate with Digital Natives. Distributors will win or lose in the marketplace depending on how they embrace this demographic shift.

Surveys of Trade Hounds users about their satisfaction with distributors show that many distributors are still selling the way they did 20 or more years ago. They report low levels of satisfaction from their distributors who haven’t embraced new trading paradigms.

Regarding buyer preferences, Trade Hounds users report the following:

• They prefer to buy digitally, but they don’t want to have 5 different distributor passwords or navigate 5 different e-commerce site experiences to order from their distributors. This is a major reason why most distributor e-commerce sites remain mired in single-digit revenue percentages.

• In many trades, they are heavy patrons of Home Depot and Lowe’s, which provide a strong omnichannel experience of convenient store locations and digital buying tools.

• They don’t want to sit on hold or call distributors to get the materials and tools they need to do their jobs.

• They search and buy socially, gathering peer ratings and insights about products and suppliers.

• They disregard traditional advertising, viewing it as biased and inauthentic. They distrust corporate-produced content, preferring User-Generated Content (UGC) from their peers.

• In many cases, they look to domain-specific influencers to evaluate products and suppliers. Most of these trades influencers — several of whom have 500,000 or more followers — are under the age of 30. Many have sophisticated production teams that prodigiously generate social content that drives awareness and preference with their followers.

• They form relationships with sellers organically via social connections. They generally aren’t on LinkedIn, which they view as corporate and inauthentic.

Distributors who want to out-compete in the markets of the future should consider making several important pivots:

Sell Socially: Sellers should connect socially to their customers and prospects, to lead with relationships and value-add before selling products. Specialist platforms like Trade Hounds lean into the specific ecosystem of industrial B2B, with its manufacturers, rep agents, distributors, and contractors. Instagram and TikTok are also viable, but they are harder to navigate for distributors due to their generalist nature and the algorithms that drive their content feeds. It’s hard for trade-focused content to stand out in a generalist content marketplace heavy with cat videos, toddlers dancing, and endless music videos and memes. Hire for social-selling competency and train your sellers how to sell socially.

Build Your Company’s Social Presence: Hire a social media manager and incorporate social into your marketing and sales strategies and plans.

Embrace UGC: Content is still king, but content that drives purchasing needs to be authentic. Your people and your customers can provide crowd-sourced, authentic content that builds genuine value for the community.

Meet Your Customers Wherever They Are: Integrate your catalog, inventory and e-commerce platforms with social marketplaces. Make marketplaces a core part of your go-to-market. Embrace the access and efficiencies of the social marketplace to build stronger, more profitable customer relationships. Make sure the marketplaces you embrace are based on value creation, not price-based competition.

Distributors have always had to adapt to changes in technology, buyer preferences, and new cultural norms. Alongside AI, today’s demographic wave and associated cultural movement provide an opening for forward-thinking distributors to connect meaningfully with, and sell to, the new generation of buyers while unlocking the broader benefits of digital commerce.

https://www.naw.org/connecting-and-selling-to-the-next-generation-customer-in-the-skilled-trades/