Why contractors should hire builders who can sell

Matt Verderamo is a consultant at Well Built Construction Consulting, a Baltimore-based firm that delivers strategic consulting, facilitation services and peer roundtables for construction executives. Opinions are the author’s own.

Hiring a business development manager is a massive decision for most construction companies. It is a straight overhead role and the return on investment can be difficult to justify.

Plus, many business owners ask themselves: Shouldn’t my estimating staff do the BD anyway?

But a good business development manager can be a game changer for an organization. With the right tools, skills and tenacity, they can support a healthy pipeline and give you substantially more confidence in your ability to close work.

So, what should you consider when hiring a BD Manager? Here are a few thoughts.

Why builders outperform sellers in BD

I am probably heavily biased in this opinion, but if I were considering hiring a business development resource inside my construction business, I would lean heavily towards hiring a construction professional who needs to learn how to sell versus hiring a salesperson that needs to learn construction.

The buyers in this industry — whether you are a general contractor or sub — almost always expect to deal with someone who they find credible.

It’s possible to find a salesperson without construction experience who your prospective clients will trust, but it is much more difficult. Learning everything you need to know to speak with authority in construction is a tall order.

• Builders bridge the trust gap fast. A superintendent-turned-BD manager who can sketch a phasing plan on the whiteboard, talk MEP coordination or explain how they’ll protect operations during a live renovation establishes authority in minutes. That accelerates movement to scope, budget and schedule — where deals are won.
• Builders qualify better. Builders understand what makes projects risky: bad logistics plans, no path to negotiate, impossible phasing or “free con” — as opposed to pre-con — forever. They walk away from pursuits that aren’t a good fit — and redeploy energy to better opportunities.
• Builders make clean hand offs. Because they think like builders, they bring operations in early, reality-check assumptions and set projects up to earn back points through buyout and execution. Your promise in the sales meeting survives through to operations.

When a sales-first hire still makes sense

There are exceptions. I’ve seen companies hire a sharp salesperson and teach them construction. It can work.

A gifted seller can open doors, organize a pursuit and keep momentum when a team is stretched thin. It works especially well when you have a highly technical team who can be there along the way to support the sales effort.

There are situations where a classically trained seller shines:

• Highly programmatic work with clear playbooks (e.g., multi-site refreshes) where access and cadence matter more than deep technical nuance.
•  Long enterprise pursuits across multiple stakeholders where orchestration, storytelling and patience are the main game.
• Thin top-of-funnel where you simply don’t have enough first meetings to justify a builder’s time in BD.

Even in these cases, it still helps to pair that person with a technical lead early and create a two-in-the-box motion: The seller opens doors and manages cadence; the builder leads the technical discovery and shapes scope.

Considerations for hiring

If you are hiring a BD manager, make the role expectation explicit. The hire must own the sales process and ensure the rest of the company supports them in stacking a healthy pipeline and ultimately closing deals. They should be a leader, managing and holding regular meetings with estimating, preconstruction and operations staff.

When interviewing, I suggest asking the candidate specific questions. For example:

• “Walk me through how you would phase a live-environment tenant improvement on three floors while keeping operations running.”
• “Tell me about a time you recovered margin after award. What changed? What did you do?”
• “In a first meeting with an owner’s rep, what are your five discovery questions?”

You can also add a practical exercise. Give them a short request for proposals excerpt and 15 minutes to outline a pre-con approach and a meeting agenda. You’ll see how they think, speak and sequence decisions.

Then be sure to look out for red flags, such as overuse of sales jargon, willingness to promise “unlimited budgeting” with no path to award or no opinions on margin discipline.

Bottom line

In construction, credibility is the shortest path to trust, and trust is the shortest path to award at defendable margins. You can teach a builder the sales basics faster than you can teach a pure seller to think like a builder.

Hire builders who can sell, equip them with a simple sales system and hold the cadence. You’ll earn more meetings, more credibility and more wins you actually want to build.