What happens when your sales strategy calls for growth, but your compensation plan keeps rewarding your team for maintaining the status quo?

Alex Honnold didn’t free solo 3,000 feet of El Capitan by treating every move as equally important. He identified the crux—the handful of moves where success or failure would be decided—and prepared obsessively for them.

Your sales strategy has a crux, too.

For many LBM dealers, that crux may be the compensation plan. When leadership wants proactive prospecting and profitable growth but compensation rewards maintenance, account management, or simply putting in more hours, salespeople naturally focus their energy in the wrong places.

In this episode, Bradley Hartmann uses Honnold’s extraordinary preparation and Richard Rumelt’s strategy concept of “the crux” to show how LBM sales leaders can identify the problem that matters most, reduce the risks surrounding it, and move forward instead of waiting for market conditions to improve.

By listening, you’ll discover:

• How to identify the crux in your sales strategy so your team stops wasting time and resources on problems that aren’t driving meaningful progress.
• Why compensation plans can unintentionally reward maintenance instead of proactive prospecting and how aligning incentives with the right outcomes can support profitable growth.
• How disciplined preparation can reduce the risk of making a major sales change and why maintaining the status quo may carry an even greater long-term risk.

Play the episode to discover how to identify the crux holding back your sales team, align incentives with profitable growth, and confidently start climbing toward better results.

If you’re ready to stop competing on price and start having the right sales conversations that win business, send us a note at [email protected] or visit our website and click on Increase Sales.

In The Craft of LBM Sales, we tackle real-world sales challenges in the lumber and building materials industry, including handling sales objections, improving phone sales, and what to do when you can’t close deals. Learn how to land new business, strengthen your negotiation skills, and build a reliable sales pipeline, even if you currently have no sales process in place. We also explore proven sales techniques, value selling strategies, overcoming sales rejection, hitting your sales goals, and navigating tough conversations around discounting.

New podcasts are dropped every Monday and Wednesday.