Still Quoting by Phone? You’re Already Losing.

There’s a version of this industry that still runs on fax machines, hand-written delivery tickets, and a sales rep’s memory for who ordered what last time. Executives defend it as “how relationships work in this business.” I’d call it something else: a slow-motion transfer of market share to whichever competitor figured out that a customer shouldn’t have to wait two days to find out what a yard of concrete costs.

Let’s be blunt about what refusing to modernize sales actually costs a bulk materials business, because the industry has gotten very good at not naming it. Nobody puts a line item on the P&L called “revenue lost to a fax machine.” But it’s there, compounding quietly, and the data on how far behind this sector has fallen should be uncomfortable reading for anyone who thinks “we’ve always done it this way” is a strategy rather than an excuse.

The Industry Built Its Own Blind Spot

Start with the scoreboard. Construction sits second-from-bottom on McKinsey’s industry digitization index — only outranked by agriculture and hunting, while historically spending less than one percent of revenue on IT and R&D compared with far higher spending in other capital-intensive sectors. This isn’t a recent stumble. Construction productivity improved a mere 10 percent between 2000 and 2022 — 0.4 percent a year — against a 50 percent gain for the total economy and 90 percent for manufacturing over the same period, and productivity actually declined 8 percent between 2020 and 2022 alone.

That’s two decades of standing still while every adjacent industry compounded gains. And it isn’t for lack of capital sniffing around the opportunity: venture and private equity funds poured roughly $50 billion into construction technology globally between 2020 and 2022 alone, 85 percent more than the three years prior. The money showed up. The adoption didn’t. That gap between capital availability and actual behavior change is the most damning statistic in this entire conversation — it means the barrier was never cost. It was inertia, dressed up as tradition.

Building products and materials specifically get called out by name.  The building products market is one of the most fragmented and least digitized industries in the world, and a great many of its manufacturers, distributors, and dealers still rely on handshakes and fax machines to do business. Read that sentence again. That’s not a description from twenty years ago — that’s current McKinsey analysis of the exact sector this magazine covers.

Speed Isn’t a Nice-to-Have — It’s the Whole Game

A contractor sourcing aggregates or ready-mix for a Monday pour is not going to sit on a quote request for two days while a rep works a call list. If your process depends on a human checking a stockpile, phoning a plant manager, and hand-typing a number, you have already lost the order to whoever can produce that same quote in minutes — probably before your rep has finished dialing.

And don’t mistake this for an argument against relationships. It’s the opposite. A rep buried under manual quote requests has no bandwidth left for the conversations that actually need a human being — the tricky spec, the credit exception, the customer wondering whether a schedule slip changes the order. Digital tools don’t compete with relationship-building. Manual quoting is what’s currently strangling it.

Blind Pricing Is Expensive Pricing

Materials pricing moves constantly — freight costs shift, plant capacity tightens, weather wipes out a pour schedule. A business running on spreadsheets and phone calls finds out about these shifts late, usually after a customer already knows. That lag shows up two ways: margin erosion, because you’re quoting yesterday’s cost structure against today’s inputs, or lost volume, because a digitally equipped competitor caught the shift and repriced before you did.

This is exactly the pattern McKinsey flags across the wider engineering and construction sector: across every industry, digital transformations frequently underdeliver, and in one McKinsey survey just 16 percent of organizations said their digital transformation produced sustainable performance improvement. That statistic gets used by skeptics to justify inaction. I’d read it the opposite way — it means most companies are doing digital transformation badly, which is an argument for doing it properly, not for refusing to do it at all.

No Data Means No Memory

Every phone-and-paper transaction is a data point that simply evaporates. No record of what a customer asked for but didn’t get quoted on. No pattern showing which accounts are quietly drifting toward a competitor. No early signal on demand shifts by region or product line. A digital-first competitor isn’t just quoting faster — it’s building a compounding feedback loop that makes every subsequent quote sharper, faster, and better targeted. An analog operation starts every quarter from zero, guessing at patterns a spreadsheet could have told it months ago.

The Workforce Won’t Wait Either

There’s a demographic reckoning coming too. Construction’s technology gap sits alongside a workforce that skews older and less inclined to adopt new tools, at precisely the moment the people entering procurement and estimating roles expect software that behaves like the consumer apps they use everywhere else — fast, transparent, on their phone. Asking that generation of buyers and sellers to manage supplier relationships through phone tag and paper tickets isn’t just inefficient. It’s a retention problem you haven’t diagnosed yet, and a recruiting disadvantage against every company that has.

What I’m Not Arguing

I’m not arguing that software replaces judgment, or that an algorithm understands a mix design, a site condition, or twenty-five years of a supplier relationship better than the people who built it. Materials businesses run on trust between people who know the material. That expertise isn’t going anywhere, and it shouldn’t. The argument is narrower and sharper than that: stop burning that expertise on manual quote assembly, phone tag, and re-keying numbers that a system should generate in seconds. Let the humans do the parts only humans can do.

The Bet You’re Actually Making

There were, at one point, defensible reasons construction materials lagged the rest of the economy — fragmented markets, thin margins, logistics too locally variable for off-the-shelf software. Fine. Those were real constraints in 2010. They are excuses in 2026, when the tools exist, the capital has already proven it will fund them, and your competitors are the ones using it.

Every quarter a materials business runs its sales process on a fax machine and a good memory, it is making an implicit bet: that speed, real-time pricing visibility, and compounding customer data will not matter to the people writing purchase orders. Based on where the rest of the built environment is headed, that is a bet that gets harder to win every single quarter it’s placed.

References• Agarwal, R., Chandrasekaran, S., Sridhar, M. “Imagining Construction’s Digital Future.” McKinsey & Company, 2016; revisited via handle.com, “Revisiting McKinsey’s ‘Imagining construction’s digital future,’” 2022. https://www.handle.com/construction-digital-future/

• “Improving construction productivity is the new imperative.” McKinsey & Company, 2024. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/delivering-on-construction-productivity-is-no-longer-optional

• “Decoding digital transformation in construction.” McKinsey & Company, 2019. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/decoding-digital-transformation-in-construction

• Bereman, M., Blanco, J.L., Fitzgerald, B., Mattik, I., Sjödin, E. “Building products in the digital age: It’s hard to ‘get smart.’” McKinsey & Company, 2022. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/engineering-construction-and-building-materials/our-insights/building-products-in-the-digital-age-its-hard-to-get-smart