Notes for owners · Channel and customer growth
How to advertise to contractors
A contractor is on site, on a phone, with one hand free. Work out first whether your product is chosen by him or by the person paying him, because that decides everything.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 8 min read
Before you spend anything on contractors, settle one question: is your product chosen by the contractor or by the person paying him? Cement, wire, pipe, adhesive, binding wire and shuttering are chosen at the counter by the contractor. Tiles, sanitaryware, paint shade, kitchen fittings and the front door are chosen by the owner, with the contractor giving an opinion. The first group is worth advertising to a contractor. The second is not, and most of the money wasted in this trade is spent ignoring the difference.
Where a contractor is, and when
On site, standing up, on a phone with a cracked screen, from seven in the morning. Not at a desk, not on email, and not reading anything longer than a screen.
The reachable moments are specific. Early morning at the hardware and steel market, when material is being loaded and the day is being planned. Late morning at the dealer counter, waiting for a bill. Lunch, sitting down, when the phone comes out properly. Nine at night, at home, when YouTube gets watched in Hindi or Kannada and the WhatsApp groups get read.
Afternoon calls fail. The site is loud, the caller is unknown, and the phone is in a pocket under a shirt. A missed call from you at two o'clock will not be returned.
The counter is your main medium
A contractor buys from the shop that gives credit, keeps stock and is nearest to the site, in roughly that order. A thirty or forty-five day credit line decides more sales in building material than any campaign.
Which means the dealer counter is media. The board over the shop, the rate card on the wall, the display piece the contractor can pick up and bend, the sample box, the shop's own WhatsApp broadcast to its contractor customers. All of it is bought from the dealer rather than from a media owner, and all of it is cheaper than a hoarding.
Then the mistri and the foreman. The person applying the product tells the contractor what works, and the brand that trained him has already won. A waterproofing brand that spent a Sunday teaching twelve masons how to mix its product correctly has bought a year of recommendations for the cost of lunch and a sample drum.
Buy at the stage, not at the season
A site consumes different material at different stages, and an advertisement that arrives at the wrong stage is simply early or late.
| Stage on site | What is being bought | When the brand decision happens |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation and structure | Cement, steel, binding wire, shuttering | Before the first slab, and then repeated for the whole build |
| After the slab | Blocks, sand, plaster, chemicals | Contractor decides at the counter |
| Concealed work | Wire, conduit, pipe, fittings | Contractor or electrician decides, owner rarely asks |
| Finishing | Tiles, sanitaryware, paint, adhesive | Owner chooses the look, contractor chooses the adhesive under it |
| Handover | Door fittings, locks, waterproofing touch-ups | Split, and usually rushed |
A tile brand advertising to a contractor at foundation stage is eight months early. An adhesive brand that is not in front of him the week the tiles arrive has lost that site entirely.
Five things to stop paying for
Enquiry forms. A contractor will not fill one in, and will not wait for a callback.
Email, in any form. The address on the visiting card belongs to the office, and the office opens it once a week.
Long PDF catalogues. If it does not open in WhatsApp in four seconds and read clearly on a six-inch screen, it was not seen.
LinkedIn, except for the largest turnkey and infrastructure firms where a project manager genuinely uses it.
Price-led messaging with no margin story. The contractor is quoting the owner a rate for a finished item. What he wants to know is what he pays, what he can bill, and whether the material will fail and cost him a rework.
A worked example
For example, imagine a firm making tile adhesive and waterproofing chemicals, selling across Bengaluru through around sixty hardware dealers. Average sale to a site is roughly ₹18,000, and the figures here are illustrative.
Six months of Meta advertising aimed at people interested in construction produced enquiries from homeowners the firm could not serve and from job seekers. The same budget spent on counter displays in thirty shops, four mason demonstrations a month, a WhatsApp catalogue the dealer forwards, and a points scheme on the bag reaches the person who actually names the brand at the counter.
Note what changed. Not the channel from offline to online, but the target from the person who pays to the person who decides.
Tracking it, which is the part everybody skips
Put a different phone number on the counter board than on the van. Give each dealer a code for the scheme. Ask every incoming call which shop or which site they are calling from, and write it down. Three months of that register will tell you which thirty of your sixty dealers are producing everything, and that answer is worth more than any platform report.
What to do next
Go through a hundred recent sales and mark each one: chosen at the counter, or chosen by the person paying the bill. If most are the first, your money belongs at the counter and in demonstrations. If most are the second, you are running a consumer campaign and should stop calling it trade marketing.
We do that split on real enquiry records during the free audit, and it usually changes where the next quarter's budget goes.