Home Depot’s HVAC deal and the blurring line between B2B and B2C
The episode opened with news that SRS Distribution, the specialty trade distributor Home Depot acquired in 2024, had completed its purchase of Mingledorff’s, a wholesale HVAC distributor with 42 locations across the southeastern United States. Andy framed it as a B2B story first and foremost. Home Depot has said HVAC distribution represents a roughly $100 billion market and that the deal lifts its total addressable market to about $1.2 trillion. Buy a company, add a vertical, expand the addressable market: Andy’s point was that this explains the steady run of Home Depot acquisitions aimed at professional contractors rather than retail shoppers.
Brian connected it to a broader pattern of B2B and B2C converging. Retailers are adding wholesale arms, consumer brands are opening B2B channels, and B2B companies are going direct to buyers. The reason it holds together, he argued, is that the buyer is the same person with the same expectations on either side. The guest reinforced the point from the inside, since his business sells both direct to consumers and to other businesses.
A trillion dollars of software, and half the licenses unused
The main topic was getting more from technology you have already bought. Brian set it up with two numbers. Gartner projects more than $1 trillion in worldwide software spending this year, spanning ERPs, ecommerce platforms, PIMs, DAMs, CRMs, and AI systems. Against that, a widely cited industry figure holds that more than half of SaaS licenses at large enterprises, often cited as around 53%, sit unused or underutilized, with the resulting waste estimated in the tens of millions of dollars per large organization each year. Andy noted the short-term incentive problem: a vendor books the revenue when the contract is signed, and whether the customer ever uses the product is a separate question that tends to surface only later, often at renewal.
Step one: find out what you already own
Dale Edman, VP of eCommerce and Shopper Marketing at Lipton Teas and Infusions, the maker of Lipton, Tazo, Pukka, and PG Tips that spun out of Unilever about four years ago, joined to talk through how he approaches this. His first step is simple to say and hard to do: know what you have.
The first key is you have just got to figure out what you have.
Dale Edman, Lipton Teas and Infusions
At a company his size, a strong procurement partner who tracks contracts and renewal dates across regions makes that possible. In larger organizations with decentralized purchasing, he said, no single person holds the full picture, so the work becomes networking across peers to learn what tools exist, who uses them, and why. Brian and Andy pushed on whether IT or procurement should own this. Dale’s view was that procurement and IT know the contracts and renewal timing, but they are not the day-to-day users, so the individual business owners share responsibility for knowing what is used and what is not.
The handoff between buyers and procurement
Brian named the structural weak point: the handoff. A team evaluates a tool, hands it to procurement to negotiate, and may not see exactly what gets signed, since contracts often specify seat tiers rather than precise usage. The team then operationalizes the tool its own way, and at renewal it goes back to procurement, who do not necessarily know how it was used. Dale’s countermeasure is to start the renewal conversation early, 60 to 120 days out, and reconcile real needs: trimming licenses the company bought but does not use, and expanding only where there is demand.
When tools overlap: the two-PIM problem
Dale told a story from a previous role about product information management. The enterprise PIM held the full catalog, hundreds of thousands of products with all the required data. But the ecommerce and marketing team needed to tailor content, different bullet points, descriptions, and keywords, for Amazon, Walmart, Target, and other partners, on the fly and without IT involvement. So they brought in Salsify, positioned as the marketer’s PIM. The result was two overlapping systems, the enterprise PIM and the marketer’s PIM, each maintained separately.
Eventually someone pushes for consolidation, whether IT tired of managing several platforms or finance looking at the combined bill. In that case the team rolled its requirements into a more enterprise PIM, going with inRiver, and lost some functionality in the move. Brian drew out the lesson: fully leveraging your investments usually means some parts of the business have to compromise. Dale agreed, with a caution that you have to keep enough of your requirements, or you end up back in spreadsheets and have gained nothing.
Use the renewal cycle as a checkpoint
Dale’s recurring discipline is to make the vendor re-pitch at each renewal. Have them walk through what they have launched and what is new, partly because vendors often want to charge for those additions, but also to understand where the product is now versus when it was first signed. Master B2B put the underlying question to its own audience: are you fully or mostly using the technology you have purchased? The result was a 60/40 split, with 60% saying they do not fully use it, in line with the research.
Why this gets harder: AI-accelerated feature velocity
Andy raised the part that makes the problem worse going forward. Software providers tell him AI lets them ship features far faster, compressing what used to take a year into a quarter. If a one-year contract now delivers several times the features it once did, someone has to keep track of all of it. Dale said he is already seeing partners ship more, faster, which raises a harder question than whether a feature looks impressive.
I was ready to sign, to pay, to rethink my budget. And then I thought, wait a minute, can I action the insights this is going to bring me?
Dale Edman, Lipton Teas and Infusions
The real question before you buy: can you act on it?
Dale’s discipline is to ask whether his team, and the wider organization, can act on what a new tool would deliver before committing budget to it. It is easy to get excited about the tool that promises to solve every problem, but the test is whether you can do what you want with it once it is in place. Andy closed with a metaphor for the pace of change.
It would be like going to a restaurant, ordering a burger, and they come out with seven dishes. I would love to eat all of it, but I cannot eat it all right now.
Andy Hoar, Master B2B
His point was that the pace of new capability keeps increasing, and something has to give. Either companies get faster at absorbing it, or vendors find ways to make it more digestible. Until then, the discipline of knowing what you own, reconciling it at renewal, and buying only what you can act on is how teams get value from the software they already pay for.