“Win the Pro.” It was a phrase repeated often by executives of The Home Depot Inc. earlier this month as they outlined their strategy to Wall Street analysts.

And they weren’t just talking about getting more business from the local tradespeople who have long purchased at the stores of Home Depot and home improvement retail competitor Lowe’s Inc. Home Depot wants more business from big businesses, including from home builders and contractors who are core customers of many regional and national distributors.

President and CEO Edward Decker told analysts that those large companies now use Home Depot mainly “for fill-in or emergency purchases.” But he said Home Depot is aiming to get more of their business by offering the kinds of services provided by traditional distributors and leveraging its national reach.

“Our value proposition for these larger Pros is unique,” Decker said. “As they consolidate more of their spend with Home Depot, we can make their life simpler and ultimately speed up the cycle time of their jobs. Pros get more jobs done at a lower cost.”

The moves Home Depot is making to woo large companies are significant, but it’s too soon to say that the retailer will win a lot of their business, says Lori McDonald, president and CEO of Brilliance Business Solutions, a digital commerce consultancy that works with manufacturers and distributors, and owner of specialty food manufacturer  Norsland Lefse.

“Home Deposit is clearly becoming more capable of serving larger contractors,” McDonald tells Distribution Strategy Group. “Whether that translates into being a truly significant distributor to larger contractors depends on their execution and earning their customer trust.”

Meanwhile, she says, “Traditional distributors can still win where local execution and specialization matter.  The key is understanding your customer pain points and solving them better than anyone else.”

Home Depot builds on distribution acquisitions

Home Depot executives told analysts that “pros”—businesses large and small—now account for half of the company’s revenue, with the rest coming from consumers making purchases for home improvement projects and routine repairs and maintenance.

The B2B side of Home Depot’s business has been beefed up by two big acquisitions of distribution companies in the past two years. In 2024, Home Depot spent $18.25 billion to acquire SRS Distribution, a distributor of roofing, pool supply and landscaping products with 750 branches in 47 states. The retailer backed that up with its $5.5 billion purchase of GMS Inc., a distributor of specialty building products, a deal that closed this fall.

SRS and GMS add to Home Depot’s distribution portfolio, which already included HD Supply, a distributor of MRO [maintenance, repair and operations] products that Home Depot acquired in 2020 for $8 billion.

Dan Tinker, president & CEO of the SRS business unit at Home Depot, told analysts that customers who previously bought from one of those Home depot subsidiaries are starting to buy from the others.

“These customers had previously only been buying from HD, SRS or GMS separately,” Tinker said. “They’re now choosing to bundle all three platforms, concentrate their spend and become enterprise-wide accounts.”

He added that Home Depot is getting a boost from the dozens of private equity firms that have begun buying up small distributors and now seek suppliers that can service all their businesses. With its more than 2,350 stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, as well as the reach of its large distribution subsidiaries, Tinker said Home Depot is an attractive option.

“We win in that environment because they may have been just buying, they bought three companies, one in Dallas, one in Florida and one in Charlotte, and they all bought from three different distributors,” he said. “And now that they’re all owned by one private equity, they’re saying, now I need a supplier that is in all three markets, so I can lever that spend.”

A 6-point plan to win more B2B business

But Home Depot executives made clear they know the company must do more to win the business of large customers. “There are six capabilities that are expected in wholesale distribution that we have not typically offered,” said Michael Rowe, Home Depot’s executive vice president for the Pro business, who outlined plans to fill those gaps.

A big one is offering more trade credit so that builders, contractors and other businesses placing orders for large projects can pay over time and after products are delivered, standard practice in building materials distribution. For a builder buying windows or doors, Rowe said, buying with a credit card, as many must do now if they don’t have credit with Home Depot, means paying well in advance of receiving the products.

“Windows and doors can take 6, 8, 10, 12 weeks in order to arrive,” he said. “And so, therefore, they were paying us long before the product arrived to them.” With trade credit from Home Depot, they will have 30 days to pay after the products arrive, he said.

Rowe said some 7,000 companies now have credit with Home Depot, a number that he said should grow to “tens of thousands” by the end of 2026. But that’s still a small fraction of the 9 million pro customers Home Depot says it has.

One current limitation is that business customers can’t apply trade credit to online purchases, instead having to contact sales reps to tap into credit lines. Rowe said Home Depot will make credit available for online purchases in 2026.

That’s a smart move, McDonald says.

“The intended outcome is to shift routine purchasing behavior online—fewer phone calls, faster reorders, and more consolidated spend—especially for larger, multi-site contractors,” she says. “Whether that becomes a true differentiator will depend on how well those credit tools integrate into real contractor workflows beyond checkout.”

Bulk deliveries to more job sites

Another service Home Depot is enhancing is its ability to deliver bulk orders and heavy equipment directly to job sites. The company began addressing this need in 2019 when it opened the first of what it calls “flatbed distribution centers” or FDCs, warehouses that can store and load the kind of products and machinery that frequently must be transported on flatbed trailers.

Rowe said Home Depot now has 17 FDCs around the country and is expanding their reach beyond their core markets with a system called Relay that, for example, allows an Atlanta warehouse to deliver flatbed loads to nearby cities.

“Delivery drivers from our Atlanta FDCs are now able to drop off flatbed trailers overnight in certain local store parking lots, which are then delivered to the job site the following morning,” Rowe said. “This allows us to get greater coverage in our Atlanta market, while also extending our reach into adjacent markets like Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

More sales reps for business customers

In addition to the trade credit and delivery initiatives, Rowe outlined four other ways Home Depot aims to better serve business customers:

• More sales reps: Rowe said Home Depot had 300 reps dedicated to business customers when it stepped up its focus on the Pro segment in 2022. “Today, we have over 1,500 across the country and are continuing to build out our teams,” he said.
• Improved order management: That includes the ability to reserve inventory for business customers and to modify delivery times, for example, when there are delays on a construction project.
• Better pricing: Rowe said Home Depot will offer “preferred pricing programs that are more transparent and curated for Pros’ specific needs to simplify the value proposition for our customers.”
• Improved online services: Home Depot aims to provide “a best-in-class digital and B2B experience that provides tools for complex project planning, advance order tracking online and seamless integration of trade credit online and more,” Rowe told analysts.

Rowe also said that in 2026 Home Depot will be upgrading its mobile app, which is largely used by business customers. In another effort to leverage advanced technology, Home Depot last month announced its AI Blueprint Takeoff Tool, “which can take a PDF set of blueprints and turn it into a quote for materials,” said Jordan Broggi, executive vice president of customer experience and president-online. “We’re also building a simpler version into our website that will have a cycle time of just minutes or seconds.”

How can distributors compete?

That’s an impressive list of initiatives, and shows how a company like Home Depot, which projects sales for this fiscal year of more than $160 billion, can invest in a combination of technology, facilities and acquisitions that has the potential to make it formidable competitor to distributors.

But even distributors that can’t match the reach or resources of a company like Home Depot can still win by staying close to their customers and making it easy for them to get the products and services they need, McDonald says.

“The strongest competitors will be the ones who consistently test assumptions with customers and let real buying behavior—not internal opinions—drive their investments,” she says. “That insight should guide where they invest, both operationally and digitally, rather than trying to match national players on scale alone.”