Paul Indinger didn’t set out to build a construction sales intelligence platform. He started by paying students in China €3.50 each to research architecture firm project pages. That experiment, born out of a student job for a carpet manufacturer, eventually became Building Radar, a platform now used by companies like Schindler Elevators, Heidelberg Materials, and Bosch to find and win construction projects.

In this episode, Paul explains why construction sales are fundamentally different from any other B2B sector. A standard CRM is built around a single sales cycle. Construction sales has two axes: your progress toward a signed contract and the construction project’s timeline. If there’s no groundbreaking, there are no elevators to sell. Generic sales systems ignore this, which is why so much of the industry still runs on spreadsheets, people’s heads, and inbox folders.

Building Radar’s answer is a platform that sits between early-stage project intelligence and the CRM, and increasingly acts as the CRM itself for around 30% of their customers. The platform ingests project data from across the web, processes inbound leads, reviews specification documents, and is being extended with AI agents that support the full sales workflow. The goal is not to replace salespeople but to eliminate the admin work that crowds out relationship-building.

Paul also makes a broader argument. The way products and services are allocated to construction projects today is inefficient and often defaults to habit rather than merit. His example: a major building products company with the world’s first net-zero cement needs to reach the Google data center developer two years before the concrete is poured, not the contractor who places the order. Better sales intelligence leads to better procurement decisions, which ultimately result in better buildings.

We also discuss the hard lessons from scaling a startup: obsessing over users rather than pitch decks, why adoption fails when AI is added on top of existing workloads instead of integrated into existing tools, and how generative AI is changing internal product development at Building Radar itself.

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn and visit BuildingRadar.com to learn more.

Listen here or watch the interview on YouTube

Listen here and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: