From Student to Sales Manager

Porter Pipe & Supply sales manager talks promotions, building teams and harnessing generational knowledge — all with the help of MDM

When Addison, Illinois-based Porter Pipe & Supply’s Blake Kukla enrolled in ASA’s Master of Distribution Management (MDM) program, he had a straightforward goal: learn how to become a manager.

The timing could hardly have worked out better.

Shortly after graduating from the program, Kukla was promoted from inside sales to inside sales manager at Porter Pipe & Supply. A year and a half into the role, he is now putting those lessons into practice as he navigates moving from being responsible for his own performance to being responsible for the success of an entire team.

“I used to be worried about having a big month,” Kukla says. “Now I’m worried about what I can do to help everyone have a bigger month.”

It is a mindset shift that captures much of what has changed since Kukla entered MDM, and much of what the program helped prepare him to do.

From top performer to team builder

Kukla entered the PHCP-PVF industry eight years ago through Ferguson’s training program. He eventually moved into inside sales, specializing in hydronics and later helped lead the company’s 24/7 water heater program.

After roughly two and a half years with Ferguson, Kukla joined Porter Pipe & Supply, where he has now spent five years. Several years into his time at Porter Pipe, his manager approached him about the future. Retirement was on the horizon, and Kukla was viewed as someone who could eventually step into a leadership role.

“He said, ‘Hey man, I think you’re the next guy,’” Kukla recalls.

That conversation helped lead Kukla to MDM. He entered the program wanting to better understand what it would take to manage people and a business rather than simply excel at sales. Not long after completing MDM, that opportunity became reality.

One of the biggest adjustments, Kukla says, has been redefining what success looks like. The skills that helped him become a high-performing salesperson were valuable, but management required him to think beyond his own numbers.

“I got promoted because I was that top-performing sales guy,” he says. “Now my job is to build up my team to be full of those top performers.”

Building the next generation

During his relatively short tenure as a manager, Kukla has already watched two longtime employees retire, taking decades of experience with them.

It is a familiar challenge throughout wholesale distribution where companies must transfer years of institutional and product knowledge while simultaneously developing the next generation of employees.

Kukla is working to harness the knowledge of experienced employees while effectively building a new sales team from the ground up. It requires hiring and developing people, understanding different working styles, and creating an environment where employees can learn from one another.

One of his biggest leadership lesson so far has been to simply listen to your front-line employees.

Rather than assuming the manager should always dictate the answer, Kukla has learned to lean heavily on the people closest to the customer and the daily work.

The employees on the front line often understand what the business needs before anyone else does, he said. His responsibility is to listen to them, understand their challenges and help remove the obstacles that keep them from succeeding.

Seeing beyond your own department

One of Kukla’s biggest takeaways from the MDM program was the importance of cross-functional communication.

Employees naturally become immersed in their own areas of responsibility. Sales focuses on customers and revenue. Purchasing worries about inventory and suppliers. Accounting focuses on financial performance. IT manages systems and infrastructure. It can be easy to believe your own department is carrying the business, Kukla points out.

“Too many times we get stuck in tunnel vision of what we do, and our job’s the most important job out there,” he says.

MDM challenged that perspective by exposing participants to the many functions required to operate a successful distribution company.

“You get into a program like this where you get to see all sides of it and understand that it really takes every different department, every single team member on a team to do it,” he adds.

This meant learning more about finance, accounting, inventory, purchasing, technology and other parts of the business that had not necessarily been part of his daily responsibilities in inside sales.

“There’s all kinds of things that you don’t think about when you’re just doing your day-to-day,” he says. That broader business knowledge became even more valuable once he moved into management.

Learning by doing

MDM also gave Kukla opportunities to develop leadership skills in an environment where participants could practice before the stakes became higher in their own businesses.

Peer-to-peer sessions required students to lead discussions, run meetings and present ideas. All experiences Kukla said helped build confidence in communicating with groups.

His capstone project also produced tangible value for Porter Pipe.

Kukla focused his project on the use of artificial intelligence in pricing and quoting, exploring how new tools could help improve an important part of the sales process. The work allowed him to take what he was learning through MDM and apply it directly to a real business challenge.

That combination of classroom learning, peer interaction and practical application is one reason Kukla believes the program has value well beyond employees who are immediately in line for a promotion.

“It really opens your eyes to pretty much every part of the supply chain and how we do business,” he says.

For younger employees especially, gaining that perspective early can help them better understand how their role connects to the larger organization.

Today, Kukla is using that understanding from a different seat. Instead of chasing the biggest month himself, Kukla is developing people, transferring knowledge and working to create an entire team capable of producing one.

By Natalie Forster