Dean Curtis - Sales presentations that hit the next level - PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of an live interview with Dean Curtis from Ingage. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast. 

Megan Ellsworth:
Welcome to Roofing Road Trips with Heidi. Explore the roofing industry through the eyes of a long-term professional within the trade. Listen for insights, interviews, and exciting news in the roofing industry today.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Hello and welcome to another Roofing Road Trips from RoofersCoffeeShop. This is Heidi Ellsworth, and I am here today virtually road tripping to meet with one of the, I want to say rising stars, bright stars in roofing. Probably has been around a lot longer, but you know roofing, we always kind of get things a little bit later. But I'm here with Dean Curtis, the CEO of Ingage. Dean, welcome to the show.

Dean Curtis:
Thanks so much for having us. We appreciate it. I've never been called a rising star, but I'm thrilled to now add that to my list. We have definitely come into this a little bit late to the game in terms of the history of the industry, but it's been a great ride in this roofing world.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I have to tell you that roofing unfortunately and we're trying to change that. We've done a lot with roofing technology Think Tank and RoofersCoffeeShop and really trying to spotlight these amazing technologies like yours that a lot of times roofing contractors just haven't known about, and now they do so. Yeah, the rest of the world does. We always kind of like it's all bright and shine new to us so.

Dean Curtis:
I've been in technology for a long time and I've always been on the forefront of mobile technology and we've, it seems like every time you step into a different vertical market, everyone's ready for it. They just didn't know they were ready for it, right?

Heidi Ellsworth:
Exactly. Yeah.

Dean Curtis:
There's always an education process in anything and it's nice to have the opportunity to share this with the world.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah, I'm really excited. I'm really excited to talk about this and share this out there. So for all of you who are kind of wondering like, "What are you guys talking about? We don't even know what's going on here yet." Dean, why don't you start out if you don't mind, introduce yourself again and just tell us a little bit about you and also about Ingage.

Dean Curtis:
Yeah, absolutely. So Ingage as a company has been around since 2008 and I'll give you a little bit of history of the company to how we got to where we are. As you mentioned, I'm the CEO of the company. I'll be here five years at the end of this month. It's kind of crazy. And we're a very different company than we were when I do joined five years ago. I spent most of my career as I mentioned in technology. And it's relevant because I actually was a high school and middle school math teacher before I started in technology.

Dean Curtis:
And I got into technology as a technical salesperson and really what I was doing in teaching middle schoolers algebra, I was doing the same thing for tech companies teaching people how to implement the ins and outs of technology. And when I joined the company, I previously spent eight years at Apple before coming to Ingage. And I was really focused on bringing iPhone and iPad to enterprise. And I was introduced to the company through the partnerships that we had at Apple. And I was just intrigued by this idea of democratizing the creation of great presentations and making sure your team had access to them.

Dean Curtis:
So at Ingage, that's what we do. We have a platform that helps people create amazing powerful presentations, gives them a platform to easily share them with their team. That team could be the sales team. It could be we work with some product manufacturers who create content and share them with contractors and then measure whether or not people are actually doing anything with them. A lot of people invest in sales content, but they never really know what someone did with that.

Dean Curtis:
Hey, I went into the home to present a roofing job and the latest products and what we do and our company story. I don't know if Jim did it well. I don't know if Sally did it well. So we want to give people that the analytics that are really helpful to know, not just in a big brother sense of, "Hey, are they presenting," but what makes sales rep one better than sales rep two. Are they spending a certain amount of time in a certain part of the presentation that is really helping them to close business? Do they ever get to financing? Do they ever talk about insurance? Like all those different things that are part of the sales process. Now it gives people insight into what people are doing in the home.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Wen I first learned about this, I actually learned about Ingage before we met from Owens Corning. And they are just a huge proponent of this and talked about it. And it's just such a great way to look at it. Having been in sales, I can relate exactly. I want to know what works and what doesn't. And being a sales manager, I want to know who has that magic and who kind of understands how to work the presentations in the right way because people can totally snooze if you don't do it the right way.

Heidi Ellsworth:
And so maybe let's just talk a little bit more about that cloud-based presentation, how exactly it works. I'm a salesperson and you got my owner and my sales manager and stuff. How do they incorporate this into their everyday business?

Dean Curtis:
Yeah. So imagine today's world for a lot of people is someone in sales or someone in marketing says sends an email out or a notification to the sales team. The latest version of the presentation is now available on the shared drive, Box, SharePoint, whatever it happens to be for your company, Dropbox. Make sure you get it. And the people in the field are like, "All right, now I have work to do." What we do in our platform, you open your iPad in the morning and you're getting ready for your appointments. The latest presentation is there. So we want to make sure that everyone has the latest content on their device.

Dean Curtis:
So when I walk into someone's home, I don't have to worry if, so for example, what if a style is and this is happening quite a bit today. A certain style is out of stock or unavailable for 10 weeks, but I know that this other style is, and the presentation was updated to reflect that. We'll make sure that all the sales team has the latest content, no matter where they are when they go into the home. So people are primarily using our platform on iPad in the home, but we support Windows as well. And content can come and be assigned based on who that person is in the field.

Dean Curtis:
Maybe there's certain people on the sales team that only pitch insurance jobs. You could have a series of presentations that are sent to them that are just on that. And then some are just doing windows in addition to the roofs. Whatever it is, we can segment all that content so people have exactly what they need on their devices when they hit the home.

Heidi Ellsworth:
You know, Dean, I've been sales and marketing my whole career. And as a marketing person, we would create these beautiful presentations. We're just so proud of ourselves and then they got totally changed or they weren't used or whatever, just exactly what you're kind of saying. And so I'd love for you to go in a little bit deeper about that instantly updated every morning when they go on there. I mean, for the marketing and the ownership to be able to do it one time and for the salespeople to get it and not have to worry about it. That's incredible.

Dean Curtis:
Yeah. I mean, we hire our sales team to sell. We have a sales team too. We hire our sales team to be amazing at selling. I don't hire salespeople to create sales content. That's why I hire marketing people. I think those people should communicate and let them know what works and all that, fine. But there's this ever-important balance between sales and marketing alignment that we feel like we help with because the sales team gets a deck that's exactly the same every time. If someone changed it, they'll get the latest version of it. And we also have the ability for marketing teams that love this to prevent a sales team member from messing with the content, right?

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah.

Dean Curtis:
So we have controls that allow you to lock in certain things. It's very dynamic. You could have it so that they could change some things, but not others things. We have the ability to dynamically link between presentations. Let me explain what I mean. Maybe you have a set of content that's the company story that never changes, but there's a piece of the presentation where you want to drop in some photos of the person's home that you're going to.

Dean Curtis:
We can give you the flexibility dynamically and easily link those things together through the presentations rather than having this 180-page uber-deck that everyone has to go through. And the death by PowerPoint is real. We want to make sure we give that flexibility. So lots of flexibility in the platform to keep things locked down or give people the ability to change as they need to.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I see. I want to talk a little bit more about the analytics for the sales manager, but before we get off this topic, you just made me think of something that I would've loved to have. And as a marketing for person to be able to actually look at the analytics and see what parts of the presentation are being used the most.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Now, all of a sudden, as a marketing person, I can start actually trying to work with the sales folks more to make sure they're getting what they need and not just the stuff they're flipping through because they really don't care about it. I mean, have you seen a lot of that where they've been able to change and adapt?

Dean Curtis:
Absolutely. So in some of the analytics reporting, we can provide heat maps. Imagine a heat map of a presentation.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah.

Dean Curtis:
Which shows you aggregate across your team for a presentation who spends time and where people are spending the most time within a presentation. Well, from a sales perspective, maybe you've done training to say this is the right flow, but then you realize on page seven, no one spends any time there, but that's the thing. Like that's the one thing that everyone should be spending time on, the big value prop and you realize that it's not. And maybe that's a great opportunity to go back to the sales team for marketing say, "Hey, we noticed that not everyone's spending a good amount of time in this section of the presentation. Is the content not hitting well? Do we need to do more training? Is there something you would rather see there? Are customers not interested?"

Dean Curtis:
What I love about it is it creates the opportunity for better conversations rather than going to the sales team and saying, "How's it going?" It gives you a better informed question to say, "I noticed this. What can we do better? How can we improve? And that is just I think is game-changing for a sales team.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I do too. I've been on both sides, marketing and sales and I know as a sales manager really you do all this training, but I know you do ride alongs and you're there, but you don't always know. So talk about those same analytics from that perspective of a sales manager.

Dean Curtis:
Yeah. One of our customers and we have this quote right on the front page of our website because I think it's so powerful. It's like a ride along on every sale.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I like it.

Dean Curtis:
Right?

Heidi Ellsworth:
I like it. Yeah.

Dean Curtis:
And that's an expensive resource. So a sales manager sitting shotgun with a sales rep, it's an expensive endeavor. So it's time, it's real money because they're not doing other things. And if you can give a sales leader an analytics dashboard with shows aggregate for an entire team, which is something our product will provide. And then be able to drill down to the individual level of a salesperson and a particular session with a customer, you can see how they went through a presentation.

Dean Curtis:
And again, it's not the intention of picking on somebody or being big brother. It's really about making them the best salesperson and also learning best practice from people who are doing really well and applying those to your training so that you can share that information across everybody. So it's using all of it together or for the greater good of the team.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. When you can look at closing rates and know that Joe has the highest closing rates and then look at where he's really focused in his presentation, that's going to make a big difference to new employees, new sales because I know what we see on RoofersCoffeeShop right now is everyone's looking for salespeople. And how do you train them that this tool is the perfect to really be able to show them how to do it and have the numbers to balance that out.

Dean Curtis:
Yep, totally.

Heidi Ellsworth:
That is so cool. I love it. So what do you see? What are you hearing back from your contractors, the contractors who are really utilizing Ingage and how has their sales grown?

Dean Curtis:
Yeah. Obviously, all over the map. And it depends what you value. Do you value faster close rates? Do you value less time in the home? Do you value obviously more money? The bigger deal sizes. In the roofing industry, especially it's upsells. So maybe you're there for an insurance claim and you're able to upsell them because they now can present other options that can go above and beyond what the insurance company's going to cover. But now you can sell a gutter job on top of it because, "Hey, we're there for another 1500 bucks." And they have a presentation, which is the upsell presentation.

Dean Curtis:
So we've seen ROI across all those different things. And we have some really good case studies on our website, which will guide you through some of those. One customer, 9% increase in overall sales once they started using Ingage in their first quarter. So it's a solution that can really net you real money. It can also net you real time. And we've seen some people where the close rates are up and also the time to close is down. Meaning, we're getting through presentations faster.

Dean Curtis:
When we first start working with customers, they use bring what they're using today. So they have a 120-point page PowerPoint deck and we usually get those down to anywhere from 25 to 40 pages because the information density in an Ingage presentation is much different. We have what we call progressive disclosure of information, where I don't need seven pages in a presentation to show all of different color styles.

Dean Curtis:
I can actually build an Ingage presentation that has interactive elements that allow you to dig in. Well, in doing that, you now aren't literally boring your customer to tears through that process so you're closing faster because you're getting to yes faster. You're getting to their questions faster because of the power of the presentation. So lots of good ROI across the board.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. I love the fact that you are helping to kind of build those presentations for the contractors. How does that work between your customer service and the marketing, or the sales teams in the roofing companies?

Dean Curtis:
That's a great question because a lot of the folks we work with are not technologists, they're roofers and they love and there's so knowledgeable about what they're doing there. But there's sometimes a level of trepidation to say, "I don't know if I'm ready to get started because I'm on the roof all day or I'm managing my business. Can you help me get the presentation started?" And so what we do as part of every new customer is we offer training as part of the onboarding process. Training to set up the users, training to set up the analytics. But more importantly, training on the design of a great presentation.

Dean Curtis:
So we have a team of presentation designers that will work hand in hand with your marketing team to help you build a great presentation, help you reimagine what you've already been doing in an Ingage fashion. At the same time, we also offer a service that we'll do it for you. So you give us all your old stuff, you give us all your assets and then for a fee we'll create those presentations for you.

Heidi Ellsworth:
That's great. And that is so needed. I mean, because just also the philosophy, the art, however you want to go through it of the sale to be able to have all that knowledge where you're seeing so many success stories and be able to share that. I think that's incredible.

Heidi Ellsworth:
And I know that you're working with a number of partners out there too. So as roofing contractors, who should they be? I mean, are there some partners there that they should be aware of that they can actually ... Because like you said earlier, the material shortage, which colors are so being able to kind of have that information rapidly is also important.

Dean Curtis:
Yeah. So we work with a number of partners. We have over 60 some partners in our network. Some of them are manufacturers and those manufacturer partners, they're great for us because they get us introductions into a lot of contractors. But what they've done is created what we term ready-made content. So Owens Corning you mentioned earlier is a great example of that. Owens Corning has created two presentations, one is a product presentation and one is a contractor presentation where a contractor can very easily swap in their logo, some of their before and after pictures of work they've done. And they can be often running in literally hours on the Ingage platform.

Dean Curtis:
They also through those partnerships get discounts on the Ingage Suite when they buy through their Owens Corning relationship. We also have partnerships with other technology providers. So as you're adding Ingage to the technology stack that you run your business on Leap, One Click Contractor are examples of that. You have configure price quote tools or CompanyCam. Maybe you're using CompanyCam to capture images.

Dean Curtis:
2022 as a big year for us in terms of integrating more closely with those guys. Most of them have integration today where if you have a resource library in something like Leap, you can very easily link over from Leap because it's a big part of your sales process into your Ingage presentations and then float right back to where you were in Leap. So we're providing a real easy connection between some of those apps as well.

Heidi Ellsworth:
With your technology background, it's so important because like you said, I mean, the roofing companies out there, the roofing contractors, they are craftsmen and women who are in their craft and they don't always have time to figure out the marketing, the technology, everything that else that goes on with it. So as you're looking at the different technologies to be able to integrate all of them, they don't have to pick and choose or figure it out. I mean, I just think that's great. And it sounds like it's two-way. You're going back and forth with Leap or with CompanyCam.

Dean Curtis:
That's right. So Leap is a great example. So a lot of folks have implemented Leap and they have their products in there. They have their resources in there, whether they're PDFs or doing financing through there. And what we do as part of the resource library, as soon as you start making Ingage presentations you can very easily link to them from Leap and will automatically open up that presentation within your Ingage library. And when you hit back, you go right back to where you were in Leap.

Dean Curtis:
It's amazing to me how advanced the sales processes are in a lot of these contractors. They have spent tremendous effort to really define a seven-step sales process. And we might be step three in that process where you're opening a presentation to tell the company story, the products, whatever it is that you want to present in the home. We want to be able to get right back in that same flow.

Dean Curtis:
So we've integrated into Leap, they've done work. We also have the ability to go if we're the starting point, back out to all those places as well. So whether it's going from us back over to Leap or over to One Click Contractor or i360 or whatever CRM you have, we have some folks using salesforce.com. We can very easily go back to Salesforce as well. So lots of different ways to make that flow work really, really well, which back to the ROI questions. How do I make my sales team more efficient? How do make sure their process is consistent? We want to be a part of that solution.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Right. That is great. What do you see, I'm talking about solutions, what do you see as some of the trends in the home improvement sales process coming up in 2022? I know you said you had a lot of big things come in 2022, but what are some of the trends that you're seeing out there too?

Dean Curtis:
I think this idea of a technology stack is something that everyone should be considering. And really locking it down and saying, "All right, here is the technology stack" because the feedback we get from a lot of customers and when I talk to customers, there's often a sense of, "Man, how many more SaaS subscriptions do I need?" However, it's really important that you go thoughtfully into that because before you know it, you could be 10 SaaS subscriptions deep and you're like, "Wait a second. How much is my cost per rep per month? This is crazy."

Dean Curtis:
So I think really identifying the jobs to be done by the tech stack. That's really, really important. It's no different in my mind than the job to be done with the tools in the box that go in the truck that go to the job site. You're you need to look at technology you the same way. We do it in our own business. We cut two pieces of technology out of our stack this year and added one to replace it just because it's a cost savings. It's an efficiency for our employees. I think everyone should be really looking at what are the pieces of technology that are actually helping me make more money? Which means my people are more efficient.

Dean Curtis:
And it doesn't necessarily just mean sales. The production team, the marketing team. Everyone can benefit from the world of software, but how well do those pieces of technology integrate? How well do they actually solve problems that my team is having? So that tech stack to me is it's the thing to really spend a good amount of time really considering.

Heidi Ellsworth:
And like you said, not just once a year. I mean, not just this year, but every year really looking and evaluating that tech stack. We have to do the exact same thing and things are changing so fast too.

Dean Curtis:
We have gone all in on a tool over the last nine months that didn't even exist two years ago called Airtable. Wow. It's like a low-code database thing. We do a lot of data in it and the reason we've adopted it is because it replaced literally three other things we were using for about a quarter of the cost.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Wow.

Dean Curtis:
Okay, great. And I think everyone needs to be doing those assessments on a regular basis to say, "Is this really providing the ROI and is it helping my team?"

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Because processes, productivity is so important, especially culture with everything that's happening with labor shortages. I mean, those kind of things make a huge difference and make it easy year for the sales team. I mean, I love it. And the marketing team .I'm telling you this is across the board. So you had mentioned a little bit about you have some big things coming out this next year. Any previews you can give us or anything that you'd like to share with everyone out there?

Dean Curtis:
Yeah. I mean, I'll reiterate the first thing is being closer with our partners about how we can make it easier for the contractor. So if they're implementing us and a couple other technology things, how can we make their life a little bit easier? And the big part of that I believe is the hyper-personalization of content.

Dean Curtis:
So if I'm walking into Heidi's house and I'm going to sell you a new roof, I think Heidi wants to see her house in that presentation. How can we make it very, very simple for the sales team to make that a reality. I'll leave it at that, but to us being able to provide the sales team with even more power in the presentation is a big focus for us in the year ahead.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. That's cool. That's cool. In my past days at EagleView, I saw that, those same types of things. When you show that aerial image of a house or you start saying, "Yeah, here's what it could look like with some sort of visualizer." All of those things goes a long ways.

Dean Curtis:
If you go back to the idea of integrating it all together, like how do you stitch all those things together and make it super simple? Because remember that we talked about it earlier. We're roofers, we're contractors. For the most part, I'm not trying to be disrespectful at all. I want to meet people where they are and make it super simple so that they don't have to learn this huge curve in technology. I want to make it really, really simple for them to do that.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I think the other side of that too is as we are recruiting and trying to bring in that next generation, they're going to expect this. I mean, this isn't even anymore about, "Well, it might be a nice thing." This is like, "If you don't have it, I'm going to go work down the street because they have the technology that makes my life easier."

Dean Curtis:
Exactly, exactly.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I'm telling you, I love this. This is as I said before, as I saw it just with both of my hats, marketing and sales, I was just like, "This is phenomenal." So I would really recommend to everyone listening to this. Of course, Ingage's on RoofersCoffeeShop, go to their directory, check out the different promotions they have on the site. We're bringing eBooks all kinds of great things, but then get to the Ingage site where you can really see this and get some demos of it because it will change your life. It'll change your business when it comes to sales and marketing and and across the board. It'll probably make all your finance people very happy too. So Dean, any last thoughts for everyone out there?

Dean Curtis:
Yeah, Heidi. First, thank you just so much for having us on. I've really enjoyed talking with you about this. As hopefully you can tell with my voice, I'm very passionate about this. I love enabling sales teams and making sure that they can do better today than they did yesterday. And the best thing if anyone wants to follow-up is to get a demo. To see this live it's really important. You can get a great sense, like you said, by visiting our website. But right on the website, there's a get a demo link. It's the best way to kind of take the next step to kick the tires and really understand how it could impact your business. And our team's always available to meet you on your schedule to have those demos.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I think that's so important. And you know the third thing I would really recommend too is talk to your vendors. Talk to whoever you're working with right now with different technologies, whether manufacturers or distributors and ask them if they're working with Ingage. Because obviously with 60 different partners out there, there's probably a great opportunity that you're going to be able to do that, plus you to find all those great things on in the CoffeeShop too so.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Dean, thank you. Thank you so much for being here today and thank you for bringing this. I mean, this is great technology that's going to make a lot of difference, make huge difference with a lot of roofing companies so thank you.

Dean Curtis:
Great. Thanks, Heidi.

Heidi Ellsworth:
And thank you all for listening. You can hear all of our cast and see all of them on RoofersCoffeeShop under the Read Listen Watch navigation. And of course you can find them on your favorite podcast channel. Don't miss a single one and we'll see you on the next Roofing Road Trips.

Megan Ellsworth:
Make sure to subscribe to our channel and leave a review. Thanks for listening. This has been Roofing Road Trips with Heidi from the rooferscoffeeshop.com.