 What we've seen is that from the homeowners that we interact with, overall, especially in the last five years, there's so much more educated than we're accustomed to. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Smarter Building Materials Marketing. I am really excited to introduce our guest for you today. His name is Alex Cook. He's the Director of Operations of Lifetime Windows Insighting, and we've got an awesome conversation coming your way. So first and foremost, Alex, thank you so much for joining us, and welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks, Beth. I appreciate the invite and excited to chat with you for a little bit. Yeah. So before we dive in, Alex, why don't you just take a few minutes and give us the 30,000-foot view of who you are and who Windows Insighting is and what your role is there. Gotcha. Yeah. So, gosh, overall, I was kind of trying to calculate it this morning, but probably about nine years in total in the building material and residential remodeling space. I originally got started working for a small regional distributor in Colorado Springs as an outside sales rep. We sold replacement Windows, different sighting products, some decking, railing, things like that, and our primary target market was contractors. And so we sold to, gosh, we had maybe about 150 different clients that we served in that market there, nothing direct to homeowner. After a little bit of time there, I kind of morphed into a selling manager position. So kind of got a little kind of more of a peek behind the curtains to the purchasing and warehousing and stocking and all that kind of stuff. Ended up leaving there to go work for a vinyl window manufacturer called Kensington High Performance Products. Worked for them for a couple of years and transitioned over to Infinity from Marvin, which is a fiberglass window manufacturer. Spent about a year with those guys and then got an opportunity to go back to Kensington as their national director of sales and marketing at what was a really cool time because we went through an entire rebranding. And we kind of tried to take what we had started at that company five, six years earlier and develop and kind of move forward and be a little bit more homeowner-centric. And so that was kind of a big lift where we kind of rebranded the name of the company and name of the products, the website, all the marketing materials. And then I was there for about four years. And during my process in working and manufacturing, I became aware of a company called Lifetime Windows Insighting that's based in Denver, Colorado. And Peter Speed and the owner there reached out to me and said, hey, I'd love to open up a place in Texas. And so we just started talking and figuring out what would be a great place for him to look and different people to meet with. And it just ended up working out to where he wanted me to join the team and get us off the ground here. So that's been what we do. So at Lifetime, our big deal is we are in the replacement and remodel market where we focus on replacement windows and siding. We do have a roof and solar division. And we also have a bath and shower division that we're just launching actually this month and getting off the grounds that we're pretty excited about. So when they say that we have a small industry or our industry is a small world, you're a great example of that. Once you're in, you're in. You might bounce here and there, but you're not going anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. My dad's in the business too. And it's, you know, it's kind of like one of those things. Once you once you get into the window world, there's, that's it. You can't leave. Yeah. But what has been enjoyable about my process thus far is I've kind of been able to see it come full circle now, you know, from the distribution side to working in manufacturing. And now I'm on the retail end, you know, from the time that the product is made to getting it over to a contractor to getting it into the home and having that, you know, a satisfied homeowner at the end. It's definitely interesting seeing the different angles that we all have of trying to, you know, make somebody's house. So one of the reasons that we were so excited to talk to Alex is partly because of your very background, but all within the industry. And I know one of the things you wanted to go after today is the big question of who should manufacturers be targeting as kind of their top audience. If they, if you know that contractors and homeowners are both part of your buyer journey, who's, who's the best? And are we doing pull through or going after the pro? So I've got loads of questions for you in that arena, but let me just ask you that blanket question first. What's the right audience? Is it the contractor or is it the homeowner? Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I think if it was, if you had to pick one side or the other, it's ultimately the person who's, who's spending the money, which is the homeowner, you know, because if the homeowner doesn't make the purchase, then nothing happens, right? There's, there's no contractor that's hired. There's no installation going on. There's no product being made if the homeowner is not excited about it. And so what's been interesting is that varying different manufacturers kind of have a different approach to whether they're going to make a website and marketing material that attracts the contractor and gives them kind of the information that they need to feel like they can purchase it and install it successfully. Or there's another group that primarily focuses on that homeowner and giving them the glamour shots in the photos and lets their mind run wild with the, with the imagination of, okay, hey, this isn't a worthwhile investment because I can see an idea of what my house is going to look like. So I can, I can play devil's advocate on either side of the conversation because there's clear, there's pro and con, right? And it's kind of a trick question that I kind of set you up. But, so let me just devil's advocate a second, knowing if I'd given that answer, what I would hear from a manufacturer is, well, the homeowner is only going to buy once and the pro is going to buy consistently. Talk me through where you're talking through how you still see the homeowner as the ultimate to go after. Well, what we do know is from our industries that our products have specific niches. So whether it's a window product or a siding product or a roofing product is that it's going to appeal to a certain demographic in a certain clientele. As much as we think that our product that we manufacture might fit into a house that's 150,000 to 1.5 million and all actuality that rarely ever happens. Aside from maybe drywall where we all use the same drywall or the same studs to build the house. But when you get into the fits and finishes and the final product, you've got a specific niche. So that homeowner that looked at your brochure and liked the photos because that house and that brochure looked a lot like the house that they live in or a lot like the house that they would like to live in. It's going to appeal to that same type of demographic that we're trying to get repeated over and over and over again. So I think that might be a little false scenario because what we want is we want repeat business, we want repeat clientele from that kind of same target market. And if your publication or your website appeals to the right demographic and group, then you're going to have plenty of customers that look a lot alike in regards to what they're trying to achieve. I think that's such an important piece that you're saying, Alex, which is it can feel like if you go after the homeowner, I think the misconception that you totally nailed is like it's like reinventing the wheel every time where the truth is they really have about like probably the same four to five either questions or objections for any given product that they're putting into their home. So I think you're you're nailing it, which is if you know who you're going after and you know the value that your product brings, you're able to still create that very repeatable but really impactful collateral, messaging, branding, marketing, all of those things to get that either repeat from the same customer or at least repeat results from multiple customers. That's really interesting. Yeah, I would say the same would be true for even the the sales cycle. So a lot of contractors and now we're on the end of it or I'm on the end of it in retail, right? We sell in the home. So we're going in somebody's house. Most big successful contractors and in home remodeling companies have a sales system and a sales process and they'll tell you that, hey, one, don't prejudge the lead and two, don't deviate from the process. So regardless of if you are kind of walking into that $150,000 house or that $1.5 million house, you're supposed to follow that same type of sales process and treat everybody the same and you never, you never know what their credit score is going to be or how much money they've got hidden away under the mattress to pay for it. You have no idea until you get to that point. So the same I think is can be true for the marketing aspect of it is that we want to approach every customer with that same same type of respect and say, hey, this is this is what's possible and either fits in work for your house or we're not the right one. I'd love to know, Alex, you mentioned at the beginning of the show you helped open the store for Lifetime Windows and Doors in Texas. Is there anything that you did when you were you're new to the market? Windows and Doors is highly competitive. Is there any specific strategy or tactic that you saw to really gain traction as a local store in a new market? Yeah, that's that's a phenomenal question because it's a battle. Oh, it's a total battle. Windows and Doors is brutal. It's totally brutal. Yeah, there's a lot. So we're in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and I mean just a quick Google search and it's just, you know, it scares a lot of people from even thinking about opening up or moving into a location. I was talking with our sales manager earlier today on a different topic, but I think it kind of fits to this scenario that you mentioned here, Beth, is that oddly enough today is Election Day and not to get too political of it, but I think what what we've been able to do and and be successful is that rather than trying to spread this this broad net over over an entire city that's, you know, massive between Dallas and Fort Worth put together and try to appeal to everybody as if we're running like a statewide campaign, is that we've kind of shifted our marketing and tried to think about it more of like we're trying to win like a school board election, you know, because if you're running for school board, it's a it's a small area, right? You've got a couple of neighborhoods that are grouped together and for us what what we know is in order to become like a household name is that they have to be able to recognize you. They have to see your trucks. They have to see your print media. They have to see if you are doing a radio spot or a TV spot. We want to be in the right, you know, the right areas. So it's kind of that combination of, you know, once we do sell a job is we try to take over a neighborhood as best as we can, you know, be visible with yard signs, knock the neighborhood when we sell it, knock the neighborhood when we're installing it like, you know, hey, you know, the Jones right down the street, yeah, a truck down there. Hopefully we're not in the way. Hopefully we're not, you know, making too much noise, anything like that. And then on the on the digital marketing space, they're way, way smarter than I'll ever be, but they're able to, you know, geo fence around certain zip codes and locations. So they do see, hey, the Joneses are getting new windows down the street. I didn't quite catch the name of it, you know, new windows near me, we, you know, can pop up towards the front. And so I think that's big is, especially when you're in a big, giant massive market, we don't have name recognition like we do in Colorado or, you know, that we built over in Phoenix. So it's just in very grassroots, you know, just kind of neighborhood by neighborhood. And once you start seeing that repeat business and it starts to build a little bit of traction. So you're building momentum really like municipalities or neighborhoods at a time versus just trying to blanket a whole area, which I mean, especially for an area that's booming, like Dallas, Fort Worth makes a absolute ton of sense because there's such, I mean, there's huge construction boom, there's huge, like push for specific manufacturers or retailers. I mean, I think that that just going methodically. And like you said, trusting the process, I think that makes absolutely a ton of sense. Okay, so you're in a new market, you're going after the homeowner, you're doing like, you know, you're hitting the streets from a marketing standpoint. Honestly, I think that strategy makes a ton of sense. One big pain point for manufacturers or retailers that go after homeowners is connecting them with installers. So talk to, can you talk to me a little bit about what your process was to earn installer trust so that the windows that you convinced a homeowner to buy could like, you know, end up in their house. Nowadays after, you know, being a manufacturer rep and traveling around is that a lot of people are moving away from the showroom. And they're moving into, you know, smaller smaller offices, less overhead and just kind of a either like a third party warehouse site or something like that or relying upon distribution channels to store their product for us. We went a different direction. And here we kind of built a little bit of a Taj Mahal of sorts of the showroom. And it's a big challenging layout to build something like this and find the space and kind of make that capital investment in doing so. However, what we've been able to do is kind of utilize that really on a whole lot of different avenues to whether it's recruitment of sales reps to where they can come in, they can see like, Hey, these people seem to know what they've got going on. You've got installers that come and then you show them a clean and tidy warehouse with racking and windows available for them to go and install. And they're like, Okay, I feel like if I work for these guys, I'm probably going to get paid every week. That's a good thing. And then the homeowners, they know it's, you can see it when they walk in the door, like it's just this, like they kind of relax a little bit because, you know, most of the process is done in their house. We come out and we talk about who we are, we talk about the company that we are and the services that we provide. And you don't get that from a lot of other companies that, you know, if you Google them online, their address is a a UPS box, you know, it's it's a different feel. It's a completely different vibe and it's different scale to having this and having a showroom where we've got, you know, full size product installed in the mock demo walls. It enables us to relay kind of how we want this product to look how we want it to be installed how we want it to feel to the installers. And it also gives that homeowner the opportunity if they so choose to come in and touch it and feel it and see if it's what they're what they're looking for. It's an interesting advantage to think about showrooms being for the pro because showrooms for homeowners make sense of sense, right? But for the pro to be like, Oh, yeah, that's real. Like they're they're real people in a real place. And I guess if I don't get paid, I know where to show up. Exactly, right? For sure. For sure. The last couple of years being able to go in and put your eyes on inventory, I'm sure was a really strong argument for developing partnerships of not only can I tell you that I have a product, but like, look, there it is. I mean, that's pretty, that's pretty significant. Yeah, because it's like, I mean, as you mentioned, it's with it being as aggressive and challenging of a market as it is just to get the sale in the first place, because we have so many competitors out here. Now you fight that same battle on the production operation side of getting installers and then getting them to want to leave a place where they've they install five, six days a week and then they want to come over to a new place. So yeah, being able to demonstrate that to them is pretty, pretty important and being able to to recruit and bring people over. So before I let you go, Alex, I just I want to go down the path of talking about messaging for a second because you I mean, we've talked through so many great strategies and tactics that you've put into place. And if we go back to thinking about the homeowner versus the contractor, and especially what you mentioned from a show, so from a showroom standpoint, we know for homeowners, they have such a difficult time conceptualizing, we talked about this on the show all the time, like that window that I see online. And you know, when a digital marketer says that they need to see something in real life, that that's that's a real need, right? What either online or you send them like a sample of the corner or something. So talk to me about what conversations what nuggets are you hearing or seeing or having tested that really resonate with a homeowner? Because especially in windows and doors, it can start to feel, you know, really similar from one competitor to the other. So how what messaging have you seen resonate with homeowners? Yeah, that's a that's a really good point. What we've seen is that from the homeowners that we interact with, overall, especially in like the last five years, there's so much more educated than than we're accustomed to. Like they, you know, you come into the house and you talk to them and it's like, all right, I already got the deal on low eglass, I already got the deal on argon, I already understand the insulated frame first, not insulated frame. What is this thing going to look like on my house? That's that's the primary thing that they want to know. And so the utilization of like different visualizers, whether it's through the manufacturer or or independently through a third party service, that's what we've seen has been really the shift of the conversation when we're in the house, because I tell you what, when you pull out the iPad, and you take a picture of the outside of their house, and then you come in, and then as the sales rep, you start kind of showing them, hey, okay, we can put this window here, and you just ever so gently encourage them to start playing with it. Well, at that point, they've designed it, right? So they've gone through, they've built it, they selected their options, and really they've built their own price, really, without without knowing it. And then so it just kind of follows an evolution of a system to where they got to build it, they got to design it, they got to feel like they're not trying to take a corner cut of a white window and visualize what's this thing going to look like with SDL grids. And I want to change this window from, you know, a triple single hung into a three light glider, what's that look like on my house, they can do it, and they can build it, and they can see it. And that just makes it so much easier for them. And then you guys, it's kind of really easy to justify the price at that point, because it's like, hey, this is, this is what you want, right? Yeah, exactly what you want. These are the options that you built. So I mean, we're so accustomed to online shopping now anyway, it kind of gives them a chance to have that experience of, you know, they built their shopping cart, they filled the basket, here it is, here's the price. If you don't like it, we can take some things out, we can, you know, drill it down and get to where we get to it's the conversation seems to be coming a lot more about, can you make my vision happen more so than can you make my monthly payment happen? And the psychology behind I built exactly what I want. And now how do I walk away from that? By the way, this is literally the third conversation we've had in a row on the podcast that where product visualization came up and people are going to start to think that we're like, I don't know, sponsored by product visualizers. We're not like, we believe in it, but it's like genuine coincidence, because it's just becoming so prevalent. And it's this exact conversation where you see the impact that it has and the light bulbs that go off, especially for homeowners who are holding the burden of the cost and the impact of the product being in their home. And the security that you're building in them, especially in today's consumer, I mean, you mentioned how much more educated consumers are now and consumers is, you know, a very broad term, but specifically homeowners, they care a lot. The fact that you don't have to explain the different types of glass, like out of the gate, I mean, five years ago, that was like, okay, let's start at page one. So here's what the different types of rays are from the sun and why you want to keep some of those from coming into your house. I mean, just the fact that you that's, you know, you're starting at step 50. And coupling onto that today as consumer, everything feels customizable. So when I get to my house, and I've got to just choose like window A or window B homeowners are like, hold on, hold on, hold on. I don't fit in window A or window B. Like I have a very specific vision. It's so, so impactful. I just, I love it. I mean, that's like, that's the game changer when you've got it in your hand. And then you just, you see the price tag and you're like, yeah, sure. I mean, how do I now, how do I turn down my expectations or walk back what I my dream? That's really, that's like next level stuff. Yeah. And then it's our responsibility to, you know, find a way to make it affordable for them. So either, you know, can they do the whole project? Do they need to finance it? Do we need to break it out into phases? Because yeah, because at that point, the selling part of it, it's over. That's, that's done. You know, they've, they've got what they want. And yeah, seeing that light bulb click or seeing them build something that they thought they liked in Southern Living Magazine. And then they put it in there. And then they're like, Oh God, that's what my house was like with black windows. I don't want that. And it's like, well, I'm glad you said that now, rather than on day of installation, because that would have been terrible. So yeah, that that has really, really been a big driver. And you can definitely tell the manufacturers that are out there that are paying attention to this and are putting that easily accessible on their website to where, you know, you don't have to give your email address or do anything super crazy right. You just kind of grab your phone, you go up to the, your house on the outside, you snap the photo, upload it, and then you start playing. That's, that's just been fantastic. That's incredible. Alex, I want to say thank you so much for your time. This has been an awesome conversation. We really appreciate it. If, if anyone who's listening wants to get in touch or pick your brain, what would be a good way for them to reach out to you? Yeah, email is probably best. Just Alex, see me as uncook at lifetimewindows.com or LinkedIn is about the only social network that I use anymore. So should be able to find me on there as well. Awesome. That's great. Well, for all of our listeners, if you like this or want more content like it, head to vinvio.com for more. Until next time, see you guys.