 What we really need to be doing is saying, what is different about our product, right? What is unique that we can deliver an experience to the homeowner? Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right everyone, welcome to another episode of Smarter Building Materials Marketing. I'm your host, Beth Popnukolov, and in the house today, we have one of my very favorite products. I'm so excited to get to be able to talk about it, and we're going to talk about how builders can differentiate themselves and what manufacturers can do to partner with builders to help them achieve that. The market is changing, everyone's waiting to see what happens as we head into the new year, and housing demand shifts, prices shift, things are going on, supply chains in the ever flux that it's been. There's a lot of opportunities for manufacturers to boost their partnership with builders, and we have an excellent voice in the studio today to help us have that conversation. So Russ Eisenberg is the vice president of business development for Goldheat, and he's here to talk to us about how to build incredible relationships with builders. Russ, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me, Beth. You know I'm a big fan of the podcast and the show, and so I'm excited to be here with you today. We're excited too. So before we jump in, why don't you give our listeners the 30,000-foot view of who Russ is and who Goldheat is? Sure. So as you said, my name is Russ Eisenberg, I'm the VP of business development with Goldheat, but obviously I didn't always do that. My first career was in IT during the dot-com boom after that bust, I was looking for something new to do. And so construction, why not, right? Sure, why not. Right. Pretty well-wined. And so I went out and started a surface preparation and decorative concrete business, because I thought, well, yeah. Very natural career path. Sure, as you do. Very natural career path. And so did that for a number of years. So concrete polishing, coatings, self-levelers, microtoppings, epoxy, polyaspardix, et cetera, et cetera. You know, all of those types of floor prep and floor coatings. And you'll always really try to do it with a mind towards efficiency, a mind towards health and wellness, zero VOC products, really creating a healthy environment. And yeah, eventually transitioned out of that and went to work for a company doing a great window insulation product, I know this is Indo. I am no longer there, obviously, but it was a wonderful learning experience and really getting to understand, you know, both how builders or modelers work and really exploring the energy efficiency space. Last year I transitioned to gold heat. Gold heat has been around for 20 years and produces electro-gradient floor heat. That is all we do. We do it well. We do it differently. Thank you so much for this great intro. And I started by saying it's one of my favorite products and I'm not ashamed to say I'm a total fan girl of underfloor heating. It's one of those products where it sounds like something that you're like, oh, that feels like a little bit much. And then the first time that your bare feet hit a heated tile floor when it's 22 degrees outside and snowing and miserable, you're like, this is not a luxury. This is a life changing necessity and I can never go back. Absolutely. Right. And it's all about that mean radiant room temperature. You know, when you're dealing with floor heat, you know, people think and just like you said, right, you step on it, it's comfortable, it's lovely, you know, we like to say we take lovely spaces and turn them into luxury spaces, you know, and that can be, you know, a spa experience in your, as you're getting into the tub or whatnot, you know, as you're getting ready for your morning routine. If you're me, it's actually the three o'clock in the morning when you're, you know, making that transition from a bed to bathroom and back, but it could be on the bathroom, right? Historically, for radiant heat, especially on the electric side have been kind of the number one room, but that really has grown. So, you know, moving from the bathroom into the kitchen into the bedroom now with work from home, right, being able to sit in a space that's just nice and evenly comfortable because with electric radiant heat, you're turning your entire floor into a heat pipe, right? And, or into sunlight, right? I mean, it is the exact same principle. So, so much of what you're talking about is linked to exactly why we have you here, which is what gold heat does and what specific products do are really helping builders to build homes that are different and differentiated without going just completely bonkers and over-investing or over-engineering, which is a big risk for builders right now. So, talk to me a little bit about what you're seeing from builders in the market as it stands today and if and where they're differentiating themselves or what opportunities you think they have there. Well, absolutely. So, you know, I just got back from the Housing Transformation Summit up in Seattle this week and that was, that was the overarching topic, right? I mean, you had all of these builders in the room and you kept hearing this theme of how are we going to differentiate, right? Last year we could build, or we could sell everything that we could build, right? If you could build it, it was gone, prices were going up, you really didn't have to think about what features, I mean, and that extended well beyond even homes, right? Into appliances, into cars, you know, people were just buying these things up with all the supply chain challenges. Well now, you know, now interest rates are up, right? People are looking and they're more discerning, right? People need to make these decisions and I mean, I spend a lot of time on builder websites, right? And as do you and, you know, differentiation is not $50,000 off, right? $100,000 off now, right? Because now everybody's saying that. That isn't even a differentiator, right? I mean, it's just a race to the bottom and that doesn't do anything for anyone, right? Well, what we really need to be doing is saying what is different about our product, right? That we can deliver an experience to the homeowner to say, yes, this is who we want to be working with. This is truly the product, right? And when I say product, I mean the whole home as product that we want to live in, that we want to experience, that makes our life better. Yeah, with our particular sector, right, with electric, radiant floor heat, it's been really interesting talking to builders because, you know, there is this paradigm, right, that electric, radiant floor heat is difficult, right? That's the overarching paradigm. So if you ask a builder, right, if you ask luxury builders, they'll say, yeah, we do it. Well, what product do you use? Well, whatever my flooring installer is willing to do, right? It's not even what they want to do. It's what they're willing to do because, historically, it is a challenge for a flooring installer to take, you know, a length of cable, right? And maybe they buy a kit for a hundred square foot room. I don't know anybody that builds a perfect hundred square foot room, right? I mean, you're trying to put this kit into a 97 square foot room or 108 square foot room. And the person that shows up on the job site has to do a good job, right? They have to know how to do that product. And so especially as you move downstream out of your million dollar plus homes into, you know, more of your, you know, median home price and maybe a little above, builders are saying, yeah, we don't want to deal with that or we'll deal with that if a customer asks for it. But it's a wonderful opportunity to differentiate. And so, you know, 38%, I read this recently, I believe it was on real estate, which 38% of new home buyers wish that they spent more on luxury upgrades, right? We know that a million homes a year add electric radiant floor heat. And the vast majority of those are done after market. 35% in homes built in the last 10 years and about 50% in homes built since 2000. So that is current builder product, right? That is what builders are building today that their customers tomorrow are saying, eh, I want to make that a little bit better, right? I want to improve that. Why doesn't the builder just go ahead and include it, right? It's this fear, it's this concern, it's risk, right? You know, if there is difficult product, right? Why am I going to take on risk, especially right now while things are going on with interest rates going up and margins going down, right? You really, you want to protect yourself and have smooth projects. And that's where we come to the pit. We set out to make it easy, right? That was the problem we were trying to solve. So, de-risk, de-risk, de-risk for the builder, which creates what we like to call accessible luxury, right? It means that luxury doesn't need to be scarcity, right? It needs to be easy for the builder. It needs to be low risk for the builder and the installer. And that means that the homeowner gets this wonderful experience that, frankly, because of the historic paradigm is just not being offered a nest. So why not take this opportunity, right? I mean, you said the word experience, I think I counted five times. And I was like, I couldn't possibly agree with you more, especially when it comes to new home construction. If you're starting at price, that's not where a new homeowner has started. Maybe they started there three years ago of I just need a house I can afford. So I'm a statistic. I'm the person who would love to own a home. But the prices in my home, in my area, when my family moved here, we're like, I mean, $750,000 for a four bedroom house, which God bless you if that's in your price range. But I just don't feel like that's a wise investment. And like, so the, but we've been beaten down to where what I, our family considered, and like I would put like me as the statistic, what people considered, this is what I would pay for a house has just like slowly inched up, not because I've decided I now want granite countertops and a giant island and 7000 square feet and a finished basement and a mother-in-law suite. But it's because I'm like, no, that's just how much they cost, man. So like if we would like to own a home, this is how much you are going to have to pay to have a home that you are going to enjoy and not regret. Can you imagine regretting not spending more? I mean, that's just, which makes complete sense in this, in this arena. So if you are ex, if you're overloaded on home inventory and your first thought is, I'm just going to make these guys cheaper. You're basically, you are not understanding what the homeowner is asking for. This is the biggest expense that they'll make. So make them feel like that expense is the expense that they should make. Go after experience first before you start cutting into your margins. You might even be able to keep it at level. If not a little bit higher as dollars go down, because you, you did it. Like you beat us down. This is now what people believe they have to spend on a home. So give them what that home is now worth. Give them value in that home. Okay. So the change is hard, right? Right. So that's my next question for you is you and I agree on this. This is not surprising. Like we could just basically preach to the choir all day long. Honestly, I would find that conversation enjoyable, but like, that's probably not valuable for our listeners. Builders who are, they're not panicking. Like builders are smart. They've all been through cycles of the home, you know, of like the home buying process and of the, of the market. It happens. It's not, you know, it's not like nobody saw this coming. We all for the last three years have been like, none of this feels quite right and it's great, but something's coming. Right. So here it is. Builders are smart. They're not panicking, but they are also not, they also were told on a regular basis, my product will make you be able to sell your homes for more. And if they've been in the game long enough, they know that like typically that's not 100% accurate. Otherwise everybody's house would be $5 million. What are you doing or how have you been able to get builders to sit longer, to have an actual conversation? So we don't want to be the company for everybody, right? You're, you're not going to find us on Amazon. You know, you're not going to walk into Home Depot and find us on the shelf there. You know, we do really believe in partnering with our customers, right? We have customers that have literally been with us for 20 years. I've been in customers offices recently being told how competitors were trying to get in. And at the end of the day, when they say, well, what can we do to earn your business? The response, and I'm quoting, is be gold heat. And so, you know, we are looking for partners that truly want to partner with us. And so what that means is I don't necessarily need to break through with cold emails, you know, all over the place. I do look to actually have that sit down face to face conversation. So, you know, our strategy for gaining those minutes, right, is really an event-based strategy, you know, some of these, you know, more executive one-on-one type trade shows, you know, which have especially grown in popular, in popularity since, you know, the pandemic where just, you know, even though we're going to do the Builder Show this year and such, you know, these more personalized events, you know, are, there's just more of them. So we participate in those to get those kind of few minutes face to face with somebody and be able to get the message across. But, you know, just like the first time that you and I talked about this, you know, and you said, well, you know, I'm a fangirl, right? I mean, I, sorry to, sorry for the big reveal, I'm not ashamed. I'm not, underfloor heating is incredible. Most people know that, right? I think you, you have, of course, you have people and, you know, I've had people who say, well, you know, I grew up in Hawaii, so I, there's no need for that, right? And, you know, my response is, well, you still put a heater in the house, right? So it doesn't say that warm all the time. You know, I'm from New York, so of course I have a lot of family in Florida. And so, you know, and, and so they wear jackets, right? Like they get cold, right? Even growing up in New York and moving, you know, in the Uaakalame. So, you know, I think that there is application nationally, but people that most people understand the actual intrinsic value of what we do, where we have to struggle and where we have to communicate is in the paradigm shift of electric gradient heat is a giant pain, right? Or it takes a long time or it has to be expensive because it takes a long time and you have to absorb risk into the project and all of these things, right? You know, even in my life as a flooring installer, right? I mean, there were certain things that I would do that I knew were riskier floors. And so I had to price in the do it again, right? And, you know, especially when you get into intricate dyes and patterns and things like that, even though the material cost isn't anymore, right? You're pricing risk into the project. And that's what we, you know, at a foundational kind of level of installation we've removed, right? Like I said, we really de-risk that. But when you're dealing with the builder and trying to help them differentiate in the market, you have to go way beyond that, right? Conversation one is, hey, let's do a paradigm shift and throw out the fact that, yeah, you in concept buy this, right? Like you understand the comfort. I mean, like the arthritis foundation says that radiant floor heat is awesome because it helps you move better, feel better and all of these things. Like that's not really debatable at this point. But how do we partner? And this is why we aren't trying to be everything to everyone because we want to build that relationship. You know, it's not a when I mean with the builder, it's not, hey, what's the next project that we can get in, right? It's what is your sales process? What is your engagement process? How do we integrate into that? And not just, hey, here's here's how you sell radiant heat, right? It is, you know, are you building your process around gap selling, spin selling, sandler selling, challenger sale, right? Like pick your sales methodology and then let us help integrate into that, right? It's not us telling you how to sell our product. It's us partnering with you to communicate to your customer in an effective way why you as the builder are delivering a differentiated product. And that goes from sales conversation to collateral, right? It's, you know, I have plenty of spec sheets and technical data and all that stuff. But, you know, two weeks ago, I was in a life filming lifestyle videos, right? That are designed to be customer facing that are going on to the builder website. You know, we're in the BDX Envision platform. So, you know, trying to make it super easy, right? A builder wants to offer our product and they use Envision as their digital sale center. Just turn us on like it's a toggle and then we'll get you through the install. Don't worry. I mean, I tell people, look, our install guide, we have a quick install guide that's like a tri-fold and that's really all you need. I could teach you how to install our product with a staple gun in five minutes. Don't worry about that. Worry about communicating the value. Worry about that differentiation. Let us give you the tools you need, but it's got to be a two-way street, right? We need to talk to you and understand what works for you. And then you need to come back as the builder and say, hey, this works. This doesn't work. This is what I'm hearing. You have to let us in in order to have those those relationships because you've heard the thing, right? You are the average of the five people you spend most time with. I think that that extends to companies and you are the average of the vendors that you choose to partner with, right? Oh, that's great. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you're getting a builder to think differently, you're basically showing them how to think differently and how you think differently. And I think that's that's an incredible open door opportunity. If I could help, if I could pull up what you're saying for our listeners, because I think there's so much value in what you're sharing is, number one, you're not trying to be everybody for everything. Nothing, or maybe I should say few things, build confidence in your customer more than telling them when you're not a good fit. If you instantly know, hey, actually, that's not going to work for us, or let me tell you where we're not going to work, or I was actually just talking to one of your competitors, partners, guy across the street and told him we wouldn't work for these exact reasons. Now I'm I'm actually much more engaged with when you do work because if for nothing else, I'm not competing with those in supply chain. I'm not competing with those numbers, but also I can believe you that you know what you do. And I think the other thing is for differentiation, one of the first things that you said is it can't be difficult. You can't go into a builder and say, hey, this is an opportunity to differentiate, but it's going to extend your project timeline by this amount of dollars and increase your upfront cost by this amount of dollars. But in return, you're going to get this amount, man, that risk is high. So what's really important here is you solved for that before starting the conversation. So essentially you absorbed that risk and that's I mean, that's building that partnership showing like, hey, I think that this is a differentiating product and I think it's valuable for you. So here's how our organization solved for your pain points, solved for your risk install time expertise that you would need to have in their callbacks, homeowner experience, homeowner call like homeowner replacement, homeowner concerned about absorbing risk, right? Don't make me fall in love with my underfloor heating in my kitchen. And then it breaks when my toddler drops the chair on the floor and I'm exhausted and tired and busy and I'm never ever going to fix that. And so you're like, oh, that was a nice six months. That's 30 K down the drain that we're never going to get back. Maybe when they go to college, we'll fix it. Like, no, show them all of those ways that you've solved for that. That's how you get to have those really meaningful conversations and show that you're a true partner, not just not just an opportunist because it can feel like that when market shift and suddenly everybody's like, hey, our product makes the difference. Where were you when your product, why didn't your product make the difference during the pandemic when we were, you know, stressed about supply chain and all of those other things? So I think I think that's huge. And just for your listeners, it would have to be a really big chair that you can't drop that out there. You know, very strong toddlers, very strong toddlers. You know, they'd have to come back from the bowling ball convention. The bowling ball slash juggling convention to really do damage. But that's fair. That's fair. That's fair. Not just not just a chair or a tonka truck. Yeah, something much more significant. That's fair. That's totally fair. Russ, this is this has been awesome before I let you go. Let me just ask what piece of advice would you give to manufacturers who are wanting to build these partnerships and help builders differentiate? Be honest with yourself. Make sure that you really are offering a differentiation, but be honest with yourself, right? And look for the spots that you you truly do differentiate and lead with those so that you don't sound like everybody else, right? And that you don't get engaged in this race to the bottom on price. That would be my biggest piece of advice and listen, right? It's not it's not about your sales process. It is about your customers buying process. And I don't care if that is B to B, B to C, B to B to C, right? Because we don't technically engage with the end users of our product, right? We have the builder, the manufacturer in the middle and really understand what your customer and what their customer needs. Not what you need and be OK, making those adjustments, because when you are willing to change, when you adapt, then you can really integrate in a meaningful way and improve. I love that you should expect to see me wearing a t-shirt soon that says it's not about your sales process, about your customer's buying process. I love that. That's incredible. Well, Russ, thank you so much for your time. If any of our listeners want to get ahold of you, pick your brain, ask questions, what's the best way for them to get in touch? You can email me at RussEat at GoldHeat.com. You can find us on, well, you can buy me on Twitter at Russ Eisenberg. You can find us on Twitter at GoldHeat Radiant. And then obviously linked in, you know, just hop on our website, GoldHeat.com. You can call us, email us. Pretty easy to find. You can just Google my name. I come up. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. And for our listeners, if you want more great content like this, head to vinvio.com slash podcast. Until next time, I'm Beth Poppins-Kolab. See you, everybody.