Digital Marketing for Contractors

The Power of the Pitch: Featuring Dean Curtis of Ingage.io

FatCat Strategies

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In this episode of Digital Marketing for Contractors, Janet and Caitlyn sit down with Dean Curtis, CEO of Ingage, to talk about transforming the in-home sales presentation. Dean shares how Ingage helps contractors close more deals with polished, interactive, and data-driven presentations that boost professionalism and consistency across sales teams. You’ll hear real success stories, tips for overcoming adoption challenges, and a sneak peek at what’s next for the platform. Plus, Janet and Caitlyn announce that FatCat Strategies is now a Certified Ingage Design Partner—helping contractors get the most out of their sales pitches.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

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Speaker 00:

Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors, a podcast for home improvement contractors to help you crush your lead goals and take your business to the next level. Join us each episode as we give you powerful insights and practical tips on the best digital marketing strategies to help you grow your home improvement business. Let's get started.

Janet:

Welcome back to the Digital Marketing for Contractors podcast, where we help home improvement companies win more jobs, increase revenue, and build lasting brands. I am Janet Mobley here with Caitlin Noble, and today we have a super special guest that we're very excited to have join us, Dean Curtis, CEO of Engage.

Caitlyn:

Yes. Hey, Dean. Everybody listening, if you have ever wished for your sales presentations to do more, grab attention, tell a story better, actually help you close deals You are going to love this conversation. Engage is transforming the way contractors present to homeowners and we are diving into exactly how. Dean, welcome to the show. We're so excited to have you here.

Dean:

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate you inviting me on and having this conversation.

Janet:

Yeah, so let's just dig into it. So for listeners who are not familiar, tell us what is Engage and what problem were you trying to solve when you launched it?

Dean:

Well, it's It's a little twofold story. So I'll, if you're, if you're okay with it, I'll give you a little history lesson.

Caitlyn:

Kind of

Dean:

crazy, but when Engage was conceived, I was actually at Apple. So I worked at Apple for eight years and I was part of a team building out partnerships and Engage was one of the partners that we were trying to sign. And at the time the company was well known for creating incredible, immersive, interactive experiences for the iPad. So as an Apple person, we were super excited for them, right? But But what they were was really a digital agency. So they had a piece of software, but it took a ton of work to build anything on top of it. So it was very, very expensive to build these interactive experiences. But they were building experiences for the Super Bowl, the launch of the Chevy Volt, GMG, GE, Johnson & Johnson, like massive companies, Apple. And what we said is, well, what if you had your software could do that for anyone and you could do it on an iPad? And they were like, hmm, that's a really interesting idea. So they hired one of my friends from Apple to come over and lead the engineering effort. And then they brought me over six months later to lead the go-to-market. And what we created was from that core software, an iPad app that allowed anyone to create those same digital experiences at a fraction of the cost and effort. And that's really where Engage was conceived. Now we solve a very different problem. So it's kind of funny how the original idea is still there. We help people create amazing interactive content. content for touch devices and we are focused on sales teams.

Janet:

Okay. So how has the platform evolved since then?

Dean:

Yeah. Since those early days, we realized a few things. Number one, people don't want to create content on the iPad. So our original vision for the product was anybody with an iPad could create great content, which is true, but the market for that is not very big. So we ended up creating a desktop creation experience because 95 plus per of our viewing of engaged content is on mobile devices. But that leaves a very small amount. The creators want to do it on a computer where all their assets are, where they're used to having a pointing device, all of those

Janet:

things. A big screen, a mouse, a keyboard, a tablet, all kinds of stuff.

Dean:

Exactly. So we also needed more features to differentiate the platform. So we added additional interactive elements to it. We added management of users and content we also added rich analytics to know what was happening when presentations were being delivered so at first it was this rapid creation product on an ipad and now it's a full platform and suite

Caitlyn:

oh that's amazing um i know we were introduced to you guys because of the contractors that use it um right in the industry we focus

Janet:

probably three or four years ago we first encountered engaged

Caitlyn:

yeah absolutely um and our clients that do use it have a ton of success with it um is it is it just for the remodeling industry the contractors or do you guys i mean yeah we only have home improvement i know that's off script but i just was like

Dean:

oh well here's the thing right so we intend we set out to serve every market while we're building a software product it's nearly impossible to do

Janet:

right yeah

Dean:

right you have to have a niche and a niche found us so we had a little widget on our website and someone came and booked the demo and It was NewPro. Okay.

Janet:

We knew

Dean:

NewPro. Right? Out of Boston. Yeah. And before we knew it, we had NewPro as a customer. And they helped inform our product roadmap. They gave us some ideas. And they also gave us nine other friends.

Janet:

Oh,

Dean:

yeah. And introduced us to them. And then before we knew it, we had 10. Yeah. And then we had a building product manufacturer who was one of their providers, their materials providers. And we were like, wait, maybe there's something here. Right. We started focusing our efforts on home improvement and now it's pretty much what we do.

Caitlyn:

Yeah, absolutely. I know that was not the question that I was going to ask, but I was sitting here thinking, I'm like, are you guys, is it just home improvement?

Janet:

Yeah, I mean, we know you through home improvement and we have clients that use Engage and we've built Engage presentations, but that good question.

Caitlyn:

And yeah, and the manufacturers, et cetera, have now partnered with y'all. I mean,

Janet:

it's

Caitlyn:

amazing. Do you have, I know you've mentioned New Pros being the first, kind of home improvement company to get involved. Is there a story that comes to mind? Maybe it's new pro that showed real results of the success of switching to this, you know, to engage?

Dean:

Well, I'll tell you, in general, the big problem we solve is raising the level of professionalism. A lot of times, I mean, I had this experience myself. So I did a little secret shopping when I had a solar project. And I invited far too many solar providers into my home. And Because I wanted to see how they sold. And we have a couple of solar providers on the platform and I've obviously invited them and then the others. And what I found was a lot of people come in and there's absolutely no organization to how they're trying to educate me in the process of selecting them to do my project. And solar is a pretty big education thing. I have to understand credits and how it's going to impact my roof. There's so much education. And we found that people started choosing us because it raised the level of professionalism. And what they found was when the customers would say, well, why did you choose us over someone else? That was like one of the reasons they said, you were so prepared and polished. And when you can have already, you know, ready-made content on brand consistently delivered in the home, you win more. And those are the, and we have tons of case studies on our website that can tell you the But lots of different ways that we've helped contractors to close more business for higher rates and quicker times, all those things.

Janet:

No, absolutely. I always like to break things down. I imagine like my grandmother, you know, listening, make it as simple to understand as possible. If we haven't said it already, Engage helps your sales reps with the in-home sales presentation of your information, right?

Dean:

Yep. I mean, we do more than that, but that is what we do. is the primary use case that people buy us for? They have a sales presentation, however you're doing it today, paper, flip books, PowerPoint, whatever it is. That's how we help people win.

Janet:

I'm glad you brought up PowerPoint and flip books. What makes Engage different from a traditional presentation that our listeners might be familiar with? Maybe they send their reps out with binders of project photos and samples, if it's an awning the fabric samples. So that's what everybody knows. What makes Engage different or better than that?

Dean:

Imagine all of those things in one place, perfectly organized, on brand, and always up to date when your sales rep opens their iPad. That's pretty cool. So what we do is a lot of people have invested tremendous amount of time, resources, and training someone on a sales process.

Caitlyn:

Exactly.

Dean:

So being able to ensure that the sales process is followed because one, the content is not editable. Now it can be, we have different controls. If you want them to edit it, they can, but most sales leaders don't want you to edit it because what they, what they did in the past is they'd send out some sort of electronic press presentation, and then if they did any sort of inspection later on, they would look and be like, why did you rearrange these pages? We have told you, if you go from here to here to here to here, and in that order for these amounts of time, you are going to have a 47% chance of closing that deal. They know these things. And we kind of give them all of the controls that they need to embed their sales process, control how people navigate through, stay on brand with role-based permissions, and then most importantly, distribute. Know who gets what. Exactly. And then if someone leaves, they can actually take it back too.

Caitlyn:

Right. And that was going to be my next point to bring up. Another powerful part of Engage is the analytical and interactivity that you guys bring behind the scenes. So

Janet:

there's sales reports for the sales manager, are they not?

Dean:

That's correct.

Janet:

So I

Dean:

won't go so far. I mean, you could replace the ride-along. I don't want to be so bold and brave to say you would because I think there's there's still value in that. I think there's a lot of value in going and seeing someone live in the field. But imagine you could have a report every week to show, literally compare your five sales reps and who's presenting, how long they're presenting, how long they're spending in each section, how long they're spending on each page. If you know you train that by 45 minutes into the sales process, you should have positioned financing. You know that people aren't getting there. That's a great trend to be able to train on.

Janet:

And it's really Rather than you guessing or having a sales meeting and asking, you know, you get your five sales guys in the room for your Tuesday morning meeting and you ask like, who's talking about financing? I mean, the old school way to do it is everybody goes, I'm talking about funding. So I'm always talking about, but now you're

Dean:

like, Hey Jim, no, you're not.

Janet:

You actually, you actually

Caitlyn:

did

Dean:

it. Or maybe, maybe they are. Right. Found a different way. Yeah. You know, like everybody thinks of these analytics as like big brother. I think the opposite is, all right, well, Caitlin is actually closing at five points higher than Dean. What is she doing when she's delivering the materials that makes the difference? Is it something to do with how she's delivering, when she's talking about certain things, what pages she's spending more time on versus others? I mean, the content can really leave clues to success.

Janet:

Yeah. So in your hypothetical example, if Caitlin is our leading sales rep, then we could dive into how she's using the presentation and then get insights like, oh, within the first 10 minutes, I'm making this up on the fly right here, but in the first 10 minutes, Caitlin has hit on these three product features and all the color options.

Dean:

That's

Janet:

right. And she's doing that more consistently than anybody else. And she closes seven points higher than all the other sales reps.

Dean:

That's right.

Janet:

Well, then you train on that.

Dean:

Exactly. I use the financing example as a real one because I think there's a, There's a push for financing in today's day and age. And it's something that some people are really uncomfortable talking about. And it's one of these things that we hear from our customers all the time. We need people to position and educate on financing. They built two or three pages or one page to explain the financing options that are available and they realize people aren't getting to it or presenting it in the right way. So there's lots of really good training, teaching, coaching that can come out of using advanced analytics on top of the presentation data.

Caitlyn:

So exciting. All of this is amazing. We geek out over data. Absolutely. I mean, people who listen to this are owners, marketing managers, sales managers, et cetera, from businesses of all size. A small, just mid-sized business, they might find this overwhelming. How am I going to manage that influx of data? What can I get from it? I mean, this is, again, a little bit off script, but it's easy. It's not that difficult. I mean, we're making it sound super powerful and it is, but it's dead simple to use. I

Dean:

mean, you can be as advanced as you want, right? So we can create some advanced reports, but we also provide very top level metrics of who presented the most last week. What was the most popular presentation?

Unknown:

Like that, that kind of stuff that we present, we provide right out of the box.

Caitlyn:

Okay. That's amazing. Do you see any like mistakes that companies are making with their sales presentations? Like I mean, amongst some of the other data points?

Dean:

Yeah, I would say the biggest mistakes they make is not, number one, not knowing their sales process. I think it's really hard to nail down a good in-home sales workflow. And I think the presentation is part of the workflow if you don't understand your sales process. I mean, we see the most customers leave our platform, not because they didn't like the content, because they really struggled because they didn't have a great sales process. And then mapping that presentation to the process makes it that much more effective. Another one is not having great assets to tell their story. They don't have pictures. They don't have lifestyle images. They don't really understand who their customer is. So they don't know, like, what do I put in the presentation? Because you want the customer to see themselves, literally, not literally like a picture of them, but, you know, people who look like them, houses that look like theirs, projects that look like the ones they are. Exactly. don't have those great assets to tell their story. I'll tell you the saddest one is they have no plan for adoption. They buy technology. It's like loading up the plate at the buffet and they're like, I have no idea how I'm going to consume all this. They just don't plan for the sales rep who's going to be resistant to adopting new technology or the learning curve that it takes because it does. It's not all simple. It takes time to adopt technology.

Janet:

We have deaf with our clients, we have helped our clients with the onboarding from the content. I mean, we didn't sell Engage. They bought Engage and then they told us, hey, help us build out this Engage presentation. But we have walked that walk where they didn't have the assets. They weren't exactly sure how they were going to integrate it into their sales process. So we so know what you're talking about. But we've seen our customers kind of push through that and then come out the other side. with much tighter controls over, you know, if you've got 10 sales reps, 15 sales reps. I mean, one of the big things that I heard from our customers was, okay, we used to use binders, like hard copy pocket folders. Then we bought everybody iPads and we made a keynote presentation. But if we ever wanted to change the keynote, they all had to come back into the office with their iPad and we had to load it up and And then you have this situation where like, okay, well, maybe Sally was sick that day, which she's now got an iPad floating around out there with an outdated presentation with old pricing or an old promo or whatever. And so Engage kind of solves all of that because it's a central hub for your official presentation that then you push out to those iPads without them having to come into the office. So I'm glad you talked about the adoption part of it because I think with any technology, if you introduce it into your company and you don't have a plan for rollout and adoption, it's just not going to go very well.

Dean:

Yeah. I mean, how many people have had failed CRM projects, failed CPQ projects, failed digital marketing project? I mean, you guys probably see that all the

Janet:

time.

Dean:

Yeah. We're doing marketing automation. You're like, are you, are you ready for that? What

Janet:

you did is you gave your credit card to a company. Right. That's right. And now you're being billed for it and you're mad that it's not working.

Dean:

Well, don't know what you mean i've never had any customers call me about that yeah

Janet:

so do you have any um i mean our listeners really love to hear like concrete numbers that they can get excited about do you have um some numbers you can share with us about a customer that they brought engage on they onboarded they trained and they saw an increase in their sales closing ratio can you share any numbers

Dean:

absolutely so we're super fortunate i mean our customers are willing a willing to share their success because everyone's really proud like yeah it's not a simple thing you do have to put some work in to make it successful and we have a success story on our website everybody can go read this ridge top exteriors okay in their first year using engage their average closing rate rose just shy of four points so four points not like four percent on top of something i don't they didn't give us the exact detail but that's like 32 to 36 it's right it's a significant jump. So up, you know, just shy of four points and their average ticket also increased 12 points. Oh, now they closing more, they're closing for a higher rate leading to an increase and get this 40% revenue improvement across all three of their locations.

Caitlyn:

Wow. Oh my gosh.

Dean:

Yeah. And we've seen any, so the, you know, the close rate we've seen anywhere from, you know, two, 3% all the I mean, it's incredible. And what it is, it's consistency. It's doing the thing over and over. It's what people train for in the sales process. Now you're giving them content to support it, and it's just kind of a high tide rises old boat sort of scenario of just that consistency over and over.

Janet:

You know, we've never talked about this before, but it just strikes me. I wonder if you've got a sales force, and let's say you're a growing company and you're bringing on sales reps. can be really hard to train people and get them to do things consistently especially if some of your sales folks are either transitioning from another industry or maybe they're younger I would imagine and I don't know if this is true I would imagine that if you're new in that job and you have this presentation that you're hearing from your colleagues oh you know before you join the company we used to do it this other way and since we've been doing it this way our closing ratio is go up, which means the sales reps make more money.

Dean:

For

Janet:

new hires on the sales team, I would imagine that it actually gives them more confidence. If you just do the program, if you do it the way we trained you, if you use the presentation, if you go through the interactive steps the way we trained you to, the numbers show you could have four points higher on your closing ratio. I don't know if you've heard any of that anecdotal from your customers that it's soft measurement, but it's this confidence.

Dean:

There's a couple of things. We've seen it as a recruiting tool. Some of our better customers say, you get to sell with Engage here.

Caitlyn:

We

Dean:

actually track a referral type inside of our CRM that when someone leaves somewhere and goes to another place that's not using Engage, but they tell them to use Engage, we're like, we we kind of give them credit for saying, Hey, you brought engaged to your new place.

Janet:

Right? So then you've got, I'm going to, I'm going to make up somebody. You got Robert. He's a rockstar sales guy. He left a roofing company and went to a siding company. That's doing really well, but the siding company is kind of behind the times on. And Robert says to the owners, dudes, I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but at my old company, we did this. You should check it out. That's, that's awesome.

Dean:

Yeah. And what we also find is people are you, again, our best customers, the ones who have the most success for their sales team actually use Engage in the training process. So what they do is they take their Engage presentation and they get some of their best reps to present it live and they record it. And then what they do is they literally just take an interactive, one of our little interactive elements and put it on the screen as a training button. So every page has one, two, three examples. So their training deck is, is-

Janet:

On the device that they're going to be using. On the device.

Dean:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they have a separate version of the presentation with three little buttons, option one, two, and three. And you can see how Janet and Dean and Sally all present the same thing. So they use Engage to train on Engage. It's kind of a self-perpetuating thing.

Caitlyn:

No, that's amazing. So we've obviously talked about how the sales team uses it. We've talked about how it's easy to use, the data behind it. So if somebody's interested, there's- obviously partnerships with manufacturers, et cetera. How, and again, a little off script, but then I'm teasing what I'm about to share. How would you get started? Like, I mean, are we asking like a marketing or sales manager to go in and like create the presentation? Like, I mean, you guys walk me through that and then

Dean:

we'll share. It's a very typical question. Like, so what people do is they come to our website, they sign up for a demo, they get on with our sales team and we go through the demo and then the next logical question is this sounds really great but how do i get started

Caitlyn:

exactly

Dean:

and we part of what you buy into when you buy into the engaged platform is you buy into our onboarding team so we give you an onboarding manager who stays with you for the life of your contract with us they get you up and running what we do ask is that there's an owner internally right someone has to own the adoption and own the plan to get engaged you know in the infrastructure

Janet:

an engaged cheerleader.

Dean:

Yeah. We call it a champion. Yeah. Stakeholder, champion, cheerleader. I like all three of those. And you have to have someone who has ownership because like any technology product, if you don't have someone who's truly owning how it's going to be used and measured the success measured within your infrastructure, you're not going to be successful. Same thing with CRM or anything else you're doing. If you don't have success metrics, why are you doing it? So we help people get up and running. So we'll find who Who's going to actually administer the system? Who's going to add the users, make sure they have the right content assigned, et cetera? Who's going to build the content? Do you have someone who internally, who's going to be responsible for building the presentations? Some companies have people for that. Some companies don't. And we'll talk in a minute maybe about how the companies that don't might do that. But it's more of a, in that respect, there's a kind of a DIY world. And then there's a DFY. You do it yourself. it's done for you. And we have a whole host of folks who we can connect people with if they want them to have it done for them.

Janet:

On the do it for you, Caitlin, go ahead.

Caitlyn:

Yeah, no. So I know we've been talking for a while and yeah, thanks for answering that last question because I wanted to tee this up. So as of today, Fat Cat is officially a certified engaged designer, which is super exciting because of all of the reasons we were just talking about. I mean, this is a a powerful, powerful, powerful tool, but the legwork to make sure the presentation stays up to date. Looks good. With relevant content. Maybe we've talked about, you know, having versions for different ages of people who, you know, you're going to sell to. You

Janet:

know, the type of home. Different products. Yeah, different

Caitlyn:

products, etc. So what this means, it's not just a badge on our website. So our team has been trained by approved and So we know what we're doing. you're not like left out, you know, on your own to build this presentation. You can point to an agency like ours. And I know there'll be others who can do this too. So

Janet:

yeah, we're so excited about this. So yeah. Stoked to be part of the program. Can you share with us why you created the certification program?

Dean:

Yeah,

Janet:

absolutely.

Dean:

So, I mean, we realize until we, you know, hundreds of customers coming to us all the time and as, as, as much as we, much as we want to believe that they are going to follow through on their promises and as much as they believe they're going to be able to carve out the time to do it, there are only so many hours in a day. I think we all get to the end of our day and you're like, yep, I thought I was going to get those 12 things done and I got four. Sometimes you

Janet:

need to buy back. I'm impressed. I get two out of 12.

Dean:

Sometimes you need to buy back your time. When you look at your buyback rate and you say, all right, so So if my time is worth $100 an hour and I can pay someone $20 an hour to do the thing, why am I spending my $100 an hour to do it? Whatever your buyback rate is. And I think also you're hiring the expert to shortcut the process. And there's a real cost to doing it yourself. And however you calculate that for yourself, I actually think about this in terms of a buyback rate. I look at what value I bring to the company and I think, is this task that I'm about to do, right? You don't spend, you know, your time on $10 tasks that not that this is minimizing what you guys are going to provide. You shortcut that for the customer. And we feel like you have understanding of their brand. You have understanding of maybe the assets they have. You understand the marketing story that you're already trying to tell. You can shortcut it so much for them. So we figured why not partner with people like Fat Cat in order to tell the story for Absolutely.

Janet:

I mean, for the customers where we've built the Engage presentation, to your point, we're already doing their display ads. If they're doing any kind of like flyers at home shows. Managing their website. We're already managing their website. We're already doing their social media. Email marketing. there's very little friction for us because we already know how to use Engage and we already have all their assets. We know what their promo offers. We know what their value proposition is. We know what their demographics are. We know what their service area is. We're just putting it into a platform that we already know how to drive.

Dean:

That's right. That's right.

Caitlyn:

So we're excited. I know our clients who are not using Engage have been poked about it. Absolutely. And if you're not a client of Fat Cat, but you're a client of Engage and you are listening to this, you're like, gosh, I needed help. Just because we're not your full-time agency also doesn't mean we can't help you plug in and just clean up the presentation. We'll talk more about that in just a second. We want to hear real quick, what's next? Is there anything new, features coming to Engage?

Dean:

Content is king or queen, however you want to look at it. We believe that we need to do everything we can to get customers up and running faster. One of the strategies is to build an engaged certified design network so that you can work with people to do it. We're also looking at ways to do that within our platform so that we can do what we're calling dynamic content. So imagine you create a presentation that's 80% the same for everyone, but because it's connected to your CRM, we can grab 20% of the content and update certain things so that it's unique and personalized for that pitch.

Janet:

That is super cool.

Dean:

So that's one big thing. And then the other one as premium content so that the other side of that is what if there's form data or pricing data that you want to insert because you just did a quote in some quoting software we're working on those kinds of things as well so lots of really good ways to make your content even more valuable and dynamic at the point of sale

Janet:

and i would imagine once you get all those things plugged in for the homeowner who honestly is just looking for the solution you know they just they want they want the thing they want the solar panels they want the bathroom they want the siding and now you're just making it really easy for them to say yes

Dean:

yeah I mean hyper personalization is a huge trend I think you guys probably know the more that I can see myself in the things that you are presenting to me the more likely I'm going to buy from you and you know people buy from people they know like and trust and the more I can build that trust by personalizing the content we're very much going down that path

Caitlyn:

absolutely No, that's amazing. It's just like what we do with our display ads. Thank you so much. You gave our listeners a behind-the-scenes look at how Engage is changing the sales game for the home improvement industry. We're so excited to be a certified Engage designer.

Janet:

Yes, and for everyone listening, remember Fat Cat Strategies is now a certified Engage designer. And that means if you're ready to upgrade your sales presentations, we can not only get you set up on the platform, but we can also design an interactive deck built to help you close more deals. Plus, you'll get exclusive perks to keep your presentations working hard for you. So we'll drop all that information in the show notes so you can learn more and book a consultation with our team. Yeah. Thank you, Dean. We could have talked forever.

Caitlyn:

Thank you for having me on.

Unknown:

I appreciate the time.

Caitlyn:

Yes, we so appreciate you. And as always, be sure to follow us wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss an episode. A review is always great and we will catch you next time on Digital Marketing for Contractors.

Speaker 00:

Digital Marketing for Contractors is created by Fat Cat's For more information visit FatCatStrategies.com