How a Commercial Window Manufacturer Grew 30% with Tech & Alignment

We self distribute, we sell direct, we've taken that same mindset into our sales approach, into our marketing approach, and not to sound bad but the more control you have, the more you can control. 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 Popmi Kolev, and in the studio with me today, we have Curtis Pertalwitz. He is the sales and marketing director at Intisquindos, and has a rare perspective of not just overseeing sales and marketing, which we usually have feelings about, but he's the real deal. He's also over customer service. He does key projects. He's got a 360 view of the customer journey, and I'm excited to dive into all that is involved in that today, so Curtis, thanks so much for your time. Welcome to the show. Hi, Beth, well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Before we get started, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and about Intisquindos. Yeah, happy to. A little bit about myself. As you mentioned, my name is Curtis Pertalwitz. The sales and marketing director at Intisquindos, but what that really means is that I oversee our sales team, our marketing team, our customer service team, and many of our core strategic projects as a company, because what's really important, especially for our clients, is that all of our departments are aligned in our mission, and make sure that everything we do on a daily basis is part of our culture. I've been in the industry since 1996, so I've been able to experience a lot, see a lot over the years, learn a lot, worked with a lot of great people, and from there, I've been able to build my own knowledge to help our clients even more. As a company, Intisquindos, we are a commercial windows manufacturer. We manufacture windows, doors, unitized curtain wall for commercial projects, so mostly mid-rise, high-rise applications, always finding ways to make sure that our clients get what they need, successful solutions, and in part of that approach, we are a tech-forward AI-enabled company, which is key as part of our approach in that we find ways outside of the box to make things easier for our clients, not just so that they get upgrade projects, but so they could be budget-friendly on time and on schedule. Curtis, I know when you and I chatted, I said we have to talk about your job title, because usually in our industry, when someone's title is director of sales and marketing, what it really means is director of sales, also we have some marketing sometimes. And I was really impressed when we chatted because that's clearly not how you and Intis have approached your role. Tell me a little of what it looks like to create balance between some very strong competing priorities. Yeah, it's a great point because balance is a key, but really also alignment. And we've all too often in our industry and in other industries as well, are it odds between sales and marketing? One wanting to go one way, one seeing something else the other way, and for us, we've realized early on that sales and marketing need to work together. I have that same uniform message, but also share information and experience as well. Marketing world definitely has their buzzwords, their topics, sales has theirs, but what's key is keeping those uniform throughout and making sure that it's a cultural impact on a day to day basis so that no matter whom you speak with on the team across the company, we're all on the same page as a client, you're getting the same experience. Can you imagine going to an organization where you are only over one of the three of those departments now? I could not. It's definitely changed my experience as well, and I see how the rocket ship takes off when you're together as opposed to in individual silos. A great response, which was it's not just balance, it's alignment. What are some of the benefits? How are you rolling all of that up under one umbrella and to get the most out of it? Yeah, so a lot of shared meetings, a lot of shared viewpoints, a lot of shared conversations, no one department reports to the other, we all work side by side to make sure that we're sharing the same information, we're working off of the same information, we're discussing the same ideas and all having a voice in those as well. Tell me a little bit about what your technology looks like. You said your AI forward, which you wouldn't believe it is not usually how organizations are introduced on our podcast. So what does that mean for you? You've always got tech forward. You've got impressive tech tools. You said you're an AI forward organization. What does that mean in practice? Yeah, so as a company, we are a decentralized company with a very robust internal IT team. So we design a lot of things internally to help drive our support of our clients and the business that they need and expect. So for us, we're constantly developing a lot of applications to help better serve our clients. So when we see what the clients needs are, rather than go out, try to shop something and fit it into a box, which we know it's always outside of that, we design that ourselves. And so even down to the way we support our clients through quote presentations, through design analysis, we've even designed a whole design software for our clients to be able to design a building much faster and a much more expeditious way in the way they want to, not the way we want them to. And that's key is really listening to your clients and that's where the sales and marketing working together is very important. So you are certainly not the only window company in the industry, right? So if I'm a window company, we're serving the same people and I'm not talking about as competitors, I'm just saying like your customers and my customers are probably very similar. Again, it's a unique perspective to take of where we're going to go after these customer needs from a technology standpoint. Walk me back, bring me to some history. What was the room like? How did you decide as an organization the way we will solve customer problems is through technology? What was the driving reason for that and what was the intended and hope outcome of tech over in person or something like that? So looking back at our history, we were that old school way, that old style that in person way, then COVID came. We were all set up because we were all spread out across the country. We were all remote to an extent, but COVID obviously forced and changed people to be different. As we know, work from home, the remote work environment, we leaned in and embraced it. We saw immediately how the benefits were there and it wasn't just there. It was how we could interact and better support our clients. You no longer had the ability at the time to sit across the table from somebody and flip pages together, mark it up with a pen. And we actually saw that we could be more productive by leaning into technology and utilizing technology to do those virtual page turns, those design elements. And so we really invested heavily in the IT side to design the programs internally so that they could be used externally to support our clients. We made some errors along the way. We learned some things most definitely, but the key there is also listening to your clients and meeting them where they want to be met and not forcing the way you want to meet them on them. And through that, we've been able to, through a lot of iterations, design and continuously change and update our approach to be there for what works best for our clients. What results do you see from that decision that tells you this is the right decision? How are you measuring success for pushing further into technology? Yeah, that's a fantastic question because we see it on the day to day on the numbers game in the metrics. That's a fantastic thing. From a company side, we also see it that we've become much more efficient. Our team has grown most definitely, but at the same time, the percentage of what an individual can work with and can see, we see that exponentially grow. Ourself have continued to grow, which is great, but it's also showing that we at the time had moved from a couple small regions in the Northeast in the mid-Atlantic states to now being in 44 states to Canadian provinces and more projects across 48 states coming as well. So a smaller team doing more. There's just so many metrics that show that, but really at the end of the day, the biggest metric are the client reviews and the testimonials we hear from our clients. So, would you say even in the past couple years when we've seen a settling from post-COVID sales numbers, you guys have continued to grow even over the past several years, you have year-over-year growth? Yeah, we're seeing not only double-digit growth, but we're seeing on average 30% year-over-year growth. More states coming on, more areas, we're just continuing to scratch the surface. Is there a way that you're leveraging technology as part of building a bridge with relationships as well? Are you really pulled back from interpersonal connections and it's full on a tech experience? No, so there's definitely a person behind it. It's not just working with a computer. Technology is only as good as the person that helps to guide it and being that it's guided. So we do have robust internal training programs as well for our team that is not just focused on using the tech, but how to make things work for the client. What is that focus? How can we help them get to their solution faster? Which leads also to additional support technology in the design side, in the support side of specifications and details and documents. But being able to have that all at your fingertips, the beauty of being on these remote calls is that we can click and choose, pull things up quickly and speed there is huge. So because you're having more and more remote conversations, the tools are further supporting how the sales process is involved as well. Yeah, it's what the clients need when they need it and when everybody needs it is right now. That's amazing. I'm going to pivot us and take us to marketing before I do. I need to discuss the custom art that I'm seeing on your walls. So for our listeners who are missing the view that I have, there is some exceptional finger paints behind you. Tell me about your artist, the hand print. So I've got big hand print, small orange hand print for our listeners. Tell me about your finger paint arts on the wall. Love it. Yeah, so I'm a very proud dad of two little girls. Now five and eight when those finger paintings were done, they were younger. And this is one of the benefits that we love and is part of our culture to being remote. While our manufacturing team is in remote, we haven't figured that part out yet. Our entire sales team, our entire marketing team, all of our office support team, we are all remote. And so we do have the benefit of being able to work from home and it makes everybody happier as well being around family and seeing this. So I'm proud to show that off and show their accomplishments. I love it. I should have guessed you have girls. I don't have finger paints because I have boys. And so I have like mud and sticks. We have a killer rock collection. If you ever want to see it, that I know intricately the different names of them. I should have girls sit and paint boys are just like muddy blurs back and forth. That's super cool. Okay, let's go to marketing. So what benefit do you see of having a marketer in the director of marketing position? Because you have a marketing background. How are you seeing the benefits of that or how do you bring your experience to that role that would be different than someone who's been in the business for a long time and knows the product really well, but may not know the marketing side as well. Yeah, it's important to definitely have both understandings and be able to speak both languages. We talk about when you deal with legal contracts, speaking legal ease. It's very similar to speaking sales and speaking marketing and then being able to translate those two. So great ideas still need to figure out how to execute them and to be able to jump from one arena to the other and have a foot in each one with an understanding. And then obviously an amazing team that we work with that can really make amazing things happen and incredible. They make these ideas come to life. That's important, but being able to communicate them and express that vision is an important component to making both sides work. If you were helping manufacturers define and create job descriptions, roles, talents for the marketing department or marketing leader in their organization, what would you want to make sure they have? That's a great question. Communication is probably the biggest component to it all because even the best ideas will never come off the ground if you can't communicate them or know how to communicate them. And then you use the other word and there's leadership and a leader doesn't have to be the best performer, but they need to know how to corral the team, get the team excited, inspire the team and get the best out of the team. Which some of that does come to communication as well, but having that vision and understanding in the open mind to acknowledge that they may not be the best performer on the team. In fact, it's better to surround yourselves with better performers and that's a key to having any team work better. As the overseer of marketing and sales and you mentioned, you guys have loads of meetings where everybody is in attendance. What does the check-and-balance or give-and-take look like between who's having the strategic voice, is it marketing, is it sales, is it customer experience, who's getting directive and told how to execute. How are you creating the balance there? So the biggest voice in our meetings, whether they're there or not, are the customers and the clients. So it's such a good marketer response. That was great. That was such a good response. And that's fair. I don't think that's a cop-out response. I think everybody on the same team. That's great. And that's our bell weather. We ask our question at every meeting when we're trying to make a decision what's going to benefit the client more because you could get into the numbers and look at ROI and look at dollars and cents. But at the end of the day, the biggest dollars and cents come from our customers. And so we need to have their voice as part of this. I've been there in the past in my life where we've developed a product. It's the next best thing. The budget balance right, everything was right, but the marketplace didn't need it, didn't want it. And there was no money coming through. So at the end of the day, that becomes the biggest voice in the meeting. We often say the strengths and weaknesses of sales and marketing. So you have to have the voice of sales. I know I'm speaking more from a marketing seat, but obviously even within our marketing agency, we have sales people. And we believe so strongly in marketing and sales alignment. I really think it's the only way that both are successful is in partnership the way that you're talking about. One of the tension points that we see is marketers, we live pretty high level, not pie in the sky, but we live big picture, look out front, tell everybody what's going on and how we deal with it. Sales people are great at the eye contact. They're great at like the one to one, which can often create tension of marketing says we should do X and sales team is like, my guy in North Dakota is gonna free. How are you handling those conversations? How do you navigate that to make sure everyone's voices heard in the proper way? Yeah, so it goes back to the balance and making sure you're identifying your voice as much as we define customer personas and who do our customers look like we also need to define ourselves in our own voices internally. Because you're right. Sales definitely has a different approach need want than marketing and also different specialties. And so understanding from the marketing side for us, our marketing team comes at it from a side of education. Yes, they're looking to build leads, but they're organically doing so as well through educating the marketplace about what we can offer, what those pain points are, what those solutions are. Sales is going to take that and identify it to the individual client and their individual pain point, but knowing that you're not going to cross channels and paths because you have two different voices in two different situations, but how you can use each other for your situation. What are you measuring internally to demonstrate marketing's impact in a space with longer sales cycles and channel complexity? Yeah, that's been a difficult situation to address for years, because as you mentioned, our life cycle on a sales process is anywhere from 18 to 24 months. So it's very easy to get lost on the numbers in a short period of time when it's really about the longer period of time. So what we've done is we've segmented each part to test to see how it's going along not only in the way we sell on the stages that we sell, but also in the way marketing interacts. And so we've taken individual leads and we focus on those marketing qualified leads, the conversion rates to sales qualified leads, the conversion through the different stages, which for our sales stages, we've aligned to the construction stages on a project, again, aligning it to our clients. And we see that all the way throughout so that at any single point, you can see how things are moving and continuing to move as opposed to just looking at just one number over time, which can get lost easily over time. Is there something you guys are doing, either like a particular tool, particular campaign that has worked the best that you could tell us maybe some examples, KPIs around? So for us, what we first started out as a company, we were primarily focused on the new construction marketplace and we have more than we can handle at the time as we continue to grow. We saw more opportunity and for us, another area was on the retrofit replacement and rehab side and we've been focusing campaigns on that and we do track the efficacy of those campaigns quickly to see what is the engagement rates. But we also have been tracking them over the last two years as well as what is the progression of opportunities through in the path that I mentioned. And as such, we've done some organic marketing, we've done some paid marketing, we've seen it all to the point now where we're starting to see the revenue come through on that side and giving an example just even on figures year over year. We've more than doubled the number of sales in that area and two and a half X the revenue dollars coming in year over year. So we're seeing that that's the end result, but all along the way there, we saw the size of pipeline, we saw the progression of each stage, the conversion to each stage. We were monitoring that all along because waiting two years to see a result is a long time, but we were able to know at any given point how it was flowing through the pipeline. I think that's a really important point you're talking about. We talk a lot about leading indicators and lagging indicators and the hard truth is sales and revenue are lagging indicators of product market fit of all sorts of level of competitiveness. Did you make the right investment of all sorts of things. So what I'm hearing you say is longer sales cycles mean you consider the pipeline itself a metric of success. How many people top funnel mid funnel bottom funnel percentage of them that are moving from top to middle to bottom that you're tracking that the journey itself because along the way it all can get lost, but making sure you're building at each of those funnels. So that revenue while you can't necessarily say, hey, this is Jake and he came in on September 3rd at from this conversion point and then we can see that he spent $3,000 with us at this date. We can't correlate one person to one person conversion to sales, but you can see our pipeline is growing and our revenue is growing. We know that those two things are influencing each other. Yeah, and we can also see at which point we have to make adjustments. Yes. So by focusing on the conversion from stage to stage, we're also able to see and we are tracking those. We track the monthly previous trailing three months and the trailing 12 months so that we can see what are those trends? Are they heading in the right direction? Are people getting stuck at a certain point? What can we do differently at that point? So it's allowing us in real time to actually pull the future forward and know what will happen based on what is happening now. That's such a good example of control what you can control. What we can control is when they're in the funnel and for you Curtis, where does your dark spot happen? Where do you lose tracking? Is it when they buy from a distributor or where are you guys losing the clothes loop reporting? The dark front of the moon. That's what I was trying to say. Where's the dark side of the moon for you? Other people say it, but that's how I think I don't think that's a technically ubiquitously used term, but that's how I think of that. We've tried to minimize that potential. So for us, we actually don't go through distributors. We self distribute. We sell direct and there are areas that are definitely not as impactful as others, but for us, we try to use the control levers. We saw that in the manufacturing side, the benefits of your improvements on QA QC and what you can do, whether you're sourcing something or you're manufacturing a specific component yourself as well. We've taken that same mindset into our sales approach, into our marketing approach and not to sound bad, but the more control you have, the more you can control. I want to flip seats really for a little minute, which normally I'm thinking when I'm talking to someone over marketing and sales, how do I understand, how do I talk to you so we can get on the same plan of making sure marketing sales are an alignment. And we talk a lot about strengths and weaknesses of marketing and sales. Like we just said, I want to wear your sales hat for a minute and tell me as a marketer, where are marketers and organizations that have a strong marketing division under estimating the value of sales. So that's a great question because sales will always say it's on marketing marketing will always say it's on sales of who can do what what I would say if I were to put the sales hat on marketing can lean more into who their sales people are most companies have some incredibly talented sales. And that's what differentiates a lot of situations within companies of we all know this sales reps a little better than that sales rep utilize their strengths as well as much as sales can utilize marketing strengths for the different materials you might put out the different visuals explanation of comparisons to product. It's the same thing as well, where are your sales people's strengths, where their weaknesses that you can actually boost by marketing over those weaknesses to counterbalance them and I think those things are key when you have two departments working together. That's so funny because truly doesn't market or see right it's also what sales people do is we sit in the seat of our customer what do they need what do they understand what are their own personal strengths weaknesses gaps in education understanding. If you tell them about this they're not going to care if you tell them about this other thing they're going to pay twice as much to have the same perspective of a marketing team to support sales as we're creating the collateral and the campaigns here's how we need to explain it. So this sales guy to this saleswoman to this part of the country like territory because one thing matters there was over another to customize also at like this sales individual level like we would a bm at the customer level is a kind of no brainer that I can't say I've completely thought of and that way before I think that's fantastic I really love that. Curtis before let you go let me ask you if you have one piece of advice for manufacturer dealer who is looking to create better alignment among their marketing and sales divisions what would it be have been the same meetings let them have a voice on the topic don't have separate meetings don't have one report to the other have them report together. I love it I love it that was great if any of our listeners want to get in touch reach out pick your brain here more about your amazing technology tools what's the best way for them to get in touch. Yeah so for myself personally happy to speak with anybody like I said I've been in this industry since 96 and I've been a benefactor of so many folks mentoring me and would love to help others as well however I can pick each other's brains best way to get a hold of me isn't my email Curtis K you are TIS at into windows dot com or feel free to reach out on Twitter. Twitter guy what do you talk about on Twitter we needed to look into this town what are you talking about the most in your Twitter profile. So for me my Twitter is more based also on just the business aspect most big on LinkedIn as well more so on the leadership side so it goes back to having the voice for that your clients want and meeting people where they are and each different platform has different needs wants and interactions and different styles and so my voice I'm able to speak in different voices which are part of me and who I am to do. The group that wants to hear it what do you think about rock all of AI is a tremendous tool one of the things that I look at and I use AI religiously throughout my day is also utilizing the different a eyes for their intended purposes there's some like rock there's others like Claude or Gemini they all have their purpose and it's important for us to know which ones are better for which ones have a better marketing voice which one have a better sales voice yes there's prompts and you can adjust settings to the voice that you wanted to have but some of them are stronger in certain areas. As well and knowing which ones to use at which time what do you use for marketing voice my main marketing voice using AI is Claude right now formally bar that has a little bit more of a marketing persona to it and will meet a little bit more and react a little bit better to the prompts for copy when it comes to some of the visuals there's so many that are popping up right now which depends on what you're looking for if you're looking for motion if you're looking for still graphic if you're looking for an illustration so they are too many to name but when it comes to a marketing voice I think that's a great thing. It comes to a marketing voice I think Claude for myself is the best one. What about research what do you use for research depends on the type of research I'm doing what I would say as with any AI be careful what you're putting in because what you're putting in you may also prompt certain things to come out as a company we do use close workspaces whether it being chat GPT so you want to be careful for any proprietary or private or sensitive information. So when it comes to research Grock is a good one some days it's chat GPT some days it's Gemini depends on the type of research you're looking to do. Have you ever tried Manus? I have not now. So Manus I see them advertised the most is like they build web pages or apps or whatever for no code local I have no interest in going down that rabbit hole at this point in my career. I do see it as one of the best tools for research it gets research in a different way and is able to spit things back out in a way that matches what the research required. I have also seen Manus break through some walls that I've walked like chat GPT's for example get stuck and say this is really all I can find and Manus is like I got everything I like went to the library and read all these books like. Yeah. Anyway sorry I took it down a rabbit hole. That's great but I would say also about AI is feel free to run it through the prompts multiple times I've noticed that you may ask the same question two or three times but you'll keep refining your answer to where you want it to go. Yeah I'm a big advocate of testing them out of all run similar prompts on multiple platforms because it depends on where they are even in their update cycle sometimes of who's going to give you the best output for what you're doing or how you ask it in a particular day. So I love that. I appreciate it. Thanks for going on that little rabbit trail with us Curtis. Thank you so much for your time and for our listeners if you want more great content like this head to venvio.com/podcast to subscribe until next time I'm Beth Papnicola. Thanks everybody.