Shed Geek Podcast

STEEL KINGS: Lead Generation Made Simple PT 1

• Shed Geek Podcast • Season 5 • Episode 101

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What happens when a steel dealer, a pandemic, and a 3D configurator collide? We bring on IdeaRoom co-founder and CEO, Dan Van Orden, to unpack how builders and dealers moved from paper quotes to mobile-first design that turns curiosity into committed buyers. Dan shares the scrappy origin story—from woodworking plans to full-blown configurators for sheds, carports, post-frame, and red iron—and why the real breakthrough wasn’t just 3D visuals, but cleaner processes and smarter pricing logic that reduce errors.

We talk through the moments that changed the game: remote screen-shares that closed sales in minutes, branded estimates that land in a customer’s inbox before the call ends, and a mobile experience that finally feels natural on a phone. Dan explains Boost, IdeaRoom’s streamlined UI that lifts lead conversion without disrupting sales teams, plus the growing set of self-serve tools that let dealers update base and component pricing fast. If steel costs or tariffs force changes, you adjust the rules, keep the guardrails, and keep selling.

This conversation leans into the operational side too—onboarding that now takes weeks, not months; support that solves quick wins in minutes; and the power of webhooks and CRM integrations to pass clean specs through your pipeline. We share how TVs in the showroom, live co-design with customers, and clear option rules build trust and speed up approvals. The big takeaway: a customer-facing 3D configurator isn’t a gadget; it’s your most persuasive salesperson, available on every device, at every hour.

If you care about digital sales, steel buildings, sheds, carports, or post-frame marketing, you’ll walk away with practical moves to modernize how you sell—without losing the relationships that drive this industry. Subscribe, share this with a builder who still quotes by PDF, and tell us: what’s the next bottleneck you want us to break down?

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Studio Sponsor: J Money LLC

Jared:

Yeah, what I'll tell you, dude, is I am on the left. It is time to get motivated about your business. It's time for some personal development. It's time to get out and take an hour with people. I can tell you that the Steel Kings offering.

Eric:

People need to write out the food.

Jared:

You have to get out in your communities, everybody, and do something good for somebody else. Don't make me feel better. What is going on, Eric Man? It is so fun seeing that new intro. Welcome to a new episode of the Steel Kings podcast. I'm Jared, and my man over there is Eric, and we are the Steel Kings coming back at you with another episode today. Eric man, what's going on, dude?

Eric:

How are you? Bro, I got a new setup.

Jared:

Yeah, bro.

Eric:

I'm not in the steel building anymore.

Jared:

Yeah, we're officially on air. We retired.

Eric:

Yeah, we're on air. And we oh we and we're and we're officially retiring the steel building. I like it. Steel building is gone.

Jared:

I like it. Yeah. I like it, man.

Eric:

Bro, it's Friday. Sunny. Yeah, dude.

Jared:

It's been a busy week. Dude, we met with NFBA. We talked to our friend Darren from Stor-Mor. Uh, man, it has been a powerful, powerful week for the Steel Kings, and we are happy to be with you on a Friday afternoon getting ready to talk to a really, really important and uh good friend of the Steel Kings podcast. Eric, man, you got anything before we bring this guy in? I don't even want to wait that long.

Eric:

I mean, honestly, I feel like I'm a little jealous that I don't get to go out to dinner with y'all tonight, but what I will say is that this is the way I'm ending my week. And so it could, I couldn't, I could not imagine doing it a different way than than doing a podcast with with the OG himself. That's right. That's right. And so I'm super excited about it, man. Life is good.

Jared:

So we've got so Dayton Barns, Five Rivers Pole Barns. You guys know all about our businesses. We utilize and have shared this on the product. Uh I shared this product on the podcast multiple times at this point, but we are bringing in the chief executive officer, co-founder of Idea Room. So Idea Room has been a huge part of our business and a huge part of what we do every single day. And without further ado, we're gonna bring in the man Dan Van Orden is the CEO and co-founder of Idea Room. What's up, dude? What's up, Dan? How are you, brother?

Dan:

I'm just jazzed to be on the show, guys. Thanks for hyping me up.

Jared:

Yeah, man, for sure. For sure, man. We have been a loyal and true client to you in the idea room for a long time. And the guys and gals that listen to the podcast have heard us go on and on and on, probably at nauseum more often than not, that we absolutely love the product and we are absolutely thrilled to have you on with us, man. So thank you for being on the podcast today.

Dan:

Well, thank you. And we love you guys. Thank you for being loyal customers, and it's awesome to see you moving and shaking in bigger ways. So, yeah, really appreciate being here.

Jared:

Well, man, don't waste any time. We've got so much that we want to talk about. We we've got an outline, right? We we talk about this stuff, we pull the curtain back. I always ask the guest, hey, what are we gonna rep today? What are we gonna talk about? Dan was the most organized guy. He gave me exactly what I asked for. I've got so much content here, we may end up breaking it into two episodes. So bear with us. But I can tell you, Dan, introduce yourself to everybody. Not everybody knows you like we do. Give us the the aerial view of Dan and Idea Room.

Dan:

Yeah, sure thing. Dan Van Orden, co-founder and CEO of Idea Room. You already said that. Uh I'm a software engineer by background, and then I moved into sales, which will come into play in the story about Idea Room. Uh, and now I'm running the company, uh, which is like being strapped to a jetpack. So uh with that, I actually it's probably a good idea to jump into a little bit about the company. Um yeah, anything else you need to know about me personally?

Jared:

No, I can just attest to you guys Dan's a great guy. Dan actually, I believe, was the one that signed us up originally when he was a uh when he was a sales guy. So this is a guy that let me give you this nugget of information. If you're at a specific spot in your lives where you feel like you might be lower on the totem pole than you expect to be work really hard, then you might be the boss one day. Because I can tell you, Dan has worked his way up through the entire infrastructure idea room from basically, I'm looking at it here, Dan. You were a VP in engineering, then VP of sales, then senior vice president of sales, then chief revenue officer. Now you're the CEO. So you have been here every step of the way, climbing up the ladder. And for those of us that are listening that are business development guys and personal development guys, that is an impressive resume over 13 years. Just, I mean, many hats.

Dan:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jared:

Pretty much everything. You're a hat inventor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You invent new hats.

Dan:

That vice president title by starting the company.

Jared:

Uh that's sometimes how it starts, man. Seriously.

Dan:

Absolutely.

Jared:

Yeah, that's sometimes how it starts. When you when you perceive yourself in a role, you'll act in that role, right? When you start a company, you might be starting a business and you're setting, you know, the parameters, whether you're an LLC or an es Corp, and you're you're setting the the work parameters for every you know, partner, employee, or whatever. Giving that stuff, giving that title is that motivating factor to take the next step. Because really, even though Dan was the VP of engineering or the VP of sales, he was selling, guys. So be the title, right? Walk and act and and be the title. Um, I can tell you one thing. So I want to share this up front because it's been a it's been a joke for a while, kind of a laughing thing that we we joke around about here, but I'm gonna grab it because it's my favorite one. We talked about this. America builds better, and I believe that, right? So I want to hear about Idea Room. I want to know how Idea room started. Um I got mine somewhere. I Idaho basically company, but I know where it is Idaho USA.

Dan:

Go find us.

Jared:

Yeah, tell tell us about tell us about how Idea room got started, Dan. That's where I want to start.

Dan:

Yeah, so we started the company in 2012. So we're coming up on 14 years here in 2026. Yeah, and yeah, we're a proud Idaho-based startup company, uh, American-based startup company. And we're even deeply kind of connected to our community here because really a lot of the investment was from local angel investors, and Boise's kind of been a burgeoning kind of startup and technology hub. Uh, it was it was a beautiful hidden gem when I started. Uh, everybody's found out, and now they're kind of rushing in, but uh, it was a great place to start the company for sure.

Jared:

And we love we love hearing that because technology is at the center of what drives Idea Room, and that's the changes in the industry that we're gonna talk about later. So, what's happened in 14 years, almost 14 years at Idea Room?

Dan:

Yeah, the deep history is we actually started in woodworking and do-it-yourself plans with kind of a two-sided marketplace, but we quickly moved into 3D-based tools for marketing and selling, honestly, a lot due to demand. And even very, very early on, and I can kind of share a few of you know the customers we worked with. We ended up in sheds, carports, post-frame, and red iron. Sometimes we hunted down some of the companies that we worked with, like in sheds, one of the earliest was uh Studio Shed, and they sell really high-end sheds online, and then ultimately some of these guys hunted us down. So it became really clear that there was, you know, demand just sitting there in all of these industries to kind of start marketing and selling their buildings online. And some of the earliest customers, and I just got to give a lot of gratitude because you know, again, they found us, we found them, and there's a lot of kind of just fortunate things that happened. As early as 2015, we were working with WIC buildings in post-frame, and that was back when we were doing custom-built 3D configurators, kind of building it almost from scratch with a base framework, and it you know, it took quite a long time. And then we really got into uh carports and tubular steel with uh Texwin and Mike Winslows from Texwin. We built them the first uh you know, custom carport configurator, and they pretty much hunted us down, if I remember correctly. And shout out to Mike, uh, it's a great company, and then I think it was uh Steel Buildings and Structures in 2018 when we really built what you guys know and was named at the time as Carport View. Uh, shout out to Javier. I mean, we went through a lot with those guys, kind of learning the industry, and then of course, Eagle Carports, I think was 2019. Shout out to Gabe. I mean, they've been a really good, longtime customer. And another one in post-friendly would be Leicester Buildings, which I think was 2019. So you can kind of see just a cluster there of working with a lot of really great companies early on, and that's where we get a lot of our best ideas, and of course, do all of that learning with those guys as we go into the industry and kind of build this thing.

Jared:

Yeah. Well, that's how that's how we came to be, right? That's how our relationship started was in 2020, and and everybody's heard this story. Eric started Dayton Barns and All Steel Buildings, he's a one-man shop in the middle of Huber Heights, Ohio, and he's figuring it out on the fly. He's selling wood sheds, and he starts to pick up metal carports, and he has a customer, and I'll let Eric tell the whole story. But long story short, he sells me a building, and we get to be exactly who we are now, the Steel Kings and all that. But Eric, tell us how you met Idea Room.

Eric:

Actually, you know, you you didn't have a 3D design tool, you knew what you wanted, but all steel car ports didn't have a 3D designer. Correct. It had that you had you had to you had to use um their bad e-modeler. Oh my gosh, it was awful. I remember getting on there because you had you had a you had the sent me the link.

Jared:

That's right.

Eric:

But but not I it might have only been maybe like four or five months before that. I remember I was I was jumping. The COVID honestly was good for business for sheds, and so we were I was pinned at the shop every day, and so um this this and I was advertising locally on Facebook, I was kind of like doing my thing, learning how to do all the campaigns and different things. And this woman really wanted a building, and she was trying to get me to go pretty much like three or four minutes from downtown Cincinnati, which was like maybe I would say an hour and 20 or so, and I just couldn't find the time to shut the shop down for long enough to go there, deal with it, go back because I didn't have any coverage up there, and so and I was scrolling and I remember uh I just called you guys, I think, on the phone, and I think I talked, I think honestly, Dan, I talked to you over the phone and said, I've got this lady, I had this whole grand idea. I'm gonna do a zoom call with her, I'm gonna share my screen, but I've got to get the builder on there. And at first I used American Steel because they signed up. Um, but but they didn't have their pricing on there, so it was like I used theirs and then priced it. And I was like, I don't want to use American Steels because it said American Steel. I wanted to use our own one. So that was kind of the um that was kind of the entry of like how that happened. And then I was, you know, I had this thought that like I'm gonna I'm gonna place ads everywhere and just set up a calendar and then just book people and build build build their design tools and literally send them and close deals like wherever I'm at. And so I think that was probably five years ago, like four years and ten months ago or something like that.

Dan:

Probably well, and you did probably talk to me. Um, you were figuring out how to sell very effectively online, and of course, from a marketing perspective, you're like, I want my brand and logo on there. Yeah, and I do remember sometimes not having the pricing because pricing is hard, especially in car ports, and like figuring that out has been a whole journey. Uh but yeah, I mean all of it.

Eric:

I remember Eagle was like right now, they had now you know Eagles has Eagles has a really good yeah, Eagle has one of the star star has star has a really good one, too.

Jared:

All of our all of our friends, see, that's the thing.

Dan:

Like, we when we start hearing like we're bragging on companies now, but yeah, I mean, you know, shout out we I cannot believe how much they grew, and we're actually all very fortunate, right? Like the whole pandemic thing. At first, I was like, Oh, is my company done? And then all of a sudden, no, everything boomed. And who even knew how much carports was gonna grow? Most of us that are in there early, it was like, Oh, yeah, we might have already tapped it out, and yet it just kept going and going.

Jared:

Still got it and and yeah, and I'll be honest, Dan, on the back of 3D configuration, honestly, because when you're talking about not being able to go see a customer in person, but you can present the building to them in real time, I would argue that Idea room might be single-handedly responsible for the continued boom in the carport industry.

Dan:

Well, I would love if we were part of like helping make that happen, because the most important thing to me that's like most fulfilling is when I hear having a real impact, like those moments of magic when you use it and you're like, Oh my goodness, all the leads coming in, or a customer is really lit up, or whatever the case may be. Like, uh, that's the most fulfilling thing. And having been here for the ride, yeah, I'm really grateful for that. It's really fun to see and work with all these folks.

Jared:

What's what's really been impactful to us has been the continued long-term relationship building that your team has been able to do with us. So by this point, I know, gosh, I know many, many different people on your team. Aiden, I have to give a huge shout out to Aiden. Aiden has helped me out so many times. I have to give him a huge shout out and Jordan and yourself and and others too. I mean, we've just we we've been through so many things together, and I know that that's a it's a cornerstone of your business that you care deeply about your customers, right? I mean, I I'm not just throwing that out to the wind. I mean, you care about them.

Dan:

Oh, yeah, we do. Uh, kind of going back to the beginning, we were building the software, selling the software, supporting it, onboarding it, and like working with people long term, all of it, because that's what happens when you're very early on. And I actually learned to sell both me and my co-founder, in order to make Idearoom successful, because our board told us like you've got to sell the software. When you sell it, I mean, from our perspective, it's like education and consulting. Do you have a problem? Can we help you solve it? And the most fulfilling thing is when you get all the way to when it really works, right? Yeah, and then yeah, we have so many people that have been here for so long, like Aiden. Aiden's fantastic. When we bring Wayman to the Shed Expo, everybody, everybody wants to talk to Wayman, not to me, really. Yeah, and those folks have been with us long enough, it's like they know idea room, they know like the configuration, and then they've become experts, and we've been able to see like across the industry what everybody does. And so they're kind. I mean, most of them are in Boise, and I see them when I go to the office. Uh, and yeah, we build those long-term relationships, and yeah, we we definitely care. I mean, we've gotten some of our best ideas from you guys. I know we talk about one Jared in particular that like got into the product because we were talking, and all of those support people like they care a ton, and really there's like this balance, right? You care, and there's craftsmanship and quality, and then there's also things that you want to kind of do fast, and we're always working on that all the time to kind of improve. Um, one of those things that is pretty dramatic is if you've been with us for a long time, you know, back at the beginning it was like it could be three to six months to get onboarded, it could be um, and then over time it went down to like two to three months, and then it went down to a month. And these days, because we've streamlined and standardized and templatized everything, it's typically done in two to four weeks, and that can only flow a little bit with kind of like uh time, but like it's fast, it's simple, and things work a lot more smoothly based on everything we've learned. Um, and we love that because it just makes experience better for you guys, yeah.

Jared:

And I think you know, one of the things that you've been really open with in talking to me is that you know, we talk to a lot of different folks, right? As we go out as the Steel Kings specifically at the Shed Expo a few months ago, you know, the biggest question I got is man, you really like idea room, but it takes a long time to get these things implemented and changes and things. And I always try to relay to customers, it's that way across the board. And I would argue that in a lot of ways, I like the transparency that you all give me. I've never once been told, hey, it's gonna be done in two days and it's done in two months. I like the idea of you have a chat interface built into your sales view portal. You can talk to your, you know, you can talk to the person that's handling your case through the process. I've really been appreciative as you guys have grown. You haven't forgotten about the process. It's the process has gotten better. So for you to call out that initially six months down to two to three months, now as little as a couple of weeks, that shows that not only are you focused on growing the business, you're focused on growing the processes behind it. And again, that's why you guys are continuing to be able to grow. Not that I need to tell you that, but I want to say that to everyone that's listening. If you've got a business and you feel like your process is struggling, slow down a little bit and work on the process first. And as you grow, continue to scale that process alongside because it'll leave you behind. And that's something that you guys have done a good job. Go ahead, Eric.

Eric:

You can scale a system 100%. So if you don't have a 3D design tool as part of your system, you should.

Jared:

Yeah, at this point, I can tell you. I'll be the first one to tell you. If you're listening to me right now on this podcast and you are so invested in your business that you're giving your time to a podcast that is industry specific and you don't have a 3D design tool, you are doing yourself.

Eric:

You know, shout out shout out to Morgan. We met her yesterday at the NFBA. She said some of the members of the NFBA don't even have a website. So if you don't have a website, you definitely don't have a design tool. And I'm and I'm not and I'm not like knocking it because you know, word of mouth is good. But if you want to grow your company, you need some sort of media presence. And if you have a website, you've got to have a design tool. And if you have a design tool, you need a front-facing one, like aka the customer can use it without it being annoying and frustrating. Um, and it because it articulates what they're looking for to the rep or the person receiving it, and they pretty much you're already on the same page before any contact's been made. And so, and that's a huge, that's a huge blessing.

Jared:

That was the next topic, right? Is that idea room meets you where you're at, and which most of the time these days people are on a computer or on their phone. I mean, that's that's the touching point, right, Dan? That's what you guys are looking for. It's lead gen 101, hit them where you know, hit them where they are, find them.

Dan:

Yeah, that's the start. Yeah, and actually, this is a good way to even frame the end of the previous conversation. So we kind of obsess about customer experience. And the first customer we're thinking about is your customer, and trying to enable like the best possible experience for them when they, you know, find you on the internet or contact you or work with you, even in person. Uh, and yeah, you definitely want to meet them where they're at. And I mean, these days they're online and they're on their phone. Honestly, if they're walking into your retail location or on the lot, they also have a phone in their pocket that you want to take advantage of, right? And Eric, kind of to what you were speaking about, uh, in each industry, we kind of see this evolution, right? When we started in sheds, there just wasn't much software, weren't as many digital tools, you know, websites, maybe you had them or you didn't, social media engagement, all of that. And we kind of see each industry just progress pretty quickly as the tools come into play, especially 3D configurators, because that's in front of everybody publicly. And we put our logo on there actually for you know ingredient branding, marketing purposes, because people see it and then they hunt you down if they're like, Oh, this is amazing. That's right. Um, but yeah, mobile is extremely important, and one of the things that we have consistently done over time is constantly improve that mobile optimization because more and more of the traffic is coming through there, even up to like 60 or 70 percent these days. And it's also a tool you can use with them before they leave a retail location. Um, and so it's just kind of really important part of the experience. Now, we focus and obsess on that on the front end, and then on the back end, we work with you to make sure we can build the right experience for your customers. And yes, sometimes that can take time and effort and energy, and that's kind of one of the biggest things I would emphasize is like our people care, and yeah, you can connect with them. And if we understand your goals and what you're really trying to accomplish, whether it's with the way you configure the building or the pricing that you need for estimation and things like that, uh, we can help you accomplish that. And if we do it together, invest the time and energy, yeah, you get to a point where it's like simple, smooth, running very well, and kind of accomplishing your goals. Uh, and it's it's important to spend the time there. Like we're all busy business owners, but you do have to slow down sometimes and make sure like you kind of get it right and get that process in place so you can kind of grow and scale.

Jared:

I can I can jump in on that, right? So we've had partners that have worked with Idea Room, and it never ceases to amaze me. I can only imagine being on your end of this. So you're working with, let's just say you're working with a manufacturer on developing an update to their 3D configurator. It's currently implemented, it works great, but they need to make some pricing changes, they want to add some additional features, all these things, and you're halfway in the middle of of re redoing this thing, which is code-based. This is not something that's like plug and play, it doesn't take five minutes. You've got a you've got a group or series of people who are working on this non-stop to get this corrected, and you're 90% of the way done, Dan. And then the manufacturer calls you back and says, Well, actually, I want to change what I'm doing. Actually, the pricing is gonna be a little bit different, and you can't expect that. Like, I can't stress this enough. Like, I have to I have to go to bat for Dan on this. I have to, because as a dealer, manufacturers are overpromising to the dealer that these are gonna be done quickly, and then blaming idea room for for that lack of for that lack of speedy delivery. And it's like we all know, we're all dealers, a lot of us are dealers, anyways. We know that these dealers are like or the manufacturers are one minute, well, the pricing's gonna be this price, and then the next week there's a new set of pricing sheets that come out, and then there are two months later, there's another set of pricing sheets that come out. And let me just stress to you guys, as frustrating as it is to be a dealer on the other end of that, imagine being a person that's only job in the world right this second is to input that data into a code base to build a 3D design tool, which none of us know anything about, except for idea room. Am I wrong about that, Dan?

Dan:

I mean, seriously, I know this problem, I know this problem in spades, actually. Yes, yes, we have all come very far since kind of the the beginning days, but I know situations where it was like the company worked on new pricing for a month or longer, yep. And especially during the pandemic, it was like, oh, they had to throw out that work because pricing's changing so fast. And you know, recently with uh steel tariffs or other things, that problem ebbs and flows. Like, how fast do we need to update and change our pricing? It's painful for the company, it's painful for us if it like changes right in the middle, and we've all kind of been improving in that area. But yes, that that problem happens in spades. It's also one of the reasons we've been investing a lot in more self-service tools, and especially for kind of longtime customers. Sometimes, again, they're they're busy running their business, Idea rooom's already plugged in, they see the leads coming in. They may not even know how much they can do themselves now. Uh, we think we have things like base pricing and component pricing you can update yourself. Um, now there's always still the complicated things, and this goes back to the beginning. I actually wrote the first function in our code that did pricing on that uh Winds Those Textwin project, and I couldn't believe it. In fact, sometimes we would get the dealer handbook, I don't know, a month or two or three in where it was all the rules. I also remember, like across the beginning of doing this, we would hear things like, yeah, from dealers, what we get is orders with you know, 20% of them have errors in it, some of them were as high as 30, 40 percent. So we all know like this is a lot easier now. Like, we don't want to price the manual way, that's extremely painful. I remember writing the code for this stuff, and uh we've all just come a long way, and so you know, at this point, we're looking for every way we can hand you what is simple and you need to do it speed, so it's more efficient. But yeah, the more complicated stuff, you know, you want to make sure you get it right. And if you do much too much complexity, it adds up being a little brittle. And so we're even a lot better these days at like, okay, what should we do or shouldn't we do instead of just saying yes, and that's just the way it's done, because you know, we all have more experience now, and we've kind of learned okay, maybe we shouldn't do that, it's a little too complicated.

Jared:

There's a couple things, there's a couple things I want to touch on, right? And you brought up a few of them. One thing I can tell you is that this is something that comes from personal feedback for me. I can't tell you how many times I've had somebody, and not recently, because we've pretty much put a kibosh to it, but I've had guys at gals in my shop that that work on Idea Room every day, and they'll come to me and say, Jared, I've been having this issue with Idea Room for the last few weeks, and I can't figure out what's going on. I'll take a look at it and then I'll look at it and I'll be like, Okay, well, let me call Idea Room, and it's fixed in five minutes.

Dan:

That can be true.

Jared:

Yeah, that's not every situation, that's not every situation, but I cannot stress this enough. A five-minute phone call might be able to fix your problem, and they're not going to be able to fix a problem if they don't know that it's there, and stuff pops up in code base all the time that that might not work with a certain web browser, might need to clear your cookies or your cash, might need to do something real basic, and it's fixed in five minutes. And I can't stress to you guys enough if you leave a message, they will call you back. Okay, I can't stress that enough. And when when Dan talks about moving and making things better, look at how much better the mobile interface is on Idea room than it was five years ago. Yeah, you guys have just implemented this. I don't even know what you guys call it, it but it's a very, very slick mobile experience, right? The new mobile experience is really awesome.

Dan:

Yeah, thank you. We appreciate it.

Jared:

It's really awesome.

Dan:

We call it boost, and in fact, this is also one of those things, it's like boost your marketing results, basically, right? Boost your lead conversion.

Jared:

Is there an app? No, it's web-based. Yeah, and you just that is there gonna be an app?

Dan:

Well, we could wrap that, but honestly, people are on the web, which is why you stick to kind of it works perfect, it works perfect, but I will tell you this again.

Jared:

This is Dan giving us the behind the scenes. You have so many options and features inside your salesview.idearoom.com. You probably haven't dug into them. You have there's webhooks that you can create that they'll help you create, they can go into your CRM. There's all kinds of cool stuff that you can take advantage of right now because I know what you're sitting there thinking. Okay, dealer, whoever you are. You're sitting there thinking, oh yeah, uh, you know, these these steel king guys, they they don't know anything about what I'm going through. I'm spending a lot of money and I'm just not getting my return on my value. My email is down there at the bottom, and I'll take full responsibility. You can call me right now and I'll walk you through how to use salesview.id or dot com. Okay, I'll tell you. I can tell you there are so many cool things that you don't even know that you can do that you're not taking advantage of right now that are already there for you, included in your base pricing. That I can promise you right now. I because there was stuff as recently as just a few months ago that I didn't even know, and I'm a really high end user. One of which is with Boost, you have to turn it on. Okay, you just you have to click a button, you know what I'm saying? You have to log in, you have to actually take the 35 seconds it takes to log into your sales view.id room and click it on. Am I right, Dan? That's About as hard as it is to just complete the update for boost. You have to know your password. Yeah.

Dan:

Yeah. Actually, this was one of those where it's like, all right, we have a beautiful new user interface. Yes. You want to make sure they can turn it on themselves, not have to call for everything under the sun or chat widget for everything under the sun, which is why we're putting so much more in there. But yeah, you got to go in there and turn it on. Here's one of the reasons we didn't just force convert everybody. For the buying public, yeah, it's just better. Period. End of story, pretty much. And we know that from metrics that tell us how much higher it converts, like a percentage higher. We even have some that tell us like for non-mobile friendly competing solutions, it's two to three hundred percent higher in terms of generating leads. Uh, but you do, you need to turn it on. We didn't make it default because sales teams use this, right? Yeah, and people are nervous about no matter how good the change is, like, don't disrupt my sales team, right? I need to either train them or make them aware of it or whatever the case may be. And it kind of depends on the company, but especially if you have independent dealers. Um, so we try to be thoughtful and careful, add a lot of things, push the thing forward. But yeah, sometimes you need to be in there, see it, turn it on. And in some cases, if it affects your sales team, we want to make sure it's efficient for you. So we give you the control for that. Yeah. And please go in, turn it on, or at least experiment with it. Uh, because it's good.

Jared:

It's definitely a huge upgrade from a customer-facing perspective. And we've given some feedback to Idea Room, and to be fair, they've taken some of our feedback in the past. And that's another thing, they're open to suggestions. Okay. If there's something that could benefit everyone, it's best to share that. I mean, I know that I'm I know that I'm getting a little bit facetious today, and I apologize if I'm coming off any sort of way, but I can tell you, I have I've shared how much I really love Idea Room with everybody, and it's good to get somebody that can speak from a very big place of authority. You can't get any bigger than the than the co-founder and CEO of Idea Room. They want to make this product work for you in your business, period. And if you're using something else, that's fine too. Okay, we're not we're not gonna sit here and tell you that what you're using doesn't work. That's not what we're here to do. What we're here to do is to tell you that there is an option if you don't have one, and if you are having some issues, the guys at Idea Room, the guys and gals over there would be happy to field your phone call and see if they can give you a better solution. That's why we're here today to talk about it. I can tell you that in the business that we're in, you know, consultative sales, people buy on trust and relationships. And when I can go on to a Google Meet or a Zoom or in person, and I can use a tool that I'm not only comfortable with, but that I love to use, that my staff is comfortable with and loves to use, that makes that process that much easier. The close is that much easier when they walk into Dayton Barns and All Steel Buildings, which is where I'm where I am today, and we've got two TVs up front, and we can stream from our laptops to that TV, and I can make their building a reality right before their eyes. Not only can I do that, but with a Dayton Barns logo on it, I can walk them through the building, I can send them a 3D design and estimate right then and there while I'm grabbing their information. Now, mind you, we have a high level, we have a high level understanding of how idea works best, how idea room works best. Again, email me at the bottom if you have any questions. I'm happy to help you because it means that much to your business. But I can tell you all day, every day, that's what these guys and gals in this office are doing. They're using idea room to to generate quotes, screenshots, mock-ups, floor plans. All day, every day. That's what we do here. We couldn't do it without them. And I know that there are people out there that feel the same way that we do. All right, guys, all conversations get to a certain point where it's good to take a break, and on this one, we're gonna go to a part two. So I wanted to say thank you for checking out episode one with Dan. We really got into some good stuff here with Idea Room today, and we're looking forward to continuing the conversation with Dan next week. So, in the meantime, I want to give a huge shout out to the team at Cal, Defined SEO, VersaBend, and Jmoney for all the financing needs, order management, anything that you guys need, those are our go-to team for those items. I can tell you guys, we are excited because next week we will have Dan back for part two of this conversation. In the meantime, as always, get out in your community and do something good for somebody. It'll make you feel better, I promise. I'm Jared. Eric will be back next week with Dan, and then we'll get back into episode two. In the meantime, guys, have yourselves a great and blessed week, and we will talk to you soon.