Pam Torrey - Introducing Ingaged: A New Podcast Series from Ingage - PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Pam Torrey from Ingage. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast.

Speaker 1: Welcome to Roofing Road Trips with Heidi. Explore the roofing industry through the eyes of a long-term professional within the trade. Listen for insights, interviews and exciting news in the roofing industry today.

Heidi Ellsworth: Hello and welcome to another Roofing Road Trips from Roofers Coffee Shop. This is Heidi Ellsworth and I'm road tripping again to talk to another amazing marketing professional in the roofing business and that is Pam Torrey with Ingage. Pam, welcome to the show again.

Pam Torrey: Hi, Heidi. It's great to be back. Always a good time when I get to chat with you.

Heidi Ellsworth: I know. I love it. You are so amazing at what you're doing with all of your marketing at Ingage and everything you've done and so I'm really excited to take today and talk about podcasts. Since we're on a podcast, we'll talk about podcasts.

Pam Torrey: Yeah. It's very meta.

Heidi Ellsworth: Before we get started, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and Ingage?

Pam Torrey: Yeah. So for those of you who have not heard of Ingage before, we are the industry leading sales presentation platform for home contractors and home services professionals. And so what that means for you is that we help our contractors to create beautiful, interactive, dynamic presentations, share them with people who need them with up-to-date changes and then measure their impact through rich analytics. And what's really exciting is over the last couple of months, we've released a bunch of new features and a bunch of new tools, including our public content marketplace that makes it easier than ever to get up and running with content. We've also been rapidly bringing a bunch of new building product manufacturers onto our platform to help contractors get access to official content from their building product manufacturers that they can use in the home. And then for those of you who don't know me, I'm the director of marketing at Ingage.

I've been with Ingage for about almost three and a half years. Almost exactly. We're a week or two shy of my three and a half year anniversary. Prior to joining Ingage, I did marketing for a fintech company in Chicago where I live. I focused primarily on marketing operations, events and lead generation. And then I was at Apple for a few years before that, doing B2B sales and fun fact, I actually have zero degrees in any of this. Both of my degrees, I have a bachelor's of music and a master's of music in vocal performance with a focus on opera. So super useful to what I'm currently doing, but it just goes to show that you should never count a candidate out, because you might find somebody who's very good at something who has a non-traditional background and I really think home improvement thrives on that. A lot of our customers have the most interesting backgrounds. It's really fun to get to work in this industry, where they just see potential and jump on it.

Heidi Ellsworth: You know what? You're right. And our podcast producer, multimedia manager is Megan Ellsworth, who is a singer-songwriter and has a full music career along with working for us, so I agree. Getting into roofing and getting into the technology of roofing brings in a lot of different people with great creative backgrounds.

Pam Torrey: Mm-hmm. You get all sorts and I love that in this industry, nobody discriminates based on your background or where you came from. They're like, "Great. You can do the job. Cool. We'll hire you."

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. You're in.

Pam Torrey: Yeah.

Heidi Ellsworth: Well, okay. I have to say congratulations to you and the team for just your newly released new podcast called Ingaged. I love that name. Very nice. Tell us about your new podcast and how it came to be.

Pam Torrey: Yeah. So this has long been a fever dream of ours, which is really funny. So we're a visual product. We are a product that you really have to see to believe. Our customers buy when they see what we can do for them and I've always been a little hesitant about starting a podcast, because of the fact that we're a very visual platform. We're a visual company, but our CEO, Dean Curtis, who I know has been on this podcast before, he's always longed for a podcast from Ingage and he's always said that we had something important to say in the industry and I was like, "Okay. Give me a little bit of time. Let us get our act in gear and make sure that we can cover all the bases we currently have out there before we start a new channel."

And the time was just right. It was right at the the beginning of this year. My content marketing manager came to me and said, "I think we can do this now." I said, "Great. You're producing it and I'm happy to host it, I'm happy to be on it and talk to people and facilitate." And it's just worked out as far as timing goes. I think that we're at a point now in this industry where we work with enough players across the board. We work with a bunch of really incredible partners, industry leading building product manufacturers like Owens Corning. People who are at the top of the game who produce a premium product and want to talk to their contractors directly and we work with some of the top contractors in the country. I think we've got 25 of the top 100 on the top 500 list work with us.

These people are elite. They have some kind of secret sauce. All of these partners, these building product manufacturers, these top customers, they have something to say. They all work with us for a reason and we've provided them with a platform to communicate with their customers really effectively, so why can't we leverage their expertise to communicate with our customers really effectively? And we know people are so busy right now. They're so busy. They're still dealing with some backlogs. They're dealing with rising costs all over the place. They're trying to hire enough people to stay on staff and keep functional as a business. They don't really have time to sit down for a 45 minute to hour long webinar every week, but they do have time to throw on a podcast while they're having lunch, or taking the dog for a walk. So that was really the thinking behind it, was that we need to find a way to get this information out to our customers in an accessible format. So that was the thinking.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. It's interesting, because we find that all the time at Roofers Coffee Shop. You could have 10 people in a room and for those of you listening, you can say, "Okay. How'd you hear about this through Roofers Coffee Shop?" Well, one's on podcast, one's on social media, one's on a webinar, one's on E-News. Everybody gets their information in different ways. Today, we call it generational learning with the read, listen, watch and so I agree you have to be in those formats and then have really good content and information. So what do you think, from your standpoint, makes good content in a podcast? What should contractors who are out there, who might be either going onto a podcast as a guest, or who may be doing their own podcast, or just listening, what really makes strong content?

Pam Torrey: So I'm a big believer in keeping it short. I just don't think that for most of this content, you need more than 30 minutes or so to tell the story if you're going over that. What are you doing? So generally, keeping it short, keeping the conversation really tight, I also am really interested in having a theme for every conversation that I have with somebody. So at Ingage, we have four main themes that we cover with all content. Any content that goes out the door at our company will fall into one of four themes.

It's create, share, measure, or tech stack. Everything falls into one of those and so each one of our podcast episodes goes along with one of those topics. So it's about content creation, what's going on with content creation. Sales enablement, which is share, so how do we make sure that our teams have what they need in the field to do their jobs? It's such a critical topic right now, is making sure everybody has the tools they need to meet customer needs in the moment, measuring how do you use data and analytics to inform your business decisions? We always talk about wanting to be data-driven. I don't know that anybody really knows what that means and so let's go talk to some people about what that really means.

And then tech stack, everybody is having conversations lately about digitizing different processes, leveraging AI. How do we do these things while not losing our high touch approach to customer service? So we try to keep things thematically organized, so that our customers know what they're going to get, they know it's going to be short and to the point and they know it's going to be educational. I don't want anybody coming into an episode of our podcast and they're trying to sell me Ingage. It's great if you come and buy Ingage. I would love to talk to you if you'd like to come. If you would like to come buy Ingage, we would love to have a chat with you about that, but not the point. The point is to give you some information that you can actually use in your business.

Heidi Ellsworth: That's what podcasts are all about and I think it's learning something you'll be able to use in your business, but also being entertaining and engaging and with your background and performance, what a great combination to host.

Pam Torrey: Yeah. It's really fun. I've gotten to talk to some very cool people. We've had a couple of guests from Ingage. We actually had our director of product and engineering come on to talk about how AI is influencing tech stacks in general and how it's going to change the contracting tech stack. Specifically to come on and talk about that and that's not a topic that I'm hearing much about anywhere related to contracting, but I'm hearing about AI everywhere else and it's coming for every single industry. So how do we help our customers to face it head on and know how to use it in a way that will help grow their business versus eliminating jobs, or eliminating parts of their business. We don't want that. We want you to be able to incorporate it in and grow your business with it.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. I agree. In fact, I was just on a call with Owens Corning and I saw you on their tech stack. Congratulations.

Pam Torrey: Yes, we are.

Heidi Ellsworth: Very cool.

Pam Torrey: We built that for them.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. I know. I saw the Ingage presentation and I think those are the kind of things that really, the contractors are looking for to get those solutions. So again, as we're looking at the contractors out there, I know there's some contractors who are doing their own podcasts and there's a lot of them who are being asked to come onto a podcast, but let's talk about podcasting styles. What do you think works?

Pam Torrey: So I like to get out of my guest's way generally. I've usually asked them on, because they know something that I don't know and I can be there to facilitate the conversation and to draw out additional information from them, or if I know there's an FAQ that's going to pop up in the conversation that we're having, something that I hear a lot from our customers, or our customer success team is hearing day in and day out, I'll definitely follow up and ask that question. But my style tends to be ask them the questions, get out of the way, let them answer it and ask really thoughtful follow-ups based on what they're talking about in the moment. Obviously, we send out questions in advance. I'm not going to just throw somebody to the wolves and have them on for a cold interview. That's rude.

Heidi Ellsworth: We do the same thing.

Pam Torrey: Yeah. It's rude. But I also want to have an actual conversation with them and not just run down the list of questions. So that's really important in my podcasting style and it's the same way I host webinars. I just try to get out of the way and let the person who's an expert talk. I like podcasts that are more conversational. A lot of this falls into my webinar style as well. I host four webinars a month, so I've got a lot of reps under my belt with that. Again, it's about having a conversation. I actually hate webinars where there's tons of slide content. You just constantly go through every single bullet point, every single slide. I don't feel like those are really helpful to most people, unless it's a topic about which I know nothing, then that can be helpful, but generally, if I'm having a conversation with somebody, I like to just have a conversation with them. So I tend to look for podcasts that are more conversational, more fun. If I'm going to learn something, I'd like to learn it in an engaging way. Pun intended.

And I don't want to be lectured too, so it is always nice to find that and obviously have a sense of humor. If someone's going to sit down and listen to your podcast, you should at least try to lighten up a little bit.

Heidi Ellsworth: Exactly. No, I feel the same and conversation is it and we have built everything in the coffee shop around that idea of coffee conversations, Roofing Road Trips, talking, but when I listen to podcasts, that's what I want to hear. I want to hear something fun, engaging, but really, that conversation, I love that format.

Pam Torrey: Well, you think about your favorite podcasts from other topics, so what's at the top of the charts all the time? Like My Favorite Murder. My Favorite Murder is two best friends sitting down and talking about murder. That's why it works. I'm not learning something when I'm hearing a conversation about a serial killer on there, but I'm having a great time listening to two people who have become friends of mine since I started listening seven years ago, or whatever, it started.

I think the most effective news podcasts out there, you think about things like The Daily. There used to be a Washington Post one that I would listen to every morning, where they would have really effective interviews and just bring on an expert or someone who's done a ton of research in that area and let them talk and let them be the subject matter expert, rather than having to host be the subject matter expert. So that's really what I'm looking for and what I think works. Just go look at the podcasting charts. Go see what's out there. The bulk of the top performing podcasts make you feel like they're your friends and they're expert driven.

Heidi Ellsworth: And I also like to listen, to learn. I listen to quite a few podcasts, but I also listened to NPR, which is very similar, as the podcast before podcasts were cool and where you can really-

Pam Torrey: Radio.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. Radio and you listen to these awesome interviews and how they do it and so so much of what you said is exactly right. And for contractors out there, either whether you're going to be a guest or you're starting your own, listen to some. Just listen and see what you like.

Pam Torrey: Yeah. Go listen to some things, see what speaks to you and go look at what's at the top of the charts. Go listen to some really successful ones. You'd never start a roofing business if you had absolutely no clue how to install a roof. That would be bonkers to go do that and so if you want to start something like this, go listen to some stuff and see what speaks to you.

Heidi Ellsworth: Okay. Now how about choosing guests? Here, we really do it with our partners and we find things of interest, like this podcast. I love talking about these kind of things, but how are you going to be picking your guests?

Pam Torrey: Yeah. So we're trying to have a good mix of people, so we want to have some voices obviously from our leadership team and from within our company who are industry leaders, so our CEO has been on, our director of product and engineering as I mentioned. We're also planning to have our senior account executive come join us on a call, because he sold our product to hundreds of contractors and is probably the most engaged, famous person out there. He just has great relationships with people in the industry. I want to talk to him and find out what he's hearing from people and the changes that he's seen over the last few years. But we also have representatives from building product manufacturers on, so people who design national training programs. They've designed national sales training programs. They work for very successful companies that are continuing to grow. They're bringing on new franchises, new dealers.

What are they doing that's causing them to be successful with growing their network and how could maybe a remodeler who's looking to add another location, take some thoughts from that person and apply it to their own business for growth strategies? And then we also have a lot of our partners involved, so we work with a bunch of really great partners across the spectrum. Folks who do sales training, marketing consulting, people who just do industry consulting, folks who can provide all different kinds of services within the home improvement, home services space.

And they all have a level of expertise on something that's obviously not mine, so I don't know how to one-call close a roof, but you bet our sales methodology partner does and they can come on and talk about the top five mistakes that they see contractors making in the field, or they can come on and talk about what are the three things you absolutely have to cover during the first week of training a new sales rep. That's the sort of information they can provide, that I can't. That's what we're looking for when choosing a guest, is somebody who can provide expertise that I definitely don't have. Somebody who can provide a point of view that maybe our contractors don't get to hear every single day. I really think these national sales trainers and people who are creating product content that's going to go out to big networks, so people we don't hear from a lot in the industry, but yet they're driving all the growth.

Heidi Ellsworth: So true.

Pam Torrey: So let's get them on to come talk to them and have a conversation about what is actually working and then our partners who provide invaluable services to our customers. So those are the buckets that we're drawing from. I know eventually, we are going to start having some of our customers on to come talk about aspects of their business. It'll probably be a little bit before we get there, as we have a really long list of people who've already said that they want to be on the podcast, so it's like having a really big to-be-read pile of books. We've got to start chipping away at that before we're allowed to go to the bookstore and buy more.

Heidi Ellsworth: That's so true. There are some contractors out there who are starting their own podcasts and manufacturers, distributors. Obviously, we have people from all over listening to this podcast. I know when we started our podcast, the first thing was, and you said it earlier, you have to have a producer. You need to have somebody who knows what they're doing. So what are some of your tips for people out there who maybe want to start their own podcast?

Pam Torrey: Yeah. You have to have a producer. There's no way we'd be able to do this without having someone at our company who's directly responsible for ensuring that this gets done, so that is my content marketing manager, Olivia. She is the person who is driving the bus. She makes sure that the podcast is scheduled, that we have topics for everything, everything's themed appropriately. She's really the mastermind behind it, making sure that everything gets done. The other thing is production. You cannot put out a crappy product and expect people to listen to it. The audio has to be good. The audio production is so important. People are used to listening to professionally produced content now. I think more so than maybe 10 years ago.

I remember, this is going to be really, really deeply embarrassing, but in the late aughts, I had a podcast with two of my friends about a very famous book series that came out during that time in the late aughts and we recorded it in my friend's basement and it sounded like we recorded it in her basement. And we were just teenagers recording a podcast in her basement and it definitely had that very DIY feel to it. That would not fly now. If you want to sound professional, you need to create a professional product, so I would highly recommend outsourcing your audio production if you are not capable of doing it in-house. There are tons of companies that will help you to produce your audio and will edit it down. They'll take out filler words, they'll deal with mistakes. All of that stuff will get taken care of by a professional. Also, if you have advertisers, they'll be able to put the advertisers in.

They'll be able to format the audio correctly for them. If you have bumpers on either end, they'll be able to get that taken care of. I highly recommend finding a professional to produce your audio. If you want to be taken seriously, you've got to put on that professional face and it's more important than ever. We talk about this a lot with our sales presentations. You're competing usually against three other companies for a bid, so you're going out in the field, you're sending your rep out in the field to compete against three other companies. At least two of them are going to undercut you on price. How are you going to differentiate yourself from the competition in that respect? You need to look more professional and build more value than everybody else you're going up against. Same thing with podcasts. People are inundated with content. How are you going to get them to listen? You're going to get them to listen, number one, with a slick, well produced product that sounds great and is really easy for them to listen to and it's going to be impactful content.

Heidi Ellsworth: I know we have two people on staff and that's all they do is on production and it's so important.

Pam Torrey: Yeah. They're the unsung heroes of this process. You can have the best content in the world and if it sounds like garbage, no one is going to want to listen to it.

Heidi Ellsworth: Shout out to all the producers out there. Shout out to Alec and Megan. Shout out to all you guys.

Pam Torrey: Shout out to our audio engineers. They're doing the work. They are the unsung heroes and we really should give them more credit.

Heidi Ellsworth: Yeah. It's so true. It's so true. Couldn't do it without them. What are you hoping that contractors are going to be able to take away from your new Ingaged podcast?

Pam Torrey: I really hope that after every episode, they have one or two tactical elements that they can implement in their business. So we specifically talk to sales and marketing leaders. That's who we're focused on communicating with, because that's who we work with every single day. So if I have a sales trainer on, I would love for my listeners to be able to say, "Oh. I never thought about introducing content to my training classes in this format." Or, "Wait a second. Maybe I should switch up the order that I'm teaching the content in, based on what this company is doing." Something that's just tactical, that they can take away and go test out in their own business. It's a short podcast. Episodes are 15 to 30 minutes maximum, depending on who we're talking to. You're not going to revolutionize your entire business in 15 minutes, but maybe you can make your day easier with one or two little nuggets that you can go implement in your business. And that's really all that we're hoping to be able to do, is give people one or two little things that they can go take into their daily lives.

Heidi Ellsworth: Those one or two things, when you add them up with all the podcasts, makes a lot of business differentiation. That is awesome. Pam, thank you and congratulations again.

Pam Torrey: Thank you. We're really excited to finally get this out into the world. It has definitely been a labor of love. Lots of work has gone into it, but I'm really excited to see especially Dean's face the day that the podcast is live in the podcast app on Spotify and all those places and he gets to finally see that, yes, we have it.

Heidi Ellsworth: What are you looking at for launch date?

Pam Torrey: Yes. It will be coming out this month, May 2023. We are really looking forward to getting the first few episodes out. Episode number one is with Dean Curtis, our CEO. Episode number two is going to be really interesting. It's actually with Mark Richardson, who is an industry consultant, who's mostly worked in the custom build and design build universe and full-service remodeler universe, but he's interconnected with everyone and has a thousand-foot view of the industry and what's going on and we thought that would be a really interesting second conversation to bring to folks.

And then we have a bunch of other episodes lined up for you and podcast, I believe, will be coming out twice a month for the rest of the year. We'll be in your usual podcasting places. We're also going to be putting short clips of the podcast up on our YouTube channel, so if you're interested in getting a taste of what our podcast looks like, maybe you can't commit to a full 20-minute episode. I get that. That's a big commitment. We're putting up little short clips, like 90 seconds or so on our YouTube channel and we'll have them also on our social media. So if you want to get a taste of what the podcast sounds like, you can hop on there and get a little snippet before you download.

Heidi Ellsworth: Pam, thank you. Thank you so much and again, congratulations.

Pam Torrey: Thanks, Heidi.

Heidi Ellsworth: And for everyone out there, I want to make sure Ingaged with an I, so I-N-G-A-G-E-D and you can find all the information on this new podcast also on Roofers Coffee Shop in the Ingage directory. So we'll have it there. We're going to be promoting it out. You'll be able to find it. I'm really excited to listen to it. It's going to be great. And for all of you who are listening, thank you for being on Roofing Road Trips and being a part of our podcast. Be sure to check out all of our podcasts under the read list and watch navigation under Roofing Road Trips. There's so many great episodes, but I really like this one. I don't know. You could take a lot of nuggets out of this one. And be sure to also subscribe and set those notifications, so you don't miss a single episode. We'll be seeing you next time on Roofing Road Trips.

Speaker 1: Make sure to subscribe to our channel and leave a review. Thanks for listening. This has been Roofing Road Trips with Heidi from the RoofersCoffeeShop.com.