Nashville, TN

Selling windows in a city that is still being built

Middle Tennessee keeps building, and the building reaches a window and door dealer in ways no manufacturer's marketing mentions. Some of the houses on your schedule are run as businesses with a booking calendar instead of a family. Others sit three feet from a house that went up last year. Whole streets in Rutherford County and Wilson County got the same window in the same season and are failing on the same clock. And the supplier taking your order is also taking orders from builders who buy in volume. Social media is where a dealer can be genuinely useful about all of that, in front of a buying population that mostly arrived recently and has nobody to ask.

The window has to go in between a checkout and a check-in

A real share of the residential property in and around downtown is operated as a business, so the job is scheduled into a gap in a booking calendar rather than around a family's week.

The gap is the whole constraint. A crew that needs two days on a house turning over on Friday is a different proposition from a crew that can be in and out on a Tuesday morning, and the operator is doing that arithmetic before they read anything else.

So put the turnaround in public, plainly, by opening and by day. Operators in East Nashville, Germantown and The Gulch read for that number and skip the rest of the account entirely.

Show the state you leave a place in. A furnished unit has to be guest-ready the same evening, which means no dust on a counter, no offcuts in the yard, no ladder left leaning on a fence.

Film the opening and the frame rather than the room. The rooms in a rental are the operator's listing photographs and they would rather those stayed on the listing, which costs you nothing because the opening was the interesting part.

Say whether you can run several addresses on one schedule. Most residential dealers cannot, an operator with a handful of houses across Davidson County needs exactly that, and it is the sort of thing nobody thinks to publish.

The new house next door is three feet from the bedroom window

Infill on split lots has put tall, narrow houses beside bungalows all over East Nashville, Sylvan Park and 12 South, and the side windows of the older house now look straight at a wall.

A side opening that used to take the morning takes a neighbor's siding instead, and the owner experiences it as a dark room and a privacy problem arriving in the same month.

The fix is a configuration question rather than a product question. Obscure glazing, a higher sill, an awning unit that opens without a view across, a transom where a double hung used to be.

Publish the room instead of the elevation. What changed is what happens inside at eight in the morning, and a still camera on a tripod in the same spot before and after says it without a word of copy.

It is also the problem this trade never writes about, because it does not exist in a Murfreesboro subdivision where every house has thirty feet of side yard on both sides.

Keep the neighboring house out of the frame and out of the commentary. The new build is not the villain of the post, and whoever owns it is a plausible customer of yours next year.

Forty houses on that street got the same window in the same year

The subdivisions that went up across Rutherford, Wilson and Sumner counties in one sweep were glazed from one order, so a whole street arrives at the same failure at roughly the same time.

The pattern is uniform enough to be useful. A fogged unit in an upstairs bedroom, a slider dragging on its track, seals letting go on the sunny side of the street a season or two before the shaded side.

So publish identification rather than persuasion. How to read the stamp in the corner of the glass, what a failed seal looks like on a cold morning, which elevation of the house tends to go first.

A homeowner who can identify their own unit turns into a customer without a sales conversation, and the person next door has the identical unit with the identical date on it.

It only has to travel as far as the street, which is the part most dealers get wrong when they measure this. One job in a Mount Juliet subdivision is a legitimate reason to be known by the houses that share its floor plan.

Say plainly which of those units can be repaired and which cannot. A sash swap on a builder unit with a live warranty is a different conversation from a whole-house quote, and being straight about the difference is what makes the identification post believable in the first place.

The builders are ahead of your customer in the glass queue

In a metro still absorbing this much construction, the suppliers' largest customers are the builders, and a retail replacement order waits behind them.

Homeowners have no idea. They think a window is a thing you buy and receive, so a wait reads as your company being slow rather than as a queue you are standing in with them.

Publish the calendar instead. What is stocked, what is made to order, what a custom size does to the wait, and which months of the year the wait gets noticeably longer.

It separates you in one move, because nobody selling at a kitchen table wants to raise lead time. A dealer who says it before the deposit gets fewer angry calls in week six and more of the work that comes after.

Say when to order for a season rather than when to think about it. Anyone in Middle Tennessee who wants new glass in place before the first cold week has to order in a month when nothing at all is wrong with their windows.

For the questions that have nothing to do with Middle Tennessee, like what belongs on camera and what should never be typed into a comment, the general version for this trade sits at /industries/window-door-replacement/social-media.

Questions we actually get

A lot of our work is short-term rentals. Is that worth posting about?: It is worth building a section of the account around, because the operators are repeat buyers and they buy on different things. Turnaround by opening, whether the unit is guest-ready that evening, whether you can take three addresses in a week. None of that interests a homeowner and all of it decides an operator, and the two can share one account without any trouble.
A new house went up three feet from our customer's bedroom window. Is that a post?: One of the best available to you here. Show the room before and after from the same spot, name what you changed and why, and leave the neighboring house out of it. Every bungalow street inside Davidson County has somebody living with that exact problem and assuming the only fix is a curtain.
Everyone on the street has the same window. Do we post the same job forty times?: Post it once and post it as identification. How to read the date stamp on the glass, what a failed seal looks like at seven in the morning, which side of the house goes first. A homeowner who recognizes their own unit in that clip does the qualifying themselves, and the forty neighbors who share the floor plan are the reason it keeps working.
Our supplier keeps moving dates on us. Should we say that in public?: Say the honest version, which is that builders are ahead of retail in the queue and custom sizes are slower than stocked ones. It costs you nothing, because every dealer in Middle Tennessee is in the same line, and it makes you the one the customer believes when a date does hold. Publish what to order and when if somebody wants glass in before the cold.
Most of our customers moved here recently and do not know what they have. Where do we start?: Start with vocabulary. A short clip that names the parts of a double hung, one that explains the difference between an insert and a full frame replacement, one that shows what a quote is pricing. A newcomer to Nashville with no contractor to call is choosing between companies on whether they were made to feel stupid, and plain language is the whole advantage.

What is different here

Product approval is the part of this market that genuinely changes between counties. Miami-Dade and Broward sit inside the High Velocity Hurricane Zone and generally work through Miami-Dade Notices of Acceptance, while Palm Beach County work is usually documented under statewide Florida Product Approval against a local design wind speed. The two are not interchangeable on a permit, so approval language is a compliance statement rather than a marketing one, and it is worth having a dealer check their own documentation before it goes on a page.

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Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

Talk to us about social media for impact window and door dealers in Nashville

Tell us what you are working with and we will say what we would do first, and what we would leave alone. A real answer, not a pitch deck.