Building a luxury outdoor-living company
Skyview Detroit is a family-owned company specializing in luxury outdoor living throughout southeastern Michigan. Its service area stretches from the Ohio border to Lansing and Saginaw, with potential expansion into northern Michigan.
The company works with premium manufacturers to provide pergolas, sunrooms, motorized screens, frameless glass walls, decks, patios, and related landscaping. Its white-glove, turnkey approach gives homeowners one trusted partner to manage the entire project.
Skyview’s own trained and certified employees perform every installation. Today, the company employs approximately 40 people and operates six installation crews year-round.
Turning an owner-led business into a scalable sales organization
During its early years, Skyview operated like many growing family businesses. Trevor Calero and his brother Taylor handled nearly everything themselves, from sales and installation work to accounting and marketing.
As the owners prepared the company for its next stage of growth, they recognized that they needed to transition away from an owner-dependent sales model. That meant hiring additional salespeople and equipping them to deliver the same clear, compelling story in every customer’s home.
At the time, sales representatives relied on materials stored in Google Drive, including professional project photography. While the assets were strong, the process lacked the polish, structure, and consistency Skyview wanted for customers making a premium home-improvement investment.
The company needed a system that could:
- Standardize the sales experience across a growing team
- Communicate the quality and credibility of the Skyview brand
- Give sales representatives a reliable process to follow
- Support presentations for multiple product lines
- Make customized design renderings easier to deliver
- Scale without sacrificing the customer experience
A repeatable, fully branded sales process
Skyview adopted Ingage approximately three years ago, making the platform a central part of its sales transformation.
The company created a fully Skyview-branded presentation for each principal product line. Every presentation follows a consistent structure while preserving the distinctive features, options, and visuals associated with that product.
This gives representatives a dependable framework for every appointment, and gives homeowners a more polished way to understand Skyview’s history, capabilities, products, and process.
“It’s phenomenal for us to be able to personalize and customize a presentation and make it part of the process. It is equally, if not more, important for the homeowner to see what our company has done, where we’ve been, how we’ve grown, and what they can expect. Ingage allows us to show the homeowner that and help build that confidence.”
For Newman, consistency is especially important as the company expands its sales organization.
“Salespeople are emotional creatures. The more we can do as a leadership team to keep their day and their appointments consistent, the more successful they’re going to be. There are a ton of variables in sales, and the more of those we can eliminate by giving salespeople a high-quality, consistent presentation, the better.”
Presenting custom 3D renderings the same way
Skyview soon found a second valuable use for Ingage: presenting its custom 3D project renderings.
During an in-home consultation, sales representatives collect measurements and reference photographs. Skyview’s design team then creates detailed 3D video renderings to help the homeowner visualize the proposed outdoor space.
Initially, the company sent these renderings as email attachments. The process became cumbersome as project volume grew. Skyview began building an Ingage presentation for each customer instead, creating a much more cohesive design experience. The team has now produced more than 500 presentations within the platform.
“Ingage makes creating and editing presentations for our clients so much easier. If a client wants to see something different or needs something turned around quickly, I can drag and drop a rendering and have it ready right away.”
Faster creation without sacrificing quality
Reusable content and presentation templates allow Skyview’s design team to respond quickly to customer needs.
Skyview created template presentations for the company’s three main rendering options. Sonefeld can duplicate a template, add project-specific visuals, and tailor it to an individual customer in approximately 10 minutes.
The same approach helps Skyview bring new products to market. When the company added Lumon frameless glass systems, Skyview reused relevant content from existing presentations while introducing product-specific messaging and visuals. The result preserved Skyview’s brand and presentation structure without requiring the team to start from scratch.
“The efficiency and consistency are what really stand out. With other presentation software, putting something like this together and then changing it could feel daunting. With Ingage, I was comfortable within a day or two. I could put together 10 different presentations in a day.”
That flexibility is critical for a team managing multiple customer meetings. Sonefeld estimates that he can produce three or four presentations in the time it might take to complete one with less adaptable presentation software.
“We have meetings almost every day, and sometimes there are two or three,” he said. “These presentations need to go out, and Ingage helps me get that done.”
Supporting nearly 5X growth
Over the three years following its adoption of Ingage, Skyview nearly quintupled in size. Its sales operation grew from Newman and one other representative working in the field to seven in-home sales representatives supported by a sales manager.
The team now conducts approximately 40 in-home sales appointments each week, compared with roughly 5–10 three years earlier.
Skyview does not attribute that growth to one tool alone. Its success reflects broader investments in people, marketing, operations, products, and sales leadership. Ingage’s role has been to stabilize and standardize the front end of the business throughout that transformation.
“In the last three years, the company has almost quintupled. What Ingage has allowed us to do is stabilize the front end of the company through those transitions. These tools have allowed us to continue growing at a rate that’s sustainable.”
Preparing for the next stage of growth
Skyview plans to expand its field sales team to between 10 and 12 representatives. Its longer-term objective is to more than double the business again by 2030, primarily by increasing marketing and sales performance within its existing geographic and product focus.
As the company adds people, products, and customers, maintaining a consistent premium experience will become even more important.
For Skyview, Ingage provides a foundation the company can build on: a repeatable sales story, an efficient design-presentation process, and a customer experience that reflects the quality of the projects it delivers.
“We love Ingage. It has been a huge part of polishing the front end of our business and helping us become the company we are today.”
