Norman Taffe
Analyst · Baird. You may proceed with your question.
Yeah. Thanks, Tom, that was – you actually covered really well. But I have a few, other few added data points. I mean, on the economical reason for doing our own storage is simply in many ways to avoid margin stacking, right, instead of us paying margin somebody else than to supply that storage, we see a great economic opportunity to make margin on the hardware we sell. And that's what's important about, it's not just to new customers, which is a big deal, but to over 330,000 existing customers. And so, I think economically long term, we believe that will be meaningful, bottom line impact to the company. I think from a strategic standpoint, Tom alluded to this. What's really important to us is that we control the software that our customers use. And a fully integrated software approach means that the customer has a single tool which monitors their TV, their storage, their complete solution, and that is both important for us as far as getting customers to adopt us, stick with us, to refer us to their neighbors. But it's also important, as Tom said, is the basis for a service model long term. And I think the importance there is you really own that storage software platform, which you often won't get if you were to choose model or somebody else's providing somebody else's storage solution. Those are the kind of the strategic drivers. Just switching to a couple comments. You talked about customer acquisition costs. I'm glad Tom highlighted that we're - our appointment generation engine is getting better and better. I'll give you a good data point from October. This past month, we generated 43% more front end - our front end and funnel did 43% versus the same quarter last year. So we're not just beyond COVID, we're almost 50% larger month versus month in terms of the front end and funnel. So that is becoming a bigger, bigger portion of what we bring to our dealer partners as value. And so that's been super important. And last comment relative to the channel, it's a great question, in terms of, we're seeing a very much a mixed model. One of the keys to low customer acquisition costs has been our dealer model, it's a lower cost model. At the same time, we are seeing certain areas where virtual selling makes sense to do more in different areas of the country directly or with partners that just do sales as opposed to doing installs. So while we are continue to grow our independent dealer network, we are also growing our installed portion of our business. Its still smaller, relatively small, compared to the installing dealer portion, but it is grown.