# Brian Szakacs, Director of Sales (Midwest Region) at Hartwell Industrial Supply — read of Manufacturing Facility Expansion Alert Feed, June 11 2026

> 18 years selling conveyors, automation components, and MRO to plants across Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana. Currently managing 6 outside reps and a ZoomInfo seat I'm not sure we're getting ROI from.

## How I got here

Googled "manufacturing plant expansion leads notification" on my lunch break. I've been trying to fix our prospecting funnel for two quarters and my boss keeps asking why we're always late to the table on big capex projects. This was the third result, below a couple of LinkedIn posts. Clicked in with low expectations.

## What I clicked first

The headline promise pulled me in: "Get notified the moment a plant announces a facility expansion, acquisition, or capex project." That is literally the problem I'm trying to solve. And then the sub-deck had the pain articulated better than I've ever written it myself: "By the time your sales team hears about the project, five competitors are already in the running." Yeah. That's it. That's the meeting I want to skip.

The sample alert stopped me: "XYZ Auto Plant, Canton OH, announced $85M facility modernization. 300 new positions. VP Ops: John Smith (john.smith@xyzauto.com, 330-555-0147)." Canton is literally in my territory. That example is doing work.

## Where I paused

The pricing page. $9 per alert, 8-12 alerts per month, cost per lead $75-110. For our margin profile that math is fine if the leads are real. What made me stop was the comparison line: "Compare to LinkedIn InMail at $25+ per candidate with no project context." That's not the right comparison. InMail is a message, not a lead. This is a data product. I'm comparing this to ZoomInfo intent signals or what I'd pay a VA to monitor news. That framing made me wonder who wrote this and whether they actually know how industrial sales teams budget.

## What I distrusted

The stats. "47% Faster First Contact. 3.2x More Qualified Leads. 23% Higher Win Rate. Based on user surveys of 40+ industrial distribution and equipment vendors using the feed for 6+ months."

Then I kept reading and hit this buried lower on the page: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet."

Those two things cannot both be true. Either there are 40+ vendors with 6+ months of data, or there are no live customers. One of them is a lie. My best guess is the stats are projected or modeled, and someone forgot to remove them before adding the honesty disclosure. That is the kind of thing that gets you deleted from a sales prospect's consideration in about four seconds.

Also: the contact email listed is "sales@expansionalerms.io." That looks like a typo for "expansionalerts." On a page asking me to give you money, that's a bad sign.

And there's a whole section with scores like "64/100 Adoptability," "Year-1 take-home (Fermi)," "1 in 9 meaningful-success odds" with "$-32,800" highlighted. I had to read that three times. It's clearly written for someone evaluating whether to BUILD this product, not someone deciding whether to BUY it. That content should not be visible to a prospective customer. It makes the whole page feel like a half-finished prototype.

## What would convince me

One real, named case study. Not "an industrial distributor in the Midwest." A company I can look up, a rep I can call, a before/after on a specific deal. "We got an alert on a $30M auto parts plant in Findlay Ohio on a Tuesday, our rep was on a call with the VP Ops by Thursday, we were invited to quote before the RFQ went out." That story, with a real name attached, is worth more than all the feature copy on this page.

And I'd want to see actual sample alerts from real announcements, not the "XYZ Auto Plant" placeholder. Pull a real SEC filing or press release from last month and show me what the enriched alert actually looked like.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The page says "47% Faster First Contact" from surveys of 40+ vendors, but also says there are no live customers yet. Which is accurate, and where did the performance data come from?

2. For the decision-maker data specifically: are you sourcing contacts at the plant level or at the corporate parent level? Because in automotive supply especially, the plant manager in Canton is often a different person from whoever is in the corporate procurement system, and getting that wrong burns the call.

3. Is the $9/alert pricing live right now, or is this a pre-launch offer? If I tried to sign up today and get the 3 free alerts, what would I actually receive?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The core idea is genuinely good and the pain is real. But the page contradicts itself on whether this product has customers, and that kills trust faster than bad positioning. Fix the stats or fix the honesty disclosure, not both at once, and then I'd take another look.

---
*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-11. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*