About Me

My position would be as a Sales Applications Engineer for a centrifugal pump manufacturer rep in the Denver area. My initial responsibilities would include; reviewing new construction project documents for items we would be able to supply, performing engineering selections for the items, and generating accurate quotations for those same items. The items that we’d quote were typically full, custom-engineered, submersible commercial pump systems ranging anywhere from $500 to >$100,000 per package so accuracy and attention to detail were vital.

I quickly became proficient in these core responsibilities and started proactively searching out new ways to contribute. My initial extra-curricular efforts included documenting/ formalizing existing company practices and creating new tools/ processes for common team work flows. I drafted an inside sales handbook outlining company SOPs, remade the teams excel based quote generation tools and built an inventory management system for the companies warehouse using its existing Microsoft PowerApps license.

I was sure not to let these extra-curricular endeavors impact my core responsibilities though and was pleased to hear several customers had actually spoken well of me to the owner during this time; saying they appreciated the promptness of our responses since I had started handing their accounts. Near the end of my first year I was promoted to Inside Sales Manager.

As the Inside Sales Manager my responsibilities stayed largely the same with the addition of hiring, training and oversight of new Inside Sales people. Then about 6 month later I transitioned to a Project Manager to help the companies service team on the administrative side. As the Project Manager I took on more customer facing and logistic responsibilities; performing job walks to assemble Bill-of-Materials and coordinating between the Service Team, Outside Sales Team and our Customers to ensure jobs could be completed within budget and on schedule while still meeting or exceeding the customers expectations. This was interesting work but as I settled into it I started to feel hampered by a lack of existing records and process documentation.

If our team was working on a system they'd serviced in the past, I wanted to be able to give them records of whatever had found before. If jobs including specific services were routinely going over budget, I'd want to be able to show the Inside Sales Team so quoting practices could be adjusted. And when customer called-in for information about work that was done in the past, or about systems we had provided in the past, I wanted our team to be able to get them quick and accurate information. This is what got me interested in Business Intelligence systems, process improvement, and data analysis.