Problem solving has always been a strength of mine.  In high school, I lettered in OM.  I may not be the coolest kid on the block, but I’m smart enough and quick enough on my feet to enjoy being presented with problems that need to be solved.

Throughout my career, I’ve successfully drawn on my ability to solve problems.  In each sales position, problem solving was necessary to win clients and keep clients, especially when things did not go as expected.  However, at Proxy Partners my problem solving skills shone especially brightly when I was able to bring value within my first weeks by solving a persistent problem.

At Proxy Partners, the valuation team (including myself) priced and valued the inventory of assets at any given property.  The master inventory was then given to clients in an Excel spreadsheet that worked like a Girlscout cookie order form- so enter quantity here, and receive total at the bottom.  The problem with PackageBuilder as it was, was that the sales team did not use it.  Each salesperson was using their own format, wasting time and compromising accuracy.

When I looked at PackageBuilder, it was immediately obvious to me why the sales team didn’t want to use this tool.  Essentially we were asking them to present potential clients with a giant list of what they WOULDN’T be getting, and then ask those clients for a lot of money for what looked like minimal assets.  Of course they weren’t using it, I wouldn’t either.

I have a solid understanding of Microsoft Office and the capabilities of each of the programs.  I set out to do something fairly simple, to solve this problem and present our sales team with a much easier way to create packages and present proposals to clients.  If you’re familiar with Excel, I used VLOOKUP and drop down menus to accomplish this.  This is a very simple solution, but it immediately inspired the entire sales staff to use PackageBuilder and ended up saving the team an incredible amount of time in creating proposals and post-analysis reports.  The Sales Director estimated the time savings at roughly 50%!

Here’s a video of PackageBuilder in action that I made to help explain how it works to clients: