In 2019, I graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs with a degree in Communication. Like most college graduates, I had a hard time finding out what career would be best suited for me.
After following a friend’s advice, I took the jump into sales and never looked back. My first sales job started at a roll off dumpster rental company in 2020. Every day I would answer incoming phone calls from general contractors, real estate developers, and homeowners looking for a dumpster to put their waste in. I took great pride in helping people complete their projects around the country by supplying dumpsters to their jobsite, but ended up taking the leap into software sales where I could leverage my skills in a new field and continue to learn more about sales.
Now I’m a business development representative for Extract Systems based in Madison, Wisconsin. Extract Systems is a software development company that specializes in developing automated data extraction solutions for healthcare, government, and other customers. Extract’s software uses machine learning and natural language processing technology to extract data from unstructured documents like lab results, orders, and any other type of incoming document you might receive. In turn, this helps organizations save time, money, and reduce human error.
There is a big learning curve when transitioning from the waste industry into automation software. After all, physical waste management involves some very different logistics than software installations, but the sales approach is not as different as you would think.
Both industries offer what might be considered “off-the-shelf” solutions, but they also tend to fare better when they can address specific customer challenges and pain points with a more consultative approach to sales.
What might seem like a straightforward sale in waste management always involved details about how the customer planned on using the product. Getting things like size, location, and pickup frequency led to happy customers in the same way that understanding a hospital’s document types, nomenclature, and where they want their documents routed leads to happy customers at Extract.
Understanding how organizations do business is not only crucial in providing the best possible product and expectations, but digging in to processes and specifics can often lead to more insight than a quick fix. Maybe you didn’t realize that the dumpster won’t fit where you thought it would or maybe you didn’t realize your healthcare organization had 1000 different document types.
It's exciting to be at Extract introducing organizations to software solutions that save money and provide clinicians with better and more complete data at the same time. If your organization is still manually entering data or entering entire files as a pdf, please reach out as we’d be eager to learn more about your organization’s workflow and find a solution right for you.
Eric Friedberg is a Business Development Representative at Extract, look forward to hearing more from him soon!