Kelly Carls | Specification Sales

It might sound like a contradiction in terms, but I’m a people-oriented engineer. My degree is in engineering, I have a technical brain and I’m incredibly detail focused, but I always knew I wouldn’t end up in a lab. After graduation from college I went into the GE Management Training Program, rotated through a variety of assignments, and almost inevitably ended up in sales.

Before coming to Reflex I worked for a major distributor, which gave me a very practical knowledge of how the whole lighting supply chain works—and in particular how what gets specified for a project can actually end up being changed along the way for a whole variety of reasons. That’s important, because it doesn’t do a manufacturer much good to get on the specification list only to have their products substituted out somewhere down the line. By knowing how the distributor and the contractor think, you can do a much better job of protecting the manufacturer’s interests.

Besides that kind of knowledge, I can guarantee a manufacturer that like all the other members of our team, I’ll really dig in to understand their products—and I’ll present those products to architects and engineers in their own language, in a way that best highlights how those products work and what special value they offer.

In the end, that’s really what sales is all about.