My Top Three Skills

Parker Brand
Nov 8 · 2 min read
Photo by Matthew Smith on Unsplash

Every professional has a quiver of skillsets to pull from at any time, in this blog I’m going to highlight what I consider to be my most valuable skills.

Research
My ability to research a specific topic comes from a deep-rooted drive to find out more about the things I’m interested in.

This ability to research led me to build my first online business. I was able to learn everything about the industry, from who was good at coding the systems behind already successful sites, to figuring out the best way to approach customer service. Not only do I excel at research for professional reasons, but I’m generally the go-to person when one of my friends is making a decision ranging from the best pair of earbuds to get or what cars they should be looking at based on their preferences. Put simply: I’m good at gathering information from varying sources and making the right decision when data is present. I’m a firm believer that having enough data and analyzing it properly will help me make the right choice 99% of the time.

Building Rapport

My current position, while not being exactly door-to-door sales, requires me to build rapport with customers in just a few sentences, spoken or written. At the door, I have to immediately gauge who I’m talking to and adapt my language, speech patterns, and mannerisms to best build trust between me and the homeowner. This ability also spills over into written communication. From one or two emails or phone calls, I can adapt to how the recipient is thinking and provide the right information in the best way to increase the odds of a sale. After many sales, customers will comment that they’ve never even considered purchasing something from a salesman at the door, but because of the way I conveyed information they decided not to shoo me off their porch.

Resourcefulness

I pride myself on the ability to use all available resources to tackle a problem. At every position I’ve held, I have solved either fresh or long-standing problems in day-to-day operations. At Panera Bread, where I worked as a delivery driver, I would be consistently tasked with last-minute delivery and catering issues such as making quick and concise decisions based on minute-by-minute metrics. For example, if a large catering order were made incorrectly and it was my duty to complete it, I would have to decide between fixing/remaking it or calling another store to assist. Additionally, within my first month at Panera, I identified a large issue with inter-store communication and worked with upper management to create an entirely new system that is now being deployed to stores across the nation.

    Parker Brand
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