Today is my last day at SearchTec and I figured I’d do some reflection to find my biggest takeaways from the experience as a whole. One of my favorite things about this internship was the perspective it gave me into the various sections of a business. I wasn’t cornered into one portion of SearchTec and gained exposure to everything from production to marketing to accounting.
Weekly sales updates were some of the most interesting times for me at SearchTec. At the start of every sales update, I was given a couple sheets of paper that displayed each sales persons’ latest pursuits and where they stood with each. In these meetings, potential strategies were discussed that might help the salespeople close the sales. This helped me understand the appeal of SearchTec in the industry, a local business that had specific expertise, especially locally, that larger competitors simply did not have.
Marketing meetings were also interesting. Discussing ways to expand into new territories, improve branding, and continue offering value to existing customers were some of the focal points of these meetings. One of these initiatives that I was directly involved in this summer was the “See a Demo” landing page. After discussing in a marketing meeting, I changed the format of SearchTec’s current website by replacing all the “Open an Account” buttons with “See a Demo” buttons. This new button takes the customer to a page with a 90 second video, detailing SearchTec’s value to lenders and contained a form below to sign up to see a live demo of SearchTec’s order process.
While sales and marketing were interesting to me personally, I also got a look at the production side of SearchTec. I spent an afternoon examining the search process that occurs after an order is placed. The person doing the search has to consult multiple databases for each county in order to obtain all the necessary information that a lender would want. After the searcher has obtained all of this information, it is passed to the typist to type into an organized report. One small project I worked on was to do some analysis to see if a searcher typed their information directly, how many fewer searches would they do at most to make them no longer efficient.