Context
Not long after I moved from product management into the solutions engineer role at PegEx, I took the lead on a deal with an environmental services and waste logistics coordinator serving New England. On paper, they were shopping for a waste operations system: scheduling, tracking, and managing the work moving through their network.
What discovery turned up
Early conversations kept circling back to something that wasn’t on their list. Every month, their team spent about a week pulling together the reporting their state environmental agency required. The data lived in several places, the formats were strict, and the work fell on the same few people every time.
That was a problem I knew well from the product side. I had spent years working on exactly that kind of regulatory reporting at PegEx, so I could see that what they really needed was an operations system that also handled compliance.
How I approached it
Instead of a standard product tour, I built a demo environment around their own reporting. I loaded it with enough of their workflow and reporting requirements to show what their monthly state submission would look like coming straight out of the system, already in the format the agency expected.
The conversation shifted from comparing features to a much simpler question: what would it mean for their team to stop spending a week a month on this?
Outcome
They signed within a few weeks. Once they were live, reporting that had taken their team about a week each month came down to about a day.
What it reinforced
The strongest demo is built on the buyer’s own problem. Product experience made me a better solutions engineer, because I could see the need behind the request and show it solved, not just describe it.