This summer I was a Business Development Representative for VanCraft, a Salt Lake City
company that builds camper vans on the Mercedes Sprinter chassis. I was also a part of the REVelry cohort this year, run by alum Josh Kline. Where I was trained all summer in Sandler sales and AI revenue engineering. VanCraft brought me on as they had a bunch of inbound leads and not enough personnel to get to all of them.
I spent about 40 days out west this summer working on site and traveled to Utah, Denver, California, Idaho, Oregon, and Arizona, where I worked 5 shows in total, generating leads that I then later qualified during the week. When I was out west, my day-to-day was a lot of
traveling on the weekends and calling during the week. When I was in Indiana, I spent my mornings building AI systems to manage and organize our leads, as lead organization was a big issue for VanCraft. Then I would call and prospect with my afternoons.
By the end of the summer, I had generated $3.6M in pipeline and $364,624 in closed revenue for VanCraft.
The biggest thing I took from it is that persistence beats talent in sales. Early on, I treated a lead list like a checklist, one call and gone, and I was nervous about calling people someone else had already contacted. Once I stopped doing that and started following up relentlessly, everything changed. Huge thank you to Kyle Spencer at VanCraft, Josh Kline at
REVelry, Matt Nettleton, and Mike Hurley for investing in me this summer. Grateful to be surrounded by people willing to bet on a rising sophomore.
