I spent this summer in Indianapolis through REVelry, a sales talent accelerator that places early career students with early stage companies. It opened with a week of bootcamp: four hours of sales training and four hours of go-tomarket engineering a day. I was then placed for eight weeks at Cloud Accountant Staffing, a firm that connects growing accounting practices with vetted accountants in the Philippines, and every Friday the cohort came back to the REVelry office for more training. At Cloud Accountant Staffing I wore two hats: Sales Development Representative and GTM Engineer. That meant two blocks a day on the phone and the rest of my time building the systems behind those calls.
The phone work humbled me. I made about 7,400 cold calls, and most went nowhere. What I did not expect was how much that grind taught me. After a few hundred conversations you hear exactly where the process is broken. That became the raw material for the other half of my job. On the engineering side I built automated workflows across Clay, HubSpot, Instantly, RB2B, and Hunter.io, all with the same goal: replace things that only happened when someone remembered or based on a buying signal with systems that fire on their own. One identified anonymous visitors to our website and dropped them into a personalized email sequence. My favorite workflow
matched open job postings to our best candidate. By the end I had worked 25 portal subscriptions into three live deals worth roughly $103,000 in first-year pipeline.
The biggest thing I learned was about myself. I really enjoyed GTM engineering. I really liked building something that had complex problems. Building GTM systems feels like solving a puzzle that pays out. Early in the summer I told a Mike H (our GTM teacher/mentor for the summer), “I feel like what I know should be illegal.” Every time I work I get that same feeling.
I am staying on at Cloud Accountant Staffing part time through the school year, with the goal of turning it into a full-time offer after graduation. Thank you to the donors who funded this internship through Wabash. It would not have been possible otherwise. Thank you also to the team at REVelry for the training and the placement, to Conner and Jordan for bringing me onto their team, and to Caleb for his mentorship and patience all summer.
