This summer I worked with CSA360, through REVelry. For CSA360, a security management software company, I was a sales development intern covering gated residential communities and private clubs. Alongside it I was in Revelry, an AI and sales accelerator program. Both of these companies are led by Wabash alumni, Tony Unfried (CSA360) and Josh Kline (REVelry).
It was eye-opening to work in the sales industry that I knew nothing about in May. For CSA360, I built prospect lists, wrote cold emails, and made a lot of calls. Paired with the REVelry skills I was developing, it felt great to know that I was making an impact right away with my work, as I was targeting a market segment that really hadn’t been tapped yet. Paired with the tangible CSA360 work, REVelry was outstanding to my development in sales, AI literacy, and other technological competencies. The program paired Sandler sales training with an AI automation track, and I combined the two into something I never planned on building: an automated lead qualification pipeline. Written in Python and run through Claude, it pulled public licensing and community records, enriched each one with contact and company data, and scored every prospect against our ideal customer profile. By midsummer it had processed tens of thousands of communities.
I would love to be able to say this summer was a resounding success, but there are many places that I still need to grow. I learned a lot about what to trust and not to trust in respect to AI. The system I built was great, but with Claude doing the heavy-lifting in mundane work (contact-verification, deduping, etc.), more mistakes happened than I had anticipated. This led me to really lean on the critical thinking side of work to figure out how to healthily depend on resources that I have available to me. I also need to grow more in my “sales” life. I don’t particularly want to go into a sales role post-grad, but it became clear to me this summer that knowing how to sell is important, no matter what job you have. Both of these areas of growth I can tackle with more of a plan due to my experiences this past summer.
