Every summer Revelwood hires 2-4 college interns to join its ranks for 10 weeks of immersive experience in the world of business and technology. Our internship positions have ranged from technical to marketing to sales to general business research. What’s critical to us is that all internships are mutually beneficial: interns must feel they are receiving at least as much value from Revelwood as they are giving.
This summer we have four ambitious interns who’ve joined us for an inaugural sales program we developed to help generate business opportunities for Revelwood. We modeled the program after a similar one that one of our vendor-partners in a different industry had created for its sales team. In fact, we are holding some joint best-practice sharing events across the two teams.
While mobile app development or predictive modeling and machine learning might seem extremely technical and challenging, I must say that sales is one of the hardest disciplines in business, and one that is not taught as much in America’s colleges and universities as it should be. Our sales program kicked off with a 3-day intensive boot camp of interactive learning, including lots of role playing. The team then jumped into action and hit the phones. Over the course of the summer they will learn critical business skills such as organization, discipline, perseverance, communications and building self-confidence.
I am impressed with how much our interns have learned already and their results so far. And, their positive, can-do attitudes are rubbing off on the rest of our team. We provide them with daily and weekly coaching and mentoring, so everyone is benefiting. Whether any of these students decide to pursue a career in technology sales is not so important. We hope their time at Revelwood will provide them with a valuable learning experience and set of skills they can take with them in whatever career paths they decide to pursue.
Why, you might ask, should all this matter to Revelwood clients? As individuals and as a company, we’re committed to continually learning. Not only do we expect our team of interns to learn new skills, but we also anticipate that many of our established Revelwoodians will learn to look at what we do – and the value we bring to our clients – with a new perspective.
