Why everyone should do a sales internship

Even if you’re selling votes, not widgets

As a twenty-something, I’ve done more than my fair share of internships. Aiding my indecision and appetite for variety, they’ve run the gamut from fashion magazines to senators’ offices to non-profits to investment banks to private equity funds.

However, I think the most useful one was serving as a field intern for Obama for America in swing state New Hampshire the summer I turned seventeen. That sounded really cool when I applied, but what it really boiled down to was sales.

Every day, I received a stack of phone numbers and cold-called down the list to enlist support, even if it meant accidentally running into the occasional Republican. (Full disclosure: I’m actually a registered Republican, but that’s another story for a different day.)

In other words: rejection.

Rejection, rejection, and more rejection.

I learned to not take it personally.

I learned that the world is big, and the strangest kinds of people inhabit it, including eighty-year-olds who suddenly start screaming FUCK at you before slamming the phone in your face.

I learned that if you call enough people, at some point, someone is going to say yes. In fact, more than one, probably. (Thanks, probability!) So instead of dreading the next number and the next response, I learned how to feel hopeful because it represented yet another opportunity.

I learned that confidence, whether real or imagined, leads to results. Fake it until you make it.

I learned that if you persist, sometimes even miracles happen. Like the Republican woman who was so impressed with the campaign’s “enthusiasm” that she would throw in her vote for Obama that year.

As we all know, New Hampshire swung Democrat that year.

While my contribution to the overall effort was small, I learned more calling down the numbers listed on one sheet of paper than I ever did fetching coffee or transcribing interviews or even manipulating numbers on Excel models to arrive at the desired enterprise value.

Today, I have a B2B startup. We sell to corporations, not voters. We deal in art and design, not politics.

But the lesson is still the same.

Ultimately, to get anything done, you need to never give up and always be closing.