SDR Summer Intern

Overview

You'll spend 10 weeks in Nashville doing actual SDR work at Glean—making cold calls, sending prospecting emails, and trying to book discovery meetings with potential customers. The company is building this as a real internship program with structured enablement, coaching sessions, and exposure to their SDR leadership team. You're not just shadowing; you'll have activity metrics and meeting quotas like a regular SDR, but with more support and lower expectations since you're learning.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Growth stage (1,493 employees—well past startup phase)

Size: ~1,500 employees

Growth: Building their first intern program suggests maturity and investment in talent pipeline

Market Position: Large enough to have a full SDR org with multiple layers of leadership

Note: The company website pulled up Bitly data (URL shortening), but the LinkedIn post is clearly about Glean. Based on employee count and Nashville presence, this is likely Glean (the enterprise search/knowledge management platform), not Bitly. Assume you're selling enterprise software that helps companies find information across their tools.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• Some inbound leads (company this size has marketing generating MQLs)
• Heavy outbound prospecting (SDR team with dedicated leadership suggests volume outbound motion)
• You'll likely work both: follow up on marketing leads AND do cold outreach

SDR/AE Structure: Dedicated SDR team passing qualified meetings to AEs

SE Support: Likely available for technical questions during your calls, but you won't be booking SE time yourself

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Cold Calling (30%) | Email/LinkedIn (25%) | Learning/Training (25%) | Admin/CRM (20%)

Week One Reality

You'll spend most of the first week in training: learning the product, understanding the pitch, doing role-plays with your manager. You won't be making real calls until mid-week at earliest.

Typical Day (Weeks 2-10)

• 8:30-9:00am: Team standup—share yesterday's results, discuss what's working
• 9:00-11:30am: Calling block. You'll make 40-60 dials, talk to maybe 5-8 people, have 1-2 real conversations. Most people don't answer or hang up quickly.
• 11:30am-12:30pm: Write follow-up emails to people you talked to, update CRM notes, research accounts for afternoon calls
• 1:00-2:30pm: Second calling block or email/LinkedIn outreach. You're trying to get responses from prospects who might not answer the phone.
• 2:30-3:30pm: 1-on-1 coaching with your manager or shadowing an AE discovery call
• 3:30-5:00pm: Admin work—logging activities, watching recorded calls, working through enablement training modules

Key Activities

• Cold calling from a provided list: You'll get a list of accounts/contacts to call. You're using a script at first, then adapting it. Most calls end in 15 seconds when they say they're not interested. You're trying to get them curious enough to book 30 minutes on an AE's calendar.

• Email sequences and LinkedIn messages: Writing short, personalized outreach messages. You'll follow a template but customize with research on their company. Response rates are low—maybe 2-5% reply.

• Weekly coaching sessions: Sit down with your manager to listen to call recordings, get feedback on your pitch, work through objections. This is actually valuable—full-time SDRs don't always get this much attention.

• CRM hygiene: Log every call, email, and outcome in Salesforce or HubSpot. Update contact info. Write notes on what the prospect said. This is tedious but required.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Rejection is constant: Most people you call will blow you off, hang up, or say "send me an email" (which means no). You'll hear "not interested" 30+ times per day. By week three, this either stops bothering you or you realize outbound sales isn't for you.

• It's repetitive: You're saying basically the same pitch 50 times a day. The job is about volume and persistence, not creative problem-solving. Some days you'll feel like a robot.

• Metrics pressure with training wheels: You'll have a meeting quota (probably 8-12 per week vs 15-20 for full SDRs), but you still feel the pressure to hit it. Some weeks you'll crush it because you get lucky with good responses. Other weeks you'll struggle and feel behind.

• You're at the bottom of the sales org: AEs won't always take your meetings seriously if the prospect is weak. You'll book something that feels qualified to you, and the AE will say "this isn't ready" and kick it back. That's frustrating.

What Success Looks Like

• You book 8-12 qualified meetings per week consistently by week 6
• AEs accept most of your meetings as good-fit prospects (60%+ show rate)
• You get comfortable with rejection and don't take "no" personally
• You learn the basics: how to research accounts, handle objections, book meetings on calendars, use CRM
• By the end, you can decide if you actually want to do this full-time or not

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers (who you'll actually talk to):

• Mid-level managers or directors in IT, Operations, or department heads
• VPs who might pick up if you get lucky
• Individual contributors who can connect you to their boss

What They Care About:

• "Will this actually save me time or just create more work?"
• "How hard is this to implement?" (enterprise software has an adoption problem)
• "What's this going to cost?" (you'll deflect this to the AE, but they'll ask)

What You're Saying: You're not explaining the full product—you don't know it well enough yet, and they won't listen anyway. You're trying to surface a problem they have (can't find information across tools, wasting time searching, knowledge silos) and get them curious enough to talk to an AE for 30 minutes.

Requirements

• Currently enrolled in a university (you need to be a student for Summer 2026)
• Available for 10 full weeks in Nashville (this is in-person, not remote)
• Comfortable making phone calls to strangers and hearing "no" repeatedly
• Basic professionalism: show up on time, take feedback, stay coachable
• No prior sales experience required—they're teaching you from scratch
• Thick skin or ability to develop it quickly

What You'll Actually Learn

• Prospecting fundamentals: How to research accounts, find contact info, write cold emails, structure a cold call
• Objection handling: What to say when they say "not interested," "send me info," "call me next quarter"
• CRM basics: How to log activities, manage a pipeline, run reports
• How B2B sales orgs work: The handoff between SDR → AE → SE → AM
• Whether you like this work: 10 weeks is enough to know if you want to do this for 1-2 years as a full-time SDR post-grad

Real Talk

This is a good internship if you're curious about tech sales and want to try it with support. You'll do real work, hit real metrics, and get real coaching. The downside: it's a grind. Cold calling is hard. You'll have bad days where nobody talks to you and you question what you're doing.

The upside: If you're good at this and like it, Glean might offer you a full-time SDR role when you graduate. Even if they don't, you'll have real sales experience on your resume, which helps you get other tech sales jobs. And if you hate it, you found out in 10 weeks instead of quitting 6 months into a full-time job.

Expect to make 200-300 cold calls per week, send 100+ emails, and book 8-12 meetings if you're hitting plan. Most interns book fewer than that, and that's okay—you're learning.