A fresh start
Embarking on the adventure of starting an internship for the first time in a foreign country, can be the most intimidating but also the most exciting time for a university student. It wasn’t any different in my case, when I started my internship at Spryng.
Spryng is a tech company that provides solutions for businesses that want to improve their communication processes. Since I was hired as the marketing intern , my main tasks revolve around marketing related tasks, but since it’s a smaller company, there is quite a bit of overlap between sales and marketing tasks, which I appreciate, since this way I am allowed to gain experience in both.
Daily life at a startup
On a daily basis the tasks manifest in different ways, there are days when I am responsible for the rebranding and website migration of the company, and there are days when my primary focuses are SEO, ABM (account based marketing), email campaigns, recruitment for new interns, social media and many more, depending on which project we aim to prioritize for that day/ week.
In a more practical sense, our workday starts between 8:30 and 9:00 depending on your preferences. Every morning we have the standout at 9:15, during which everyone shares their tasks and goals for the day. After that I either join meetings or do the tasks that I planned for that day. At 11:45 all interns start preparing the lunch, which we usually have from 12 to 12:30. After that we clean up and get back to work. We usually have full freedom over our schedules, since we have weekly strategy meetings, where we discuss everything we want to do that week, and from then on we decide when we want to execute the projects, as long as they’re finished before the deadline. At 16:30 we have the stand out, which is essentially the same as the stanford up, but here we share what we achieved during the day. I find this encouraging and motivating since we always celebrate each other’s successes. Around 5 pm is when the workday officially ends, however, if I finish everything I planned for the day, I am allowed to go home a bit sooner.
Exciting projects I’ve participated in
Since it is a startup company, the teams are smaller. The marketing team only consists of the marketing manager and the marketing intern (me). The sales teams, of which we have three (NL, BE and DACH) are constructed similarly. There is a lot of collaboration between the marketing team and the sales teams, since each project requires the strategic planning and preparation, which is done by the marketing team and the outreach which is done by the sales teams. One good example for this, is the ABM campaign we launched in early january. Although the planning and preparations for this campaign started in December, it was finalized at the very beginning of the new year. The sales team created a leadlist that contained all the names and contact details of the representatives of companies they wanted to book a meeting with in 2024. Once that was done we had a meeting to brainstorm gift ideas we could send out. Once we had an idea of what we would like to include, I ordered the products, assembled the packages and sent them to the recipients. 7 out of the 12 companies that received the gifts have booked meetings with the sales representatives. This showcases how successful collaboration between teams can be.
Conclusion
In conclusion, doing an internship at Spryng has provided me with wonderful opportunities and has taught me about not only the field of marketing, but the workings of a healthy work environment and the value of teamwork.