Commonwealth Joe has established itself as an office luxury, uniquely delivering craft on tap beverages such as nitro cold brew coffee, nitro tea, kombucha, and non-alcoholic seltzer. Based in DC, we are proud to serve a range of companies in the largest business cities of Washington DC, New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia along with 25 states across the country. Along with a passion for craft beverages, Commonwealth Joe prides itself on its workplace culture by researching, inputting, and sharing industry insights to enhance productivity and culture effectively. Working at Commonwealth Joe is a unique opportunity that I have had the pleasure to experience as a Summer Sales and Marketing Intern this past summer. A truly immersive and hands on experience, interning at Commonwealth Joe is a unique professional opportunity.
My initial Commonwealth Joe experience began in the interview process with CEO, Robert Peck and Sales Manager, Emma Tremont who shared an openness and passion for their company, product, and services. A large part of the interview process, for interns and full-time hires, lies in the interviewee selling themselves and their resume as to why they should be hired. However, their confidence and attitude behind Commonwealth Joe was an attractive selling point that differed from many previous interviews I had done with other finance, advertising, and marketing companies whose main attraction stood in their name value. Before the internship, Robert and Emma were very interested in getting to know me more as a person with a genuine curiosity of my background and aspirations. Their detailed and personalized work plan demonstrated a genuine commitment to intern professional development, exposure to a range of skills, and promoting personality above all.
Weeks one through three were highly instructional and served as a training camp introduction into Commonwealth Joe’s core. Filled with longer meetings and initial challenges navigating new platforms, the introduction week provided a strong foundation and connection to the brand. After four weeks, the first project was a business presentation aimed at understanding office decision-makers' roles, office amenity trends, and the impact of the post-pandemic shift towards hybrid work. In addition to workplace insights, the research project demanded case studies, data, and insights to draw actionable conclusions to validate or refine Commonwealth Joe's customer profiles. With the goal to optimize offerings and strategies in line with current industry trends, this combined deliverables and autonomous extensive research resulting in a true passion for my findings and strong desire to share actionable insights for future marketing efforts.
Throughout the internship, weekly duties required constant focus. Tasked with monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on sales and marketing funnel performance using Google Analytics and a CRM platform called Close. Data reporting and analytics continues to remain an important sector of business insights to inform and improve future efforts. Both platforms provided exposure to industry-standard tools highly sought after in the job market. Using Close, I focused on the outbound messaging of sales qualified leads requiring the creation of creative messaging techniques and persistent messages to schedule sales calls. A true test of uncomfortability, Close required equal parts confidence as software familiarity in order to enroll in persistent sequence messaging and accepting a lack of responses or complete rejection. This experience was much needed to understand the operations of smaller businesses and engage with customer profiles in a convincing manner.
One of the main projects that was ongoing were blogs such as this one, generating and sharing unique blog topics as well as creating white papers to be shared with customers as informational pamphlets. The overall aim of this project was to create compelling, SEO-optimized content that not only drives awareness and understanding of the importance of cold coffee in offices and the services Commonwealth Joe provides, but also incites action from target customer profiles to engage with the sales team. Published on the main website, generating engaging blogs allowed for the unique hands-on experience of having my work on the main page. Not many internships are very hands-on but generating blogs on the main website and sending white pagers to multiple interested customers, seeing my work being put into work effectively demonstrated a company culture of equal opportunity. Other projects included social media generation and e-newsletter marketing to target existing businesses and customers to continue engagement and keep them informed and interested in our brand and services. Using platforms such as Instagram and MailChimp, I was able to combine digital marketing with sales to appeal to consumer interests.
The Commonwealth Joe internship experience reflects everything an intern can want in their early professional career. First and foremost, Commonwealth Joe provides structured deliverables but promotes creative flair to experiment and let personality shine. Such autonomy and flexibility reflects a leadership and culture of employee success just as much as consumer satisfaction. By providing hands-on and effective projects, Commonwealth Joe provides exposure to multiple softwares and platforms desired in the job market such as sales, design, data analytics, and lead generation. By publishing intern written blogs and e-newsletters, Commonwealth Joe is not like other internships but provides deliverables with effective outputs. Overall, my Commonwealth Joe experience has been an educational opportunity that has not just boosted my professional skill set but connected me with some of the brightest and creative minds bringing craft high-quality beverages on tap to world class businesses.
By: Ben Do