i asked for gong keys on my sixth day

so you want api keys from your manager. well buddy youve come to the right place.

you want keys for gong, hubspot, gmail. whatever. problem is, nobody wants to give them to you. you’re just an sdr. nobody trusts you. why would they. maybe you’ve only worked there for a week like me.

here’s the move. find a problem. something that’s costing the team data or money that nobody bothers to fix. then fix it. you just need the one thing to work.

once you ship it, the next ask isn’t really an ask anymore. it’s “oh, he’s going to do another one of those, give him the keys.”

here’s the thing i shipped.

gong wasn’t syncing transcripts to hubspot when i got to openrouter. notes, yes. transcripts, no. we own that data as a company, and it was just sitting in gong, invisible to anyone working in the crm.

i slacked our gong admin. told her we own the data, it doesn’t sync automatically, and i can build the sync through the api. i just need access.

she said absolutely, didn’t even know we could. cool.

so i got the gong keys, gave claude code access, asked for a hubspot api key so i could backfill. about 300 calls worth of transcripts. claude did the whole thing. now it syncs automatically going forward too.

hubspot is finally what it was designed to be. one source of truth. aes don’t have to check three places to figure out what happened on a deal. all the context lives in one record.

another one, same pattern. hubspot wasn’t logging emails we sent to prospects from our connected gmail inboxes. nobody knew why. i had claude code dig into it, found the fix, and asked for elevated permissions to apply it. got them same day. and i kept those permissions after the fact.

from there, i started asking for more api keys to cover similar blind spots. every request framed the same way. not “this would be more convenient for me.” instead, “the data lives in one place, the aes get better context, the team moves faster.”

convenience for me was never the pitch. it’s just the side effect.

here’s what the side effect looks like. my whole job lives in claude code now. i’m not bouncing between slack, hubspot, gmail, calendar, gong all day. that switching tax is gone. the work just happens in one place.

but there’s a second thing that’s maybe more important. claude code tracks everything. every correction i make to an initial draft. every conversation. every transcript. i’m building a corpus of how to do inbound at openrouter. what kind of inbounds we get, what gets responded to, what books, what closes, what’s a good lead. all the data on what’s working sits in one place.

which means i can actually teach a robot to do this job. not guess at it, not prompt around it. point at real patterns and say here’s what good looks like, go do that.

you don’t have to work the way your tools want you to work. you can make the tools come to you. you just need the keys.

if you want some low hanging fruit to start with, the gong to crm sync is a good one. it’s fairly easy for claude to do, and it’s probably not being done at your company right now.

all you need is an api key for gong and one for your crm. get those into claude code and the whole thing is pretty easy to build.

if you want to know how i did this, feel free to reach out to me on linkedin.

carpenter ants that move between multiple nest chambers in a single day live roughly 20 percent shorter lives than ants that stay in one.

this issue was written with claude code, which is where most of my job lives now.

if this landed, forward it to one person who’s tab-hopping all day. if it didn’t, reply and tell me why.

if you want to know more about how i did any of this, reply here or reach out to me on linkedin. replies go to my personal inbox.