Samantha Eynon '23 went from scoring goals to shattering goals in short order.

A little more than a year after graduating from Muhlenberg, where she was a two-time All-Centennial Conference women's lacrosse player, Eynon is making an impact as a strategic enterprise business development representative at Toast, a restaurant management software company based in Boston.

A business administration major with a concentration in marketing and an analytics minor, Eynon received her job offer in January of her senior year and began working at Toast in July. She started as a sales development representative.

"It's a standard entry-level role to prepare me for a future sales closing role," she explains. "I was focused on inbound outreach, so I would get people that had requested information about Toast. It was small-to-medium size restaurants, working with them to come up with a technology solution."

Held to a quota of 34 meetings held per month, Eynon hit 295% of her goal in her first three months. That led her to her current position in Toast's brand new sports and entertainment vertical. 

"It's kind of the opposite type of outreach," she says. "I'm now doing cold outreach, focused on minor league baseball teams, convention centers, large cinema groups and stadiums, and then when the seasonality switches, it'll be basketball teams, NFL stadiums. So pretty much anything in the sports world, which is super exciting."

Eynon finds herself leaning heavily into experience playing intercollegiate athletics.

"I didn't know if sales would be for me, but within my first couple of months I realized that it was pretty similar to the competitive nature that I had already," she says. "When I would collaborate with some of my peers in leadership, they would just ask, 'what do you think made you so successful?' And every time I would answer with the fact that I'm competitive because I was a college athlete.

"I feel like I had that kind of innate nature to be goal-driven and want to do the best I can just from college athletics."

Eynon also attributes her success to the close-knit community at Toast. "Everyone at Toast celebrates each other's success, and it's an extremely positive environment to advance my career," she says.

That welcoming culture that reminds her of the small liberal arts college experience at Muhlenberg. 

But it wasn't just a matter of popping that supportive environment into a toaster and having a successful career pop out. Eynon takes skills she learned at Muhlenberg to work every day, even when she stays home in her hybrid role.

"I think firstly, having such small class sizes, you really interacted with your professors a lot," she says. "Interacting with adults on a daily basis and having to speak professionally and present professionally … that's something that is beyond required in a work setting. I also think the wide variety of courses that I took at Muhlenberg definitely prepared [me]. I can use everything I've learned in my day to day."

Making cold sales calls comes with its challenges; not everybody appreciates the outreach. Eynon is well equipped to deal with the frustrations, however, thanks to the challenges and adversity she dealt with at Muhlenberg both as a student-athlete and as a student. 

In one particular mathematics class she took during her junior year, her expectations of "crushing it" were dashed following a rocky first test. But after meeting with the professor and making sure she was preparing herself better for future tests, she was able to dig herself out of the hole.

Says Eynon, "I feel like that definitely correlates to what I do now … knowing that when you put the work in, you'll get what you want out of it."

"Made Mules" is a series that looks at recent Muhlenberg athletes who have achieved success following graduation.  Previous "Made Mules" profiles:
Joshua Barnett '21