This summer, Jenna Link (NYU Stern, ‘21) worked as a Business Value and Strategic Selling Consultant at Salesforce. Jenna worked on numerous projects that flexed her strategic thinking, financial analysis, and pricing expertise. Additionally, she networked with over 80 fellow employees, planned two virtual events, and built relationships with her fellow MBA Interns. During this interview, Link shared her summer internship experience, and her advice for others in successfully navigating MBA Internships.
MBASchooled: What did you do for your summer internship?
I interned as a Business Value and Strategic Selling Consultant at Salesforce. Business Value Services (or BVS for short) is a strategic team that provides consulting services to the sales organization by supporting top account opportunities. The “support” can vary from developing high-level strategic maps to building robust ROI analyses around the function and implementation of Salesforce’s products. Think: consulting but strategizing on why Salesforce products are differentiated. The role gave me the chance to flex my B-school strategy muscles and look at business investments through the lens of C-Suite execs.
MBASchooled: How has your internship helped you grow/develop?
Before business school, I worked as a buyer and financial planner at Macy’s for 4 years. The jobs entailed modeling long term and short-term financial plans, assessing and managing sales, and overseeing inventory levels and gross margin for multi-million-dollar brands. I had difficult conversations with vendors around pricing and marketing strategies and needed to be extremely organized, managing my book of business.
At a high level, I leveraged many of these skills during my internship. However, the applications were very different. In a sales-facing role, I needed to really sell customers on our product. At Macy’s, especially in my role as a buyer, vendors sold me on their product. At Salesforce, I needed to be extremely strategic in my customer discussions, ensuring that my messaging was tailored to specific customer pain points and needs. Over the 12-week internship, I refined this skill, conducting customer discovery workshops and presenting strategic analyses to 14 different customers. The best part? The customers I worked with spanned 11 industries. Until business school, my professional experience was narrowly focused within retail. The BVS internship was a fantastic way to apply my skills globally and gain experience across a range of industries.
MBASchooled: What projects/responsibilities did you have for the summer? What were the important skills you had to use?
The three key tenets of my internship were around revenue growth, strategic support and customer success.
- Revenue Growth: I worked on 14 deals across 12 Salesforce products and 11 industries. I led customer discovery sessions, built value maps, quantified business cases, created robust ROI analyses and presented to C-Suite execs.
- Strategic Support: I developed a tool to enable our sales team to convey the business value of Pardot (Salesforce’s B2B Marketing Solution) to Salesforce customers.
- Customer Success: I co-authored a learning module with my fellow MBA intern that’s set to go live on Trailhead.com this Fall. The module is designed to empower Trailblazers to uncover value as they implement Salesforce, coaching them on how to identify key business goals, select KPIs, define benchmarks, and create processes for accountability and growth.
MBASchooled: What did you learn from your summer internship?
While I refined hard skills like building financial models and slide decks, advancing my soft skills, around managing internal relations, were critical to being successful in the role. I needed to be aligned and trusted by all members of the sales team. I partnered with account executives and cloud specialists, solution engineers and enterprise architects in BVS. Without their trust and confidence in my work, I would not have been able to meet my business goal of developing and presenting a strong business case to the customer.
MBASchooled: What was it like to build relationships virtually? What helped? What was hard?
I met with 85 incredible Salesforce employees for 1:1’s this summer, who provided insights into Salesforce, gave feedback on my work, and shared career advice. I went into these meetings prepped with speaking points about myself, my work at Salesforce and some well thought out questions to ask the person I was meeting with that day. I approached the 1:1’s through the lens of inputs and outputs. For inputs, what key takeaways did I want this person to remember about me and my work? For outputs, what questions or requests did I have for them? Those outputs could be around networking (who should I speak with next?), career advice, or feedback on my work and projects.
Another way I tried to connect with my team and build relationships was by co-planning two cultural events. This was a great way to collaborate across my vertical and demonstrate my work ethic, while also contributing meaningfully to the team’s engagement. The first event was a fireside chat on entrepreneurship. Our team nominated four talented women entrepreneurs on BVS to highlight during the chat. We had 47 attendees join, including women and allies from outside BVS! The second event was our Q2 Engagement week that focused on education, wellness, togetherness and FUN for the 36 members of the Commercial Business Value Team. I co-planned 10 events with a BVS director, culminating in a flagship two-hour event.
MBASchooled: What was an important lesson that you learned from your summer internship?
The internship was a great way to get outside of my comfort zone and take risks. I could put into practice the strategy, leadership and negotiation lessons learned in the classroom to establish myself as a trusted and creative source for the team.
In doing this, one of the most important lessons I learned was to put my own “spin on things” and challenge the status quo. For example, when it came to creating content and presenting to customers, there were standardized slide decks for BVS. I’m an artistic person with a creative background (I sell my paintings on Etsy and studied graphic design at a vocational high school). Early in the internship, I realized that I could inject my creativity into my slide decks to make compelling business cases in a fresh and exciting way to my customers. This visual story-telling became my “thing” and a tangible “input” to share in my 1:1’s.
MBASchooled: What was a challenge that you had to overcome or work through?
I did A LOT during my internship. My personal goal was to exceed everyone’s expectations by the end of the summer. Achieving that meant managing a very demanding workload. There were times, especially at the beginning, where being an intern in a new function, in an unfamiliar industry (SaaS), was overwhelming. When that happened, I took a step back. Sometimes that was quite literally leaving my apartment to go for a 15-minute walk to clear my head. Other times, that meant setting up a 20-minute sync with my onboarding mentor (Salesforce calls these mentors “Trail Guides”). Taking the time to ask for help, instead of spinning my wheels, was important in maintaining my sanity and productivity.
MBASchooled: Knowing what you know now, what would you do to prepare in order to be even more successful in your internship?
“Business Value Services” was not a team or function I was familiar with before business school. While not all companies call the vertical “Business Value,” the sales-consulting function exists in most large-scale tech companies. For example, Microsoft calls the role “Technical Sales Consultant” and Google calls it “Value Advising.” The skills required for the role are similar to general consulting skills. Because I did not recruit for consulting, I did not learn how to “case” like an MBA consultant. In retrospect, this would have been a valuable skill to have entering the summer. This year, I plan to sit in on a few of the consulting bootcamps to help further refine my ability to break down problems and build solutions.
MBASchooled: What advice do you have for other MBA Interns?
A virtual environment meant there was less physical visibility and I wanted to find a way to share all that I had undertaken and accomplished. To address this, each week, I wrote a weekly recap highlighting how I’d allocated my time and shared the post with my immediate team. For example, if I met with Product Marketers to discuss my strategic support tool or if I led a customer discovery workshop with a customer, I included those bullets in my weekly recap. It was a reliable and consistent way to create accountability with my manager, too.
MBASchooled: Now that you’ve finished your internship, what’s next?
I know now that I want to work full-time in a sales consulting role. I loved partnering with customers and interacting with a variety of internal functions to meaningfully impact business pain points and goals. As I head back to finish my second year at Stern, I plan on further developing the aforementioned skills in the classroom (I’m taking Brand Strategy with the notorious Scott Galloway), through my role as co-president of the Stern Technology Association, and as a teaching fellow for marketing undergrads.