This summer, Maxine Lau (USC Marshall, ‘21) got the chance to intern at Salesforce as a Product Marketing MBA Intern. In this role, Lau immersed herself as a product marketing manager working on three separate projects around strategic marketing and sales enablement, customer engagement, and data and insights. In this interview, Lau spoke about her summer as a Product Marketing Intern, and some of the lessons and learnings she got from her experience.
MBASchooled: What did you do for your summer internship?
This summer, I interned with Salesforce as a member of the Product Marketing team in the Technology Service Delivery organization. As a Product Marketing Manager (PMM) intern, I had the opportunity to combine my MBA education, previous work experience, and passion for areas such as go-to-market strategy, marketing, and product development in high-tech to work on strategic marketing initiatives as related to Salesforce’s global infrastructure.
At Salesforce, Trust is our #1 value and this means that we deliver the highest standards in system availability, performance and security. Product Marketing helps connect the voice of our customers to our product and engineering teams so that we can continually improve Service Delivery features, which are crucial to the success of Salesforce customers.
MBASchooled: What was a project that you worked on this summer as a Product Marketing Intern?
One underlying theme I’ve found throughout my career is that I am passionate about bringing people together and connecting the dots to create business and technology solutions at scale. As a PMM intern, I juggled several projects throughout the summer, but my favorite one was developing customer personas. Understanding your customer means that you can enable strategic selling, which helps focus your team’s time and energy on the most qualified prospects, guide product development for internal teams, and create prioritization and alignment across your organization. Additionally, deep understanding of personas can aid in customer acquisition and retention, which is key to sustainable, and long-term growth for any company. Following the completion of this project, I received kudos from team members who were able to use this deck for long-term departmental planning.
MBASchooled: What were the important skills you had to use to be an effective PMM Intern?
To be an effective PMM Intern, some important skills include: flexibility and adaptability, strategic alignment, and ability to translate raw data into actionable insights. As a PMM, you will constantly be bombarded with new projects, ideas, etc. from all directions and it is important to take a step back, to process the upcoming tasks at hand, and to evaluate which projects will create the most immediate and tangible impact for your team.
This is where alignment with your manager and senior leadership becomes critical. I had formal meetings bi-weekly with my manager and bi-monthly meetings with senior leadership to ensure that my projects delivered tangible value. To further build transparency and accountability, I set up a Quip document (a collaborative productivity tool) to stay organized and to keep track of what I’ve accomplished for the day – and shared this with my manager so that he could help re-direct me as needed. Finally, the ability to analyze data from a variety of input sources and then translate the data into actionable insights through story-telling is crucial to be an effective PMM. Several projects depended on my ability to synthesize the data efficiently, and to create an end deliverable that outlined the current problem, why it was important for the team to take action, and how taking action based on these insights would produce results for our team.
MBASchooled: What were some of the things that helped you be successful in your summer internship?
Networking. I had over 50+ coffee chats and 1-1s with colleagues on the Technology Service Delivery team, the greater Technology, Marketing & Product (TMP) organization, cross-cloud PMMs, and Account Executive and Customer Success teams. Through coffee chats, I learned about their backgrounds, why they love working at Salesforce, and any other tips & tricks they had to help me do well over the summer. These 1-1s helped me understand what some of my team member’s individual priorities were and how might my projects add value to their existing workflows. Their feedback helped me obtain buy-in and compile input from a variety of stakeholders, ultimately to develop and present strong business cases to senior leadership.
Prioritization. Adding on to some of the points mentioned earlier, constantly prioritizing and re-prioritizing is a must. Given the short timeframe of the internship, I focused my energy and attention on the projects that would deliver the most value for my team. At Salesforce, we use a tool called V2MOM, and this enables our team to achieve alignment. Aligning my projects to my team’s V2MOM was crucial to ensuring that we continue to operate as a cohesive unit.
MBASchooled: What aspects from your previous work experience, or skills you had were relevant in your PMM internship? What were some new skills you had to build or use?
Prior to my MBA, I worked in various roles for startups across CPG and Cleantech industries in B2C and B2B. Working in the startup environment taught me how to wear numerous hats (product marketing, sales, program management, operations, etc.) and gave me the opportunity to learn what my key strengths are (and also what I least enjoyed doing). Product Marketing seemed like a natural fit given that I enjoy tapping into my creative side to find solutions – and highly prioritize and value the voice of the customer in every project I take on. Interning at Salesforce provided the opportunity to learn how to navigate a large organization (50,000+ employees) and gave me the confidence that I can take the skills I learned in previous roles and apply them across a much larger and mature organization.
MBASchooled: What was it like to build relationships virtually? What helped? What was hard?
Building relationships virtually is challenging. I found myself needing to be much more proactive and diligent in order to build genuine, meaningful relationships – with my team, fellow colleagues at Salesforce, USC Marshall alumni, and our intern class. Over the course of the internship, and with the help of my Trailguide – who serves as a mentor throughout the summer – we identified who I should connect with to maximize my internship experience. Additionally, and as often as possible, I would find ways to engage and participate in virtual activities to build personal rapport. Luckily, we had the amazing Futureforce team who helped organize wine-tasting, pizza-making events, and even virtual painting classes to help us build these relationships a bit easier.
MBASchooled: What advice do you have for MBA students considering internships in Product Marketing?
Great question! I would advise to learn as much as you can about Product Marketing during the Fall – whether it be through attending organized workshops, speaking to those already in the field, and taking Marketing classes that teach you how to analyze and process data to make business decisions. Sharpen all of these skills in your toolkit so that by the time interviews roll around, you have plenty to say about the work you’ve done.
Additionally, here’s a couple extra resources that might help you through the MBA recruiting process: