Sophia Rendon (USC Marshall, ‘22) spent her summer as a Business Value & Strategic Selling MBA Intern at Salesforce. During this experience, Sophie got to learn first-hand experience working on customer-facing projects to understand their business metrics and KPIs and to help construct a business case of the value of potential software investments from Salesforce. This experience put to test both her hard skills and soft skills, and during this interview, Sophia spoke about her MBA Internship experience, and what she learned from her summer at Salesforce.
MBASchooled: What did you do for your summer internship and what projects did you work on?
During my summer internship I specialized in addressing the pain points for our customers within the media and entertainment industry and expressing the value of Salesforce products through a quantified analysis that addressed the customer’s most important KPIs. My project was to create a POV on Media Cloud to inform users on the value of Media Cloud, to learn the media industry and provide customers with business ready case slides.
MBASchooled: What initially attracted you Business Value & Strategic Selling Internship, and how did that play out during your summer internship?
The Business Value Services internship allowed me to leverage skills I learned from the first year in my MBA program while building on my prior experience in ad sales in the media and entertainment industry. I refined hard skills like building financial models and slide decks and advanced my soft skills like focusing on managing internal and external relations.
MBASchooled: What were the important skills you had to use to be effective in this role?
The most important skill was building trust with all members of the sales team while partnering with account executives, solution engineers and enterprise architects. With their confidence in my work, I successfully developed and presented a strong business case to the customer that addressed their specific pain points. Overall, being a good listener with both internal and external relations is helpful in providing the best business case when partnering with a customer.
MBASchooled: What was it like to build relationships virtually? What helped? What was hard?
It was challenging to build relationships virtually, but it helped that my team often connected with one another and were extremely welcoming to me ever since my first day. My mentor provided me with a list of names of people I should reach out to introduce myself to and I spent most of my time the first couple of weeks getting to know people on my direct team. Asking thoughtful questions and offering my perspective made it easier to establish common ground with my team.
MBASchooled: Knowing what you know now, what would you do to prepare in order to be even more successful in your internship?
It was very beneficial that I had joined my school’s consulting club and committed myself to case preparation prior to my internship. However, in hindsight, it would have been helpful if I had taken a spreadsheet design course so that I could more clearly organize my business cases.
MBASchooled: What was a challenge that you had to overcome or work through?
A challenge I had to overcome was not being able to see my team in person in the office. From my personal experience, being able to ask questions in the office is how I typically had learned the day to day of a job. Luckily Salesforce had Trailhead, which is a training module that serves up bite size information and tests you on your knowledge of Salesforce products in a fun, interactive platform.
I spent any free time I had in my day, even if it was 10 minutes, upskilling my knowledge in Trailhead to further immerse myself in the product. I also was able to meet some team members in person in a COVID-safe manner and that helped solidify deeper relationships with my team.
MBASchooled: What was an important lesson that you learned from your summer internship?
An important lesson I learned was the importance of asking questions and feedback. Whether it be with internal team members or external customers, asking good questions establishes trust and credibility while allowing me to better understand how I can assist. I also learned that it is important that you care about what you are doing and that you are passionate about the value your work adds to society.
I was extremely passionate about the value Salesforce could provide our customers in giving employees hours back in their day to think at a higher level by eliminating non-value add, inefficient activities. At the end of the day, to be successful you have to be willing to work hard and go through any obstacle that comes your way. If you are passionate about your work, it makes being successful easier.
MBASchooled: What advice do you have for MBA students considering internships in this field?
I would advise MBA students considering an internship on the Business Value Services team to join their school’s consulting club and practice strategy cases, specifically within tech. The consulting prep is beneficial because it offers frameworks and important questions to ask customers when partnering with them on solutions.