Jenna Link: BVS at Salesforce
Class of 2021
Business Value Services at Salesforce
New York City
What did you do prior to Stern?
Retail Buyer/Planner at Macy's.
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.
What was the best part of your internship?
Over the 12-week internship, I refined my strategy and consultive skills, 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.
What was the company's culture like?
Salesforce has an extremely strong culture, even in a virtual environment. Salesforce has 1:1:1 model which means that 1% of product, 1% of equity, 1% of employee time. During my internship, I spent 17 hours completing VTO (Virtual Time Off). Even as an intern, we are allowed to donate up to 56 hours of time over the 12-week internship. One of my favorite volunteer events involved planning and leading a fireside chat to empower women entrepreneurs on my team.
One of Salesforce's core value is equality, so during the summer, I joined the BVS Women's Initiative. As part of my contribution to the team, I led the July Fireside Chat. Our BVS team nominated four talented entrepreneurial women to highlight for the event. We had 47 attendees join for the chat, including allies and non-BVS-ers! It was a fantastic way to uplift team members and share their impressive achievements outside their Salesforce work.
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.
What kind of events did you get to do with your fellow interns and/or team?
When Salesforce announced the summer internship would be 100% virtual, they pivoted FAST. They created robust programming to keep as engaged as possible. We indulged in everything from wine tastings (yes, they shipped us four full bottles of wine from Napa) to weekly Uber Eats credits to augmented reality paint nights. We had two cooking classes led by top chiefs and Salesforce shipped us the ingredients! Salesforce faced the challenge of a virtual internship head on. I feel very fortunate to have had such a dynamic experience.
What was the city like? Did you have a chance to explore? Did it affect your internship in any way?
Unfortunately, the internship was 100% virtual because of Covid-19.
What was most challenging part of your internship and what would you do it again if you could?
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 on-boarding 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.
If I could do it again, “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.
What was most helpful to you during the recruiting process?
I leveraged my study group network within Stern to practice behaviors and tech-casing questions. Ultimately, we leaned on each other through the mental ups and downs of recruiting.
What advice do you have for current and prospective students for their internships?
It's unclear how long work-from-home (or study-from-home) will remain a reality. Find a way to create accountability for yourself. During my internship, 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.
