This summer I have been an intern for 3M. In this internship I am a sales representative, and work out of Austin, Texas. I am stationed within the Communications Market Division and the team I work for deals closely with AT&T. However, my internship didn’t start in Austin and I’ll explain that now. In the middle of May me and 34 other interns headed to 3M headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota for our internship orientation. Here we first gained access to the 3M system, and got settled in with new emails, computers, and phones. During our time in headquarters were taught the 3M sales model and got a greater understanding of 3M as a whole. However, that is a big task to do. 3M is a company composed of over 88,000 thousand employees globally and sells and manufactures over 55,000 products. Each and every intern had a different job and was assigned to different locations around the country. Before we left for our assignments however we did get to see some amazing this happening at 3M headquarters. For example, we got to tour the 3M Innovation center and you can see a picture of a few fellow interns and myself below.

During my time in Austin I have had a few different responsibilities. My largest comes from performing product trainings for our fiber products to AT&T tech garages. I have spent a few weeks in Houston and even spent time in Madison and Milwaukee WI. Below is a picture of a co-worker of mine conducting product training while I shadowed him in, Houston.

On top of these product training’s I have spent a lot of time in the office doing some account analysis and finding key opportunities to sell and push several of our product lines. By bridging the gaps between product sales I have been able to identify tech garages nationally that should be a point of interest for our division. Lastly, I have spent a lot of time on salesforce.com and have helped conduct a salesforce.com ‘playbook’ for our AT&T team. A struggle that existed was confusion with a new CRM system, and hopefully through several meetings that I have lead I have made salesforce.com more simplified and easy to use.

This internship has taught me many things about both the job and myself. The most important thing that I have learned this summer is that it is okay to take on challenges that do not directly relate to your skill set. By getting familiar with excel and doing some account analysis I have been able to strengthen my skillset and have added value to the division in which I was placed. In terms of the job, I have learned that organization is so important for any field sales position, and by being organized with planning sales calls and visits you can truly be the most effective. I have loved my experience and have truly learned more than I thought was imaginable. My time in Austin has been wonderful, and I am glad I could intern for such a well respected and highly performing company.