Marco Pena gained skills in sales strategy and customer service as a summer intern with Vivint.
How did you get your internship?
I got my internship after attending a career fair for a PAH 383 Pre-Internship: Building Career Readiness course assignment. I saw the Vivint booth in the Bear Down Gymnasium and I decided to walk up and meet the representatives there who would actually end up being two of my co-workers and managers. We had a great conversation, we laughed, the energy felt positive, and based on what they saw in me they believed that I would be a great fit for their job. From there, I gave them my resume and exchanged contacts with them. They gave me a call two weeks later for a first round interview, then I had the final interview with Nick, the manager, through a zoom call. From there, I went to three of their meetings in their office at Phoenix and was offered the position.
Why did you choose this internship?
I chose this internship because it focuses on sales, which is something I have always had an interest in and my family also works in sales. My father was a car salesman before he passed away and my mother, in addition to her full time job, sells water softeners and purifiers. The only difficult part about deciding to take this job was that the pay is commission-based, but I was motivated by the fact that both of my parents had sales jobs before and it was possible to still make money. It also helped that my mother had full support of me taking on a sales job like this.
What kind of work did you do throughout your internship experience?
I did door-to-door sales, phone sales, and commission based selling. Every week or two, we would all get assigned to a neighborhood to obtain leads and close sales. We learned how to communicate with people, pique their interests, respond to customer pushback, and deal with rejection. It is mentally tough job, and not everyone can be good at it, but if you have the work ethic and the mentality to never give up, you can find success in sales.
What new knowledge did you learn in this internship? What skills did you gain?
New knowledge that I learned is the art of sales: how I can use my words, my attitude, and my conviction to convince people to make same-day decisions when buying a product. I learned how to overcome objections, use my words, analogies, and figurative language to explain the advantages of buying a product at an exclusive rate. The transferable skills I developed were communication, work ethic, problem solving, and overcoming rejection. I developed a much stronger mental fortitude and just overall gained communication skills with customers to improve my sales.
What did you find challenging about your internship and what did you learn from it?
What I found most challenging about my internship was when I had door-to-door sales on hot days or when I did a sales pitch to people who were rude or wouldn’t give me their full attention. Another challenging part of this job is when I would have a week where it felt like I had a bad batch of sales leads and had to bounce back the next week. Now that I’ve had more experience, it makes me happy knowing that the more people who give me “no” for an answer, the closer I am getting to that “yes.” What I learned from this challenge is that not everyone is going to be your customer and that is OK. There are simply people who are too stubborn to hear you out, don’t have the finances to pay for it, or overall, do not see any type of benefit from your product. I shouldn’t blame myself for not making every single sale; people who aren’t willing to hear my pitch are just not my customer.
How has your internship experience influenced your plans for your future?
Although I did better than I thought I would with my first time in sales, I definitely want to come back next year and make at least double of what I made this year. For now, when I come back home to school, I am going to be working with my mother at her sales job, because I know that she can sell products well and I can learn from her. On my end, I can try out some of my door-to-door strategies to find potential customers and share the coordination of making appointments with customers. I will also shadow my mother to learn her strategies for closing deals and split the commission from the hopefully increased sales.