BizAcademy was in full throttle yesterday, with the teams rehearsing their pitches all morning in preparation the The Lizard Panel. The Lizard Panel is made of internal salesforce.com managers, and each serve as a judge of the team's presentation skills. This is all to aid their preparation for the external Dragon's Panel today.
I got the lowdown from Peter Belton, Regional Enterprise Sales Director of Marketing Cloud and Barry Dietrich, Regional Sales Director of Enterprise who were Lizard Judges. Both Pete and Barry were personally invited to sit on the panel and had not previously been a part of BizAcademy. It is safe to say that neither of them knew what to expect.
Peter Belton's Panel Experience
Peter found the whole afternoon to be a great experience that gave him a new perspective on what he does for a living. There were three teams of young adults, and regardless of the type of personal challenges they have to deal with daily, these students seriously impressed him. He would have been amazed if new hires had provided such presentations after a few days, let alone these students. They really stepped up to the challenge and executed coherent, well structured presentations - and this was only their practise round!
Dylan was the student who stood out the most to Peter. Dylan only has 2% vision, but he memorised all of his notes and slides, provided a solid introduction and was a powerful force when it came to objection handling.
Peter's new found view on BizAcademy
To see how quickly the students learnt the technology and business skills within 3.5 days was amazing. I have seen experienced Sales Executives who could not process this amount of information so quickly. The program provides great insight to the students on how businesses operate on all levels. BizAcademy is genuinely a place to grow the students confidence, to show what they are capable of and that there is nothing to be afraid of in the business world.
Barry Detrich's Panel Experience
Having previously been unfamiliar with the Biz Academy program, Barry was completely and utterly blown away by the whole experience. He had no expectations other than he knew they had gone through a basic boot camp and all the students are disadvantaged in varying ways. He was having a hard time wrapping his head around how the students would be able to absorb all this information and create a presentation in three days!
Barry's Presentations
Safe to say, the students were able to show Barry what they were capable of. Their delivery was brillant and the slide decks were superb, in fact one of the slide decks "is one of the best slide decks I have ever seen at salesforce.com." He went on to share that he would be bringing that creativity into his team. Barry was particularly impressed with the creative and story of the deck from team two. One of the students acting as a Sales Engineer provided an impressive and thorough demo of Chatter. He actually logged in and ran through the whole functionality. One group even managed to articulate how the Service Cloud can support the customer service team, all through Chatter. A brilliant pitch!
Barry's new found love of BizAcademy
This is a world class program. The ability to bring together salesforce.com employees and partners with young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds to collaborate - the buzz is just indescribable. Barry was truely inspired with how the program gives back to these selected students and how it guides and educates them. All the students need is a little mentoring and support. A particular student stood out to Barry. Johanna has suffers from Cerebral Palsy, but when you meet her, all you see is this bright and intelligent spirit. She was incredibly engaging during her presentation. It was incredible to see these 12 beaming faces at the end of all the presentations in front of complete strangers, they were just bouncing with confidence.
Barry is already gearing up to volunteer his services for the full week, and will be getting his team involved as well. He believes that everyone can give back to this program, but at the same time we can all learn from it and take something away.
Today is the final day with all three teams going head to head against the Dragon Panel! Good luck BizAcademy!
