Well, I have officially started my senior year at CU Boulder. As I begin my new classes, I am noticing that what I have learned during my internship is already proving to be useful. Not only can I apply my new knowledge in my classes, but I can also apply it to college life in general.
For example, what I have learned at Net-Results has helped me identify the flaws in my University’s email strategy. Like many large organizations, CU uses an email blasting technique. This is not necessarily a bad strategy at times but it can be a bit of a nuisance to receive emails that are not relevant to you. When I first started my college career I was in the school of Engineering, and although it has been three years since I transferred to the Business school, I will still receive the occasional email intended for engineering students. This indicates that there are inaccuracies in their segmentation or database cleaning process. Even though I have unsubscribed from their emailing list and transferred out of their school, the engineering school hasn’t fully removed me from their list of targeted email recipients.
I can also connect what I have learned about product development to my own school projects. This semester, I actually have a project where I must design a product and develop it to the point where it could be taken to market. One of the most important elements of product development is the voice of the customer. Listening to your customer’s needs is the best way to ensure your product’s success. However when working on group projects, everyone has their own ideas of where they want to go with the project. It can become easy to lose sight of the actual goal and what the professor or customer actually wants. At Net-Results our customer experience and product development teams are very good at taking feedback from our customers and using it to improve our marketing automation platform.
Before I started my internship this summer I had very little experience with the concepts of lead generation and lead scoring. Now that I do have experience with the process, I feel confident that I can apply them to other aspects of my life. For example, every college student should use lead scoring rules when trying to find suitable roommates. The process of lead generation starts by identifying leads and evaluating whether or not the lead is a good fit for your product offering. As the prospect becomes more of a suitable fit, lead scoring showcases that. The higher the lead score, the higher the quality of the lead is. Finding a good roommate in college can be difficult and it is important that the roommate prospect is a good addition to the household. The last thing a busy college student needs is a roommate that decides to throw an impromptu party at 3 AM the night before finals (unfortunately, this has happened). Taking a page from Marketing Automation 101, and scoring potential roommates could spare students from signing a lease with someone they might regret.
I look forward to continuing my internship at Net-Results, and I know I will gain more professional experience. I’m also sure that I will end up learning many further life lessons.
