Dublin, 01-03 July 2008

This year's BizAcademy featured a group of youths from Whitechurch Youth Development Project, who have been learning about business and entrepreneurship and who expressed the wish of spending some time with salesforce sales experts.

To accommodate this request the volunteers delivered a series of workshops aimed to showcase how to work out a business idea, how to make business plan and how to sell a product in commercial environments.

On the first day, Kieran Carrick (Regional Vice President, Corporate Sales Services, EMEA) opened the session talking about Salesforce.com, and telling the group some very personal stories which made the kids realize that ‘behind every business-man there's a hard working, enthusiastic human being'! Kieran also had the great idea to invite a ‘real entrepreneur' to the session: Frank Seo from Sofiaworks was in town and didn't hesitate a second to come in and present the kids with a real life story of a success and entrepreneurship. The kids were blown away and got empowered by Frank's narrative and enthusiasm.

Karl Harriau (Senior Renewal Manager) and Cormac Murphy (Sales Representative) were great in helping the kids to think through their business ideas and get the teams to choose various professional roles for their fictional companies.

On day 2, the students were divided in 2 groups and worked with pairs of volunteers. Marco Nuti (Senior Manager, SR), Alvern Bullard (Corporate Sales Development Representative), Philip Dunne (Account Executive (TE) and Rosie Carley (manager, Employee Success, EMEA ) helped the kids to finalize the project-plans and to figure out how to transform them into selling goods.

The 2 projects decided consisted in a ‘Mosaic Mirror production' and ‘Gift goods production'. The teams also enjoyed researching the appropriate materials and techniques to produce their goods.

The last day was all dedicated in refining the students understanding of the business process and sales techniques. Eilis O'Shea (Recruiting Manager) and Louise Jordan (Recruitment Coordinator) delivered a brilliant session, focused on presentation-skills and marketing. On the sales-side Sanj Bhayro (RVP, Corporate Sales) and Andrew Dungan (Account Executive (TE)) looked at every aspect of the sales cycle concerning the students' projects.

Overall this was another successful BizAcademy; the students really learned a lot in a short period of time, and they got very excited about the experience of being in the office and meeting real professionals. Big 'thank you' to all fantastic and enthusiastic volunteers.

Marco & Alvern