The Wedding Intern

• By Erin Rupprecht
• On 8:08 am EST, Thursday November 5, 2009

Wow. That one word pretty much sums up my summer internship at The Washington Post (NYSE:WPO - News) newspaper. At first, my project -- creating a print wedding planning guide for the D.C. metro area -- sounded like it would be cool but perhaps not too substantive. As I met with my two managers to discuss it over lunch on my first day, however, the project quickly revealed itself in all its multifaceted, cross-functional, skill-stretching glory as the most perfect MBA internship project I could have imagined.

Add to a great project the fact that the Post's MBA internship program is deeply respected within the company and that a large percentage of the newspaper's upper-level managers are products of the program and highly interested in mentoring current interns. What's more, the program provided me and my four fellow interns with incredible access to senior business leaders as well as leaders from the news side of the house (from Watergate-era Executive Editor Ben Bradlee to Pulitzer prize-winning editorial cartoonist Tom Toles), and you've got a pretty darn good summer.

What particularly distinguished my project from some other opportunities I explored was that the project's bottom line was my responsibility from Day One. Unlike other internships that ended with a presentation on recommendations for strategic next steps, the Post essentially handed me a new business to run for the summer. While I had an incredible amount of help from personnel across the paper, without which the success of the project wouldn't have been possible, at the end of the day the profit and loss buck stopped with me. My final presentation focused on what our profit margin would be when sales into the guide ended on Aug. 28 (about a month after the final presentation).

100 Calls a Day

The project itself had three main parts, and what I really loved about it was how each of these really tested me on a number of fronts and put many things I'd learned during my first year -- especially in my marketing classes -- to work in real world situations. The first part, ad sales, drew primarily on personnel management and the ability to develop and execute against a sales strategy. The second, the development of the guide itself, from artwork to editorial content, required a thorough understanding of consumer needs. And the final part, marketing the planner, challenged me to develop a full marketing plan that ensured that the guide would be distributed to brides who met our advertisers' expectations in terms of wedding budgets and spending patterns.

I'd like to delve a little deeper into each of these three project elements to help give a fuller picture of my internship.

Ad sales were arguably the most important project component. Before my arrival, my managers had hired two undergraduate interns to serve as a dedicated telesales force for the wedding planner. The interns' job was to make at least 100 calls per day to wedding vendors who didn't currently advertise with the Post, and pitch them ad space in the wedding planner. (One hundred calls might not sound like a lot, but it's a best-in-class number for any cold-calling sales effort and it's hard.)

My job was to coach the undergrad interns on effective sales techniques (or, as turned out being the case given my limited sales experience, identify the Post's telesales genius and recruit him to contribute to the regular skills development sessions I set up for the interns), develop a sales script and marketing collateral for them to use, keep them motivated, and evaluate their performance.

Cost Discipline a Key Driver

At the same time, I was also supporting the sales efforts of what I called the "real" sales reps -- the deeply experienced sales people with years of tenure at the Post. These folks were the ones who owned the ad sales relationships with existing Post advertisers. The reputation of the Post's MBA internship program helped me with these sales reps. While I think they were expecting a snobby MBA kid who didn't know a lick about sales, their familiarity with (and respect for) the MBA intern program led them to at least grant me one meeting. Many of these sales reps ended up being invaluable resources and mentors once I demonstrated that I was there to learn from them, and several of them put a good deal of much appreciated effort into selling ads in the guide.

The second part of the project was to develop the guide itself. The key driver of my work here was cost discipline, and I have to say that my accounting classes and how they sensitized me to the various guises that costs could assume in a project like this one, were very useful. Plotting out all the steps that needed to take place for the production of the guide to actually happen on deadline was something I did thanks to my operations class, and the tracking spreadsheet I created as a result was invaluable in keeping me and my colleagues on track with our internal deadlines across the summer. I also used some of the research skills and resources I'd developed and learned about in my marketing classes to understand our consumers and ensure that we were putting together a product that would serve their needs.

Finally, I put together a marketing plan to promote the guide to brides. That was fun because I had the whole spectrum of Washington Post Media outlets to choose from. Which media would be best for reaching the affluent, 25-to- 40-year-old women I was targeting? The Travel section? Sunday Style and Arts? Washingtonpost.com? If so, which pages online? What about targeting the moms of newly engaged women, who would also be part of the planning process? The Post also gave me the latitude to explore whether using other marketing outlets such as Facebook would make sense for this project. A class I took the second semester of my first year called Advanced Marketing Planning definitely came into play in all of this and was helpful in ensuring I didn't forget some key part of the marketing plan development process.

On to Entrepreneurial Selling

My experience at the Post this summer, while drawing from what I had already learned, also helped to highlight some skills areas that I still need to fill in. Sales, for example, is a key function at many organizations, and I learned this summer that I could know much more about how to do it well. I've therefore signed up to take Entrepreneurial Selling this semester. Greater facility with Excel will also always be useful, and I'm hoping that the Decision Models class I'm taking will further develop my skills in that area. Overall, though, I felt well-prepared for my internship, thanks to my first year of business school, and know that another year at school will put me in a solid position for whatever I pursue full time.

Buzz up!