Box founder Aaron Levie: “Sales should be used to close big deals, not to drive product adoption”

Make sure that the product itself is something that can be adopted, spread, and utilized without any friction by the end user. Sales really should be used to close big deals, not to drive product adoption. That's a big distinction in the traditional enterprise software world, where sales was sort of the only way that you could push out product adoption into companies. In our case, what we did was put a huge emphasis on all of our sharing functionality in box. So when you had a document that you wanted to share, we wanted to make it really, really, really simple to be able to share those files around. So then the software would spread itself, as opposed to us having to just keep selling it into companies like the traditional enterprise software vendors were doing. And then you use sales to close bigger deals, essentially to help sort of navigate in that customer environment. And so Slack today is sort of the perfect quintessential example of a viral enterprise software product, where the very usage of the service is to then spread to other people. Because by definition, you're communicating with other people. They've really done this extremely well, which is make sure that you're building a product that is as easy to adopt and as viral as possible. Every single thing about that product is tuned for the end user to be able to be empowered to spread it on their own, so they can build their own sort of viral distribution channel. Sales then comes in later, and then you can sell additional services or capabilities to that enterprise. So you really want to have a bifurcation between product adoption and sales.