Running the Box Playbook Even Better The Second Time

So this is a pretty cool session. We've got Menk and Anthony with me and this is something that I wanted to learn about. It's now that we're in sort of the second and third generation of SaaS, we have folks that are veterans and Menk and Anthony were both very senior in marketing at Box and have gone on to their next generation of SaaS companies. Menko runs marketing at Kleiner backed Betterworks and Anthony runs marketing at Gainsight. Both since day close to day zero, I think. Right. And I've had a chance to watch both of them. I'm close to BetterWorks and with Gainsight, I was fortunate to speak at the first customer conference. The others. So I've watched them blossom and it's been fun for me to see them take some of these things that I've watched over the last 10 years at Box, repurpose them, learn from them, tweak them and like do it better. And Box is obviously is an epic success, but both these companies are growing even faster than Box did, so at least they're doing something right. So I'm going to mostly be quiet here. I'm going to hand this to Anthony and he and Menko will lead it. But they're going to show us five learnings from Box that they took to their both their startups doing millions and tens of revenue and how they're doing it better this time.

Thanks, Jason. Jason. So hi everyone, my name is Menka Shroff. I head up marketing at BetterWorks. If you don't know what BetterWorks is, we're an enterprise software company to easily set and manage goals and okrs and also provide ongoing performance coaching. I've been at BetterWorks for about a year and a half and then prior to that I was AT box for five years. I started in 2009, employee number 50 and then saw it grow all the way to over 1000 in five years. So phenomenal ride at Box and already seeing a phenomenal ride at BetterWorks.

Awesome. So my name is Anthony Kenneda. I'm the VP of marketing at Gainsight. At Gainsight, we help some of leading subscription businesses, so many of you in the room here grow fast through your best asset, your customers. And you know, we had Kristen on stage earlier talking about customer success. For us, our belief is if you can help your customers get value from your products or services, really reach there and exceed their outcomes that they're trying to achieve, that would result for the business and more revenue, faster growth, higher valuations and just excited to Be to see the conversation here at Saster really take shape around customer success as well. So one of the first, I think 50 as well, at Box. I started my career at Box on the sales floor and then moved to business development and super excited to be kind of watching from the sidelines here for the last few years. So Menke and I are gonna Share with everyone 5 key takeaways from our time at Box and how we're running that same playbook again, both at BetterWorks and Gainsight.

Yeah. So the very first takeaway is to go big with the brand and message. And if you think about Box, the very first, we're going to go to the next slide. This was an iconic billboard that box did in 2010. And what was amazing about this billboard was right away, every IT buyer that dropped drove past on 101 immediately knew who Box was disrupting, who it was challenging. And the value prop that went with the message. So really critical to go big with the brand early on because investment in the brand early on is going to save you demand gen dollars later on. So you really have to think about the brand and taking that risk early on to the right message. And that was the key with Box. This Box iconic billboard. And I feel like this as a meeting room and we were discussing, like, what would be the right message for this billboard. And I feel like I was like, okay, maybe it's SharePoint.

And I remember seeing that this was iconic. Right? It goes, first of all, I'm thinking this was 2009, 2010. It feels like 1999. It's so long ago. But I remember thinking like, Box can't possibly be keeping me a SharePoint. And why are they spending this money on billboards? But it was iconic. Right? And then I think, Anthony, I think you told me that Menka came up with this. Did you tell me that?

I did?

Well, I was at the meeting. I'm pretty sure I came up with it.

No, you did.

I was. You came up with it.

I totally did come up with this.

I thought it was. So let's see. This was 2000.

You told John Doerr at the board meeting that you came up with it.

What?

Whose idea was it? Dr. Levy.

I was in the meeting. And first of all, can I take a chair?

Would you like my chair?

I got a microphone, so I might as well take a chair. So first of all, Aaron Dunn came up with the idea, just to be super clear. And the key point, Menka, was that we had to develop a challenger position to associate ourselves with this incumbent. And so you have to go big with the brand and with a message that is going to lock in people's head. That is something so sort of juxtaposed to what people think about you that they just, they're forced to remember what your brand and your positioning is. Thank you.

You're going to repeat like my takeaway every time?

Pretty much. That's what I tend to do in meetings.

That's great. Well, with BetterWorks we weren't really challenging any status quo brand. I think what we were trying to do is really get companies to think about aspirational goal setting. How do you set big goals? How do you get the team focused, engaged, how do you get them aligned and ultimately help people build their legacies at their companies? And so we definitely did the one on one billboard. It definitely helped with local awareness, it helped with our recruiting, which is obviously a challenge. But we also found two other mediums that were very powerful for us. Doing as an NPR was strong because the C suite target audience that we were talking to is spread out throughout the country. And with NPR we had a 10 million reach. So again, you have to think about what is the right channel with the right message that you want to go for. Sometimes it's one on one and sometimes it's something else. It just needs to think about that as the core strategy going with the brand.

And why did you. Anthony, I don't mean to interrupt, but Erin talked about positioning at SharePoint. Why did you decide not to position against somebody at BetterWorks?

Because I think the thing we're challenging is people doing goal setting manually. It's done today in documents and it's not done in an effective way. And I think the new set of workers that are coming are looking to do this in a more progress based way. And leaders are struggling to figure out how do I get the company agile. So for us, we weren't really challenging kind of another company. I think we were really challenging how it's getting done today.

And I think to that the incumbent can either be a process or it can be a technology. And so all you have to do is make sure that your message against whatever the incumbent process is, which is.

What BetterWorks is doing and why was just for fun. I don't mean to interrupt, but why did you pick SharePoint as that rather than a zip drive flash drive. That's obviously visceral too, right? Or tangible.

Yes. So a flash drive costs about $2.

Yeah. So that's a bad ROI calculator right there.

And SharePoint costs somewhere between 500,000 and $10 million in an enterprise. So I think just economics applied in this case that we wanted to disrupt something that was more expensive.

But it was aggressive. Right. I mean today Box is clearly disrupting and partnering. Right. It may be as big a as it was, but it was a little bit of a stretch when the billboard went up, wasn't it?

Yes. So what we were doing, right, if you follow classic innovators dilemma theory, there was a new performance axis which was cloud and mobile and sort of web services that we felt was the future of content management. And the traditional approach to on premises systems weren't going to solve modern forms of content management. So in some sense, yes, we did not actually replicate the functionality of SharePoint. But the key was we built the important functionality that people were going to be using in the future. And so for multiple years we got shit because it was like, well, you're not actually comparable. And that was the point. We're not supposed to be comparable. We're doing something that is much more modern and much more different. Now of course we have a strong partnership with Microsoft now. So I'd rather remove those billboards from the Internet. So if you can, I saw a couple people taking pictures. If you can delete those, that'd be great. So there's a time and a place for that message and eventually you sort of, you have to evolve.

It was more enterprise on prem than anything else.

Right?

Yeah.

Well, one of the big things we took away too is just you talked about this, but the boldness of the message overall. And so for us, we were pretty early on as a business when we decided to do a big billboard campaign and put something kind of controversial up. Folks are driving down 101 in our case here in the Valley and you've got an opportunity to capture their attention for just seconds. Right? A few more seconds, obviously if you leave at 4:30pm or something. But we wanted to strike controversy. So the first one we did said something to the effect of gainsight will reduce your turn by 5 to 10x. And so the boldness there was really in the claim. Right. The certainty about it. And this is actually one that's coming up here shortly.

Oh my God. This is a pre release builder.

It's a pre release. You've heard it here first.

Wow, this is like one of those Apple keynotes. But it's for a billboard.

Exactly, exactly. Right. But yeah, addressing the, you know, we're addressing the whole buzzword. This whole customer success thing is just a buzzword it's not a business model and we want to address that. And here are the logos that are validating that claim.

One other lesson. Sorry to interrupt, is billboard placement is critical. You see a lot of these companies that have billboards right as you're around the bend and you're like, I can only see like a fourth of your logo. I don't know what's going on. So just FYI, when you do the billboard, make sure that people have a long straight path to being able to see it. And they're sort of leading up to the billboard and they have multiple, maybe 30, 45 seconds to be able to.

See that message or just do radio ads.

Yeah, actually, honestly, billboards don't work anymore. So.

The second learning was about creating a movement. So if you go to the next slide, very early on, Box was, I think we've already mentioned this. Thinking about, you know, enterprise software at that time was, you know, old school, complicated, not really user centric. And sort of Box came in with this simple user centric, you know, that end users love also, it loves and adopts. So I think that was kind of the message and it was exemplified as like a very simple, enterprise, sexy message that I think was in 2009. And again, simple messages like that can be very transformative. It's. It was probably one of the best initial campaigns that we did along with choosing Cloud. So in this video, actually this is a fairly old video. I think the website even exists still. But it's a video with Aaron and I think few other CEOs. I want to say seven other CEOs talking about the benefits of cloud, choosing Cloud. And he's making a face. I don't know what to say about it.

I don't know what I was doing with my hair back then.

You do have a lot of. And it was, I think again, that was an example of creating a movement where something simple and powerful, that's something that goes beyond just what product you're selling. At BetterWorks, we've done something similar. We're very passionate about open and collaborative goals. Our CEO, Chris Duggan spends an excruciating amount of time talking about transparency in the workplace, why it's important, breaking down silos. The key here is you don't need to actually go out and do PR on it. That's not the message. I think the idea is you need to have a brand purpose. So when people come to your website, when prospects come, when customers come, there's an emotional connection with what your brand is about. And that will filter through in every execution that your company is doing. So I think it's really critical to internalize what is the brand purpose and what is that connection that you have with your customers. Great.

So, you know, our belief is that the customer success movement, if you will, is really born out of this transition to SaaS. Right. It's why we're all here. But the job function itself, you know, we've traced back to salesforce.com where the job existed. And so, you know, as marketers, we can't claim to have started customer success. Right. What we can claim is that there wasn't a community wrapped around folks and customer success. The thought was that it was almost marginalized in their business. You got sales with the gong and the president's club and marketing has their community too. But we really wanted to invest in sparking the movement for customer success. So the way we did it, we invested very heavily early on in thought leadership programs, kind of unashamedly so whether that's early stage content that we created or kind of using different form factors for that content, so events and some other things we'll kind of talk about. The theory for us is if we helped our prospects or folks that are just new to this whole customer success thing develop their strategy first, then when it came time for a more product oriented conversation, they'd think of us, they think of us first as their thought partner. And so what you're seeing here actually is we've mapped all. Also in the early days, not having a fully built out kind of funnel metrics and stuff, we were experimenting quite a bit. We looked to social media as an indicator of category growth or quantifying really how the movement's working. So we captured what does the conversation look like around customer success on Twitter today? And just a couple benchmarks. So when the company formed their Series A, it was back In February of 2013, the conversation was very little. Right. We stood on stage at our first user first industry conference in May and said, this is where the movement's really going to start and kick off right here with all of you in the room today. And we saw quantifiably the conversation start moving up into the right. And so this isn't, you know, anything that's. I can't point back to Nick on our, you know, social media mentions today as a means of justifying budget or anything along those lines. But, you know, in the early days it was a nice kind of window into some more early traction around the thought leadership stuff.

And I'm allowed just to say stuff, please. Phrase, please.

I'm on day three.

Okay, cool. Yeah. And you guys have like, sake, so I assume everybody else is drunk right now. So the killer idea that Menk and Anthony have talked about is find. I mean, if you're not doing this, really, you should rethink your business because you need to find a demographic and a customer that right now is essentially no other software company is paying attention to, no other industry sort of thing is paying attention to in a modern way. And you help them sort of realize their ultimate ambition, which is they have a job. Their job is to do something. And when they can meet both other people doing that job and learn about how to do their job better, that your software comes way down the road. Your job is to make them be heroes and make them feel like they are transforming their business in the role that they have. And then later you sell them a product. But you have to make sure that everybody sees and that they are able to really internalize that there is a company out there that cares about me, that cares about my role. And that's what I think all three of our companies have done. And you just have to find a vector that you can own. It has to be ownable. This is the other key thing. If you're the 17th business analytics company making business analysts heroes, it's not going to work. You have to have something that is totally ownable. Just make sure that you really understand what is the message you will own. It's not a product message, It's a community message, it's an industry message. And then put that across every single thing that you do.

I would also say to give it time because initially when you start something like that, you will not hear a response back. And you have to invest in it and believe in it for it to actually, when you actually start getting bored with it, that's when you know it's getting mainstream. So I would definitely invest time in it and stay committed to it. Because if you're going to do it for one quarter and feel like, oh, I'm not getting enough traction, then you might be giving up too soon.

Yes.

A quick story on that, actually, when we found that, because we definitely felt kind of the long road there. Our first sort of validation was, was that customer success showed up in an Inc article as one of the buzzwords of 2013, most annoying buzzwords of 2030. Something along those. Whatever. Whatever it was. And so for us, we're like, yes, this is it, right? We finally got the word out.

Yeah, cool. So why Are you laughing? The third key learning was to iterate on different entry points and by that is how people get into your site. So obviously as marketers we need to think about metrics when you think about leads. And this was an email that Ashley Aaron sent to me in 2009. It was on a Friday before 10am which is amazing. This must be like really important to you.

I've never been up that early in my life. That's amazing.

So it says want to see if we can discuss sign up from homepage thing new site header that matters plus phone plus lead standout and quote page. And we could do all this by next week's page push which at that time was on Thursdays and whatever other ideas you have. So I think the key here is there's like sign up and phone lead quote. It's like five CTAs that he wants to iterate and test.

Love. Go ahead. Sorry, I just love getting the Friday email from my boss. Right. Can we believe you have this ship next week?

Have a good weekend. Sorry.

Go ahead Erin. But I think the bigger idea here is that you know when you're starting up and you want to have confidence in your funnel. So if you're not optimizing and you don't understand what your conversion benchmarks are, it's going to be really hard for you when you scale demand gen to actually put in all those dollars when you don't have confidence in your funnel. So you don't want to hold back your own demand gen efforts later on just because you don't have an idea about how your site metrics are and how people are getting to your site sales team or through your application. Another thing we were the other lesson.

Is you can write emails in the form of haiku.

So it does seem pretty close.

So I would say if you go to the next slide we were, you know when we started we had a different challenge. We had a very small engineering team so we didn't have you know, zillion engineers who can, you know, who can can come up with like an immaculate self experience. We had some trade offs. Either you create a workday salesforce or a success factors integration or you create a beautiful self serve trial experience. And it really depends on your software. So for us we kind of mapped out okay, what amount of engineering work will it take for different types of call to actions for our customers to get into our site. And what we actually found was that for our software it's really about getting people to experience a fully loaded sandbox and then going back to the decision maker to make the final decision about using better work. So it was not so much as a trial, but it was actually using the sandbox which positively takes very little engineering effort. So I would say that iterate early, make sure you continue to iterate obviously even later on, but have that confidence and find the right scale demand gen method for your software. At Box, we did a lot on the viral side that was great for Box. It worked for the software it was offering was very end user centric goals inherently are a little bit more. Require a little bit more management rigor and process. So they're a little bit different in that approach. So you have to think about what's right for your company versus just mirroring what other companies are doing.

So let's just walk through, just go.

Back to that slide.

This is super interesting because Box I think has done everything on the x axis. Right. Box had a journey from almost a B2C company to freemium to serious enterprise. Right. And Box I think has done everything right from freemium self service trials. I don't know about sandbox. I haven't used a Box. I'm sure you got a sandbox today for sure. Right?

Maybe all of it for enterprise customer.

Yeah, you just sign up and then leave me alone. Give me a demo. I'm going to sit and you have to force rank these things. Right. And the learning, I think you tried everything in a box. The learning for better works is if we don't get people deep into a gated trial, there's too much engagement required in the product, it's not going to work. Right. And the meta learning is you try to all quickly figure out what's going to perform the best because it's not all equal. Right. And I think at Box it changed over time. Right.

Well and I think the, there's no, this is the probably most. There is not one size fits all part of marketing and product in all of enterprise software. If you have a tool that one individual can use on their own and there's a large number of those individuals, then freemium works well. If you have a tool that only works as a team, then something that's more of a self serve trial works better. If you have software that only really works if it's implemented across the company and only for mid sized or large enterprises, then that's really just. You have to talk to somebody and you have to go through a sales process and if you're lucky you might have a product that meets two or three of Those things where you can get in through a team or you can go through a sales process, but there's actually no perfect. There's not one perfect version of this because you can make money in lots of different varieties. The key is don't have the ability to have an end user tool that only can be used through a sales process. Make sure that you're at least optimizing your distribution channel and your acquisition channel for the kind of product and the kind of customer that you're serving.

Yeah. And a simplistic version of the mistake I see a lot, especially folks that come out of enterprise background doing startups, is they hate the enterprise process and they all want to build a freemium product. They think it's the greener grass. And they've never experienced freemium, they've never tried it. But if only I turned on my website and I had 10 trillion customers. I want to go from the left to the right, but you have to go where the market and the customers take you.

You'll have the leakiest bucket in the world if you do that, the leakiest bucket, you'll have a bunch of people come in and they'll try and install your HR software and they'll be like, holy shit, this doesn't work. And then they leave because you didn't have a very thoughtful process. Given that it's a very different kind of software than when they want to go share files.

Yeah. And I think it. And then Anthony, let's talk about yours. But I think at BetterWorks you literally, you experiment with all. And then going to Aaron's point, I think you cut off the stuff on the right. I mean, you had self service trials and this is a product that requires C level engagement. Right. And you turn this functionality actually off. Right. Box has never actually turned off the free and freemium product, to my knowledge.

Never.

Right. But you literally tried it at Box and it's not performing. Right. I need this level of engagement. So what did you learn? Keep going, Anthony. Sorry.

Oh, north.

Yeah.

Okay. So you know what? We had sort of a different kind of dynamic at play here for us. We were in a position where we had to. Not to dissimilar what actually Aaron was saying, but educate the market first about what customer success is and then at the right time bring up the product conversation. So to some extent we're teaching while selling. And the challenge we ran to was that our prospects had conviction for they felt the pain of churn. They understood kind of the opportunity with upsell, et cetera, but they didn't have the budget, the six figure commitments on the annual budget every year to go and procure technology for this. In fact, in some cases there's no technology for this. It's process. And so we decided that we really had to find a way to teach our prospects how to buy Gainsight. And so a few of the ways we did that, we invested in an ROI model very early. So we had 10, 10, 15, 20 customers. We were already thinking through the value that we were kind of providing to those folks marketing those. We mobilized our early customers as loud, passionate advocates. They were willing to do videos for us, they were on reference calls. And we really kind of worked hard to make them feel like they were really part of our team. And something interesting. We created a lot of ladder stage content and promoted them further up the funnel. So one thing we did was customer success, platform, buyer's guide. Right. Sample RFPs, different sort of content items that could help create process where there otherwise wasn't process. And today that's actually a big part of what we do. ROI workshop is one of our first kind of few calls within the sales process. So it's something we take to heart.

Yeah.

But maybe like I wonder if you could like a product training manual as the lead acquisition content. Not literally, but is that what your point is?

That's the idea. Right. For folks that have never sought out.

Technology and they're like, what is this even gonna do? And then.

Yeah, well, the questions I should be asking, that's clever. How do I champion that internally and stuff along those lines.

And what'd you learn on going back to Menka's X axis? What'd you learn from Gainsight? Take away from. Because Box did everything. What performs on that.

We didn't do that. I'm going to do the training manual thing.

Cool.

All right.

I don't know. I don't think there's a freemium gain site.

No, there's no freemium gain site. We have a sandbox.

Like what are, what are those? What ended up performing of the Box.

Baggage, It was, it was more of sort of the top down kind of. We need kind of the team managers to really kind of buy into this.

Yeah.

And then, I mean, it's not too dissimilar from the Salesforce model in that, you know, it's for the reps, but it's really for the managers too. Right. To have the reporting and the pipeline forecasting stuff along those lines. And so for us, if we could win the hearts. Well, in this case, now the minds of the management team and sell down that way. That was our sort of entry point strategy.

Let me throw up one more thing. Sometimes, and I'm curious where you guys are with this with BetterWorks, but sometimes you can separate the enterprise product from something that an end user can get sort of value out of. And I haven't really seen this be done super perfectly and I don't have a lot of good examples top of mind. But if there are components of your product that sort of are modular enough that there would be a lot of groundswell to utilize at an individual level and then somehow it sort of connects back to the overall puzzle piece, which is your enterprise software. I mean, I think there's probably opportunities in a lot of software categories to be able to do that, which is like this little widgety thing that every end user in your category could just use and that is essentially doing your marketing for you. But it's just a small component of your product. Menke, have you thought about that?

Yeah, we have. But I think the challenge is the way the buying decision is made still is fairly chopped down. And while that can give us that end user access and information and can help us have conversations with the buyer, you know, given the resources and the focus, I think we're actually focused on let's just do the right enterprise route and then think about scaling that. So I think we've seen that work better with our sales cycle.

Yep.

I think that interesting trend back in the day when I was a CEO at EcoSign in our category, we saw that because you could use a very tiny amount of the functionality, no workflow, no power, but anyone could access it. And usually they did not migrate to a larger lead, but they certainly could. I think the interesting Learning from BetterWorks is because I've observed conversations about it. The concern is that you could build that it isn't built, it would be a lot of work and that functionality would be so degraded that it would be to the detriment of the larger enterprise customer. Because they might say this is not a serious product.

Yeah, you don't want to somehow get reverse positioning.

Yeah. This is not a C suite tool.

It's also something think about the use case. Right. Like you don't necessarily do goals individually to track progress on your own. I mean you can do that. But the real power actually does come from the cross functional collaboration. So usually the end user products are better when there's at least a use case for yourself. And in our case the magic actually happens when there's more People involved. Which is generally a challenge when you have an end user, freemium ish product offering.

Yeah. Although can I say. Okay, so it's interesting though, because especially if your incumbent is a legacy process and where people haven't experienced maybe a modern way to do that, where like, hey, that engineering team adopted this technology and it's increasing performance by 30% or whatever, that filtering up to HR, you know, has some interesting implications. Of course, it's a resource balance of like, just where do you spend your time?

Yep.

Yeah. All right, cool. So events are a big part of the DNA of both Gainsight and BetterWorks. And it's no surprise that we took our cues, I think, from Vox on this one.

Kathleen's in the audience.

Kathleen, Boxworks queen is here.

Yeah. What do you do? Challenge. There's an extra chair right there, so feel free to leap on stage at any time. Right.

Actually, this is usually where Marc Benioff will come on stage and say, I invented that.

There we go.

That would be. That'd be the real way to do this.

Awesome. So this is Kathleen's chart, but we put here the growth in the attendance of Boxworks every year since its start in 2011. Boxworks was actually born out of another conference concept we tried back in 2010. Altitude, which.

This is confidential data.

That's interesting.

Okay, cool.

It's all public information.

Oh, got it. Okay. Yeah. So you'll notice on the years on the.

It's a backwards looking disclaimer. I've never seen that one. It contains backwards looking information.

That's right. No, but you'll notice that Box was founded in 2005. Right. The pivot to the enterprise in 2008. And the first official Boxworks event took place in 2011.

We were just asleep. Yeah. Wow.

It took you three years to figure this out.

I know, I know, I know. I have to credit Tien from Zora. That's right. He very much impressed on me that you're not doing enterprise if you don't have an event. And apparently that meeting happened somewhere in 09 or 2010, so.

Well, but what we are seeing is that companies there doing conferences are becoming more of the regular part of the marketing mix. They're happening earlier even in the company life cycle. And so for us, I kind of hinted at this earlier, but we had our first big conference about three months in three months after our Series A. We only had 15 customers at the time too. And we were able to get about 300 attendees there. And so, you know, if anyone thinks it's too early to host a conference. Absolutely not true. It's never too early. So for us, I think the key was we focused on building an industry conference. So not just for customers, not just for partners. The focus is really on generating the best practices for the industry, having those conversations, creating the networking opportunities for the folks and also kind of celebrating being pioneers in this new space. We didn't talk about the product. Kind of on the main stage, you have to go and kind of seek that conversation out if you wanted it. And every year to this day, I mean, Pulse is the most sort of important thing that we do as a company from customer SAP perspective, from a pipeline perspective, from just seeing sort of the growth in the category. So it's growing 2 1/2x per year. We launched in Europe this year, which is really exciting and we're on track for 5,000 in May. And I think we have some fun stuff to talk about too with working closely with Sastor here on the May conference.

And how broad do you go? I mean, when Dharmesh was on stage. Dharmesh saw from HubSpot on Tuesday. I didn't know this his user conference, they invite their competitors, they invite the whole industry. And he started early. It's called inbound. It's 15,000 people and there's a HubSpot track and we do get to own half the content. But anyone from the industry can come. That's kind of an extreme example. And Boxworks is clearly a prospect and customer event. Right. And it's a very. I've been every year. It's great. So other than Gainsight wanted to help create a category, but is there a learning on the spectrum here?

You know, we think about a lot. I mean, the other example is like rsa, right. They are the security kind of conference. I think Symantec spends quite a bit of the conference every year. And then you got Dreamforce right, where it's very Salesforce heavy. So we think in the early days when certainly the thought leadership, there are a lot of vendors in the space and we wanted to really claim that leadership position in the market. We wanted to make sure that we took more of the Salesforce model. But I think as the industry grows, there's certainly opportunity to grow and make it less of an.

This is just the physical manifestation of what you should be doing online with your thought leadership.

That's right.

Connect the people in person with the message that you should be having, which is an industry message, especially, especially early on if you're developing a new category.

But one Important note for us, we certainly took the facilitation kind of position on this where the folks on stage are leading the conversation are folks from the community.

Right.

Customers, prospects. None of the above. Right. And so that was something that we kind of try to stay true to.

Cool. Very similar to Gainside. The company launched in September and we had our first event in April. We did another one in New York and then we're gonna do it again this year. For us, we only had about 50 or so customers when we were planning our event last year. So it was hard to call it a customer conference when you have 50 customers. So I think what we focused on was make it very thought leadership. So we actually didn't do a single product demo on stage. It was all about okrs, it was all about how do you get teams aligned. And it was all about management and operational excellence. And while all that was great, we did get feedback from a lot of people who attended that they were actually looking for product demos. So don't hold back.

That was a little extreme.

You think?

Yeah, that was a little extreme. Don't hold back. It is an opportunity for people who are attending, they are coming to VETU as a company. So, so you wanna take this opportunity to talk about your product vision, your roadmap. Because it is critical for customers to understand how you're gonna actually solve that kind of the big top line message and how you're actually gonna solve that with your product. So it is critical to mix it. Another thing I would say is you may feel like, oh, I don't know if I wanna go big with an event. I don't have a full on marketing team. You could do smaller field events and, and vet the message first. Right. So you could do like a 20% field exclusive event where you actually go through content. So you could actually go through and understand is there like need for this kind of information. Are people actually interested in this and use that as a criteria to decide to go bigger. So it's not necessary to like straight up go big. Although if you're confident you should. But it's not a requirement. You can do, you can. And we did do that. We did, I think three field events. Right after we launched, we went to a big conference, I think three weeks after the company launched. And that was huge for us because it validated what we were trying to solve. And everyone was like, oh yeah, I want to learn more about this so you could take that approach as well.

Yeah.

And we have a sort of world tour sort of event where we go to six or ten different cities around the world and it's sort of miniaturized version of, of box work. So it's 2, 3, 400 people and it just makes it way more convenient because you get a couple hundred prospects in that region to attend and I think to maybe tie a bow on this and the thought leadership piece. As founders we are so focused on product because we just grind out on product and solutions all day. And you have to step back and remember that your customers have to go through a journey to even care and understand why they need a product. And so I mean it's great to hear about both of these events because you really have to paint the vision of the problem so consistently and well beyond the point where you think people really understand it. And then comes the solution, which is your product. So it's cool to see how you've taken these events.

And just one thing, I want to touch on events. Just talk about the human element. I'll tell you. So the first box works was 2011. It feels like it was 10 years ago, but it was 2011. So Aaron was kind enough to have me on a panel in 2011. And right after I finished, I don't know what I said, a customer came up to me and she said that's completely wrong. Whatever I said. And I said, ok, I'm wrong every day. You're wrong. Right. But I was right. Like I know I was, but it's okay. And she said, that's not what Jason.

Said on the panel. We are not in a bubble.

Yeah, whatever. I said, yeah. And she says to me, that's not what Erin told me. Right. And that was. I tried to parse what that meant, but this, and this was a customer that My guess is mid size. Right. Not one of your. But a decent sized one. And I didn't know what to make of it, but that was an eye opening moment for me that there was this human connection that had been made. And what do you get out of investing in this stuff? Because you have to make human stuff scalable. That's the challenge. You can't be everywhere. Right. And so how does this leverage? How do I get that magic moment when the customer came to me and said that's not what Aaron said.

Right. Yeah, I'll take it.

I was hoping that was a rhetorical question. No, no, no.

It sounds. But what's the, I mean, what's the learning? Right? How do we accomplish that?

It's called the Internet, Jason.

But this is the anti Internet. Right. It's the Internet bringing people together and then getting and then going back apart. Right? But you talk about socializing what the heck the product's going to do, right? Getting people ready and then buy. But if you're, especially if it's a startup, you're buying a 10 year journey with a vendor, right. You're not buying the product that exists today. It's okay that Box doesn't do everything in 2009, but because Aaron said this, I feel that by 2012 we'll have the HIPAA compliance or we'll have the private keys. It's coming 2013.

Yeah, whatever.

But I feel it. Right. And so the human side does help there, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does. Yeah, I think so. The other thing I'll add too is just the, you know, we go to the business conferences of the past. The airport hotels are gone, right. No one hopefully are investing in those. Kind of like four people. Like I'm sorry to the four of you, apologies, but no, I mean, look, Sasser is a perfect example, right? Like we sitting next to Saki here, we have the opportunity to not like check our personal lives to the door and come to an event and just go in straight corporate mode. Like we are people, we love to be, be entertained. We love to have genuine connections with others. That's something you can't do at scale without live events and without conferences. It's a good opportunity.

Should we keep going?

Yeah, no, we're sorry.

That's the point. You want to get in before we run out of time.

That's how Menka used to run meetings and stop talking. Now let's move on to the next thing.

When you send the email at 9 on Friday morning, she's got to keep the wheels moving. He's got a ship on Monday.

Right. All right. The last takeaway we have from our time at Box was to build a community around our wonderful customers. And it's no surprise that Box, one of the core values is blow our customers minds. And it starts by either building a great customer success organization or being proactive in the press with your customers and the value they're getting for Box customers really are at the heart of the business. And so. So you guys will touch on this.

You know, I just want to shout out, Sean Anderson was an early believer in Box. He was from Six Flags. That was like one of the first few case studies that we did and so critical to make sure you're working well with your early believers. Leveraging them as much possible because they'll be the Ones that'll get to your PNGs and your GEs. Right. Eventually. So really critical. Their first hundred or so customers, I would say, are so important for the business and just wanted to make sure that you respond to your customer needs at that time. And you are leveraging these customers as spokespeople for you.

This is why customer success just to plug gainsight is so critical. I mean, you're building software for people to use, and when you really nail it, the these people on the other end, your customers feel like, wait a second, there's a company out there that gets me. They get my problems, and they become your. Obviously, you're the best evangelist. So the more that you build that relationship and help them mobilize to tell that story, that will be your best marketing that you ever do, right? Better than a SharePoint billboard.

Billboard. That's very much the case. And for us, the mission that we have is to help those customers lead their worlds in customer success, whatever that world is. And because it's evangelical and it's early and it's still kind of, we're still writing the playbook for this whole thing. It's not just for customers, it's not just for prospects. It's for anyone that's really in the role. And so we created a number of different programs on the marketing side, extension of the content efforts to help the community become great at customer success. And why we do it. Well, we, you know, it's part of our brand promise. Obviously, we're a customer success company. We, you know, want to be focused on that. We're opting these folks into our thought leadership, and so we're able to, you know, market to them with other best practices.

So there's clearly a lesson you didn't learn from Jen Grant, which is no logo sprawl.

Oh, mad naming.

Yeah, that's right.

But I do see the little pulse thing in everyone except for the Customer Success University. Why doesn't that have that.

That's actually an active conversation.

Oh, okay.

Gotcha. Yeah. But now I know where that I'm wrong on my side.

I'm not wrong. It's a different point of view.

A different point of view.

I'm joking.

But anyway, for us, the other idea is we want to grow the tam of this customer success thing. We want to grow the amount of folks and have this role be just as important as sales and marketing and all the other job functions.

Right.

And so I will call out the one off there, Customer Success. You know, we created an online certification platform for Folks that wanted to become certified in customer success, whether you're new to the job and are wanting to learn kind of the basic building blocks or you're, you know, been in it for a number of years and want to kind of refresh and pulse. Local is the other one. It's we created. We facilitate 25 chapters in the US and Canada that meet region regionally to share their scars and talk about customer success on a quarterly basis. We don't even show up. We just kind of get them all together, find the venue, stuff along those lines.

Yeah, I would say my advice will probably be a little bit more on the practical side. When you're very early on, you probably don't have someone on your team running customer programs. That doesn't come until you're 100 plus employees. So I would say I would focus on two things. I would focus on diversity and depth. Right. So I would try to get case studies, content that talk about different things. So you want some on adoption, you want some on use cases, you want some on the Persona of the individual or the audience you're targeting and try to get like sort of different types of customer information and whether it's programs or a case study or however you execute. But I think it's critical to have different dimensions. And then the other thing would be on going a little bit deeper on some of the case studies, instead of coming up with like lots and lots of case studies that are just snapshots that kind of say the same thing, you might want to think about some that go deeper. So for example, in one of our case studies, we actually went and researched and found that for anyone that goes from manual to automated, using better works for goal setting, we'll save about $520,000 annually for every thousand employees. Now this became our efficiency case studies. So again, think about, think about getting some depth. Okay, if you get like fewer case studies but deeper ones versus sort of like you have a laundry list of case studies because customers will ask for like a little bit more depth in your information.

We have time for a bonus one.

Bonus one? Yeah.

Let's do it quick.

Let's do it.

60 seconds.

So it's awkward sitting next to you as I go through this one. But obviously we're fortunate to work under leadership of a dynamic, well dressed CEO. Oh, there it is. Well dressed CEO, you know, and Aaron really embodies the box brand. And I think the lesson for us was, you know, in exec Comm's perspective.

You know, maybe new to the next one.

Okay.

We'll put Nick on blast.

Okay, good.

But you can see the pages of the same playbook, right, with. With our CEO Nick Maida. It's not the maybe socks, but the pocket squares.

He took the shoes. That's good.

Yeah. Which I. Which I brought here. So, actually, real quick, I know there's plenty of founders and CEOs here in the audience today, so we want to quickly share a quick page out of the playbook too. If you reach under your chair, one of you has a white envelope with email address on there. Email me, and we're going to get you guys some Pulse sneakers. If you're the lucky contestants, I like the gimmick.

Or just email anthonyinsight.com that's right.

Yeah.

We got the winner.

Perfect. Awesome.

All right. I would say Chris, definitely not into colorful shoes or anything like that, but he actually does carry the brand and he takes that very seriously. So much so that he actually has his family do goal setting. They have quarterly check in on their iPad. This is actually Colin's goal. He's 13 years old, and this year he has to fight less with his brother. He's doing okay on that one, actually. He's not so great on the homer and the running weekends. That doesn't seem like Colin's problem.

Best childhood ever.

So I think the idea is if you're leaders of your company, you are responsible for the brand, and you need to own that brand, and you have to be passionate about it. That was it.

This is amazing. And, Aaron, pretty cool you're able to identify and help grow these leaders. It's pretty neat, isn't it? To see how the team grows internally?

We learned way more from them. But what is this?

This is Aaron doing a magic trick.

That'S so magical, it's iconic.

All right, let's thank everybody. This was epic. And thanks, Aaron, for joining us.

Thanks, man.

A lot of.