SaaStr Soundbite: Why Partnerships Matter with Karen Appleton Page and Aaron Levie of Box

Kind of kick things off directly in the panel, I guess. First question to Karen, I guess would be, how did you think about driving partnerships at Box post the enterprise pivot? What was the role of partners? Why did we do it? What was it all about?

I mean, the first thing that we thought about was how do we make ourselves look bigger? We were small, we hadn't proven ourselves in the market.

Box crushed this. If nothing else, box crushed. So talk about this, keep going. But talk about with partnerships, we stood up in a. Right.

Yeah, we did.

We always looked like we were everywhere. And I think that, for me, what that meant was, personally, we had to create a really good, strong strategy. And the strategy was based on market penetration. How do we accelerate growth and foundationally, how do you create credibility, awareness with the expectation that that will lead to revenue? And sometimes we did deals just for the credibility or just for the awareness. And always we had to kind of figure out, you know, what was going to be our path to revenue on that. And that was the more disciplined sort of a piece of it. But we identified a strategy and we went after it.

How much do you think, I don't know if this could be broken up into percentage, but how much do you think we did for technology differentiation and integration to make our product better versus as a growth driver to be able to get either reseller channels or sort of distribution?

Right? Well, we clearly had an approach that was like, okay, so everybody's got these siloed applications and all of them needed some sort of a backend that would store people's information and data. And we used that as an approach that worked really well. With NetSuite, for example, they had a piece of their product that was meant to store all this data. They weren't going to update it, they weren't investing in it. And we came in and we did a fantastic partnership with Zach that kind of solved two business problems and gave us a new access to a channel. So that was certainly an integration that was based on technology.

Let's dig into that a little bit, because I remember that even from the old days, we were an early NetSuite integration platform too. But you guys crushed it on that. Whether you did in the real world, you certainly did it at a perceptive level, at all levels. From the C suite from Zack across what was. What were the tricks here that you could trade? Did NetSuite really need Box as an application that bad in 2008? Of course it did. But you became their showpiece next generation partner. And it wasn't just that Aaron was the wonder CEO. It was much more than that. And what were the tricks? How did you make that happen?

I think one of the tricks was that we strongly invested in the people piece of it. So we made sure.

Yeah, people get this wrong, right?

Absolutely. I actually think they sit in front.

Of their computers, they do a little integration, and they wait for the customers to come through the API.

Right, right. But we made sure that our salespeople got together. We have kind of an operational checklist of all the things to do, and it was attend each other's skos, make sure we were at each other's conferences and events, do thought leadership events together, bring the salespeople together, and then make sure that everybody knows exactly what to say, how to say it, and what to do when interest was sparked. And I think we did a really good job at that.

And on the sales side, sometimes that revenue doesn't come the next week. How do you get them to do those skos and how do you get them to take it seriously is when HP comes in as a flagship customer for Box, how do you do that?

Well, the thing I would say is, back to the kind of point previously is this is why you fundamentally need a Karen within your organization.

You have to.

My preferred approach would just be don't talk to anybody. APIs are there, just watch the calls come in, the technology just works, and just integrate these things. And the reality is, though, each of our organizations have a tremendous amount of change management, we have a tremendous amount of inertia, we have a tremendous amount of work to do within the field organizations, within the sales organizations. So unless you dedicate the time, resources, people and energy to making these partnerships work, they just won't work. Now, if you're a developer platform, so we have Intercom behind us, then it's fine. Then just plug in the API into my application and everything will be fine. But for deep partnerships and if you don't invest in the people component, then there's no way you're going to see a successful outcome. And so having people like Karen, but then ultimately the team that she built under her, that was what fundamentally drove our success. So I don't know if you want to talk about what we did early on to be able to drive that, but that's like the technology was probably one tenth of what you had to do to get it right.

Well, I think just to add on before I answer your question, it was critically important for us that we had senior relationships at all these companies.

Multiple levels.

Multiple levels. Zach and I were, you know, we were buddies and, you know, and I built great relationships with all of the senior executives that were running things and then made sure that all the salespeople knew each other and all that kind of stuff. So fundamentally, it was about making sure we were connected at the execution level and at the decision making level. So that was super, super important. And then in terms of building the team, certainly, you know, everybody knows you gotta hire the best people you can find. But. But we broke our business development team into two parts. We had the hunters and we had the farmers. And the expertise here was all about how do you nurture those relationships and make sure everything from the content and the product and that we had all of the right folks doing the right things. And that was critically important. And that's an incredibly different skill set from the folks that are going out and hunting and finding the.

Let's dig in on that because it's not as obvious as it sounds. When you did the NetSuite dealer pick another deal was box under 100 employees back then?

Probably 100 or 200 employees, but 100.

Is not a lot. You can't afford to have 20 people on the BD team. What do hunters and farmers really mean when you're trying to add 10 million, 20 million AR the next year? What does that even mean? We get 100 farmers sort of mean in sales, but what does that really mean?

Oh, that's a great question. In terms of the size and how you divide the resources. We had just had a lot of people doing a lot of things. We tried to make it as tight templated as possible so that with every partnership that came over, that jumped over the fence, from the hunting side to the farming side, we had an operational checklist. Here are the 10 things that we need to do with every single partner. And we also had tiers of partnerships so that we knew that type one partnerships got these 10 things and type three partnerships just got maybe a tweet or a blog post or something like that. But we had to be really clear. And I think that it just comes right back to the point of you have to be clear on the strategy you're executing against to make sure that you're managing those resources.

Yeah, I think, Aaron, I think this is a good reminder for me. I think doing these sorts of deals if you don't have Karen is impossible. Even if we like to sit in front of a computer, CEOs have a little bit of a superpower in that CEOs will meet with CEOs if you want to hustle, and Zach Nelson is interested in what you're doing. You can probably get that first meeting and you may even get the second one. But you will never be able to penetrate the organization without a leader to own. It's impossible. And as CEOs, we make these mistakes. We build the relationships and then we lose the energy because we can't be the project manager of it.

Right? That's for sure.

This is why I think that partnerships generally have a mixed rap within Silicon Valley and beyond, which is that you see a lot of announcements that then fizzle pretty quickly. And it's because it's really easy to do a press release. It's really easy to do the technology integration. Not really easy, but resources kind of dependent. You can do the integration. It's really, really hard day in and day out in the hundreds of sellers or tens of sellers you have in the field and across your two or multiple organizations every single day to show up in front of the customer and be presenting your solutions in an integrated way for that customer over and over again. That's the really hard part, because that's people that's changed, that's evolving your culture, that's getting people to recognize that we're going to be better at selling our software. When we have partnerships and we have other people that are working on our behalf and we're working on their behalf. And so that's the part that takes a really, really long time, and that's the part that requires a lot of change. I think the thing that strikes me right now in particular in this category, in this market, is we collectively as an industry, have made it really hard for our customers because of a lack of deep partnerships and deep integration. We're one of the only industries where you sort of take all of this technology and you throw it at your customer and you say, okay, you get to now be the system integrator of all of these solutions and all of this technology. And that would be like buying a car with all the parts coming separately and the customer and me as the consumer, I have to now go put the car together. But that's what we're doing as a software industry. So we think that partnerships are fundamental. If we're going to actually be able to drive the transformation that's necessary within it. Which means that we collectively as an industry, are going to have to find as many ways to be able to work together and present cohesive experiences in front of our customers. And that's going to be both technology as well as the people side.

That's an.