The Exchanges

Q a difference? Like Box, when you joined Box was still at four hundred million, or I mean, it's a well-established brand, right? So from the front lines, what, before this change in messaging, because you're saying it worked, you picked it number one, so obviously it did work. What were you saying before? What was the team saying before, and how did that How did that change, um, in practice?

A I think, um, a lot of the underlying message was similar, but from a messaging standpoint, we were, we were really on this category shifting journey. So the market that we helped create became known as EFSS, um, electronic file sync and share. And we were helping to evangelize sort of the new cloud version of that category around cloud content management. And so we're having lots of conversations about this sort of journey from the old market EFSS to the modern market. Being CCM, Cloud Content Management, and that from a category shifting and shaping standpoint really makes a lot of sense, and there's a lot of merit to it, but You know, from my experience, when we would talk about cloud content management for seasoned IT buyers that maybe, uh, went down the ECM path, enterprise content management, and implemented those client server tools, uh, that created a little bit of confusion because then they would want to sort of compare the feature set of the old established, 19 nineties ECM category with this new cloud content management version. And then you're constantly in this like never ending feature comparison of an old model versus a new model. Which I don't think was as effective as a crisp and clear message around the content cloud.

AI assessment note: “we were really on this category shifting journey... from the old market EFSS”

Q right? What, um, What does it mean? What are you seeing on the front lines in practice? What does that mean? Like are, are, are, can you, can you capture more budget for box if you can capture some of these adjacent spaces or how is it, is it, they want to concentrate the same budget and fewer vendors or who's benefiting and who isn't from that, from that consolidation?

A Well, I think that the extra large vendors will benefit big time as they did in the client server era. And so if you think about the number one and the number two cloud investments at the app layer, not the infrastructure layer that organizations are making at Microsoft and Salesforce. They will certainly benefit from consolidation waves and they'll acquire companies that a lot of those point solutions, uh, will get gobbled up in their portfolios as we've been seen for years. We, we would be sort of an upper middle size cloud, if you will, and maybe a, a large sort of a cloud. And, and so for us, uh, we're in this space where we can be a consolidate or, or we can be consolidated. And certainly we prefer the opportunity to be a consolidate, or if we have a credible, um, Path to help a CIO sort of shrink spend in their SaaS portfolio. And so if you think about us in our core content cloud market, you know, this year, as you know, we added electronic signature to the platform. And that's a really exciting move for us because, you know, it's our belief that electronic signature should be part of your content cloud, not another app that you have to go by. And so I think that for us, it's going to be a combination of lots of net new wins as we broaden the portfolio around content oriented use cases. And then massive improvement in our renewal rates as we give customers more and more …

AI assessment note: “Well, I think that the extra large vendors will benefit big time”

Q mean in practice? How did you make, how did, how did you come in and get more folks on team blue? Like what, what besides, and we can talk a little bit about this, this, this tweak to sales comp plans, but that's not really what you're hitting here. You're getting all the functional areas to, to, to buy in and how did, how did you do this in practice?

A Uh, so I think it was the renewals team, and just to correct my color in here, the customer success team that were kind of bearing the brunt of renewals, and the rest of the organization knew it was important, but, but, um, But they weren't, they weren't, they weren't in their hearts and minds understanding that I have a role to play in this. So I think it was just really repeating the message and then getting alignment across the executive team. And, and whether that was our chief product officer, our CEO, Aaron, our CFO, Dylan, our COO, my boss, Steph, like all of us just repeating this over and over and over again, that we're all in the renewals team and everyone highlighting over and over and over again, how important it is for customers to be successful. And when they are successful, they renew. And so we, and we did make the comp changes. We did change all of our operational practices around the Around the way we measure renewals, uh, you know, all the calls and meetings that we have to review those dashboards and hold teams accountable and have interlocks and have clarity on where that number is and where we have risks. I think that the, because we had a relatively small team that really was waking up every day and thinking about renewals because of our book of business, they could only look out, you know, maybe three or five or six months at their book of business, in w…

AI assessment note: “repeating the message and then getting alignment across the executive team”

Q or maybe sales success, I don't know if you own the post sales piece too, but do you, what are the tools you use? Do you use QBRs or what other things do you do besides the data to discover customer needs for additional products without, you know, overselling them? How do you manage that? How do you manage that line? How do you, how do you have those conversations?

A Um, so a number of ways. So the first thing is, um, is that, uh, you know, we're very much a use case oriented sale, which many, many SaaS offerings are, but I mean, the truth of the matter is, is there, we don't get any inbound RFPs for companies that are going out to bid for a content cloud. So we have to go into our customers and into our prospects, and we have to identify high value use cases that are a good fit for the box content cloud. And so it takes a certain level of technical acumen and business acumen On, uh, uh, amongst our go-to-market teams in order to do that successfully. And then with our installed customers, we do do QBRs, we call them SVRs, so our, our, our, our full extended account teams meet with our, with our customers on a quarterly basis, and we do the standard stuff. We go through what their usage is, which products they're using, which ones they're not. We help them understand how they can get more value out of their current investment, because if they're not getting value out of their current investment, There's no opportunity for them to expand that investment. So we do all those sorts of things. Then along with that, uh, especially, you know, right now, because we have such an exciting roadmap, we will brief them on our roadmap to get their feedback. And then as they're doing their strategic planning and their IT architecture, they can make decisi…

AI assessment note: “with our installed customers, we do do QBRs, we call them SVRs”

Q quota now, right? Um, yeah. And, and, and what, what's your philosophy? What, in an ideal world, what percent of team would hit quota? 80%? 50%? A 110%? Uh, what, how do you think about it as a leader? What do you want to, what, what is, what is that number? If you, if you do enablement and hiring right, how good can you do in terms of hitting quota?

A Yeah, well, I mean, it, it depends, um, Uh, it's, it's a good question. So, first of all, uh, yeah, the percentage of reps that are hitting plan or the percentage of reps that are at 50% or 75%, we measure it really closely across, across, uh, quadrants. Those numbers have all gone up year on year in orders of magnitude. I can't share that data here, but they've gone up significantly. Um, I think the answer to your question around what percentage of the team should hit quota, uh, really depends on what your growth rate is. So if you're, if you're in a business where you're hiring 30 and 40% more reps per year, then it's going to be pretty hard to have really high attainment numbers against full quota against ramping quota. Maybe you can and that sort of thing, but In a business like ours, where we're not hiring, you know, 40, 50% more reps per year, I really want to see sort of 60 to 70% of the reps making the number, because we are definitely hiring, and we, and we do have people leave the company, so I think that's sort of a healthy 60 to 70%, but I definitely want to carve territories and, and have opportunity for performance at a hundred percent. I want every, every single rep on the team to have a credible path to, to plan, Based on the addressable market that's in their patch, and so we put a lot of effort into making sure that we create fair and balanced and equally dist…

AI assessment note: “I really want to see sort of 60 to 70% of the reps making the number”

Q a big one, right? It's a 20 something billion in revenue. Before we get into this, what were just maybe one of the, one or top two learnings you took from Salesforce that worked, I mean, Box isn't tiny, right? But Box is, is much smaller than Salesforce. What were some of the top couple pieces of the playbook or learnings that you brought into Box that, that helped here?

A Yeah, I mean, I'm a big believer that sales leaders have, have skills that you could put in three buckets. You know, they have deal skills. You generally don't get promoted unless you can close deals and make it rain. They have people skills. They're often kind of, uh, people, you know, people magnets. They have charisma. They can speak on stage at a sales kickoff and that sort of thing. And then they have strategy and operation skills. And, you know, really what I learned at Salesforce, uh, in the years that I was there, I'd strongly argue it was the best, you know, operated software company on earth and probably still is today. I really learned that playbook around how do you go to market? How do you operate in the SaaS world? And that's everything from carving territories to segmentation to verticalization, uh, OBR ratios, you know, and the like. I mean, basically we had the opportunity there. Uh, I was there from four hundred million to about ten billion to, uh, sort of experiment with and toy with and change lots of things. Success allows you to do that. We had lots of failure, but along that kind of a growth path, we were able to absorb those bumps in the road pretty well. And, and I think really the operational side of the sales leadership role is what I learned there.

AI assessment note: “I really learned that playbook around how do you go to market?”