Cloud Software Association

Jake - thanks for your question.. for me investment management and partnerships are quite similar. In the investment banking world one invests $, in partnerships one is investing engineering, marketing and sales resources. So it seemed like a natural extension of my skill set plus I came from a tech background so it was natural for me to come back to it

great question !! From my VC background, I had to look at market landscape and figure out trends and which companies would be the future winners. I apply the same rigour when prioritizing partners @Great question

Thank you! I'd imagine you're also comfortable with a certain amount of risk, and that comes in handy.

Yup absolutely, from the VC world I know that there is a high percentage of failure when you are relying on some external entity for your success.. great point

yeah, we are fortunate at Box to have more partners than we can handle. We think of partners in different buckets - some have light weight integration which the partner primarily works on, some have GTM benefits in terms of the brand value and some have real pipeline/ARR associated with it.. For each one of these categories we use a different prioritization framework

That’s interesting.. how do you value brand partnerships? how do you value ARR partnerships? how do you pick between a brand vs. revenue partnerships if you had to choose?

For Brand partnerships, we think about how much of resources we have to put behind the partnership. It's a constant ROI discussion

typically for brand partnerships, we try to (1) constant ROI evaluation (2) create templates so we can reuse them, whether it be be for press releases, API integrations etc

If I had to prioritize between the two, I would pick revenue partnerships for sure. However, as you and I both know, revenue partnerships are a bit of longer term.. so we typically have a lot of brand partnerships and a small number of revenue partnerships that we are laser focused on

I had a simple philosophy at FreshBooks; the “logo everywhere” strategy… I assumed revenue would follow (it did)

But focusing on comarketing to get more revenue was a second hustle.

haha that's how we are @Sunir Shah and also we wanna make sure we "have a seat at the table"

Hi Tyrone - we use a number of data points for prioritization of technical integrations (1) brand value of the partner (2) how many sales requests are we getting - meaning our sales reps think this is important for them to close the deal (3) engineering resources required to do the integration (4) GTM benefits we are going to get by doing the integration - press release, potential revenue

Of course lots of these factors are subjective, but having a framework creates a shared understanding amongs the internal stakeholders on which partners to priortize and put resources on

For revenue generating partners, in addition to the technical integration framework we also consider (1) how much is Box valuable in closing the partner sales rep deal (2) is the partner willing to open up their sales channel

even before i work on my partner strategy, I work with the key stakeholders to understand what is the goal/key metrics. Once we know the goal - whether it is gap filler or generating pipeline it's a bit easier to figure out the partner strategy.. Can you provide a bit more detail on your company and I can provide some specific feedback

Hi Nidhi, So I am the founder of a company called timehero.com, we are an AI scheduling tool that automatically plans tasks for you and your team around meetings. (changing when your day changes) So ideally I want partners who want to add scheduling to their tools for their customers.

Got it.. I don't know enough about this space, but seems like timehero.com would want to be where folks are setting up meetings, so outlook and gmail calendar.. I know that they have plugins and apps stores where one can get listed

I would start with one or two partnerships and see how that goes.. before doing too much at one go.. In the early days of a company, I would pivot more towards awareness and adoption of your brand/tool before thinking about revenue.. my 2 cents

Appreciate the insights ! cheers Scott

At Box, we try to use our dogfood so to say - so we leverage Box too much

So you don't use a Partner Management Tool of some time?

and so use Box in combination with Salesforce

ahh gotcha!

we do use salesforce community for partner portal, but no other tools.. It would be a good thing to use a number of newer partner portals in the market nowadays

what do you use for referrals and resellers?

all salesforce? affiliate links too?

yes we tag partner deals in salesforce(referrals) and for resellers we have a seperate salesforce community built on top of our salesforce instance. My sense is we are bit behind on the tool tech curve here

At Box we have the philosphy to build API's that partners can then build on.. so we generally try to get the partner to build on our open API's.

Thanks @Nidhi Jain - we are looking to do the same here.

We usually will plot partners on two axis - engineering resources required vs the perceived benefit (product differentiation or revenue) we will get out of this

great @Mark Cohen what's the name of your company?

@Nidhi Jain TradeGecko - inventory/order management - targeting the SME space (before you're ready for Netsuite).

www.tradegecko.com

Hi Gabe - can you please elaborate on your question, not sure I completely follow

I think Gabe is asking how (mechanically speaking) do you track and measure revenue from partnerships?

It’s a bit of a thorny problem because partners often generate revenue indirectly… either through changes in adoption/retention or because customers don’t necessarily click on links and buttons even if they heard about Box from partners.

yeah.. that is a really tough problem to track as partners as well as Box sales reps will forget to enter data in salesforce

Yeah, the usual, eh? If only I was working on a permanent solution for this problem with AppBind.com; if only.

we have a field in salesforce that shows that the partner was influential in closing the deal, however, once we reached a certain scale reps forget to do so.. One of the ways we have tried to enforce this by putting in a referral fee so reps are incentivized to check that box in salesforce

however, we have had limited success

Yup, absolutely, whoever can work on this problem will be golden

aye, you need a real PRM for lead registration though.

That's a tough one.. In such a situation, I would like to leverage other developer platforms like Twilio, AWS etc to promote your brand in some way

It's like asking your friend to talk about you in a positive light so other folks want to be friends with you

@Natalie Kerns to seed your marketplace, you can build the first few integrations yourself, with the blessing and perhaps with a little support from the partner, and brand it with the partner’s brand (while making clear that you support it, not the partner) - you can see an example of this on a program I manage at https://docs.konghq.com/hub/ - have a look at the Datadog and Loggly listings - they were built by my company, but they have the effect of making our marketplace appear to have involvement by name-brand partners (note that they were built a long time ago, and now that we’ve got the virtuous cycle going we are able to attract contributions by third parties

Hi Cooper - yes it can be both of the scenarios you described.. generally the one building the integration is the one who might get a new customer or a very large upsell and/or customer retention

is there one kind or the other that you strongly prefer?

I would say if Box was to get a new customer, it's easier to win the internal engineering resource battle.. however, given our size, we probably need a # of new customers to justify the engineering ask