Karen Appleton Page, general partner at B Capital Group and former big shot at Box, spills the tea on how partnerships can launch your product into the stratosphere. Back in Box's early days, cloud computing was still a new concept—but they were quick to hop on board and offset those pesky infrastructure costs. Box also knew that giving away a gig of free storage would get customers' attention—and it was those email users who really helped them pivot towards a product-led growth strategy. By listening to their needs, Box was able to forge successful partnerships that ultimately led to revenue (and major street cred!).
When Box expanded globally, Appleton Page assembled a crack team of region-specific experts and buddied up with key partners to drive growth in new markets. In other words, she was a big deal and knew how to make even bigger deals happen.
We've included the full transcript for you to review below:
Margaret Kesley:
Welcome everyone to Voice of the Product, an interview series with leaders embracing product-led growth. Today, we have Karen Appleton Page. She is general partner at B Capital Group and she was also one of the first employees at Box. I think you were number seven?
Karen Appleton Page:
I was a single digit employee at Box.
Margaret Kesley:
I love that. And a founding executive as well. You led go-to-market activities. You defined Box's approach to growth and you also cultivated customer and partnership engagement. And I don't have to tell you this, but you are an entrepreneur and angel investor and a board member. So welcome.
Karen Appleton Page:
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Margaret Kesley:
So I wanted to start off and talk a little bit about what software looked like back when you first started at Box. It was before Cloud, I think everyone called it Enterprise 2.0. Talk to me a little bit about what was important about partnerships as a growth strategy.
Karen Appleton Page:
Absolutely, and you're totally right. In fact, in around this time in 2007, I was here in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 conference and there were companies like Socialtext and a bunch of other folks, and it was before the cloud word was widely adopted. But it was at the very beginning of the trend of what we're seeing, what we've experienced over the past decade or more of companies embracing the ability to offset their infrastructure and how they run their businesses. And today people wouldn't imagine running their businesses if they didn't have a core component of cloud as part of the way that they run. We were also rated at the forefront of companies that were experiencing the ability to begin their entire development with less cost, less infrastructure, less fewer people, and boxers right at the forefront of that. In fact, I think we were one of the companies that benefited most from the ability to share documents.
We were just in the phase where internet was becoming more widely available and upload and download speeds were not enough to make you want to throw your computer out the window. And so all of that for us was huge. And I think very interestingly, certainly the terminology of a product-led growth company hadn't yet been defined or probably even experienced by most companies at that time. But we were an early beneficiary of that exact sort of dynamic and what we had begun to see at Box, we were the first company that gave away a gig of storage for free, primarily aimed at customers, although in the very, directed towards consumers. And even then our phraseology internally was that we were selling to end users. We never even actually defined them as consumers intentionally, but what we started to see, of course, was that businesses had begun to use our product.
And at the beginning of that, and this is again, this is summer of 2007, we started digging into that a little bit, trying to understand what was it about box that the end users with business email addresses were finding useful about the product. That drove our pivot. That understanding and that sort of recognition began to dawn on us that this is a set of users who would build their business around cloud technologies and that really needed and appreciated what the service at that time was able to provide. So fast-forward, of course, we needed the ability to have a channel to get our product most effectively out to the wider universe of prospects and customers. And the strategy at the time was to create awareness and credibility for the product that ultimately led to revenue, which is how I've often defined a successful partnership strategy.
Maybe not for every company, but certainly for us that was very, very important. We were just little guys that had to fight hard to make ourselves look big, and that was the approach that we took. I had a four pronged strategy at the time to that incorporated like a hardware approach, a software approach, a mobile approach, and then the idea of building kind of an app store, which was in its infancy, but was clearly a way for us to leverage our ability to integrate into other products so that we could be found by many other potential users.
Margaret Kesley:
Awesome. And I think something that's really interesting is you stayed with Box through a rapid period of growth, both for the company but also for you professionally, how did you make sure that your skills were leveling up with every new need that the company had?
Karen Appleton Page:
Yeah, it's so interesting. There are so many times that you see companies hire the best they can at that moment and people kind of grow up to their potential and then they're not necessarily there and able to scale through some of those huge periods of growth. I think I was just determined to be of value to the company. I had such passion for Box and incredible loyalty to Aaron in particular. I think we're a really good team in that respect and I think he pushed me. I also worked with executive coaches to make sure that not only from a knowledge perspective, because a coach isn't necessarily someone who's going to teach you how to run a channel or something like that, but more how to be the best leader you can be, how to manage teams, how to hire, teach your teams to be effective leaders themselves. What's the difference between managing and leadership?
How do you become a really good executive team leader? It's a lot of self-motivation, I think, and a lot of grit and determination that helps because I think there are certainly two sides there. You have to be able to run your team and to be effective. One example that I could give you is as we were figuring out how to grow internationally, I put together a plan that I thought was a reasonable plan. We did a 3D matrix of every other market we could expand to, what their proclivity was to adopt cloud services and technologies and then how hard it would be in those markets and the value of those markets. And so from that we created a go-to-market kind of plan that we did. By the way, I was still running partnerships at that time because you always have to do two or three things at a time. And then I took that out, I took it to my venture partners. I got referrals from other people to teams that had done this before and I ran my plan by them so it could get pressure tested.
One of the impactful strategies that we deployed at Box was a partnership approach that took into consideration credibility and awareness that led to revenue. We wanted to do partnerships that would boost our credibility in the marketplace and that would drive the awareness that we sorely needed to make sure that customers knew about Box and felt positively towards it. And ultimately we knew that if we had strength in credibility and awareness that revenue would follow. What that often looked like was a partnership strategy that was driven by making sure that we were with the top tier companies in the marketplace at the time, which included Google and Apple and Samsung and HP, as well as an array of smaller companies that were in our product set that were adjacencies.
For example, NetSuite was a very important partner to us at the time, but the most important thing was to figure out how do we integrate with these partners? How do we drive the relationship forward so that we would be included and have network effect in various types of events and strategies and promotions that they were deploying at the time. And ultimately for us, that meant being part of all of the sales kickoffs and all of the promotional things that they were driving forward. And it was a hugely beneficial strategy for us. We were able to leverage various speaking engagements and other opportunities to create that credibility awareness that led to revenue for the team.
Margaret Kesley:
All right. A madlib-style question for you now. The most important thing that companies get wrong about growth is?
Karen Appleton Page:
Timing.
Margaret Kesley:
Okay. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Karen Appleton Page:
Sure. I think it's really easy for a CEO to see early signs of ramping growth and want to hire aggressively, build their marketing teams out, begin aggressive demand gen campaigns, and potentially that could lead the company to get out a little ahead of its skis. And I think it's really important to pace the growth. You don't want to be too slow, but you don't want to be too aggressive. And so I think just carefully monitoring, it's also equally damaging to a company to not have enough people on hand, particularly on the sales side and the SDRs to help kind of build that ramp. But I do think that it is easy to overhire ahead and you should just be super careful to make sure that the pace is right on point.
Margaret Kesley:
So a CEO sees that and just gets too excited and just expands the team a little too quickly.
Karen Appleton Page:
I think it's probably a mix of excitement and fear.
Margaret Kesley:
Interesting.
Karen Appleton Page:
Like, oh my, my sales team is overworked, we got too many leads coming in. I mean, everybody should have this problem.
Margaret Kesley:
Right.
Karen Appleton Page:
But just make sure, because you start to hire salespeople, it takes a long time for them to ramp. You don't want to impact all of your metrics, your time to close and other important sorts of things. And again, having too much going on at the same time in the sales organization could cause customers to be dissatisfied with that process.
Margaret Kesley:
In today's marketplace, as more and more of these, let's say consumerization of enterprise companies pop up, do you think that technology is inherently more siloed than it ever was before? I think Slack would be the anti example of this because Slack integrates with everything, but there's a lot of other tech stacks, especially startups use, that are smaller companies that are sort of building in verticals and don't have a partnerships model.
Karen Appleton Page:
Right. I agree with you and I do see a lot of siloed applications, and on the one hand, it's great that we're seeing such a variety of applications to solve corporate needs. On the other hand, I think as an end user, it becomes very difficult to remember where everything is and Slack may be ubiquitous and we use that, but gosh, I can't remember half the time whether my conversation was over email or Slack or text or WhatsApp or where it was was. And so for the end user, the siloed approach obviously is more complicated. I would love to see a seamless way to, particularly in communications, to find what you're looking for, whether it's an overlay to the existing tools or not, but you could see how that carries through in lots of different scenarios. So the ability to integrate is I think going to be a killer app for somebody.
Margaret Kesley:
What did you learn at Box and at Apple that help you as a general partner today?
Karen Appleton Page:
Oh, that's a great question. Oh gosh, there are so many directions I could go with this because I think my biggest career learnings were between Box and Apple. I learned the value and the importance of teams. I learned that the ability of a leader to empower their teams for success comes back in ways that are just immeasurable. And it's one of the great pleasures for me in the work that I do and the people that I work with. You don't need to have ownership of the success of a team. It's going to be reflected throughout the organization when the products and the projects that you're working on are successful. So just let that go, let it take care of itself. I learned how to be a leader to very senior people, how to be an in-service leader. My job was to remove the problems.
Your job was to get all of your KPIs and your OKRs and mine was to make sure that you could, and that was just tremendous. And for me now as I look across potential investments at companies that are in high growth phase of their lifecycle, it's amazing to be able to have that kind of pattern recognition, the ability to see around corners. And I think that helps me to best evaluate the teams that we may invest in, to evaluate the products that they're selling and it's ridiculously fun and exciting to have an array of businesses that you can watch go through these various phases. And that has been just a total joy for me.
Margaret Kesley:
And I'm sure as a board member too, that kind of mentorship is really important since you've gone through those. I imagine the growth at Box was not always easy as growth is-
Karen Appleton Page:
Totally easy.
Margaret Kesley:
Yeah, always. It's just very easy. Yeah, I imagine that that's invaluable too, as a mentorship experience.
Karen Appleton Page:
Absolutely. You can completely reflect back to those times, and that's super helpful to, as a board member, to look in at a company and say, this is happened for us at this stage, it might be helpful to do these three things. When we saw this, we tried this, it was wrong. We tried this and it was better. And what we learned from the experience was, and using those types of approaches with companies that are at a inflection point of growth can be super helpful. And it's also really helpful even to talk about my experience when Box was at this phase or when the programs that I was running at Apple were at this phase was, these are the qualities of the team that you need to have or so on. And it's very, very fun to be able to use those learnings to help the company that you're working with.
Margaret Kesley:
Awesome. Anything else to add? Anything that we didn't chat about today that you were hoping to talk about?
Karen Appleton Page:
What's your favorite area of discussion on product-led growth companies? What do you think is the newest learning you've had?
Margaret Kesley:
So that's a great question. I think product-led growth has always sort of been talked about as a go-to-market function as a freemium or free trial experience, and that's product-led growth. I think the real power of product-led growth is really around how it aligns teams internally. I think if you have your marketing team and even your customer success and your sales team trying to figure out ways that they can scale themselves and their efforts through the product, it inherently sort of unites teams together. And so that's what I was hoping we were touching on today about cross team alignment and motivation and things like that.
Karen Appleton Page:
Absolutely.
Margaret Kesley:
Because I think it's not just purely a decision that your go-to-market team's going to make, hey, we're going to be a product-led company. I think it really has to be aligned throughout the entire organization.
Karen Appleton Page:
I don't think you can decide to be a product-led growth company. I think it's something that you can strive for and you can do your best to put all the components in place and you can be spotting what the indicators are, but I think you got to be all over it to make that happen.
Margaret Kesley:
We've talked internally, we've debated this as we were starting to think through product with growth and what it is and how to talk about it to the community. And we had this idea that the decision to become product-led, or the decision to adopt these practices is a binary one, you either decide to go for it or not, but ultimately the path to get there is incredibly varied and looks totally different from IBM deciding to become more consumerized versus a startup starting out that way.
Karen Appleton Page:
Yeah. Awesome.
Margaret Kesley:
Well, thank you so much for being here, and thank you for listening to us today. I hope you have a great rest of the day. And don't forget to check out the Product-Led Growth Collective for everything else product-led.
