How Box used automation to decrease partner onboarding time by 80%

Marc Fenner, Director of Business Development at Box, was struggling to efficiently onboard new partners to the Box Platform. Partners lined-up in droves, but his team simply didn’t have the capacity to onboard them, which left money and opportunity on the table.

He faced a frustrating and costly problem - numerous outstanding strategic partners that would boost revenue for the company and ready to join the partner network, but no way to get them onboarded fast enough.

In its current state, the partner onboarding process took several employees across various teams hours of work, numerous steps, and three different applications to onboard a single partner, and what started as a trickle of interested partners was now a cascade of hundreds.

For Marc and his team, it was abundantly clear that they needed a way to automate the administrative side of partner onboarding. The team discovered Workato for its ease of use, speed of deployment, and numerous connectors - all important components that would not only address their current needs, but position them to address future needs as they continued to rapidly scale.

The team deployed Workato with speed and ease, and connected their marketing automation platform Marketo, their CRM Salesforce, and Box for their collaboration and content storage. After connecting their apps, they were able to create a simple automation to eliminate the costly, time-consuming, and manual partner onboarding process.

Marc successfully transformed his team’s 12-step, 5-hour process into a simple automated flow, requiring less than an hour of work. Additionally the turnaround time for approving partners was condensed from 24 hours, to 4 hours, enabling the team to onboard multiple partners per day.

Marc soon realized the power of Workato and the opportunity to remedy similar problems across the company.

“This initial use case made us realize the power of Workato’s ability to integrate with numerous business applications, as well as the ability to easily build those integrations without a deep technical background” said Marc.

Since initially leveraging Workato to solve for their partner onboarding process, Box has used it to streamline their sales process, as well as automate their incident management process, creating even more value for the entire organization, establishing cost efficiencies, removing time constraints, and enabling employees to spend more time working on strategic initiatives rather than administrative tasks.