Box is a leading content management and collaboration platform that integrates with thousands of apps to make it easy for users to share and collaborate on their most important content so, when they announced the new Box Platform Partner Program designed to help Box support the partners building on their platform, it’s no surprise that there was a large response from companies around the world. Julien Bassan, the Senior Manager for the Box Business Development team, quickly realized they needed a way to automate the administrative side of partner on-boarding process so he could spend more time on quality partner interactions.
“We needed a scalable way to work with a large amount of partners,” explained Julien. “As the program took off, I realized we had a really manual process of managing partners on a one-on-one basis. Given the large number of companies that have built integrations with us and those that wanted to, we needed a way to quickly and comprehensively automate partner management.”
Related: A guide to streamlining processes
The EcoSystem: Marketo, Salesforce, and Box
The Box team uses Marketo for marketing automation, Salesforce as their CRM, and Box for collaboration and content storage. “Without Marketo, Salesforce, and Box all working together, there’s a lot of manual work that goes into every new partner we onboard,” said Julien. “When you have a high volume of interest and conversations and everything has to be done manually, we don’t want things to slip through the cracks.”
PARTNER PROGRAM BEFORE WORKATO:
As the partner momentum grew, Julien saw the hours he was spending on the management of tedious logistics growing as well. Getting the partner process automated became a more pressing need, so Julien began to seriously search for a solution. “It only took a few weeks to get up and running and now basically the entire end to end process is now automated thanks to Workato connecting all our business systems.”
PARTNER PROGRAM WITH WORKATO:
Workato automates the application and on-boarding process in two steps:
- Partner Application: Marketo Leads Move into Salesforce
- Partner Triage and On-boarding: Salesforce and Box
I. Box Partner Application
Applying is the first step in the Platform Partner process via the Box website. Box uses a Marketo form to collect the applications and needs the applicant information to automatically move into Salesforce as accounts, contacts, and opportunities.
II. Partner Triage and On-Boarding
Once the lead’s status is changed to “accepted” or “unaccepted,” the next Workato recipe will trigger. “The leads come in as pending, then I go through the queue and triage them, setting their status to accepted or unaccepted,” explains Julien. “When I change their status, it then kicks off a follow up email to the partner via Workato. If they are not accepted, we send an email asking for more information and if they are accepted then Workato automatically creates a Box folder for the partner and adds the partner as a collaborator. This folder has all the information materials for new partners and they can upload their sales collateral.”
This Box folder can be accessed by the new partner at community.box.com and they can upload any information that might help familiarize the Box team with their products.
From 5 Hours to Less Than 1: A Fully Automated Partner Onboarding Process for Box
These two recipes make a huge difference in Julien’s day and help partners get on-boarded more quickly. “The efficiency these two automations are able to drive is really powerful because Workato is such an easy tool to deploy and then modify and expand over time. You can start out with one kind of recipe and as other tools become relevant you can just modify the recipes to connect further upstream or downstream,” said Julien. “Getting set up on Workato was a pretty quick process – once we got the go ahead from our enterprise systems team, it was only 2 or 3 weeks to build the recipes and move it into production.”
Previously – it might take Julien 5 hours to bring a partner on board with all the data transferring and manual one on one communication, now he can bring a partner on board in less than an hour. “The Workato automation enables us to be more efficient with our time so we can more effectively work with all of our partners. We can take care of all the admin work and focus on the important stuff like go-to market activities and partner enablement, which is better for us and our partners. It’s been a huge success so far,” said Julien.
Want a quick and easy way to implement this solution for your business? Here are the recipes Box uses that you can copy and customize:
