When Box, the popular online file sharing and content management service for businesses, started their new Partner Program, they immediately experienced an overwhelming number of applicants. Julien Bassan, the Senior Manager of the Business Development team was suddenly slammed with new partners to onboard, which was a tedious and time-consuming process, involving many back-and-forth conversations. They quickly determined that they needed to integrate Marketo, SalesforceIQ, and Box. But finding a partner onboarding solution that could be implemented quickly — and that could easily keep up with the demand of new partner applications — was a challenge. Box couldn’t wait for an integration that would take a few months to set up. And because their desired workflow would inevitably require modifications, they needed an enterprise-grade platform that was still easy to tweak and required no code.
Box chose Workato, which took their 12 step onboarding process down to only 4. The process begins with a Marketo form to collect new applications; Workato allows them to automatically move the applicant information into SalesforceIQ as accounts, contacts, and opportunities. Bassan can accept or reject an application right from SalesforceIQ by changing its status from pending to “accepted” or “unaccepted”. Changing a lead’s status triggers the next Workato recipe. “When I change their status, it kicks off a follow up email to the partner via Workato. If they are not accepted, we send an email asking for more information; 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 also upload their sales collateral,” explains Bassan.
Previously, it took Box roughly five hours to onboard a new partner because of all the manual data transferring and one-on-one communication. Now they can bring a partner onboard in less than an hour. “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,” explained Bassan. “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.”
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