PLG at Box: Building a Product-Led Growth Motion in a Sales-Led Culture

This post by François Dufour is part of our series on Product-Led Growth and Marketing Playbooks. There, we share insights and advice from leaders who have built successful PLG businesses.

After receiving $600M+ in funding since its inception in 2005, Box went public in January 2015 on the back of a successful enterprise Sales motion, completed by a tremendous Communications and thought leadership engine led by CEO Aaron Levie.

Marie Gassée joined them in August 2013 as an Associate. Back then, PLG (f.k.a. self-serve or online sales) was not front and center, despite the freemium roots of the company. Marie quickly climbed the ranks and ended up being the Sr. Director and General Manager of the Online Sales Business Unit before subsequently joining Confluent in 2019. By the time she left Box, the self-serve segment she was overseeing represented roughly 80% of Box’s customers and close to 20% of the overall ARR (a convenient 80 / 20 rule).

Marie shared with me how she got started at Box, why they prioritized PLG when they did, how they approached the challenge, their first wins, and more. She also shared how the team at Box managed to scale a significant PLG motion in a culture that had invested heavily in their sales motion, as well as her criteria for a great Head of Growth.

Key Takeaways

• To set up your PLG effort, invest first in your data, tracking and systems infrastructure so you can measure and report on your efforts
• Identify and get your first wins. Socialize them well
• Set up and empower a cross-functional growth team with all the right players in Engineering, Product & Design (EPD), Marketing, and Analytics
• When working alongside an established Sales org, consider including the self-serve team within the purview of the CRO or head of Sales, but only if the team has hit its stride
• Great attributes for a Head of Growth: analytical, user-centric, able to work and lead across functions, acts with a sense of urgency

How Marie got started at Box

Marie joined Box right after business school, describing herself as “pretty green in my career.” She had the opportunity to participate in a two-and-a-half-year rotational program for MBA grads where she would work in one role for 9 to 12 months at a time.

Her first rotation was in finance working on the IPO, where she focused specifically on customer economics. There, she gained key knowledge about customer lifetime value, which primed her for the Growth roles she later took on.

After her year in Finance, Marie worked in Sales strategy to identify opportunities to improve efficiency in Sales & Marketing. This led her to pivot to helping start an online Sales business unit, which would focus on companies with smaller deployments of Box who may not need much hand-holding by Sales. “Box always focused deeply on the end user’s experience, but we hadn’t formalized our self-serve flows into a go-to-market function,” she said.

Box at this time had evolved into a fairly Sales-driven organization, where all customer relationships, even when a customer was spending just a few hundred dollars a year, were managed by Sales. It was a meaningful step for Box and Marie’s team to take over that segment in a pure self-serve fashion.

Why Box prioritized PLG

When Box published their S1 as part of their IPO process, their Sales and Marketing efficiency numbers didn't get a great reception.

“Basically, the market saw that what we were spending on Sales and Marketing, as a percentage of our revenue, was too high. And candidly, they were right.”

This and a number of other factors drove Box to make go-to-market efficiency a Board-level priority. Marie helped spearhead an effort to understand how Box could get more efficient, with their smaller customers.

Data: what new PLG teams should tackle first

Before investing heavily in a PLG motion, it’s key to invest aggressively in data infrastructure so that everything can be measured and tracked. Marie says this is an essential step to answering key questions and knowing what works.

“The worst thing that can happen is that you make a meaningful change, you think it worked, but your systems weren’t set up to measure effectively so you don’t actually know the impact, and you’ve lost a big chunk of time.”

Marie credits her former manager, Ben Schecter, who made measurement a priority from the very beginning. “It was Ben who made this a top priority from the get-go. His relentless commitment to good measurement helped us invest in the data infrastructure we needed to measure our PLG efforts and to know what was and wasn't working” she said.

Marie said that this investment in analytics showed that their early projects had an impact. For example, they could not have understood and reported on the impact of their pricing page redesign, which was an early "win" that gave them and the nascent business unit credibility.

Note: in a former discussion we had with Rachel Hepworth of Notion, Rachel described the same initial need for strong analytics and instrumentation as a prerequisite to PLG success.

Getting the early wins

With that data infrastructure in place, they identified and focused on getting their first early wins:  

1. They completely re-designed the pricing page on the Box website. The content didn't change drastically, and pricing stayed the same, but the UI / UX and sign-up flow were completely redesigned. The result? A 30%+ increase in conversion.
2. They improved in-trial product onboarding which focused on driving the user behaviors (for example, inviting a collaborator) that were correlated with a trial converting to a paid customer.
3. They began previewing premium features within basic plans to let users experience the benefits of these superior plans - which unsurprisingly lead to a higher proportion of upgrades.

The power of a cross-functional team: key roles

Box created the Online Sales Business Unit to focus on self-serve customers who spent less annually than a certain threshold. Rather than relying on employees still reporting into their siloed groups, Box built one cross-functional team that worked in lockstep toward a common goal: increasing ARR for self-serve customers.

“Bringing together all the functions under one business unit, with one goal, was essential to get the right resources and momentum to move the needle. It would’ve been impossible to get anything done if we were fighting for engineering or product resources.”

Having engineers as part of the online business was crucial: the lowest-hanging fruit were opportunities around product flows that required engineering.

At first, the team was very lean– Ben, Marie, and two engineers– but as they started seeing success, they added more team members.

When Marie left, the team was composed of:

• Product Management: focused on defining product improvements that the Engineering team could then build, such as improving and iterating on sign-up, onboarding, upgrades, cancelation flows, in-product paywalls, and more.
• Marketing: responsible for creating marketing campaigns, managing website conversion, creating messaging & content, and the associated performance of these programs.
• Engineering*: a dedicated engineering team, which focused first on product improvements, started with two engineers, then grew to 7 with an engineering manager.
• Analytics*: a small group focused on analytics so that progress could be measured, marked, and celebrated - as well as deep analysis that helped inform opportunities for additional growth.
• Product Design* - iterate on the UI / UX of the many user-facing properties, ranging from the pricing page to email templates, to sign up, onboarding,  upsell, and more.
• Systems Engineering*: to ensure that new initiatives fit into the greater ecosystem of systems. This group focused on billing, back-end connections and integrations, and more.

*dotted line reporting into the business unit

Metrics they tracked

Box’s cross-functional team came together, tacking the following metrics as their true north:

• New ARR from self-serve customers –  this could correspond to multiple SKUs and could be a wide range of customers. This was the ultimate north star metric and allowed Marie and the team to be accountable to the same metric as their counterparts in Sales, following the same forecasting cadence as other Sales leaders in the organization.
• Total ARR of the segment – As the team addressed many of the growth levers around generating new ARR, and naturally saw decreasing marginal returns,  they decided to look at the total ARR run rate for the self-serve segment. That made churn mitigation front and center in the next phase of the business unit.

They also tracked the following metrics closely:

• Traffic to the website and engagement on the website: The website's ability to attract traffic and engage visitors with website content.
• Website and sign-up conversions: Effectiveness of the website and the sign-up flow at converting users to sign up for the product.
• Trial conversions and onboarding/activations: The percentage of trial sign-ups that became customers. And the proportion of sign-ups who actually started using the product.
• Key product usage milestones: Users completing key milestones in product usage that are predictive of a longer-term relationship with Box.
• Upgrades and Upsell: Users upgrading to higher plans or purchasing more seats.
• Cancellations and Churn: Users who canceled their subscriptions and resulting overall churn percentages.
• Customer lifetime value: While top-line ARR metrics are great to track, it's also important to ensure that self-serve segments are ultimately efficient, and keeping tabs on the CLTV is a crucial part of that.
• And many many more! The team looked at ~50 metrics on a weekly basis.

Moving the PLG team under Sales

When PLG efforts first began at Box, the Online Sales Business Unit was under the COO who wanted to stay close to this strategic initiative. Then, in an unconventional move, the cross-functional team moved to Sales.

This move to Sales is rare, as most PLG teams stay as close to Product as possible, oftentimes living within the Product org, with some companies opting for it to live within Marketing or directly under the CEO.

The move to Sales worked very well at Box. The rationale was to remove any conflicting incentives. With all New ARR living under Sales, leadership was focused on hitting top-line metrics, hence avoiding any unproductive debate over who should get "credit" for a certain customer segment or a specific account.

What makes a great Product-led Growth Leader

Because Marie grew a PLG team from scratch, she developed a good sense of who makes a good leader for PLG efforts.

Here are the four traits Marie recommends looking for:

• Analytical and data-driven - According to Marie, many people downplay how deeply analytical and data-driven a growth leader needs to be. To be successful, you need to get into the numbers and enjoy it. For instance, one should understand the difference between correlation vs. causation and care about it.
• User-centric - “The whole point of PLG is that its go-to-market motion is driven in large part by the user of the product, so the leader needs to be heavily focused on the user and their experience with the product,” said Marie.
• Able to work across functions - "A leader in this motion has to work and lead across Marketing, Product, Data Engineering, Systems Engineering, and other functions to reach their goals. That’s many more functions than typical go-to-market motions, so being able to wear different hats and speak in different functional languages is extremely important.”
• Have a sense of urgency - It’s easy to get into academic debates and conduct deep research. But with PLG, you need to move fast, experiment and measure. Being antsy and having a sense of urgency are good qualities for someone in this role. In Marie’s view, iteration should be prioritized over perfection.

Thanks so much, Marie for sharing all these great insights, and congratulations on building such a successful PLG motion at Box!

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