Leveraging Data Across the Entire Customer Lifecycle

Kailey Raymond: Macroeconomic headwinds have hit tech hard over the past few months. While companies look to cut costs, the need to maintain, personalize, and engaging customer experiences, remains high. Marketers are now looking to simplify their tools and tech stacks while getting the most value out of their existing investments. CMOs like Chris Koehler are rethinking their strategies to expand the meaning of revenue marketing, and own metrics on the success side of the funnel. This means driving customer retention by building product awareness, and automating customer journeys through their CDPs to remove buyer friction. I sit down with Chris to discuss cost-effective plays and processes, and why a test and learn culture is critical to navigate through changing tides.

Kailey Raymond: Hey y'all, welcome to good data, better marketing, the podcast where we speak with influential marketers and digital innovators and learn their tricks of the trade. They help us understand exactly what good data is, and share stories about how they've created digital first customer experiences that stick. I'm your host, Kailey Raymond, and I lead enterprise marketing here at Twilio Segment. And with me today, to kick off season two of our show in a very special live session, I have Chris Koehler, the CMO of Box. Welcome to the show, and thank you so much for being here Chris.

Chris Koehler: Thank you Kailey for having me. And no pressure being the first guest in the kick-off of season two. So very excited to be here.

Kailey Raymond: Truly, yeah. The answers better be spicy today, Chris.

Chris Koehler: The bar is raised, got it.

Kailey Raymond: The bar has been raised. I wanted to just start off to get to know you and your career journey a little bit more deeply. Prior to CMO at Box, you were leading global VP of Customer Success, leading all of the global customer success teams, including renewals and before that, you spent 20 years in a host of different functions, product marketing, customer success, solution consulting, demand generation, enablement, at companies like Adobe and E-TRADE, and SunTrust Bank so I'm super excited to dive in and learn how all those cross-functional experiences have helped you in your role and understanding of driving customer engagement. But before we dive into that, I wanted to go back just a little bit further. Chris, what was your first job? 

Chris Koehler: I think my first job was actually a busboy in a restaurant. I think I was probably 14 or 15 years old, and I actually had a friend whose parents owned a really nice restaurant and they did a lot of weddings. And so always needed people to help, and that's a tough job, and actually high stress 'cause you're carrying heavy, heavy plates, both delivering the food and removing all of the plates and stuff from this event and it happened so quickly because they have to change courses. And so yeah, lots of stress early in life so I think it was a good lesson that my parents taught me.

Kailey Raymond: I love that. Yeah, the parents teaching the lessons of some of those really hard jobs. I was in the restaurant industry once upon a time. My first couple of jobs, I washed dishes, and I was the server and hostess. I was pretty much the only employee of this very small Italian/Polish restaurant. They did pierogies once a week, it was a big hit in my town. Nothing will teach you customer service quite like a restaurant job.

Chris Koehler: Well, yeah it teaches you a ton and then I think the actual... The one that sort of set me straight, I would say, maybe... There was one summer where maybe my grades weren't as good as they should have been, and maybe I wasn't as focused on school and I remember my parents said, "Hey, you're gonna get a landscaping job for the summer." And I literally lasted two weeks, it was the hardest work I've ever done. It was hot, it was humid and I was like, "Alright, I need to study harder because I'm going to school, I'm gonna do well," and it basically changed the trajectory of my life. So that was probably one of the biggest life lessons my parents taught me. It was, "Hey, if you don't pay attention and you don't do well in school, there's a tough life out there, and it's a heck of a lot harder than what we do for a living, for sure."

Kailey Raymond: That is a... That's a parenting hack that I think is just age-old. My parents did the exact same thing to my brother and I. We were painting the house or power washing, or mulching. There was something and it was always the summer, it was always so hot outside. And yeah, I learned that lesson pretty quickly as well. But maybe it's something that I wanna do with my future kids one day, is the lessons of those jobs that will bring you far in your life. So busboy and now CMO, but we know that from a high level, you've had a lot of experiences across the board in a lot of different roles. But in your own words, how did you get to where you are today? 

Chris Koehler: Yeah, I think it's a non-linear career path, but always sort of focused around marketing. I think a general life philosophy for me and sort of our family is generalist, right? Being a polymath, really understanding and making connections across lots of different disciplines to sort of think differently about the role. And I've been very lucky enough, quite frankly, to be given opportunities, as you've sort of mentioned, the kick-off of... I've run product, I've run demand teams, I've been a marketer of one, I've been in the sales organization, I've run renewals, I've run customer success. It gives you a very, very, different sort of perspective, both from a customer lens, and from a, "What's the value proposition of whatever business you're a part of?" And it gives you a lot of empathy, both for the customers and the teams that you work with day in and day out. So I think it's a unique journey, but one that I think has made me a better marketer over the last 20 years.

Kailey Raymond: I love to hear from a generalist because I think it's a more common career than we think. And if you look at somebody's LinkedIn profile, you might think, "What's going on here?" But really, there's a through line, and the through line for you is, you care deeply about customers, you're seeing how to engage with them and all of these different roles. And I'm betting you're a really good collaborator and cross-functional stakeholder because you've been in their shoes before and you know what it's like to actually have to deal with renewing a contract at the end of the year and what those product adoption metrics do to a lot of that. I was in sales for the first half of my career and that has taught me invaluable lessons about marketing. And I think that that's probably... If you can ever cross-learn and maybe really put yourself in the shoes of a lot of the people on your team, it's gonna build, as to your point, a whole lot more empathy.

Chris Koehler: Yeah, 100%. The fact being in sales is incredibly difficult. The scoreboard is very clear of how you're doing as a leader, as an individual sales person. Same thing with CS, you have a customer and you have some product issue and you're getting yelled at because it's impacting their business and costing them revenue or you've gotta go in and pitch the value of why we should keep your set product. And so clearly understanding the value proposition and how to position and messaging, they have to do that everyday in front of the customer. As marketers, we have to do that once, we set it, we tweak it, and then we say, "Hey, go out in front of customers." So yeah, a lot of collaboration with our partners, a lot of message testing with them, what's working, what's not, how do we need to tweak it. And that collaboration is critically important. And I think, like you said, if you look at someone's LinkedIn profile, and sometimes it's just a head-scratcher of, how did you... What... And the number question I always get is, "How do you go from running customer success to being CMO?" It is not natural, is maybe the first thing that I get from a lot of folks.

But within my 10 plus years at Adobe, I was in a lot of customer-facing roles working with marketers. I said, I've been a marketer of one at a start-up. My degree is in marketing, a MBA with a constitution of arts so marketing was always sort of my passion and love. It just wasn't... I wasn't necessarily a practitioner everyday as a part of that and it was quite fun to raise my hand saying, "Hey, I wanna get and run CMO here at Box." But all of the stuff that I said as a... On the vendor side around being data-driven and the balance of art and science and... It should just all work seamlessly together. Yeah, it's a little harder in practice that it is when you talk about it more abstractly on the vendor side for sure.

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, abstract is a whole lot easier than execution, that's for damn sure. So, we've established you've been in a lot of different roles in tech companies for the better part of 20 years. I'm sure you've seen a ton of fads, and I'm also sure you've seen probably some trends that actually took off. So would love to hear from you, what are a couple of industry trends that you're currently seeing and following as it relates to customer engagement? 

Chris Koehler: I think the one that every marketer is thinking about is just the privacy laws, third-party deprecation, more and more, how do you get to first party data? How do you engage with customers with content that they want to actually consume versus unsubscribe? As part of that. So I think a big one is, what... As more and more countries, as more and more states are continuing to adopt and create complexity in all of the privacy compliance laws, how do we shift and adapt to that? Right. And what are the new mediums we have to think about his marketers? Where in the past it was, "Okay, I have a channel or a couple of channels." Now, I've got lots of channels. What about the end product experience? Is that a product driven, or is that a marketing-driven? Or is it a combination of the both? So you start to think about, "What are all these new engagement ways to work with prospects and customers." And so I think being up, trying to understand the privacy, third party, I think that's a big one. And then the other one I think we've been forced into forever in-person was just a go-to of how you build relationships. And then Covid hit and then everything flipped to digital.

And then, we had this over-reliance on digital events, digital tools, digital, digital, it's cheap, it's easier, you can scale. Well, and then there became the word digital fatigue. I wanna... Video fatigue and all that.

Kailey Raymond: Zoom fatigue.

Chris Koehler: So then they were like, "Okay enough, I don't need more digital interactions, I want in-person back." And so we got into last year, and people started getting back into these in-person engagements. And then another opportunity, I would say, gets thrown our way around a global sort of economic potential crisis around all of this where budgets are getting tighter and people are gonna be traveling less and all that. So then you're getting back to... Well, in person started to come back, now, budgets are tightening, digital is kind of our next method around engagement. And so I think it's that interesting balance between, how do we engage with our customers and prospects in both ways, that it is the most cost-effective and most engaging way? I think is a real challenge that I think all of us are dealing with in the next few years, sadly, until hopefully things start to get economically a little better around the globe. And again, that's... Hopefully, it's faster. But who knows at this point.

Kailey Raymond: That's a fascinating point, is like the channels and the cost and being able to find the ROI quickly and kind of prove that value. You're right, the desire for in-person is definitely back, and I think the days of meeting your goals simply with a webinar and a virtual event strategies are probably over. I don't know if you've tried to host a round table recently, but people don't really wanna attend those anymore, you have to be more interesting and more innovative, and one of the things that I think is happening too is the inverse, which is in field at those events, people are bringing a whole lot more digital touch points to those experiences to be able to collect a lot of that data, and then personalized experience on site at the event, and then of course, post-event, feeding that into their CDP or other interactions to make sure you have that customer engagement and customer journey. And you're right at the top, you talked about first party data and cookie lists, we talk about that, as you might imagine, all the time on the show, how companies are shifting to a first party approach. Frankly, that's allowing a lot of people to improve a lot of their personalized experiences with higher quality data, and I know we've been saying this for years, but are we finally... Is it one year away now. 2024, is that the year that we finally go cookie-less. Do you have any predictions around that? 

Chris Koehler: It'll be longer. It's so disruptive to the model. This is a year obviously where people don't wanna drive a lot of disruption as there's so much uncertainty. My sense is that in this economic environment, you will do whatever you can for revenue preservation and so if this becomes an unknown, another unknown as part of what's going on, my sense is probably longer... And I hope I'm right but we're preparing for... That it's gonna happen. So I think you have to be prepared in you're hope that you're ready for whenever it does, but my sense is it likely could be longer 'cause we've been saying this for how many years now? Two, three, four? I don't know.

Kailey Raymond: Yeah. Truly, cookie apocalypse has been longer than I would have expected. So you touched on first party, you touched on the tension between digital and in-person events, any other industry trends that you wanted to highlight? 

Chris Koehler: Yeah, and I think there's a... And again, I think this applies across the board, is that people are trying to simplify both their technical architecture and their security posture as businesses, and we're seeing this with our own customer base, but what we're finding is more and more people aren't saying, "Hey, I've gotta add more tools, more solutions, more... " but, "I gotta figure out how to simplify this architecture, I'm gonna figure out how to make this more secure because sadly, all the bad actors and everything that's going on, it isn't getting any better, it just seems like it continues to get worse." So I think that coupled with this notion of, "Am I getting the most value out of the existing investments I have?" And we hear that a lot from our customers, making sure that I'm using every possible capability, and so I think as marketers, one of the big pushes for us next year is really driving product awareness and capabilities awareness with our existing customers as we go and we develop these new capabilities, new features we included in their subscription and their plans, we assume that we launch it and they know and that's just not true.

And this isn't a Box problem, this is a problem across the board is you have to remind your customers over and over again what they have at their disposal, but I don't think traditionally marketers have thought of that as their responsibility. And so that's a big piece of how do we make sure... Not just company awareness, brand awareness, product awareness for prospects, for existing customers that already have it, that I think that's a precursor obviously to adoption and getting more value on the solution.

Kailey Raymond: I'm so glad you're calling that out because I do think the shift to revenue marketing has really had us focused obviously on pipeline, that's kind of table stakes, of course, but adoption is a whole other thing for us to be able to make sure that stickiness is there and they were retaining customers. I also love the way that you started out, you were talking about that idea of simplicity, and so of companies getting a lot of value from their tech investments and really calculating that ROI. Something related to that idea too is that all of these tech solutions are getting more robust, they're adding a lot more futures, a lot more capabilities, and so the need for so many of these different point solutions is kind of going away in some ways, and so in our space, we look at CDPs, we look at marketing automation, and those two things are converging right now. Companies are consolidating their tech stacks to simplify and really getting value out of those investments and making sure that their CDPs can also help automate a lot of their marketing, and really making sure that they have a data first foundation.

And you've already talked about this a little bit in some of the macro trends that you've been hinting at and talking about, but it's no secret tech has been impacted a lot over the past six months or a year. As a fellow marketer, I can say that a lot of the channels have changed and some of the triad true tactics are already starting to feel not as tried and true, shall we say? So it was a leader in tech in 2023, what's different? How is this economic climate changing your strategies and tactics? 

Chris Koehler: Yeah, we've been... I don't know if I would say we were lucky enough, but we were on a journey that we had to drive profitable growth based on some external shareholders and others that pushed us quite hard over the last couple of years. And so I think this notion of growth at all costs, don't worry about profitability, that will come, you gotta drive revenue, you've gotta drive scale, let's go spend a lot of money to go acquire net new customers, that I think those days... There will still be some but what you're seeing is that market pivot and Wall Street and others saying, Now, we're going to be focused on giving or rewarding those companies that are profitable, not just growing at a high rate. And so it's gonna push all marketers to be much more ROI driven around everything that they do, right? As I talk to many of my peers, the number one question over the last probably 60 days or so is, "Okay, I'm not necessarily getting an increase in marketing budget next year, or I'm probably gonna have to cut marketing expenses, what did you guys do? How did you focus on this? And we basically took a step back and we had to re-evaluate everything that we did. Let's be ROI driven, let's test and learn, let's take those things that we've always been doing that we felt were sacred, and really question them, are we sure we need to do this? 

I talked about this with a marketing team yesterday, where we allow the team permission to say... Raise their hand saying, Hey, the thing that I'm working on, it probably may not be as valuable as that over there, are you okay if we consider not doing this and focusing our attention on something else? And we have to make sure we celebrated that and rewarded those people that were willing to do it, because we couldn't do everything. We had to figure out a way to get more efficient as part of that. So I think you're gonna see more and more of this, where tactics that were nice to have, spend that you did that didn't drive ROI... And I mean ROI could be pipelined, it could be customer engagement, it could be driving renewals and retention, but ultimately there has to be a value with that spend as part of it so I think that's gonna be a big trend. Marketers are gonna have to figure out, what am I spending every dollar on? And is it getting the most out of that dollar or pound or euro or yen or... Wherever you are on the globe.

Kailey Raymond: Laser focus on priorities and business outcome, frankly, and making sure that every single activity that you're performing can have a lot of those metrics associated with it. I love it. It's like what you said at the top is growth at all costs is over, that was literally the theme of this event last quarter for us. I'm like, "Yes," we're on and that was the way to go. But what you're also saying is reminding me of the anecdote that's actually in a report that we just launched a week ago. And a lot of the data that's being collected is being collected at record volumes. We're collecting so, so much but what are we doing with that? Right. And so businesses are now approaching data collection and mimicking that trend towards efficiency that you're talking about. So we had a customer who was frankly pretty data mature, enterprise customer come to us recently and said, "Hey, can you help us audit our workspace?" We're like, "Cool, absolutely." And we uncovered that they were tracking hundreds of repeat events and sending data to multiple redundant destinations. And so just by making two very simple changes in their Workspace, the customer saved 16 billion API calls per month. So that's obviously saving them a ton of time.

It's saving them a ton of money. And it's really just echoing your sentiment of every single thing that we're doing needs to be pointed out these North Stars that growth at all costs is over and the businesses are really prioritizing business outcomes.

Beyond just this economic environment, which of course is gonna be challenging for us to make sure we're laser-focused, what are some of the biggest challenges related to customer engagement that you're facing at Box right now? 

Chris Koehler: There's so many. I think the biggest one is they're really unifying their customer experience across all the interaction points. There are so many sorts and you were talking about it, the amount of data collected is just exponential, and it could be overwhelming of how... What do you do with all of this? Where do you prioritize? How do you bring it all together? And then quite frankly if you're collecting it, are you gonna do anything about it? Right? Is it actionable? And so, I think what's really interesting and what we have to talk about is every interaction is a brand moment that you can basically delight a customer as part of that. And you start to think about now we've got website, in-product, social, sales tools, Outreach, SalesLoft, marketing automation. Again, there's so many ways that you're engaging with... We use Drift. There's so many ways and then you've got the human connection, CSMs and sales reps and sales force….

Kailey Raymond: The list goes on.

Chris Koehler: Yeah, and they keep going and you're like, "How do you unify that so you don't look like you're not shipping your work chart where it's like, oh, the community team has no idea of anything that's going on in the accounts from that perspective?" There's so many examples of that so part of... We're excited around the journey we're on obviously with you guys and leveraging CDP and with the Segment to help us start to unify that, ways that we didn't necessarily have all that data are tied together before. A big unlock for us is product usage data, right? And as we have looked at all of the interactions as we have a platform and we've got lots of products and capabilities, right? When you come to our website, if you're using one of our newest products called Box Sign, I don't wanna necessarily send you down that journey. I actually wanna send you on something else you're not using so you can get educated around that, or if you're an existing customer, I don't wanna send you to the pricing page as part of that.

There's all sorts of things we're trying to figure out, there's tons of signals and data that we've got around customers. We have to bring that all together and start unifying that and thinking about the journey that we can orchestrate but it's incredibly hard, that's the piece. We've been talking about this for a very long time, but I think now the tools are allowing us to get to that point. And then you throw AI into the mix and what's the implications of that? And it is exciting, but can be a bit mind-blowing as well.

Kailey Raymond: Imagine, Segment plus ChatGPT personalizing all of your experiences with data at scale, I don't know, it could be interesting.

Chris Koehler: Yeah. We've had some of those conversations internally, too.

Kailey Raymond: Yeah, of course. Everybody's like, "And AI, now what?"

Chris Koehler: Yes, totally.

Kailey Raymond: Awesome. Well, it's so great to hear that Segment's helping you solve one of those biggest challenges. Obviously, we hear that all the time, data silos with so many different applications and different platforms that you're trying to get information from, marketing automation, mobile apps, you named a ton, the list always goes on. Getting good data is really, really hard in those data silos, create a ton of issues across organizations. If people are working off of different sets, that's probably gonna lead to different decisions. And what we were talking about earlier with business outcomes and being laser-focused, that's not the best for the organization. And it's really expensive too, making a lot of those decisions and making the wrong decisions on that bad data. If you were gonna find... I know the show it was named of course Good data, Better Marketing. If you were to define the term good data, how would you do that, Chris? 

Chris Koehler: Yeah, I think of that in a couple of ways. I think it has to be clean, it has to be comprehensive, it has to be timely, and it has to be actionable. And I think the most important piece is the actionable component. And we have an incredible analytics team that we partner with where I've seen over my years, tons of analytics done on data with no sort of actionable way to leverage that to change outcomes. And so, I think that's the part that more and more both analytics people and marketers are thinking about, great, we've now... We've got the insights. This is... It's real-time in many cases, and now, what do I go do with it? And so that so what? How do we change it? Is, I think, critically important for sure.

Kailey Raymond: I love that. Yeah, of course, as a marketer in real time, you're right, being able to actually activate and capitalize on that intent in the moment as it happens of course is the thing that we're all looking to do. I like that you said comprehensive, comprehension, comprehensiveness as well, because it speaks to your point of breaking down data silos. It's making sure that you're getting insights from everywhere and unifying them all into profiles.

Chris Koehler: Yeah, everyone has made an assumption based on some sort of data that was incomplete and it's like, "Oh great. The data suggests X." And in reality, you start to... Later on, you bring something else, they're like, "Oh, we didn't realize that there was something else that actually was interfering with the decision we made." Unless it's comprehensive, you could make really bad decisions on data that you think is correct, and it can be very costly.

Kailey Raymond: A hundred percent. What are some examples? We have the definition, I think you said clean, comprehensive, timely, actionable, that's good data. How are you using good data in your organization? What are the tactics or programs that you would wanna highlight? 

Chris Koehler: Oh my gosh, we have so many. We've really transformed to be a super data-driven sort of test and learn organization. Where do I start? Again, every campaign that we run, we are sort of maniacally-focused on what's the return on investment? Is it driving the right behaviors? Every digital program we've got, every in-person event that we run, looking at the metrics, and it's not always about pipeline, it could be about the amount of revenue in the room from existing customers, can we change the trajectory around a churn event? All of those things. And we have a unique go-to market model because we have everything from premium to an e-commerce offering to SMB market and enterprise. So we have to think about that entire gamut of all types of customers.

And so, you can imagine lots of work on the website. How do you optimize journeys of an e-commerce customer versus an enterprise customer? Because they're very different buyer journeys, customer journeys, all of that so there's a lot around that. We are doing more and more, and I talked a little bit about product awareness so partnering with the product team and the CS team. How do we fuel in-product experiences with content, with segmentation, with messaging, so that we understand and can take them on a product journey to try new capabilities and new features that we've rolled out? There's a lot we've done on driving retention plays, discounting on different plan types, testing monthly versus annual customer feedback. Again, we are...

Kailey Raymond: The list goes on.

Chris Koehler: There's so many different examples that it's just like we have to be data-driven in everything that we do.

Kailey Raymond: I'm really loving what you're surfacing here though about the typical... For revenue marketing, we talked about it like MQLs, QOs, pipeline, tablestakes but especially with the macro environment right now, expanding those goals out into product adoption and awareness, I'm sure your product marketing team is also like, "Yes, this is awesome. We have a lot of measurable things now. This is incredibly valuable." And I'm also sure that there's probably some of those features that are indicators of stickiness and retention that you're really trying to drive a lot of your user stories and trying to get your customers to adopt. I've done that before.

Kailey Raymond: At my last company, I was doing customer education as well, and one of the things that we were measuring is the adoption pre-education class and post-education class of specific different parts of the product and different features. And this is a very small world moment, and I just put this together earlier today, is the guy on my team that was running that, his name was Mark Jones. He was a Box employee and he learned everything that he knows about customer education and driving adoption from your team. So shoutout to the Mark Jones and shoutout to the Box team for building a world-class program about scaled tactics for education and driving adoption. I know you're leaning into it now, but he was there in 2016, 2015 maybe so...

Chris Koehler: Yeah. Again, I think it's been an ongoing sort of effort across the board and a testament to the great partnership we have with our analytics team of driving this across to all parts of the customer life cycle. And you're right, I think there's massive opportunity, and especially in an environment where it's gonna be harder to get new customers, focus on existing customers and clearly understanding what are the things, what are the specific actions or products or capabilities that they use that drive stickiness and retention, and then focused on helping the user along that journey take those actions and we work... We know very specifically the lift. If we can get a user in the first four weeks, in the first eight weeks to habitually start using Box, we know that the lifetime value of that individual user is much higher than if we don't get them using in the first four to eight weeks and all of those examples were super data-driven and so we basically have programs across marketings, our CS, our sales organization, our product together to figure out how do we unify that? 

Kailey Raymond: So, so smart. And one of the things too that I think is pretty unique about the way that you all go to market, is that you're talking a lot about PLG, you also have a pretty robust enterprise sales motion. And those two things, I think a lot of people are like, "Oh, how do they work together?" If you're doing it right, I think that they can work really well together, but how do you think about creating a lot of those different paths to drive revenue in those different segments? How do those two things work together with PLG and enterprise sales? 

Chris Koehler: Yeah, I think it is having a shared common goal, thinking about the broader business than your specific segment. All right. I owned a freemium in the e-commerce component, and then my partner, Mark Wayland, the CRO, he owns Enterprise and we think about this, how do we grow the business holistically together? And our... We're an enterprise company, but we have a freemium and an e-commerce offering so really almost like it's an intentional strategy of getting customers to start using Box and there's a network effect. As they start using it, they share files and collaborate with either other vendors they're working with and other companies, their agencies, and so there's that network effect around that. We don't have a freemium offer just because we want millions of users to then go from a freemium account to paying us $10 a month. We actually want them to... And have thousands of freemium accounts in any given enterprise and then go work with the enterprise and say, "Hey, you have 1000 free users using Box. Can we do an ELA or something like that with you to bring all that in the fold and make you much more secure, have more control of your IP and your content, your most valuable assets as part of that? 

And then the same thing for e-commerce, it may start out as a department and a team of five starts to use Box and they're collaborating, and then they send it to another group saying, "Hey, you should work through." And we see seeds grow and grow and grow. And we don't have channel conflict. We partner with our SMB team and we say, "Hey, this is a customer that keep adding seeds, it's probably worth having a rep reach out and say, "Hey, would you wanna do a little bit more from a volume discounting perspective? Add this to more groups." So we have it sort of all in harmony where the teams are working together and ultimately, we all think about this as what's best for Box versus what's best for my segment? And that starts at the top, that's how we think about it.

Kailey Raymond: I love that. That's always a good thing to point to towards. It's like, we're all one company, we're all working towards the same goals. I know each individual group is gonna have their goals and sometimes that creates tension, but at the end of the day, revenue is revenue and that's the end of the game. I always think about that as like the way that Slack grew. Getting a million people to adopt it, and then going back into corporate and saying, "Let me bundle that sale for you." That's really cool. Freemium is an undeniable strategy if you have the ability to do it right. Is there anything specifically that you've done to reduce friction to make sure that that freemium experience and those upsells and cross-sells are working well? 

Chris Koehler: Yeah, I think there's a... It's one of our core values of how do we make the customer experience easier to engage with us. One thing we just rolled out is Google login forever, and we had to work through and make sure that we get it right. But it's much easier for you, you've already got your credentials, you're managing your password, your Google, quickly log in. And a lot of B2C companies are doing that, but it was definitely something that's made it super, using a lift is pretty significant. We're always thinking about the buying experience and how do we basically enable our customers either buy more seats, upgrade plans, other things in the seamless way? We do that... We think about what's the user flow, the buyer journey. How do make that where if they don't want to necessarily interact with the sales rep, we wanna give them that option to be able to buy more from us versus that barrier always that says, "Nope. You've reached your limit. Go talk to someone." But also at the same time, if they do wanna talk to someone, we wanna make that as easy as possible.

So we have tools where we've had examples... We even use Drift where you can quickly click, talk to someone, chat with someone, get on the phone and do a sale that way. And then in other cases, we've streamlined where we've built the tool, we call our rep assisted buyer where we basically allow sales reps to use this in an automated fashion so that they can get deals done faster. If it's just, hey, I wanna add 10 seats on to my existing contract. Okay, well, I don't wanna go through legal and all of that." Let's quickly get you additional seats as part of that. All of those things we think about what's best for the customer, how do we make that as seamless as possible, and it's just one of our core guiding principles.

Kailey Raymond: Very cool path to revenue, making it as easy as possible, channel of choice. Wherever the customer wants to be and where they wanna buy, you gotta be there.

You're talking so much about data-driven tactics. I'm sure that throughout your career, you've found something that was surprising to you. Is there any anecdote or insight where the data that you were looking at was surprising to you? 

Chris Koehler: We have internal bets all the time. We have these sort of scrum sessions, especially on our e-commerce side, where the team will say, "Hey, I wanna test these three different experiences." And oftentimes, Aaron our CEO and founder together we're debating about, no, I think this one's gonna win. No, this is gonna win. And it's funny now, there's been examples where we're like, "We really hope this one doesn't win because we hate the user experience around it." But there've been examples where it's like, "Oh, actually that is the preferred choice for customers around how we both do that." But I think one of the biggest surprises for us and one of big success is simplifying our pricing options. We do some work around bundling and really looking at the mix of our plans and making sure that we're adding incremental value across the different plans and finding ways for our customers that would want to upgrade your plan, and it was probably more cost-effective for them than to buy all these products individually. I think probably bundling optimization for us and simplifying our pricing motion was probably the biggest surprise. We didn't understand how complex customers felt it was before, and it's been a hugely successful rollout over the last probably year to 18 months.

Kailey Raymond: I think it's a great place to think about reducing friction, too. Yeah, if anybody's... If a customer's scratching their head about your pricing model, then there's probably an opportunity for you to simplify. I love throughout the conversation, you've really been highlighting that test and learn mentality. And it's definitely of course something that we just need to continue to remind ourselves, especially as we are entering this new era with tighter budgets. Speaking of the new era, on the horizon, customer engagement, what do you see for the next six to 12 months? Any predictions or changes you see on the horizon? 

Chris Koehler: I think a couple of things, and I mentioned before. First-party data is gonna be... In systems, it's gonna be critically important, right? Those that have not invested in and implemented a CDP are gonna be behind quite frankly. I think you're gonna see customers... Those that thrive in this environment are the ones that are gonna feed off their existing customers with upsells, cross-sells. I just think it's gonna be incredibly hard. There's not a lot of boardrooms and IT leaders and others right now saying, "Okay, let's go invest in more software as part of that." So I think for any new projects it would be difficult so making sure your existing customers are super happy, they're getting value, they see you as mission critical to their business, as a brand, I think it is absolutely necessary. I think it'll be an interesting balance as we figure out this, and we talked about it before, the in-person versus digital. What's that balance look like? Marketers are gonna have to prove ROI and everything that they do. And if there's something that in-person experience that may or may not, they may not be able to justify, it's gonna be hard for them to basically invest in those things. I think those are some of the big things we've kinda hit on it, but right now, it's very unclear what's gonna happen in the world and I think we have to be very agile as marketers.

Kailey Raymond: It reminds me of the age-old CAC to LTV ratio is, it feels like it's fully in play now. Everything that you're describing is really making sure that we're enhancing that ratio. I got two more questions for you, Chris, before we let you go. And that's, what do you think is doing it right? Is there anybody that you look to for their customer engagement strategies or tactics? 

Chris Koehler: It's so easy to focus on some of the B2C companies in that perspective but from a B2B, we have a peer set of companies that... You had mentioned one like, how did Slack drive engagement and how do they drive product life growth around product usage, which was always something that we looked at? We look at Atlassian, we look at Adobe as experiences both from an e-commerce perspective. But everyone's struggling to the same degree of engagements with their customers so there's no one that's like, "Oh my gosh, they're world-class is this." I think we all have a long way to go to continue to improve the customer experience.

Kailey Raymond: A hundred percent. And B2B is even more complicated with ABM versus user journeys for individual folks within your platform, tons of different ways to take the approach. Last question, Chris, if you had a piece of advice for somebody trying to up-level their customer engagement strategy, what would it be? 

Chris Koehler: Yeah, I think it's really easy to get overwhelmed with where to start. So start small, iterate. I've been talking about, build a test and learn culture. Fail fast. That's one of the things I say with the team, and they're often like, "Well, the data is gonna suggest." I'm like, "If it's not working, move on. Go to the next thing." So I think fail fast but think big is how I would tee up but start small and iterate.

Kailey Raymond: I love that wisdom. Fail fast, think big. It's those small incremental steps in progress that gets you there every single day. Chris, thank you so much for being here. I had a ton of fun.

Chris Koehler: Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me.