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Today, I’m talking about a cool nugget that I recently learned about. I am referring to the hidden sales system that helped Box, now a ten billion-dollar company, grow from zero to four million users in a little more than eighteen months.
I want to share this system with you because it is easily applicable, anyone can use it, and it can make a massive impact on your business.
A guy named Adam Hayes did a write-up about this system on Twitter. It was one of the growth playbooks of Box, which is now a ten-billion dollar company. It is the sales system that Box used to grow from zero to four million users. It is simple and easy to use, and any business can take pieces of the system and apply them.
Box went viral in the beginning. It was successful for several reasons after posting a three-minute demo:
- Their position in the market. (It allowed people to get rid of the USB drive.)
- They were solving a complex problem in a simple way.
As a result, Box started to pique interest and gain excitement. They got a wait-list of around 75,000 people, and I found their approach super cool!
After that, they tried many different routes to get traffic, inbound leads, and create a pipeline.
I talk to CEOs consistently, and the number one problem that both sales leaders and CEOs experience is their pipeline.
In the beginning, Box was using SEM (Search Engine Marketing) on Google, and they were acquiring customers between $233 and $355 for their $99 product. Their return on advertising was terrible! What they did next, however, was near and dear to my own heart. It caused them to take off. I have used this myself, and I hope my clients also implement this system because it works like fire!
Rather than monetizing and getting as much revenue as possible from every person, they implemented a referral system. (You get an additional 500 megabytes worth of space for free for every person you bring on.) By doing that, they increased their referrals by 60%. When they talked about their growth, half of it was attributed to referral mechanics.
What they did was simple. In the last part of the onboarding process, they asked users to recommend and add some of their friends to Box. After doing that, they kept on growing and growing!
All they did was offer extra space in return for referrals, and in 2010, they hit the four million users mark!
In 2008, Box had 100,000 users. Then, only fifteen months later, in January of 2010, they had 4,000,000 users! Most of their users came from word of mouth and viral. They said that 35% of their daily signups were coming from their referral program. Since they launched, they have seen a month-over-month growth of between fifteen and twenty percent from embedding a simple referral system into their implementation process!
Can you imagine what it would do for your business if you did the same thing across multiple points?
I think that taking a page of growth from the playbook of a ten-billion-dollar company is something truly amazing that you can apply very simply.
