Most sales are not particularly complex: average deal sizes might range between $10,000 and $100,000.

The challenge here isn’t about how to make any particular sale, but how to establish a process by which a sales team of modest size can move the product to a wide audience.

Box had a good way for companies to store their data safely and accessibly in the cloud. But no one knew they needed that.

Starting with small groups of users who had the most acute file sharing problems, Box’s sales reps built relationships with more and more users in each client company.

They sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and Stanford Hospital runs on Box.

If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing.