Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It

by Tien Tzuo

Box is a great example of a company that successfully moved upmarket. When it first started as a cloud storage and file-sharing company, its revenues through a sales team were less than 1 percent. In other words, it was pretty much a pure freemium service with almost all self-service sign-ups. Now, even though so many of Box’s customers are individual users, almost all of its revenue comes from businesses—with the vast majority of its revenue being produced through its sales team. Box CEO Aaron Levie summed up how this happened: “You make your service as easy as possible to adopt but you make it so a large enterprise can fully adopt it across their entire company.” According to Levie, “There’s probably not a single enterprise that we ever sold to that didn’t start with users in that organization having adopted Box.” When enough individual users within an organization have adopted a service, organizational adoption is the next logical step.