Tricia Gellman on go-to-market strategy
From Building C-Suite Buy-In & Selling The Brand Story with Tricia Gellman, CMO of Box · · B2B CMO Project
“When I was at Salesforce, we bought Jigsaw, turned it into data.com. We decided that this is the first brand we're going to keep, we're going to bring to market, we're going to give it own sort of P&L. But we're going to sell it to the same people that we sold CRM. Well, it turned out that we didn't have the right incentives because sales people could make 5x on selling CRM versus selling data.com. It didn't matter what story we had for data.com. The sellers were not motivated. And so, that's the operational rigor of like how does your message then translate into the end revenue and the goal for your company? You have to put all those pieces together, otherwise it will fail miserably.”
On , Tricia Gellman, Chief Marketing Officer at BOX INC, spoke about go-to-market strategy during Building C-Suite Buy-In & Selling The Brand Story with Tricia Gellman, CMO of Box on B2B CMO Project.
About Tricia Gellman
Tricia Gellman, Chief Marketing Officer at Box, appeared on the B2B CMO podcast on April 25, 2026. She discussed her approach to building C-suite buy-in and selling the brand story, noting that Box CEO Aaron Levie made two foundational decisions before she joined: not building their own large language model and not partnering with a single AI partner, and prioritizing getting users to try AI even if it meant losing money in some cases. Gellman said she moved 30% of Box's budget into awareness and pitched working with an agency to measure it, but Levie told her it was a waste of money because "we would know if we had awareness based on the vibe." Gellman also reflected on her previous roles. She described her time as CMO of Salesforce Canada as "not viewed as strategic" and "not viewed as necessary at all," stating that she left as a result. She recounted an experience at Adobe where a new C-suite was brought in to take the company to the next level but was fired within six months after the team "was falling apart."