Boxer Spotlight: Colleen brings her resilient self to work

'Bring Your _______ Self to Work' is an important pillar of our Box culture. We're a pretty mixed bag of different backgrounds and values around here, so the blank is different for each Box employee. In this series, we'll interview one of our own to give you a look at our diverse family of Boxers around the world. Our Boxer this week is Colleen Carreiro, an Account Executive based in Austin, Texas.

Tell us a little about yourself and what you do at Box.
I was born and raised in Northern California and went to college at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on the central coast of CA. Until the end of my college career, I planned on living in California my whole life. But when I started interviewing for full time jobs, there was one job stood out to me-a job at Box in Austin. I took a step outside of my comfort zone moving to Austin for Box and it was the best decision I ever made! I started as a Sales Development Rep and I was the 100th employee in our Austin office. Following the SDR role, I was on the outbound sales team for a year and just recently transitioned to the Emerging Business Account Executive role. In my free time, you'll find me hanging out with my dog, planning trips, or discovering new restaurants.

How does what you do contribute to the success of Box?
In my experience, forming a game plan and staying organized are essential to success. Additionally, being able to take feedback and adjust my strategy has kept me agile and enabled me to bring in revenue and opportunities for Box. Within sales, my success actually has an impact on the company's financials, which is pretty cool! By ensuring a customer has a continous, positive experience and by seeing a sales cycle through, I directly contribute to the success of Box.

What has been your most exciting win at Box?
As an Outbound Business Rep, I covered Large Enterprise accounts in Canada, where we've had wins-large wins-but fewer of them. My most exciting win was an opportunity I sourced in October for one of the largest banks in Canada that my Account Executive recently closed. Box aligned well with their initiatives as they were looking to move legacy applications to the cloud and digitize. Landing this deal was a proud moment for Team Canada as it was one of our largest deals to date and it represented the beginning of many more partnerships with Canadian Financial Services organizations to come.

What has been the high point of your career?
I've held three sales roles at Box and all of them have been unique, but my current role is undoubtedly the high point of my career. I'm just starting my first quarter on the Emerging Business team, and it's incredibly exciting to be in my first closing role! Over the course of two years, I've made an active effort to continuously improve as a salesperson and professional, and this role has already exposed me to a great deal of learning experiences that I hadn't experienced in prior jobs. I can't wait to see where the next year at Box takes me!

What do you love about Box as a product? Why do people buy it?
Organizations from Mom & Pop shops to Fortune 500 companies leverage Box for a plethora of reasons. Box replaces legacy infrastructure, creates dynamic digital experiences, enhances engagement with customers, connects global companies, and so much more. I love Box as a product because it's industry agnostic-we have customers in Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail, Construction-about every industry you can imagine. We're constantly innovating in response to what our customers need, which is why we're consistently a leader in the content collaboration space. I believe that people buy Box because it truly transforms the way they work... and that's not something you can say about every SaaS product.

Not everything is sunshine and rainbows, what's been the most difficult challenge?
The sales team in Austin has probably tripled in size since I started at Box, and with growth indubitably comes challenges. Maintaining the company's values and culture and on-boarding new team members can be difficult when a multitude of new hires come on at once. Working out of a remote office also has proven to be challenging at times because building relationships with colleagues based out of SF and HQ isn't always easy. Despite the challenges of quickly growing and being based out of a remote office, I'm exceptionally lucky to be surrounded by intelligent, remarkable people who all want to help one another succeed. It's because of this type of environment that I look forward to coming into work every day.

Hear more from Boxers working in Sales on The Muse!