How a collaborative ecosystem helped Westchester Publishing Services grow, save time, and boost revenue
Westchester Publishing Services adopted Dropbox to streamline collaboration and file management across diverse client processes, significantly enhancing operational efficiency and revenue growth.
“We know that when we share files and we host files, it's secure and our clients trust it. More importantly, their intellectual property, their materials will be safe there. They're not worried about it because Dropbox is dependable.”
Products used
Dropbox API, DocSend, Dropbox Sign, Paper, Capture
Industry
Media & Entertainment
Size
2-249
Location
Danbury, CT
Background
Westchester Publishing Services edits and typesets books and creates e-books, XML, and other digital deliverables for more than 600 publishers and content providers. Noticing that their clients were using many separate processes or platforms for file transmission and collaboration, it became clear they needed a better set of technological solutions to help them better engage with their clients to deliver high-quality publication files faster and more affordably.
Challenge: Many clients with many different processes
Westchester Publishing Services was growing but as they gained more clients, they faced a serious challenge: Each client had different processes and platforms when it came to file management. This posed a problem and threatened to hinder further growth since supporting each client required the client to define file transmittal and other workflow decisions. For the company to be able to support their existing clients and continue to grow, they needed a single solution that would allow them to pull everything into one place securely while being accessible to all their clients, no matter what system they used.
“We wanted to offer our clients a more current way of exchanging files,” says Tyler Carey, Westchester’s Chief Revenue Officer. Carey and his team vetted several platforms, including Box and Google Drive. Dropbox quickly rose to the top based on its speed, security, and brand awareness. “Key publishers had already adopted Dropbox,” says Carey. “There was already a buzz in the industry.”
What sealed the deal for Westchester was the service level. “We approached a Dropbox competitor, explaining we were seeking many licenses and would be running thousands of projects a year through the software,” Carey remembered. “We were told to go to the shopping cart and fill it out online to get a quote. When we reached out to Dropbox, however, there was collaboration and excitement.” The level of access and consultation Dropbox’s team offered encouraged Westchester to dive in deep.
“Dropbox routinely contacts us throughout the year with new toys in the toy box as they expand their platform to solve problems for their clients. It feels like a partnership, like Dropbox is keen on our success.”
Solution: A secure ecosystem, virtually overnight
Westchester initially rolled out Dropbox Business to the sales team to pilot with new accounts, but questions remained. How would clients respond to this experiment? Would asking clients to drop files into Dropbox be too heavy of a lift? “We set up templated emails with instructions for anyone who hadn’t used Dropbox before,” says Carey. “It worked great.” From there, it was a quick ramp-up to buying licenses for everyone in the company as well as implementing Dropbox with their freelancers. Nearly overnight, everything was in place.
Since the company was already using APIs with other client systems, they re-engineered a client portal with Dropbox as the hub, built on top of the API with version control in place. “This means authors and publishers don’t necessarily need a Dropbox account to download their files and project assets,” says Carey.
Carey points to another advantage of the portal: transparency. “Clients want to know where their book is and when it’s coming back to them,” he says. Through conversations with key accounts, Westchester learned what was needed and then worked with Dropbox to build a scalable solution, creating “stickiness” and removing soft costs and time sinks that had, up until then, just been accepted by a lot of publishers as typical processes in the industry.
From there, Westchester began adding on more Dropbox tools and making them available to the team. Their production director quickly realized the value of Dropbox Paper, given Westchester’s library of client documentation, and converted the library to Paper Docs, which could be interlinked and shared. This made sharing institutional knowledge even easier, so that added staff working on accounts had the same starting point as the existing teams supporting a client. When Westchester formed a partnership with a large distributor that involved onboarding clients for ebook conversion, Dropbox Sign’s features made it simple to add hundreds of accounts with minimal lift. When Dropbox DocSend was introduced, Westchester’s head of marketing saw its usefulness for tracking the effectiveness of informational assets shared within segmented marketing campaigns, tracking engagement by leads and providing better intel for the sales team. They used this information to shorten the sales cycle by ensuring prospects were being provided the right information at the right time to resolve their specific challenges. Westchester also adopted Dropbox Capture to support asynchronous communication. “If someone needs training or documentation, we now have a library of different videos created using Capture,” says Carey.
Westchester is well-distributed, with offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, and India. Dropbox helps make communications between these offices seamless and efficient, allowing the company to get more done with less effort. “It’s helped as an organizing principle, especially as we’ve rolled out more businesses like our education unit and our direct-to-author business,” says Carey. “We’re set up with tools and processes that allow for divergence while also acting as a model when we bring on a new account. It’s a quicker and better experience.”
Results: Business and revenue growth fueled by Dropbox
Dropbox has made nearly every process at Westchester Publishing simpler and more streamlined, enabling the company to dramatically grow in both size and revenue. In the first year after adopting Dropbox Sign, Westchester added 250 clients. “We basically doubled the size of our list,” says Carey. Thanks to Sign, the time needed to onboard a client has shortened dramatically, from two to three days to about twenty minutes. This new automated experience has made it easier for Westchester to upsell to these accounts, quickly growing them into serious revenue generators.
Dropbox has also made it easier for Westchester to move into new revenue-generating service areas with fewer barriers to entry. The biggest success has been Westchester Education, which generated 5% of Westchester’s revenue in its first year and contributed 30% in the most recent year. Whether using Dropbox to collaborate with internal team members on creating marketing materials, working with an external designer for developing an eye-catching booth design for an international education conference, using DocSend to provide prospective clients with catalogs and sales materials specifically for their geographic region, or using Sign to complete the contract process, “there’s not a single offering we have that doesn’t have Dropbox baked in,” says Carey.
Clients are happy with the change as well. “Folks enjoy using the tools because they don’t even realize they’re using them,” explains Carey. “It’s that ubiquitous to the workflow.” Carey also notes that even clients who had preconceived notions about Dropbox are finding that there’s so much more to it than transferring files. It’s not unusual for accounts to begin looking at Dropbox as a potential solution for their own ecosystems.
What would Westchester Publishing Services look like without Dropbox? “I honestly think we wouldn’t have achieved the growth we’ve had,” says Carey. “Publishing can be a complacent industry at times. Change can be hard to initiate. I give Dropbox credit for always looking for the right tools for the right occasion. Without them, we’d be stuck using outdated tools in an industry that’s frustrated with those same outdated tools and looking to change. We probably would have been out of business if we’d been pushing and pulling files on FTP servers from home internet connections during the pandemic, so it’s fortunate our leadership had the foresight well before the pandemic to begin embracing more efficient ways of working with our clients.”
With so many clients using so many different processes, Westchester needed flexibility, and Dropbox provided exactly that, allowing them to intake files from other places, pull them into the Dropbox environment, and work with them efficiently. “Having the right tools in place isn’t a matter of evangelizing,” says Carey. “It’s providing a solution, showing how it makes life easier, and inviting others along for the ride.” While Westchester has never been a company that sits on the bleeding-edge of technology, they are deliberate in their actions, and adopting Dropbox affords them any number of growth possibilities.
“Dropbox was a key partner in helping us have the right conversations with our clients about what the technology could bring to bear, and then we tailored it to our specific industry.”
Tyler CareyChief Revenue Officer, Westchester Publishing Services