An odyssey to build trust and support client growth
End-to-end technology solutions provider Lentner Technology knows technology businesses must change and adapt. But they’ve remained a long-term Dropbox partner because it offers tremendous ROI to their business and clients. Learn how Dropbox has helped Lentner improve security, increase revenue, and become a trusted advisor.
“The partnership [with Dropbox] not only bolstered our sales but contributed significantly to the bottom line,” Lentner says. “As we move forward, understanding these sustainable elements of our growth is paramount.”
Trustworthy solutions that enhance the customer experience
For almost 25 years, Connecticut-based Lentner Technology Integrators has helped customers adapt to the changing needs of business. One of the largest Dropbox resellers in the world, Lentner is the only distributor in the world that provides service as a solution and sales enablement to Dropbox resellers and end users. Lentner team members are experts on all things Dropbox, cloud migrations, and API development.
Lentner’s customers range from SMEs to publicly traded companies and everything in between. Firms often come to Lentner with a specific workflow or integration to address, and the proposed solutions have to be amenable to all use cases. Founder and Principal Sean Lentner says their success is due to the early adoption of technology that’s secure and adaptable enough to benefit customers across multiple verticals.
“A lot of vendors sell a customer whatever’s going to get the deal done. That’s not how we work,” Lentner says. “It's important my team understands the few products we sell, and they have to understand them very, very well.” This approach allows the Lentner team to learn these solutions deeply so customers can trust their knowledge. One of these solutions is Dropbox.
Why Dropbox? It’s simple: reliability and trust. “We know the products are going to work and work reliably out of the box,” he says. Finally, Lentner Technology can easily adapt Dropbox tools to suit all customers. It’s simple to bring Dropbox into a SOC 2-compliant company, and Dropbox’s APIs allow Lentner to integrate a more holistic solution instead of just a product that addresses a single need.
For the past decade, clients have increasingly been migrating to the cloud and SaaS solutions, which has meant becoming more dependent on software. Customers are also increasingly demanding secure solutions. Not only does Dropbox help Lentner’s customers become more secure, but becoming Dropbox distributors and experts in cloud migration has helped Lentner seize new revenue streams without adding to headcount, producing an impressive track record of growth.
“The trust factor—that the product works and is scalable—is important. With Dropbox, we can always be innovative and create something very efficient, and that’s where you get ROI for the customer; by creating a unique solution for their unique business needs.”
Happy customers open doors to new revenue
Lentner learned the hard way that it’s better to turn a prospective customer down than implement a solution he doesn’t trust. In 2014, he agreed to deploy OneDrive across a digital storytelling company operating in 33 countries against his better judgment because the customer insisted. “It was a nightmare,” he says: conflicting syncs, duplicate files, and the product simply not doing what it was supposed to do. “As the vendor who’s deploying the solution, that doesn’t look good for me or my brand,” Lentner concludes. “We literally had to rip it out and put in Dropbox. That was a big, big, big eye-opener for me.” From then on, Dropbox has been Lentner’s cornerstone for storage and collaboration.
In one customer example, a franchise operator of a company that performs fire, mold, and water remediation was hesitant about the value of moving to the cloud. Lentner showed them how building a new workflow around Dropbox file requests would streamline the process of field technicians filing insurance documents. This action allowed the customer to get more from field technicians while being paid faster by insurers.
Another Lentner customer is a manufacturer of medical devices that can determine if a person is susceptible to a heart attack. For the clinical trials of some newer equipment, Lentner built a workflow integrating the Dropbox storage API with the customer’s clinical studies platform. This workflow allows doctors from anywhere in the world to review these findings and lets the customer organize the information easily as they see fit. The manufacturer is heavily regulated, but Dropbox checks all the boxes of security and compliance.
Dropbox tools are so widely applicable because of their APIs, which are mature and well documented. “I think that the real value prop is that since these APIs are fairly extensive, you can indeed build solutions to help move very large data sets, which we do,” Lentner says. “We had a university that came to us, wanting to move 2.5 petabytes of data. That's an enormous amount of data, but that's how extensive and how mature the API is that Dropbox offers with the storage product.” During the height of the pandemic, Lentner moved 300 terabytes of data for another client without a single hiccup or ever having to go on site. Migrating servers in the past required a lot of human capital and had unforeseen circumstances, like outages. Dropbox APIs allow for smoother, faster migrations.
“Using Dropbox has changed our posture tremendously,” Lentner says. Before, they were a company customers called when they had a problem, not necessarily the company they called to discuss solutions. Now, all sales associates understand their role is as a trusted advisor—even if they don’t sell anything. Lentner notes that if you buy a lemon of a car, it reflects badly on the person who sold it to you. The opposite is also true: “When customers get a good ROI, that increases the customer experience, which in turn increases NPS.”
Anticipating customer needs delivers sustained growth
In 2020, Lentner Technology embarked on a strategic initiative to integrate Dropbox services across all customer segments, which resulted in annual sales skyrocketing by 40.4% and net profit surging by 60% from 2020 to 2021. The momentum continued in 2022, with a 9% growth in annual sales and a 14% increase in net profit margin compared to the previous year. These figures reflect a sustained upward trajectory, as 2023 sales and net profit margin increased by another 26.2% and 19%, respectively.
Using Dropbox allows a company of eight like Lentner to take on accounts and offer guidance to Fortune 500 companies. “Where we’ve seen a lot of benefits as a business is that Dropbox has opened doors to new revenue streams,” Lentner enthuses. They have achieved this without adding to headcount. Lentner has increased business tenfold with Dropbox, yet added only one support staff in the past four years.
Educating the customer about the value of Dropbox remains key, because Dropbox isn’t just for storage—it has many more tools that improve collaboration. “It’s the perfect pivot since the pandemic,” Lentner says, “because collaboration is what businesses need, without the additional expense.”
People gravitate to what they know, but taking a chance on change can unlock a lot of value for a company, both in improved workflows and operational efficiencies. In this market, no one can ignore that.
“It’s the perfect pivot since the pandemic, because collaboration is what businesses need, without the additional expense.”
Sean LentnerPrincipal, Lentner Technology Integrators