(regal music) Hi. I'm Peter Burris. Welcome to another CUBE conversation from our beautiful Palo Alto studios. Today, we're talking with Dan Rodgers, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Service Now. Good to see you, Peter. Dan, thanks very much for being here. So Dan, you as a CMO, we're going to spend some time talking about what the CMO does, what the CMO does at Service Now, but give us a little bit of your background. Who are you? Where'd you come from? How'd you get to where you are? Sometimes I joke that I was born in the clouds. (Peter laughs) I come from the North of England, it does rain there a lot, but professionally I've spent all my time in cloud companies, sales force, Amazon web services, and now, of course Service Now. And what does Service Now do? Give us a little bit of background, how is Service Now doing? Where's it going? How are customers working with you? Well, I think the way to answer that is by saying, every company is undergoing a digital transformation. And as they undergo a digital transformation, they realize that all the great stuff that they have in people's personal lives, great user experiences, great service experiences, they want that at work as well. So Service Now really brings those great experiences to work. We have a platform, which is called the Now Platform, Now Platform basically is a set of services that deliver great user experiences, the ability to request things easily, help me fix my X, help me get a common answer to a question around say an employee question, and great service experiences so we create great work flow underneath so that all of those activities are orchestrated across the organization. And then great service intelligence so that over time, we're predicting things and recommending things. Just like you have with your cosimo services today, we're bringing all of that to the enterprise. So let's talk a little bit about the CMO role, because ultimately there's, you mentioned digital transformation, and there's been for quite some time predictions made by various folks that you know, the CMO's going to spend more money on technology than the IT Manager. Well that clearly hasn't happened, but that does not mean that the CMO's role and the marketing function hasn't changed as a consequence of technology. How has technology, how has a data orientation, how has speed and alignment with data and how the organization operates at Service Now and others, change the CMO job, changed marketing? Well, I think in both a B to C context, it's a very rich data environment. A lot of that is happening through the web, so you have instant data, you can make you know changes on the fly, do AB testing, dial in your forms, improve your completion rates, dial in you conversions. The same is also true in B to B. In B to B, a lot of what marketers are doing is providing the pipeline to the sales team, and that has a funnel mindset, a discipline around how much is converting at each stage, why's it converting, what's not converting, where are the leads going, which leads are the most effective, and where should we ultimately spend differently to help get those leads into meeting and onto our sales teams so that they can execute against the opportunities. Now it used to be that B to B was characterized by what Peter Drucker would have called value in exchange. That you would sell a product, and the product imbued the value of the company, and then it was up to the customer to figure out how to get value out of it. We now seem to be moving to a value in utility model, where instead of selling products, we're increasingly selling outcomes, or increasingly, it's actually taking the form of services. Service Now is at the vanguard of that change. Tell us a little bit about how that notion of value in exchange to value in utility, is changing your job, and quite frankly, changing Service Now. So, yeah, I'll actually take us right back to the founding of our company. In 2004, our company was founded by Fred Luddy, and it was founded on the simple idea that we were going to make work better for people, and what we would do that for, is listen to our customers about the problems that they had and design solutions with them, to get them to answers. So, in my world, that means that I'm not just going to describe speeds and feeds of the product, in fact, I'm going to dial in to the solutions that our customers wanted to talk to us about, and the business outcomes that they need. There are seven solutions that we go to market with, I'll just briefly tell you a little bit about those. The first one is, modernized IT service management. If customers are asking us, we have a legacy IT service management infrastructure, how do we get help desk from IT? Help us to modernize that, we know we can do better than our antiquated process. Now that's where you started. That's where we started, thank you. And then you know, we've migrated in to IT to a much richer conversation around how to eliminate service outages. How can we predict anomalies before they happen in your IT environment? And then I want to run IT like a business, I know you're going to be talking to our CO later in this series. A lot of what modern CO's are thinking about is, looking at all the projects across the companies, how can I support those with IT, to transform the organization? Those are our IT conversations. We have conversations happening in HR, and they want to consumerize the employee experience, and the customer service. How can I improve customer satisfaction by resolving those underlying issues faster? In security operations. How can I resolve vulnerability and incidents faster? And finally, we open up our whole platform to allow anyone to build applications that are intelligent and smart, take advantage of all those platform capabilities around great user experience. Those are the seven solutions we go to market with, and our customers care about those outcomes against those seven solutions. So increasingly, the marketing organization is talking in the language of business value. To what extent are our customers doing those seven things, what business value have they had, have they increased IT productivity by 20%, have they resolved those security incidents 45% faster? We're talking in that language and we're helping customers accelerate their time to get to those outcomes. Increasingly, the modern marketer, I think is stepping in to that role, not just get the leads, get them to our sales team, but really thinking about the whole way through, getting those customers to those end outcomes. Yeah, and I want to talk to you about that a little bit, but let me take a quick way point here, that you mentioned earlier, the B to C world, the marketer has always been familiar with the role that data could play within an organization, simply because in most B to C circumstances you have a lot of customers that are doing that value in exchange. Dan: Right. You know, I'm buying gum, a lot of people are buying gum. But one of the things that's interesting about the B to B world, especially as we move to this notion of value in utility. The solution, the ongoing service provisioning is, we don't have a lot of customers with limited engagement, we have perhaps fewer customers but with a lot of engagement, because now it's at a service level and that creates new forms of data, new types of data, a much richer set of insights into what customers are doing. How are you using that to inform marketing, do a better job of serving customers, do a better job of serving sales, do a better job of serving shareholders? Yeah, and it's the question I love, and you know, I'll interpret the questions, how do we get customer insight? How do we make sure that our marketing is customer centric and not generic? We have a few feelers for that. You talk about the data, obviously from a web perspective, we have really good fidelity on where our customers are going, what they're interacting with, what demos they're doing and what the conversion rates of those are. We also have a lot of physical world interaction so, my organization runs the EBC. EBC? Yeah, Executive Briefing Center. Got it. So it's part of the executive briefing center, we have hundreds of customers joining us, we actually surveyed them and asked them, what's top of mind? We begin every one of our EBCs with a section called, Voice of Customer, where we hear from them, what's most important for them. As our product teams come and have those discussions, they're gleaning from those customers. What do they most want to talk about? What do they most want to hear about? And because all of that data is captured on our platform, that actually becomes rich and actionable for the rest of my product marketing organization. That's a set of customer insights. Our knowledge event, so we have an annual user conference called, Knowledge. This year at Knowledge '18, we'll actually have around 18,000 registrants. So you know, these are becoming-- Peter: Small little intimate gathering. Yeah, these are becoming huge events. But what's very unique about our event, is 95% of the sessions are designed by, and delivered by, customers. This isn't a marketing event, this is a peer group event of customers teaching customers, telling customers what they've learned, sharing their experiences. So when we do it, we do a call for content for knowledge. We're really building our agenda based on exactly what the data is telling us. What do customers want to hear about? What do they want to say? Again, that's really, from a marketing perspective, just such rich ground for us to learn exactly what they care about. We have customer feelers, of course, you know, through all of our activities that we're doing in the field. In fact, not a single field activity that my team does is without a customer. So every time we're getting that rich insight, you know, to the point which I'd say, we are a customer centric marketing organization, is there any other way? Well some would say that they might be, but they're probably going to get eaten by Service Now, all over the course of the next few years. But let me tie this back because, again, historically marketers have been asked to engage customers, generate leads, that funnel, you know, get us that original group that's going to want to talk to us. And marketers have sometimes taken some very annoying approaches to make this happen. One of the things that our research shows, is an increasingly, the sustained engagement requires that marketing also has to be a source of value to customers. You mentioned a community approach at your big conference, and the fact that you're providing content, providing information that the customers will find valuable. Do you subscribe to that notion? That marketing should be a source of value to customers, in addition to others? What do you think? Yeah, absolutely. I think if you have this limited mindset that somehow you're getting a lead, and lead is victory, I think it's game over. You talked about community, I'll just build on that real quick. Service Now is a very active community itself, online. We have 150,000 community members, my team run the community. We literally provide advice to the community, that's one of the most joyful things we can do. Similarly, my relationship with sales, isn't you know, throw over the lid, we're working with the sales team to understand how they want to develop those accounts, what do the accounts need from them? And that really influences my marketing plan, so I see us definitely as part of value exchange with customers. So we believe pretty strongly also, that the marketing function because of this orientation towards outcome, because of the, you know, increasingly services approach, an ongoing sense of value and the fact that you have this rich opportunity to capture data, has to take a more broader, whole life cycle role in customer engagement. That doesn't mean that sales is less important, which is I think a mistake that many have made, is that oh, fewer sales people. I think that sales gets more focused. That much more important, more of a problem solving function for customers. But talk to me a little bit about this idea of marketing becoming more a part of the entire customer journey, and not just that discover and evaluate phase. First of all, do you agree with me? And second of all, how's it playing out for your team? Well I'd say, you know, one of the amazing things about a subscription business, and you know we're in a subscription business, is customers get to vote with their feet every month, and this is the nature of subscription. Peter: Right. The great news is at Service Now, our renewal rates are over 97%. Peter: Which is astronomical. Some of the highest in the industry, yeah. Well, in a lot of other businesses they talk about, in B to B, they talk about 85% being good, but 97% is almost B to C like term numbers. And there is only one way you get that, and that is the entire company needs to be focused on customer success. The way we think about how we develop products, the way our sales team is engaged, and the way marketing teams engage, is around customer success. So, I think it's almost like if you don't have that hat on, and you're in the executive seat, you're never going to get those numbers. So my role, half, three quarters, is customer success. Ultimately, that's what I'm doing. And you're going to start to see a lot more of how we go to market, you know, really have a lot more of that success mindset. I'm looking forward to Knowledge '18, I think you'll see a very different orientation from us at that conference. Peter: Oh! You'll see things like success clinics, things like office hours, and a whole bunch of other best practices that we're going to be sharing with our customers, and that helping customers get to value quicker, is very much something I care deeply about, and that's really a big orientation for my team. So you mentioned if they don't have the hat on, that it's not going to work. That says something about culture, and it says something about the type of people that you hire and bring in, and Service Now is growing very, very rapidly. Give us a couple of key things, if we had a group of marketers here and you said the one thing you need in a culture, beyond just customer centric, but the one thing you need is this, and then one thing that you need when you look for people. What's the one thing you need in the marketing culture? You know, it's such a fast-moving space, I'd actually say, you need this combination of innovation and execution. Execution is clear, that means you do have a relationship with the product team, you have a relationship with the sales team, you have a relationship with your customers, and they have needs, and those things need executing on, but also 'cuz it's such a fast-moving environment. The nature of the job is changing, the nature of the tool set is changing, what our customers need, which is ultimately driving it, is changing very fast. You have to have this sense of innovation. This idea, you know, Jeff Bezos from Amazon, talks about it, this idea of day one. So it's really day one for how you do those traditional things in marketing, because they're not being done in the same way. Everyone needs to come with that day one mindset. You learn, you grow, and we can execute that. So a cultural performance, nonetheless, is porous and open to change. People. What kind of people, what kind of things are you looking for when you sit down and interview potential Service Now marketing employee? And of course we have, those different functions, so there's functional skills and the harder skills. But again, I'd probably say the same thing, it's that ability to innovate because a lot of what we're doing hasn't been done before, or it's not done well, and we want to do it better, we want to reimagine and reinvent. So that idea of dynamism and flexibility, and then this underlying execution is, can you get it done? We want to be an organization that commits to things, and gets them done so I think it's to combination of those two things and then those functional disciplines. Of course we've got product marketing, we have digital marketers, we have some of the, you know, folks that are qualifying the leads, we call those ADRs, they all have the very different functional disciplines, and then some of those underlying values, I think. So you and I are having this same conversation, in 2023. What is the one thing that you're doing more of in 2023, than you're doing today? What is the one thing you're doing less of in 2023, than you're doing today? You know, I'm going to use the customer as the North Star on that, as well. I think we'll be even more intimate with our customers in 2023. That's how I'm grounded, that's how my organization is grounded, that's how my company is grounded, I don' think we can far enough on that and--- So spending more time with them, looking at the data more, engaging with sales more to understand what's working, what's not working. Ensuring they get to value. Right. As quickly as possible. Bingo. Yep. So speed the value, time the value, and increase the level of value that Service Now is able to provide. Yep. Okay, what's the one thing you're doing less of? (Dan sighs) Talking to me! (Peter laughs) Hmm, this is going to be a great question. I want to give it, you know, the right mindset. You know, I think so much is going to change. I think the way we go about what we do is going to change fundamentally, I think the way we think about events is going to be different, I think the way we think about meetings is going to be different, the way we engage is going to be different, it's going to be all driven by that North Star of the customer so I can't even imagine what it's going to look like and that's why it's such an exciting profession, it really is. More or less, how about outbound? More or less outbound. Dan: I think that will look just different. Yeah. I think we'll be doing outbound, I think it'll have different flavor, and that's one of the things I love about my job, that's why I get up everyday, because it's all going to be different. What we're doing now is entirely different than it was two years ago, but it's super exciting. So reflecting what you said about the culture that you want and the people that you hire, you, yourself are performing great growth in Service Now, while at the same time being very porous, very flexible to change, and anticipating and expecting it. Dan: That's it, Peter. Alright, Dan Rodgers! Thank you very much for coming on in. Dan Rodgers, Service Now and his great CUBE Conversation. Dan again, thanks very much for coming here. I'm Peter Burris, from our Palo Alto studios, and we look forward to having another CUBE Conversation with you. (regal music)