>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018, brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to theCUBE live coverage of ServiceNow. We are here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dave Schneider. He is the Chief Revenue Officer of ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Oh, it's my pleasure. >> You're a CUBE veteran, so- >> It's good to be back. >> Not your first rodeo. No, it's really fun to be with you. >> So, I want to talk with you a little bit about the growth of the company, which has been really astonishing. Why has it grown so stupendously? What makes ServiceNow so special in your mind? >> I think the key to any great company is having really strong focus on the client, and the whole notion that the client's at the center of our universe. We build technology and service the people, and we act as one in service of our customers, because we know that in turn, our customers are serving their employees, their partners, and their ecosystems. So, just having that unified view as our true north is really empowered the growth. Great technology helps. Being in the Cloud really helps, but then also linking it back to who we are as an organization, what our purpose is, and what we're all about as a culture and a team. >> So, John Donahoe said, "Customer success is an important priority for us." So, I wonder, how do you define customer success? What are the metrics that you use to measure? >> There are a couple, and I think there's various phases of this. For one, are customers getting the value that they were hoping to achieve from the project, and more importantly, are they establishing that value clearly and in the front of that project, in the first place? Because some people just want to buy new technology for technology's sake, but that's not good enough. They need to really have a business value in mind, and we should be helping them to think about that, and then measuring that along the journey. Because if we achieve it, then they have more ammunition to go fight the next battle, the new automation to solve another problem. >> So, having said that, every customer's different. I mean, I'm sure there are patterns. So, how do you guys discern what matters to the customer? Do you have a process to do that? What is that process? And how much is the go-to-market team involved in that through the life cycle? >> It starts in the selling motion, it starts in the pre-sales motion, trying to understand the priorities of the executive team and the issues that are facing the customer. As we understand that, we're doing what they call a value assessment, and we share that back and forth with the client to make sure that we're onto the important issues that need to be solved. And then as the deal is structured and happening, and then they are going live, either with our PS people or our partners, which are such an incredible resource to our clients. We're then measuring the outcomes. Now, the measuring the outcomes part is a newer part of our motion, and you can see in our Customer Success Center, which was new as well, a value calculator, so customers are actually able to understand what the potential value is for a product with ServiceNow on different aspects of their business. >> I want to actually talk to you a little bit more about the Customer Success Center. It is new, newly launched. What was the impetus for launching it and then how is it being used? >> One of the things our customers had asked us for over the years is give us best practice. Be more prescriptive. You heard John talk about that on stage today. Tell us what other great customers, how do you recommend that we implement ServiceNow along the following domains? So, what we did is we picked 10 to 15 of the highest kind of gain items and focused on those first, being as prescriptive as possible. What's coming next is these little micro-focused burst ideas, so little things around what's good form design or other ideas great customers have done. But we'll be continuously publishing to that Customer Success Center, and then our community is now answering over 5,000 questions a week on what best practice is. >> They're crowd-sourcing these ideas. >> They are. >> Wow. >> And that's one of the secrets to this event to ServiceNow as a community is that the customers are helping other customers on their journey. >> Dave, organizationally, Customer Success management, professional services, training, and a partner ecosystem are all under sales. Talk about that a little bit. What precipitated that and how is that going? >> So, I actually reverse it. Customer Success is the overarching goal of the company. We happen to put sales, pre-sales, PS, Customer Success team, the technical training advisory piece, all within this group, knowing that it's about the journey. So, we didn't want to just focus on the selling motion. We want it to be inclusive of all aspects of what we think a great customer is going to expect of ServiceNow. So that's how we structure it. >> And how's that going? >> I think it's going pretty well. We're learning some motions on this, but I think the customers who are in that high-touch pilot that we have going on right now are experiencing some really good results from additional resources we're putting on it. They're appreciative of the fact that we have been very prescriptive in certain areas, and then we're organizing ourselves to be more unified to the client. I will say on the training and development front, the investments we're making around curriculum-designed, the mechanisms of getting that material out there, the better and more complete training that we have for our partner community is also yielding really great results. >> Frank Sleuben used to talk about IT are our peeps. >> They are. >> But still, the majority of your business from IT, much, much larger proportion outside of IT, but still a core chunk of the business's IT. You guys talk about digital transformation. My question is who's leading the digital transformation within your customer base? >> It's interesting, a lot of times we do have a group of IT professionals that are leaning in and leading the digital transformation, but they're usually partnered with someone else on the line of business, somebody who's got a goal, a desire to changes something, they're leaning in with that. One of the best examples is the Human Resources element around, they're being asked to change the digital experience for employees, to make the place a better place to work, more inclusive and belonging place to work. And they're using technology to help bridge that gap and get efficiency, so HR's been a real strong suit, and then we're seeing customer service re-imagining how they're going to reach out to customers with a service discipline. So this isn't just inside the company, but it's about how service disciplines can help with customer-partner relationships as well. >> Such a huge part of digital is getting digital right, whatever that means, and a lot of that involves, obviously, strategy at the board level, the C-Suite. When we first started doing this show, you didn't see a Deloy, E&Y, etc, certainly not as prominent as they are now. Those companies get heavily involved in that kind of digital transformation work. Where do you guys fit, how do you guys partner at that strategy level, and then where does ServiceNow come in as a platform? >> It's a great question, and I do think that what's happening here is that our customers, some of the early customers, really were just looking for new technologies to replace legacy technologies. The best of the best were taking that opportunity of transforming processes, either on their own or with partner communities, some of which are now here as larger sponsors and partners of ServiceNow. And now what we're seeing is this next generation of customer and/or our legacy customers, people who've been on the platform for a while, are recognizing that to get true value they've got to think about process. So, the bigger the SI, the ones who have process experience are going in with those customers really thinking about the art of the possible. You've heard Extensor talk about a human centric design, the human first with the heart centric design, making sure they're focused on the people and the process, rather than just the technology, and we're seeing that time and time again. >> I want to talk a little bit about not just the digital transformation, but the cultural transformation, and that has been a real talking point here at the conference so far. I want to hear how you, as the Chief Revenue Officer, are thinking about culture, the culture of ServiceNow, and making sure that culture is really pushed down throughout the organization. How do you do it? What are your best practices as a manager? >> Every day you have an opportunity to lead from the front and model the behaviors that you're expecting others to have, and I think one of the things that we're really proud of at ServiceNow is that we not just say that we're customer-focused, but we have evidence of really spending our time as an executive team, focused on the issues and directly with customers, making sure they're being heard and listened to actively. The other thing, inside the company, we have a tendency to describe ourselves as hungry and humble, that we want to keep achieving and keep pushing ourselves to the art of the possible, but we don't have a big ego about it, and I think when you see companies that are truly listening, the ego is pushed down and they're really focused on the outcome of the customer. And then that makes us feel good, and that's what's driving us forward. There are way too many companies with big egos that forget about the customer, and I think that's the beginning of the end for them. >> The fiefdoms, the egos, the the outdated policies and procedures, how do you kind of get rid of those, not just at ServiceNow, but at your customers that you're working with so closely? This is, again, we're practicing what we call the East-West motion at ServiceNow, between the leadership team, so myself and CJ Desai, or Mike Scarpelli, we have problems we're facing every day as we've grown the business. I've been with the company now almost seven plus years. The processes we had a year ago aren't sufficient to meet the needs of where we need to go tomorrow. So we have constant conversations at our levels about where we can use automation, where we can change process, or where we can use our own technology. As we do that, we're practicing that good East-West motion as executive team, and that's being modeled down beneath us in our people. The other thing I'll say is we often find ourselves listening like we're wrong, and I think that's important as a good leader or a good business person is that if you spend the time to understand the other person's perspective as an active listener, and understand their view, don't be so fixated that you're right all the time, and that allows us to really come together and solve tough problems. >> One of the key measures of success is renewal rates, and you guys are off the charts. I oftentimes get into Twitter debates. We were talking about Twitter and LinkedIn before, trying to help people understand the Mike Scarpelli math of how you count renewal rates, it's a dollar-based renewal rate, which is the only way to count for growing SaaS company, folk. You can't count units, do the math, it doesn't work. Check out the 10K and you can get the exact math, but astoundingly high renewal rates, increasing average contract values, to those numbers, it plays out in the financials. I know that's an outcome of the work that you're doing, but it underscores the success that you're having. >> When you start off and deliver great technology to solve a problem, and then you've got passionate customers, the things we have historically and continued replacing aren't things that change very often inside the enterprise, so it's very important to get it right on the way in, and then as you do that, customers do start to think of you as a 10 to 20-year relationship. And we should trust and treat each other as a 10 to 20-year relationship versus a transactional relationship. I think you're seeing that in our renewal rates, you're seeing that in our growth, you're seeing that in the traction of this event, and then that's really what's driving us forward. But as a sales professional, someone who has to go out there working with customers, the worst thing for a sales person is to have a non-renewal, because it's not just the loss of dollars, it's the loss of reputation. We take that really seriously as an organization. >> Well, Dave, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's always a pleasure to have you here. >> Thank you for having me. It's great to see you guys. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> All right, bye-bye. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow just after this. (techy music)