>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet ENGAGE '18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018 from Bellevue, Washington, I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm sitting here with a couple of Smartsheeters. We've got Steven Branstetter, the VP of customer and partner success. And, Mike Andrews, you are the VP of strategic accounts. Guys, welcome! >> Thanks for having us. >> You're Smartsheeters! >> That's right. >> We are. >> I have to say, I was very scared to say that on the air, and I did it twice now, and I'm going to stop, 'cause I didn't mess it up. So, Steven, running customer and partner success. I want to start there, because customer success as a term can mean different things to different companies. Something that I read that you wrote recently was customers' feedback saying, "Guys at Smartsheet, you need to be operating a different playbook for customer success." So, first question: How do you define and deliver customer success at Smartsheet? >> Right, so, first of all, customer success is often looked at as a single department, and it's not. It is a whole company effort. You've talked with our product folks, talking with sales, everyone in the organization is part of that customer success. What they're telling us, what the customers are telling us is customer success primarily is about change management. We're going through a transformation that has a lot to do with your product, not everything to do with your product. But, we need help with that transformation. And, what you saw on the keynote was you saw three folks standing up who said, "I, at my organization, signed up "to do this really hard thing." And, we didn't have a playbook as to how to do that thing. What we try to do as a customer success organization, as a company, is make sure we're standing behind that person. So, when that person comes out and says, I can accomplish that thing, that unsolvable thing for our organization, and I can do that on Smartsheet, we want to make sure that person is successful. And so, sometimes, that's the customer success team. Sometimes, that's the training team. Sometimes, that's our consulting team. Sometimes, it's elements of product helping to come alongside them, showing them what's possible. So, customer success at Smartsheet is holistic. It's not meant to be a single department. This is a company effort, so that when folks do raise that hand and take on that impossible task, that we're with them to make sure they can accomplish that. And, that creates the stories that you heard earlier today. >> And, what Steven's talking about is, during the general session this morning, the CEO, Mark Mader, actually went down to the audience and just randomly asked several, maybe three customers to talk about how Smartsheet is empowering them. And, it was really interesting how articulate they were, being put on the spot. But, how they were able to speak so eloquently to how they are facilitating this transformation. You mentioned change management. That's a hard thing to do. >> It is. When you're looking at an enterprise that has a ton of applications, and, Mike, you know this well, being a sales leader, they're comfortable with certain applications, yet companies grow organically by acquisition, and there's a lot of different tools that some groups are married to. Other groups are, eh, I'm not so sure. To transform digitally, cultural transformation is probably step one. So, how are you seeing, and, this is the second part question to you, Mike. How have you evolved CS in Smartsheet to be facilitators of that change management, not only for customers, but for you guys as well? >> So, one of the things we thought early on was, we tried this new thing, it was called Office Hours, and we did it at one of our largest customers, and it was a huge success. Literally, the first day we do it, 400 people show up on this webcast, and it was fantastic. And so, I talk with Mike, and we talked with organizations saying, we have this new thing, Ii's going to be amazing. The feedback was fantastic. We go to that next organization to roll out the same thing, and four people show up instead of 400. >> Wow. >> And so, one of the things that's been really important for us is understanding not all organizations are the same, especially in the enterprise. That, as we create that playbook, there's certain elements that absolutely resonate at, maybe, our tech customers, that don't resonate at all in the manufacturing space or organizations, and that each of those organizations are different. So, we've built a lot of that playbook with an understanding that different elements of it are going to be applicable at different organizations. And, that's the way we've approached it, which has been really successful, where we know there are elements that have to happen. We know there are elements where we need to have scalable programs. Not everything can be one-on-one. But, at most organizations, there has to be some level of one-on-one connection as well. And, whether that's a big Smartsheet day which we'll run, which folks will fly their own folks into, it's almost like a mini ENGAGE conference at their own organization. Or, whether that's all over the Web. So, we'll go to some customers. We'll show up in person, and there's a big meeting room, there's only four people there. And, they tell us, well, there's actually 200 people watching this. And so, it's figuring out that motion, at least at the enterprise, that's different for every organization. But, as you also know, we have a long tail through our organization as well. So, while we have those really large customers, we also have this long tail where we need to meet those customers at scale. We need to provide programs. So, our Center of Excellence is a good example of that. Our Webinar series is good example of that, where we provide these motions that at a scaled element, so even our smallest customer can take advantage of it. >> Awesome, so, Mike, transitioning over to you. So, I love stats. Geeky, very geeky, but I admit it freely. I was looking at Smartsheet, 75000 customers. Here, you have about 1100 companies represented over 20 countries. You guys have presence in half the Fortune 500, 90% of the Fortune 100, lot of customers, pan industry. Some of the things that they were hearing from you guys, or, rather, you're hearing from them is, we want you to build for scale, as you were talking about, Steven. We want you to teach us how to phish. And, they want you, also, to help them do it right and do it fast. How are you helping customers do it right and do it fast? Can you do both at the same time? >> Absolutely, we're proving that. And, I think, something that's really unique about how we go to market, and really the basis of our ethos as a business, is we're obsessed with keeping the software easy to use. And, as we add functionality to not get it heavy and put friction in place. So, when we think about engaging with the biggest companies in the world, we have the benefit of starting from organic adoption, where individuals and teams are using the software. They're experiencing value, they're sharing. They're collaborating. And what we see happen, the dynamic we see happening is, as individuals share and go to directors or VPs, we start from sort of work execution, project management, task tracking, and the next step is often these line of business solutions, whether MNA or product planning or employee engagement. Literally every function in the business can benefit from the ability to configure the software. And, keep in mind, we've already taken off the table the biggest issue. I've been in enterprise software for 30 years. I've sat with a lot of CIOs who've written seven figure checks. And, when they're honest with me, the biggest thing they worry about is: Is this software going to get used? We take that issue off the table. We turn it on its head. And, that ability to have that basis of adoption, to have raving fans who love using the software, and then the added benefit of being able to go higher in an organization with senior leaders who want transparency. They want speed. They want accountability. That configurability to solve bigger and bigger, more complex, more strategic flows is a huge advantage for us. It's, frankly, what fuels us, sort of our passion around serving our customers, because we get such great feedback. >> That configurability that you mentioned, Mike, kind of seems to be how customer success is set up. To be configurable, sort of modular, to be able to adjust it with the agility that's needed to deliver what these customers are needing. So, sounds like, maybe, land and expand. I know we've got a gentleman from the office of the CIO at PayPal who's going to be on shortly with us, really helping the C-Suite at PayPal, which everyone uses to be able to see things more clearly, have that transparency in terms of managing projects. >> Absolutely. >> So, I know Cisco's a customer as well. So, is it pretty typical to start with a function within marketing, for example, where there's a team that, hey, this is innovative. This is going to integrate with Jira and Slack, and all these things. Is that kind of a common sales conversation? >> Absolutely. We practice the principles of the challenge your sale and challenge your customer. And, one of the key elements of the challenge your customer is this idea of a mobilizer. And, the mobilizer does two things. They drive change, and they build consensus. And, what we find is those individuals who are change agents often times love our software, because they can do things that they wouldn't otherwise, they'd have to depend on a consultant or IT. So, we find those individuals and we work with them, and they coach us up on: what are the priorities, who are the key players?" And, that becomes a common play we run to get higher in the organization. The other thing that's happening now, I'm seeing it, really, over the past year, is organizations are starting to choose to sort of play offense with us. So, we'll continue to have that bottoms-up organic growth. But now, we're seeing VPs of marketing or CMOs, or CFOs or COOs realize, hey, you know what? I love the fact I have this base of users who love the software, and I can do things, I can enable priorities or initiatives that span the organization, get away from side-load apps, and have the kind of visibility and speed that's been unheard of. And, we're starting to see that our customers wanting to play offense with us. >> That speed to value element has just been critical. So, you heard in the stories this morning, we have MOD Pizza. Their first solution, the gentleman probably built that in a day. And, that was just to roll out one store, and then they rolled out eight the next year. And, I'm sure they made some modifications there. And then, they need to go from eight to around 200 in a year. And, they were able to do that very quickly. They were able to take an existing solution and make the modifications, add in one more element, which is control center for us, to make it that much more scalable. So, when you talk about the land and expand motion, it's both within the customer as a whole, but on a solution as well, where we have story after story where someone starts a new initiative. They don't know whether it's going to work out. It works out really well, and that effort they put into the initial solution isn't lost. They don't have to switch over to a different application, because it's now gotten too big, or some element like that. The software and the application is able to grow with their growth as a business, which eliminates a lot of those things that often happens in business, where you have to pause something that's growing to replace a software. >> Right, so, in terms of the feedback loop, you obviously, as you were describing, Steven, the customer success program you're running here is very cross-functional, very collaborative. It's product management. It's marketing, it's sales, it's IT. It's all these groups that need to come together. What is the process like, maybe from both of your perspectives, Steven, starting with you, of getting customer feedback when they're engaging with their customer success manager, for example, and they want a feature that is not quite there yet, How do you take that feedback from the customers, from the field, and start to really prioritize that internally? >> So, let me start. So, one of the things we've introduced this year is, as we've grown the field organization, is we're using our own software, and we've built these territory hubs. So, the account exec, the SC, the CSM, the SSR, the internal team, everyone is on the same page, as it relates to what we're doing in the account. And, we run weekly meetings. We check off on priorities and to-dos. So, you have that visibility by use of our own platform. So, everybody's on the same page. And, that idea of signal that we talk about, that Gina Mark talked about, it starts with that team that is right there with the customer, and then we feed it. Often times, I'll let Steven take the hand off. So, we have that signal. We have the pulse right with the customer with these field teams, and then that gets fed. And, I'll let Steven talk about how we drive it here sort of in Bellevue. >> Yeah, so, there's two elements of getting that signal, and I'm sure there's more, if you think about it. But, one is from the internal team, and one is the feedback from the customer. And, we, not surprisingly, have used the Smartsheet application to do that. But, any time we're getting a customer signal. That could be from our community, that could be coming in from a support ticket, that could be a conversation with a customer success manager, could be from any site. That feedback then goes into a Smartsheet form, and that goes directly to the product management team. And, anyone who has submitted that from a support rep perspective, for example, gets visibility to where that stands in the progress. So, is it something we're looking into? Is it in progress? If there's a date to it, what does that look like? So, we get all that. And then, the other element is we are huge users of Smartsheet internally. And, Mark likes to talk about that he is the biggest user of the mobile application across our whole customer base, and he probably is. But, we absolutely eat our own dog food there, or drink our own champagne. >> I like that one better. >> Probably a better one. And, that motion really helps us understand how to use the application, so Dynamic View, which was launched this week. We're going to be one of the biggest users of that right out of the gate. For the example that I just brought up, what Dynamic View allows us to do is it allows us to provide a view of all of those submissions of request, and the right view to the right company, or the right internal stakeholders, so they know exactly what that status is. So, those are two ways that we get that feedback back into our producting. >> Mike, you said you've been in sales for a long time. How helpful in a sales situation is the fact that you do drink your own champagne? >> Huge, it's huge. >> On Smartsheet, I imagine, a lot of companies don't show that. >> It's a really big deal; anybody who's, really anybody in the company. Anybody's who's touching the customer, When I hire people, the ability to have that confidence and understand how to use and speak from personal experience that fuels passion, it fuels credibility, and it's authentic, which is one of our core values. And then, so much of it is the art of the possible on the whiteboard with the customer. This ability to move from an idea, we've literally mapped out processes, and within 30 minutes, the essay's in there, and we've prototyped a solution. And, not only is it a quality solution, but the customer's blown away by the speed with which we've done it. But, that starts with that deep understanding of the platform and all the functionality, and what you can do with it. >> Right, I'm sure that breeds that authenticity that Gene actually talked about. Well, we're almost out of time, but I want to quickly, Steven, talk about the Partner Success Program. You guys partner with Amazon, Oracle, NetSuite, Salesforce, Slack, Google, I'm probably leaving out a few. Talk to us a little bit about the partner evolution as you compete with some of these partners as well. >> Well, I'm going to switch that a little. So, we have two elements of partners. So, we have those technology partners that you're speaking to. And then, we have the solution provider partners and resellers; that's more in my world. But, what's been really exciting about those folks and, we had a big partner day yesterday, so I'm kind of coming off the high of talking with all these folks. And, one of the things that we hear over and over again is whatever their focus is. So, sometimes, that's a geography focus. Sometimes, that's an industry focus. They tell us how much we're missing already. So, they'll say, if I'm focused on the accounting industry, they'll say, you guys don't even know how great your off the shelf application is in the accounting world. And, what they're so excited about is being able to configure it, being able to build the applications on top of Smartsheet. That then, they can bring to that world, so that, from a scale perspective, we don't have to be experts in accounting. We don't have to be experts in any of those different verticals or in those geographies. We can leverage those partners, their expertise, their relationships, in order to bring that to market in each of those areas. >> Any feedback, I know we're out of time. But, any feedback on some of the announcements that came out today from some of your key partners, besides two thumbs way up? >> They were extremely excited about Dynamic View and seeing what's possible from a new solution perspective. They were just like the rest of the customers. So, when there was the final slide showing all the new features we're bringing, all the phones came out to take pictures. It was a great scene, and they were definitely in that mix. >> Excellent, well, Steven and Mike, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with us how you're transforming, how the customers are able to evolve and transform with your technology. We know you have a lot of meetings to get to, so we'll let you go to that. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin live at Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest. (techno music)