[Music] hi I'm Peter Burroughs welcome to another cube conversation from our beautiful Palo Alto studios today we're talking with Dan Rogers who's the chief marketing officer of ServiceNow good to say pietà Dan thanks very much for being here so Dan you as a CMO we're gonna spend some time talking about what the CMO does with the CMO doz now at ServiceNow and but give us a little bit of your background who are you where'd you came from how'd you get to where you are sometimes I joke that I was born in the clouds I come from the north of England it does rain there a lot but professionally I spent all my time in cloud companies so Salesforce Amazon Web Services and now of course so is now and what is ServiceNow do give us a little bit of background how is ServiceNow doing where is it going how our 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 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 ServiceNow 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 helped me get a common answer to a question around say an employee question and then great service experiences so we create great workflow underneath so that all of those activities orchestrated across the organization and then great service intelligence so that over time were predicting things and recommending things just like you have with your consumer services today bringing all of that to the enterprise so let's talk a little bit about the CMO role because ultimately the there's you mention digital transformation and there's been for quite some time predictions made by various folks that you know the CMO is going to spend more money on technology than the IT manager well that clearly hasn't happened but that does not mean that the CMOS 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 it serves now on others change the CMO job changed marking I think in both a b2c context it's a very rich data environment a lot of that's happening through the web so you have instant data data you can make you know changes on the fly do a/b testing dialing your forms improve your completion rates dialing your conversions the same is also true in B to B and 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 is it converting what's not converting row the leads going which leads are the most effective and where should we ultimately spend differently to help get those leads into meetings and on to our sales teams so they can execute against the opportunities now it used to be the b2b he 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 that 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 were increasingly selling outcomes or increasingly it's actually taking the form of services serves 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 in 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 ludie and it was founded on a simple idea that we were going to make work better for people and what we would do therefore is listen to our customers about the problems that they had and design solutions with them for the to get them to answers so in my world that means that I'm not just going to describe the speeds and feeds of the products in fact I'm going to dial in to the solutions that our customers want to talk to us about and the business outcomes that they need there are seven solutions that we go to market where they'll just briefly tell you a little bit about those the first one is modernize IT Service Management customers are asking us we have a legacy IT service management infrastructure how get help desk from IT help us to modernize that we know we can do better than our antiquated process that's what you started that's where we started thank you and then you know we've migrated in IT to a much richer conversation around help you 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 gonna be talking to our CIO later in the series a lot of what modern CIOs 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 consumer eyes the employee experience and then customer service how can I improve customer satisfaction by resolving those underlying issues faster in security operations how can I resolve vulnerabilities and incidents faster and finally we open up our 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 that would 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 of they had have they increased IT productivity by 20% have they resolved those security incidents 45% faster and 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 into 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 this end outcomes yeah I want to talk to you about that a little bit but let me take a quick Waypoint here that you mentioned earlier the biggest sea world the market has always been familiar with the role the data could play within our organization simply because in most b2c circumstances you have a lot of customers that are doing that value in exchange you know I'm buying dumb a lot of people are buying go but one of the things that's interesting about the b2b world especially as we move to this notion of value in utility this 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 and what customers are doing how are you using that to inform marketing do a better job of serving customers do a better job of service sales do a better job of serving Cheryl yeah and it's a 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 a data obviously from a web perspective we have really good fidelity on where customers are going what they're interacting with what demos they're doing what the conversion rates of those are we also have a lot of physical world interactions so my organization runs the EBC it's policy yeah executive briefing center drive so it's probably the executive briefing center we have hundreds of customers joining us we actually survey them and ask them what's top of mind we begin every one of our ABCs for the 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 are they most want to talk about what are they most want to hear about and because all of that data is captured on a platform that she 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 knowledge 18 will actually have around 18,000 registrants so you know these are become small little intimate a huge huge event 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 a we do a call for content for knowledge we're really building our agenda based on exactly what the data is telling us what our customers want to hear about what do they want to say again that's really from 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 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 there there might be but they're probably gonna get eaten by ServiceNow over the course of the next few years but let me really tie this back because again historically marketers have been asked to get engaged 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 that increasingly the sustained engagement requires that marketing also has to be a source of value to customers you mentioned the 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 leaders victory I think it's game over you talked about community I'll just build on that real quick ServiceNow as a very active community itself online with 150,000 community members my team run the community we literally provide advice to the community that's one of the most joyful things that we can do similarly my relationship with sales isn't you know her over the lead we're working with the sales team to understand how they want to develop those accounts what are 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 a services increasingly a 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 lifecycle role in customer engagement that doesn't mean that sales is less important which is I think a mistake that many of maids at OU fewer sales people and 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 businesses customers get to vote with their feet every month Venus is a subscription the great news is service now our neural rates are over 97 percent which is you know yeah well in a lot of other businesses they talk about 85 and b2b they talk about 85% being good but 97% is almost be to see like churn numbers there is only one way to get that and that is the entire company needs to be focused on customer success the way we think about how we develop products through our sales team is engaged in their marketing teams engage is around customer success so I think it's almost like if you don't have that hat on and the executive seat you never get to get those numbers so my role half three quarters is customer success ultimately that's what I'm doing and you may start to see a lot more of how we go to market you know really having 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 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 then it's not going to work that says something about culture and says something about the type of people that you hire and bring in 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 the culture beyond just customer centric but the one thing you need is this and then one thing you need about 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 me this combination of innovation and execution execution is clear that means you do have a relationship with a product team your relationship the sales team your relationship with your customers and they have needs and those things need executing on but also because it's such a fast moving environment the nature of the job is changing the nature of the toolset 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 of 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 go and we can execute that so a culture performance and nonetheless is porous and open to change people what kind of people what kind of things are you looking for when when you sit down an interview potential service now marketing employee and of course we have those different functions so there's functional skills sort of 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 in the thing that's the 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 we're qualifying the leads we call those ad hours they'll have a very different functional disciplines and then some of those underlying values I think so you and I are having the same conversation in twenty eight twenty three 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 customers the North Star on that as well I think will be even more intimate with our customers in 2023 that's how I'm grounded some organizations grounded that's how my company's grounded I don't think we can go far enough on that they're 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 that's really as possible being so speed the value time to value and increase the level of value that serves and I was able to provide yeah okay what's one thing you're doing loss of talking to me that's great this is a great question I want to give it to giver the right 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 away 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 I think that will look just different I think we'll be doing outbound I think I'll have a different flavor and that's one of the things I love about my job that's why I get up every day 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 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 expecting it that's it paid off all right Dan Rogers thank you very much for come on on in Dan Rogers service now and his great cube conversation Dan again thanks very much for coming here and we look forward to I'm Peter burns from our Palo Alto studios and we look forward to having another cube conversation with you [Music] you