 Hi, I'm Peter Burris. 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 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 now at ServiceNow. 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. 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, ServiceNow. And what does ServiceNow do? Give us a little bit of background. How is ServiceNow 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 ServiceNow really brings those great experiences to work. We have a platform, which is called 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 ex, help 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 we're 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 there's, you mentioned digital transformation, and there's been for quite some time predictions made by various folks that, you know, 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 CMO's role in 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 ServiceNow and others changed the CMO job, changed marketing. 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, you can make changes on the fly, do A-B testing, dial in your forms, improve your completion rates, dial in your conversions. The same is also true in B2B. In B2B 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, where are the leads going, which leads are the most effective, and where should we ultimately spend differently to help get those leads into meetings and onto our sales teams so they can execute against the opportunities. Now it used to be that B2B 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 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. ServiceNow 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. 2004 our company was founded by Fred Lutty 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 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 with. I'll just briefly tell you a little bit about those. First one is modernized IT service management. Customers are asking us, we have a legacy IT service management infrastructure, how we get help desk from IT. Help us to modernize that. We know we can do better than our antiquated process. That's where you started. That's where we started. Thank you. And then 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 going to 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 consumerize 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 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 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? 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 those end outcomes. Yeah, I want to talk to you about that a little bit, but let me take out a quick way point here that you mentioned earlier, the B2C world, the marketer's always been familiar with the role that data can play within an 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 gum. A lot of people are buying gum. But one of the things that's interesting about the B2B 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 in 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 a question I love, and I'll interpret the question as, 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 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. It's part of the Executive Briefing Center. So it's part of 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 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 a 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 these are becoming- Small little intimate gathering. 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 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 marketing perspective, just such rich ground for us to learn exactly what they care about. We have customer feelers, of course, 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, to the point in which I'd say we are a customer-centric marketing organization, is there any other way? Well, some would say that there might be, but they're probably going to get eaten by service now 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. 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 lead is victory, I think it's game over. You talked about community there. I'll just build on that real quick. ServiceNow 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 that we can do. Similarly, my relationship with sales isn't throw over the lead. 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 the value exchange with customers. So we believe pretty strongly also that the marketing function because of this orientation towards outcome, because of 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 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 salespeople and I think 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 one of the amazing things about a subscription business, and we're in a subscription business, customers get to vote with their feet every month, and this is the nature of subscription. The great news is at service now, our renewal rates are over 97%. Which is astronomical. Some of the highest thing in the industry. Yeah, well, in a lot of other businesses, they talk about 85, B2B, they talk about 85% being good, but 97% is almost B2C-like turn 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 teams engage 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 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, 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 it's just something about the type of people that you hire and bring in. So it was now 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 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 because 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 culture 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, some of 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 in this 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 that are qualifying the leads because those ADRs, they'll have very different functional disciplines and then some of those underlying values I think. So you and I are having the 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't think we can go far enough on that. And that's helping. 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 as quickly as possible. So speed to value, time to value and increase the level of value that service now is able to provide. Okay, what's the one thing you're doing less of? Talking to me. That's a great question. I want to give it 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? I think that will look just different. I think we'll be doing outbound. I think we'll have 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 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. That's it, Peter. All right, Dan Rogers. Thank you very much for coming on in. Dan Rogers service now in his great Cube conversation. Dan again, thanks very much for coming here. And we look forward to, I'm Peter Burris from Palo Alto Studios. And we look forward to having another Cube conversation with you.