 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smart Sheet Engage 2019. Brought to you by Smart Sheet. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Smart Sheet Engage here in Seattle. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are joined by Anna Griffin. She is the CMO of Smart Sheet. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you guys for having me, I appreciate it. So you're pretty new to this company. You joined in April. I'd love to hear, but you've also had an illustrious career in marketing. You've worked servers in big names, including Apple and Nortel and Saturn, and you've also worked on Land's End and a whole bunch of varied career. What attracted you to Smart Sheet? You know, it was interesting. When I first got the call about Smart Sheet, I had never heard of it. And the way that it was positioned to me was super intriguing. And I realized it was one of those, a category that's just not established, but a category that has the potential to be the next big thing. And, or not even the potential, I mean, it will be the next big thing. And, you know, I met with, that was intriguing. But then, you know, I met with the executive team and it was that perfect combination of, you know, a killer product, but a killer company. I can't tell you how special the leadership of this company is, and their authenticity and their passion and their drive and their belief, it's so contagious. There's no way you would not want to be a part of it. So, and then the privilege to be able to tell this company's story, I feel like it is the best kept story, not only in Seattle, potentially the world. And I plan to tell the story. And what a gift, what a great opportunity as a marketer to have this type of opportunity. Well, we're going to get into how you're going to tell the story. Okay. A little bit later, but, so now you've been here a few months. This is your first ever engage. What are, what are your, what are your impressions? Well, I wish I had been to a previous engage to have something to compare it to, but the fact that this conference has doubled in size, 4,000 customers here. And it's only its third show. I will tell you in the industry, I've worked, you know, managing event teams for many, many, many years. Not a lot of conferences grow at this size. And so to have 4,000 customers here, who are zealots, they are their passion for the product and what it's doing and what it's doing for their, not only their companies, but their own personal careers. There is an empowerment story through their mouths that will just inspire you. So it's, it's, it's incredible. The energy here is really, really special. We feel it too. Yeah. Good, good, good. And we see a lot of the smaller conferences in the early days. That's why they're fun to be here. We were last year, when it was 2,000. It was adjacent to the, to the office across the, across the water. Exactly. But it is a really passionate community. And, and, you know, to hear literal, literal cheers and claps at features. I know, isn't that crazy? I mean, it's crazy good. Well, it's crazy. It's like copy-paste from one road to the other because it's clearly something that, that means something to these people and that they've asked for and, and the company has delivered it and really, you know, demonstrates this listening. Yes. To engage these crazy people. Yes. It's a great asset. Yeah. Well, you know, the listening thing is huge and I feel like that's one of the things, and I think it's why there is a CMO now. Why get the privilege to be the first CMO is because the customer said, we need more awareness of this company. We need our, our executives. We need lines of business leaders. We need IT to know who you are and the magic of what you do. We need awareness. It's going to make it that much easier for us to get much wider adoption across these companies. If people know who you are and they know, you know, what, what, what you're capable of. So, so listening, that is one of the number one things we've heard. It's like awareness. They wanted awareness. So, because it'll help make them more successful. And so, you know, I think that was the catalyst for, okay, let's get a chief marketing officer. Let's go build that story. So they've got you. What are you going to do? What are some of your top priorities to tell the story and to build brand awareness? Yeah, yeah. Well, well, you know, the first thing was to really kind of tighten our positioning. You know, again, it's a great, great products make great brands and this is a great product company. But man, we're starting to do so much more than just killer products. We're really getting into this enablement, this transforming companies. And so you, I wanted to make sure we are positioned properly and we're really positioning more in a more transformative altitude and the capabilities of what we can do. You know, we have found, we've spent way too much time talking about technology versus people, versus what technology and people are going to do together. And that is the magic of what SmartSheet does. It really takes a platform, a common platform that basically integrates with the tech investments that you've already made, with the systems of record that you already have, pulls that data out and then allows the people to work with that data all in a common real time application. And when you can marry those two things together, tech and people, that's when one plus one equals three. And so we call that, that three is what we really call achievement. Like again, everybody in our space is work, work, work, task management, project management. The capability of SmartSheet, yeah, we do all that too. But when you play in that transformative altitude, we are enabling achievement at an enterprise-wide level and achievement like what your business can achieve, but this is the more special part and this is where I get excited to be able to tell this story is, the achievement happens at a personal level too. Like again, I'm telling you, I when I talk to customers and I see what they're doing, they're like, you don't understand, you have changed my career. I'm doing more strategic work. I am seen differently in my company. I champion this. Like all of a sudden I am leading big teams. I went from this to this and their empowerment is so big. And so you have really that last mile of digital transformation is cultural transformation and that's what this product does. And so job one was position us properly so we can tell that type of story and really put our solutions in that kind of light because that's what it does. And then job two is to launch the campaign, launches to the world. So we just launched two weeks ago and it's a slow roll. I mean, we have hundreds of assets in play. So I love seeing us on television. I love seeing us deeply in digital. I love some of the new interesting things that we can do in media. But when our customers are saying, that they're seeing it as a CMO, like, oh, you get a high from it. So yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's fun. So job two, launch the campaign. And the campaign is, well, we call the campaign can do. You know, we're positioning the brand as the platform for enterprise achievement. Number one, Smartsheet is a platform. I think a lot of people, you know, as it's grown, I mean, it truly is a platform and it really is enterprise strong and wide. It scales, which is important, but it scales so everybody in a company can align organizational alignment to truly achieve something bigger. Aligned organizations do not fail. And so that's the power. But I digress. Yeah, you can answer the question properly. No, that's good. Look, and I love one of the great legs of your go-to-market strategy and your lead gen is your licensing formula, which enables me as the smartsheet licensee to engage lots of people, many outside my own, not only my own team, but my own company, and let them have access to this tool. What a smart way, whoever ever came up with that licensing strategy, what a great way to introduce the opportunity to use this transformational tool to the ongoing and broad audience. Yes, I'll tell you what was so exciting when I was in the interview process and I was riding on a plane and clearly I had met with a company and I heard somebody in front of me was a consultant at one of the consulting firms who had met a complete stranger on the plane and somehow smartsheet came up and she was going, you got it, oh my gosh, smartsheet. This is like, oh, she was going, this is the best kept secret. We're using it with all of our clients. We heard about it through one of our clients who had a lot of things about it and then we were using it like, oh my gosh, this is a game changer and I'm like, putting my ear in between the two seats. Like, oh, are you throwing more? And I put my hand in and I said, did you just say smartsheet? And then literally six people on the airplane, like random people were like, oh my gosh, we use it too. It was the most surreal experience and that was when I knew like, okay, I've got to be a part of this company. It was the special. A lot of people are now just getting that sensation of what this thing is capable of. Right, right. Well, it's funny too, your personal achievement story, it reminds me of any time you got a new software company and whether you know, Centra, Deloitte or E&Y of those guys come in, they're making a big bet, right? There are some new partners going to bet their career on this new technology. We've heard from a number of people how betting their career internally with smartsheet has changed their position in the company. Yes, yes. We've heard that today a couple of times. So clearly, you know, it is an enablement platform for someone to, you know, grab onto the rocket ship and ride the smartsheet wave to new and bigger, better things. But also her point about just, even just participating in the technology and then they're able to, as you said, work on more strategic work, be able to do more things in their jobs that has then catapulted them to new jobs. So it's not even necessarily betting on smartsheet and bringing in smartsheet, but it is just using smartsheet and then therefore they have more brain time. Yes, yes. So that's the engagement we're talking about, Jeff. Right, right. No, it is because we've been talking a lot about, you know, some of the really scary statistics about how disengaged people are at work and how many people are ready to quit their job. And, you know, they've got all these blocks, these menial roadblocks in their day-to-day existence that are negatively impacting their ability to want to do their job well, but actually just want to be there anymore. Right, right. And so it seems maybe to the outside, looking in some of these things might seem low value, but they're actually tremendous value if you're removing these roadblocks so I can get my job done. Yes, totally. And love your job. I know they love your job, but know that the work that you do matters. And I think so many people have lost that feeling. There is something about working in, I don't know if it's the corporate world, but it has become such a grind and that rare opportunity for like, I love what I do and I know that it matters. Like, it's a gift. And this is a platform that enables that in people. And so I think that's one of the fascinating things. I've been spending a lot of time on the road with customers and I was at a very big multinational, big global agricultural company and Sinjata actually. And watching, we met with probably 200 different, just what I would call power users across seven different, you know, role types like from IT to HSE to, you name it. And every single one of them, is like, we're doing more. Like we are empowered, like the engagement, the employee engagement in that company through the roof, because every single person felt like we're heard. I have ownership, you know, I'm doing work, I'm taking it to a new level. And so, you know, sure, there is a ton of operational efficiencies that are going to come out of working with Smartsheet. But I think the one to watch is what's going to happen when your workforce is truly engaged and taking ownership of the work, those are the companies that are going to have higher retention, they're going to have, they're going to see something in that talent area. So this is more than just, we're getting more work done and you know, return on investment of our systems, like you're going to see, you know, what happens when your employees are empowered. Well, and the word you didn't use is innovation, right? And I firmly believe everyone wants more innovation in their company. But how do you do it? But one of the, I think it's really simple lever on that is you just give more people more access to more data and then the ability to do something about it and open it up to all the smart people that see problems through different prisms and different opportunities. And that's where you start to get, you know, leverage this amazing talent that you already have inside your four walls. What is interesting about innovation is, I think sometimes the world so over rotates that innovation is going to be that next killer line of code or it's going to be, and they forget that the power of practical innovation, like it's that series of small collected things that add up. So allowing your entire, you know, employee population to feel like they have the power to innovate as well. That every person in the company has the power because the power of practical innovation can lead to something just as big as the big, you know, R&D investment. In fact, DevOps has shown that that's a better way anyway, right, in software development. The grand idea with the market development plan and the product development plan and the three-year build cycle that does not win against constant, relentless, iterative, improvement, improvement, improvement, improvement, improvement. Yes, indeed. So you said this earlier, and I saw it on your LinkedIn too, that the last mile of digital transformation is cultural transformation. How do you describe the culture at Smartsheet now? So I mean, we've talked about the evangelical customers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about within Smartsheet itself? It's pretty special. No, look, you're going to say, of course the CMO is going to say it's special, but it is rare when people, everyone comes to work with this belief, like this true belief that they are, they have the power to influence something and touch something that's going to do something great for other people. And I think that's what is the most special, is they're not just doing it for themselves, they know they're doing it for others. Like they know, they love these guys. Every single person in the company loves the customer. Like the love ability, they love the customer and they feel like they've got to do their best work so their customer can do something great with it. Do you know what I'm saying? They really understand that. And that's a, hey, it's an incredible place to want to work when you feel that way, but to love your customers, I think that's why our customers love us back. I mean, to be loved, you must first love. Because they love, you know, it's rare. Well, congratulations. It sounds like it's a great role and you're in the right place. And I can't wait to talk to you next year and hear more about CanDo and all of the wonderful things you're doing. Thank you, thank you guys. Great, thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight. That wraps up theCUBE's interviews. Stay tuned for our wrap of Engage 2019. You're watching theCUBE.