 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, brought to you by Girls in Tech. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Bespoke. It's in the Westfield shopping mall. It's kind of a cool event space up on the fourth floor. And we're Girls in Tech Catalyst. We were last year a couple of years ago in Phoenix and we're excited to be back. 700 people, really great event. And the program's pretty simple. We got great women leaders telling their story and the stories are varied and really cool. And we just got out of Christina's story. She's Christina Kosmowski, global head of customer success. It's like, Christina, really good job up there. Thank you. There was a couple themes I wanted to really kind of jump on that I thought were so important. And the first one you were talking about early in your career and raising your hand when opportunities come up, don't be afraid, raise your hand, go for it. Yeah, absolutely. I was always saying yes to everything. And now I work on saying no to some things. I laid her life out. No, I think it is really important that there's all those cliches around the fact that you've got to go through the windows sometimes or opportunities are masked and they really are. And so just saying yes to everything and really being open to trying new things and learning new experiences will give you opportunities you didn't even realize you had. And so I always raised my hand in college to start the soccer team. I raised my hand in my first job to go to Europe and start the London office. I raised my hand to come to Salesforce. At every single point Salesforce had something new. I said, oh, I want to do it. And so I was kind of known as the person who always liked to start and build things from scratch. And so I always wanted to be that yes person and experience these new opportunities. And that was huge. I think you said when you started Salesforce Revenue it was like 20 million. And when you left it was... Almost 10 million. Yeah, it's crazy. It was quite a ride. But great, because then you get those opportunities. Another story you were telling, which I thought was pretty impactful, was your college soccer experience, your big soccer player. And the difference between putting in your own work and time to achieve something, and nobody ever sees the work that happens when they're not there. But more importantly, bringing along the team and getting everybody else to buy into your work ethic to raise the performance of the team. I wonder if you can expand on that a little bit. Because then you said you've used that throughout your career over and over again. I have. It was an important lesson. I think for those that didn't see the speech I talked about the fact that my freshman year in soccer was the first year of the varsity program. We won three games. And I was very angry about that. And so I spent the next year kind of working my butt off. And so I got to this level, but my rest is team didn't get to the level. And so I was able to challenge them to match my level. And we were ultimately able to get into the top 16 in the country at the end of my career. And that was the first time I realized it's not just about me. And I've seen that every step in the way is I can get there. I can get my idea there. I can get work as hard as I can. But if I can't empower the team and I can't bring all the cross-functional leaders along with me, we aren't going to achieve what we need to achieve. And at Slack, I've even seen that to be even more of the case because I've come in to a function that's brand new. It started very much as a product-based company versus Salesforce was a little more sales-focused. And so it's really important for people to understand what our mission is, why it's important, how we can bring these other organizations with us. Right. So a great kind of business theme that touched both on Salesforce and at Slack is kind of the subscription economy. And we've done this Roura conference and we all switched over to our paid Adobe subscription versus trying to find a friend who'll get you a license for a deal at the end of the year. But I think the really important thing that you touched on, when you go to subscription economy, it really changes the dynamic between you and your customer. You run customers, I do. Because it's not just take the check and send them the 15% maintenance bill anymore. Now you've got to build a relationship, you've got to deliver value each and every month because they're paying you each and every month. And so you've translated that into actually building an organization that supports this very different relationship. That's right. So I wonder if you could tell us, how did that transform? How hard of a sell was that? And then what's the ultimate outcome with your relationship with the customers? I think it's so important to realize that technology is really important but if we can't apply that into the business setting, into specific outcomes and use cases, it doesn't become valuable over time. And so we've built an organization that really focuses on customer maturity and value. And so we take it in steps and so we look at what are those things we can do to give value and outcomes and affect people the way they're working today. And then what does that look like tomorrow? How do we build upon that? And then what does it look like so they can get to this fully transformed state? And we've done that through a combination of working with product to build features and in-app education. We work with all of our customers to understand what are their needs. We bring people to the table. We bring one to many programs. We've really created this champion network where we are able to allow these peer-to-peer relationships and really have this network effect with our customers. And so there's lots of different methods and vehicles that we're doing to really ensure that our customers are getting that outcome. Yeah, it's interesting. We cover a lot of the AWS shows and Jeff Bezos will talk about them being just maniacally customer-focused. And lots of companies like to talk about being maniacally customer-focused, but most of them are not. They're product-focused or they're competitor-focused or they're kind of opportunity-focused and not customer-focused. So how do you build that culture? Can you switch if it's not there? Is it got to be from the top down to the beginning? You can. I think at Slack we've been really fortunate. It also has that extreme customer-focused but our organization started about 15 months ago and so we brought even more rigor to that. And so there's lots of programs you can do to affect the culture. So one of the programs we have is a Red Account program. And one of the things there is really about bringing all the company together to swarm around issues or risks that our customers might see. And that's one way that we can start to talk about customer importance. We call it the Customer Red Account Program. Red Account, so red-like trouble. Yes. So you basically swarm. We swarm. We swarm. Meaning a lot of people from a lot of different places. A lot of different places. And there's full accountability on all parts of the organization to solve it because my organization can't solve everything. We're really just the advocates and the facilitators back into Slack. And so that's important that we have that accountability and we're swarming all around the customer. We have product feedback sessions where we're able to bring that advocacy back. We have a lot of surveys and net promoter score, things where we're measuring and looking for accountability about how we're doing with our customers. And so there's lots of different programs that you can help bring this to light, even in just a tactical ways that help ultimately build this culture of customer success. So like I said, you got a lot of sniffers in the system to see when you need to call a Code Red. I'm just curious, when you get everyone together, are people surprised where the problems are? Is it like, oh, I thought we were doing a great job in this group. It was like, no, no, no, you're the problem. Sometimes, but I think it is really around it being a team effort and really understanding that when issues or challenges expose themselves, there's multiple root causes and you can really understand, okay, part of it could be a product, part of it could be how we supported them, part of it could be in some of our marketing and messaging and how do we all solve that in more universal experience. All right, last question before I let you go. Just your impressions of the catalyst today. He said it's your first time here. This is my first time here. I am blown away by the energy and excitement and really the quality of speakers and conversations that are happening. I've been hanging around all morning and just really powerful conversations. And I think I said this in my speech, but we are in a really fortunate time right now and I think our time is now and it's so great to see all these women come together and we're the ones that can do this. Excellent. We'll make we'll see you at the Amplify there. Yes. And later this year. Absolutely. All right, Cristina, thanks for stopping by and sharing your story. All right, thanks. Thanks, Cristina. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Girls in Tech Catalyst in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching.