The Role of Partners in Scaling to $10B with ServiceNow CCO + VP of Strategic Operations

All right, welcome everybody, to Saster Enterprise. We are thrilled to have Lara And Anissa from ServiceNow here joining us to talk about the role of partners in scaling from or to 10 billion. There will be time for Q and A at the end of this session, so please make sure to drop your questions into the chat or at the end we will have time. We are getting some feedback here to talk about the role of partners in scaling from our two seconds, there will be time for Q and A. Sorry about that technical difficulty, but we are rolling with the punches. And welcome back again. So excited to be here with Laura and Anissa. As I mentioned, we will have Q and A at the end of this session, so if you have any questions during the presentation, please drop those in the chat at the end. We will also have time for you to to come on video if you want to ask that in person. So before we run into any more weird tech issues, I will kick it right over to Anissa and Lara.

Hello.

Thank you, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We're really excited to be here with this group. I'm Anissa sayal. I am VP of strategic operations at ServiceNow, and I'm here with Lara Kamey, ServiceNow's chief customer and Partner officer. Lara and I have actually known each other for years, and I'm really excited to be part of this ServiceNow journey with her and Lara. This is exciting for us to be here together. We're here to talk about the role of partners on ServiceNow's journey to 15 billion. That is a big topic with a big goal. What excites you about it?

Anissa, I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you. Partners are really exciting once you understand the importance for your technology and your face of growth. Learning how to harness their power, how you deal with the competition that can be inherent in working with partners. There's a lot to unpack. I've certainly learned a lot since I've taken this role last July. And I know, Anissa, you've been side by side with me as well, and I think there's a lot of lessons that we can share today with this audience. So I'm excited.

Yeah, I'm excited, too. I think there's a lot to unpack here, but let's start with something fun before we dive right into the meat. We're all here via Virtual Waze today, and I know over the last year we've all had our share of virtual mishaps. One of my favorite was that cat judge video from a few months ago. If you guys haven't seen it, I highly recommend you go look it up. But what's been your funniest Zoom moment?

Well, I have to say that cat judge thing still makes me giggle. My dad is an attorney in Iowa and so I totally can picture him in that, in that moment, totally frustrated. So it's super hilarious to me especially. But, you know, over the past year, we've all been dealing with this day to day life in Zoom, the intersection of our work lives and our home lives. And for me, you know, I have three young kids, I've got two dogs who are actually at my feet now and may or may not bark during this. And you know, there's a lot of these kind of these glimpses into our personal lives, which I think has, has been sort of this lovely byproduct of, of the unfortunate circumstances of this pandemic. You know, I've got so many ridiculous stories of when that, you know, when, when those moments have intersected. You know, in fact, speaking of partners, we were on a call. I remember it was like right after I took this role. So I'm like introducing myself to our biggest partners and it was a senior executive at one of our partners and my four year old runs behind me when I did not have a virtual background on Totally Naked. You know, and it ended up being one of those moments where we all laughed, we like shared some, you know, absurd stories about our children and, and you know, I feel like that's the texture of this. It's those beautiful moments of humanity that actually bring us together and, you know, help connect us in a way that you miss that sort of intimacy of breaking bread and being in person with people. But you get these sort of moments of seeing their personal lives where you normally wouldn't see that. And that's actually been, you know, that's been a nice part of this. I think one of the reminders, and I'm sure all of you have seen this as well, I spent a bunch of time talking to partners and customers globally. And the reality is we are in very different places across the globe. I mean, obviously those of us with folks on our teams in India just feeling a ton of empathy for everything they're going through right now. I think it's a lot about that. It's about empathy. It's about understanding that this thing is going to have ebbs and flows before we get back to whatever normal is going to look like. I think this notion of bringing our full selves to work and embracing that humanity and letting it Intersect. I think that that creates this vulnerability and connection with our teams that maybe is a different way than what we had, but it's super, super important.

Well, I know I've enjoyed bringing my baby onto many of our Zoom calls together and I know partners, very cute, by the way.

Guys, she looks like a mini Anisa.

She is cute, if I can say that myself. But partners, a lot of it is a relationship game and so I think building that moment of intimacy is really important, even when you're doing it virtually to the meat of it. ServiceNow is pretty far on their journey with partners. How has that evolved over time?

Yeah, I think it's really important to call it a journey because it has changed. And I think that that's one of the lessons for probably a lot of folks in this audience is that you do need to think about it really as a journey and the building of a deep relationship that isn't, that doesn't happen overnight. So let me maybe start with the 101 of what ServiceNow is, right? Just, just because I think the business context actually really matters when you think about partners, because all of you are going to have a little bit of a different situation and a little bit of a different journey depending on the role of partners in your company. So ServiceNow is a workflow company. You know, we are an application software company. We started with, we started 15 years ago and actually our founder Fred Luddy started it as a kind of a low code, no code platform before that was even a thing where we wanted to allow any everyday people to be able to automate pieces of their work. What happened, what we realized 15 years ago was that actually that was a pretty forward thinking vision at the time to sell and it was hard to get traction behind that. And so we started by building an application that was fundamentally built on that, on that concept of workflow and it was IT service management. And that happened to be a good place to start because it had a lot of old kind of incumbent legacy technology competitors. And so we were sort of the First Cloud Provider, SaaS provider to disrupt that part of the market. And then from there we've moved following the original founder platform vision, have moved into other workflows, other application areas that ultimately do the same thing. It's sort of work is requested by a human or by a machines or whatever. It's routed and automated and then resolved in some way. And if you think about it, that notion of workflow is actually how we get everything done in business and it's connecting disparate systems, disparate functions, etc. To kind of break through all of that and get work done, drive automation, drive productivity, and create better experience experiences for customers and for employees along the way. So that is, you know, that is what ServiceNow is about. And our purpose is we make the world of work work better for people, which is very broad, but also, I think, very inspirational and quite relevant given everything that's been happening. The way employee experience has really been, you know, moved up as a, as a central topic of conversation because of the pandemic. And, you know, partners today are a critical part of that story and our path to success. You know, they drive, you know, 80 to 90% of our new bookings, so they, they play some role in that. They source about, you know, 20% of our, of our deals. They drive 90 to 95% of all of our implementation. So they're critical in getting our customers to success. And many of our partners now have really big, you know, ServiceNow practices that are among the kind of top five, top six practices that they have in their companies. And so it's really been quite a journey. And we're actually at a pretty significant place here. And you can see here we have this slide that shows we've got a bunch of different types of partners, as everybody does. We've got the systems integrators that have expertise and relationships. We have technology alliances that offer important integrations, because as I said, we're a platform company that requires integrations into a bunch of different other pieces of technology to drive those automations. Service providers that, you know, a lot of customers want to outsource some of this work. And so we have kind of various service providers who are operating that kind of work for their customers. And then of course, regional partners which are critical to drive depth and breadth, specific geographic presence, specific expertise. They also, frankly, are the feeders for these big firms as they grow their practices. And, you know, I think the most important part here really is about this journey. And we thought about it, we've talked about this before, this notion of there are phases of a software company. And I think if you go to the next slide, I think there's a ton of lessons in this concept of phases of a software company. Phase one for a software company is kind of when you're looking for that product market fit, right? It's when a software company is kind of zero to $100 million. It's when you're really trying to find that right? And it's. For us, it was a single product company focused on selling it. And our journey with partners was at that point a little bit frustrating. Right. We are direct salesforce and we have a very, a very direct salesforce. We sell largely to enterprises, right. So it is, it has always been a sort of top down direct sales effort. They saw the partners as competition because many of the partners had big practices with the incumbents, right. With the BMCs of the world. And we would have to kind of compete with them deal by deal and win based on the basis of our technology. And that was kind of where we saw that phase two for a software company is kind of once you've gotten that product market fit, it's all about scale, scale the hell out of it, right? And that's kind of 100 million to a billion. And that's when you obviously keep focusing on building great products and expanding. But you also really drive that outstanding go to market, you start building customer success. And that's where we would, partners would start to get it. You'd start to kind of win them over deal by deal. And it was really about, you know, starting to build. They would maybe start to build practices around that, just around what our core, right? Just around ITSM and but it wasn't proactive like we were still kind of pushing them. We were, you know, they were getting business because we were scaling and building, you know, reasonable businesses around this. But you know, they were just kind of starting to take notice. Phase three is really kind of a billion dollars to becoming kind of a multi billion dollar company. And that's where you think about for us, it was about expanding it into multi products and it was about starting to expand geographically. It was driving additional innovation in the portfolio and starting to get a little bit more relevant in the C suite and starting to expand outside of just our core buyer. And that's where we really started to see partners starting to elevate us, right? Starting to lean in a little bit more. Starting to see, wow, this is actually a big deal. We'd have these sort of amazing stories of amazing deals that were sold, kind of co sold with partners where we were our biggest deals ever, et cetera. And so you started to see more and more, you started to feel the momentum moving. And now I would say we're kind of in phase four which is really going from multiple billions to 10 and now 15 billion. And that's where this flywheel really kicks in, right? That's where we are truly elevating to the C suite, where we're becoming much more relevant, much more known As a platform company, not just product company, it's where we have folks that are leaning in and building billion dollar practices with ServiceNow. And they're elevating us to their top tier of partnerships. And it's because they're seeing the momentum with our business. And that's in that it's this flywheel, right? It's this really productive flywheel. It's also frankly, where we're going much deeper into verticals, right? And verticals are a natural complement to a partner go to market because of, because of how they're organized. And so there's a lot of kind of goodness and this kind of force multiplying impact that you can get once you get to this phase. But as you know, as you can probably tell, it takes a while. And I think there's watch outs along the way, right? Like you need to make sure that you set the vision for what this can look like in the future. So you're not alienating partners along the way. You're creating collaborative relationships from the beginning because especially for a direct sales team, you can definitely create a lone wolf kind of culture here when really the magic is unlocked, when you have folks going to market as a team and have that kind of long term vision of what this is going to be. And you need those kind of visionary believers that continue to kind of pound the table and keep us on the drumbeat of what this potential actually is. And along the way, partners are just rational. They're just rational businesses making rational decisions about how to, like anybody, allocate their scarce resources, right? But where they're going to, where they're going to place their bets. And ultimately it's about where the dollars and the growth of the dollars are for them. And that takes time, that takes momentum, that takes real wins, that takes, I think, conscious storytelling to get there. But I think the takeaway from this whole thing for me is that while this journey is kind of hard, it's absolutely worth it and it pays massive dividends if you can get to this point.

I love this visual because it does paint it as a journey and it has phases to it. And I think that last point you made about through that journey, making sure that you're sticking with it for that long vision of what's ahead, I think is a critically important one as all of these companies scale their growth.

So I love that visual, by the way, this visual. I've used this so many times in my. Before I took on this role, I was the chief strategy officer and we use this because it marks so many different transition points for a SaaS company, for a software company. Like, for us. You can even peg our CEOs to these different phases of vision. Different kinds of CEOs are well positioned for different types of phases. And I think there's just so many different lessons you could take away from this. So we could probably have like a whole conversation just unpacking this alone. But let's stick with the partners today.

Well, you know, I think on that point of. You used to be our chief strategy officer, and now you're our chief customer and partner officer. That was a very explicit title choice, but it's actually also one that's very unique in the industry. I don't see a lot of companies have it. What was the why behind that title?

Yeah, it is a unique title, and we were really purposeful in kind of choosing it and crafting our org design this way. So for those of you who know ServiceNow, Dave Schneider was our chief revenue officer and president, and he owned kind of everything related to Go to market, and he took the company public, scaled the go to market engine, kind of created everything that we have. And then when he decided to retire, we really looked at all of the pieces and said, how can we create an org structure that really does ultimately bring our value chain closer together, all in service of the customer? And that's. And that's really what we're. What we're trying to do. The mission of my organization is that our customer success is our success, and with that, you know, our partner success is our success. And, and, you know, I think that's a philosophy, frankly, that's applicable to every SaaS company at every phase of growth. We are ultimately in service of getting our customers to achieve their goals through purchasing our technology. And our partners are absolutely critical to doing that. And so to me, it's creating a setup that's a win, win, win, a win ultimately, that's foundationally built around the customer, getting the customer to value, getting the customer to success, which creates value for our partners, but also obviously creates value for us. And so our organization has several groups. It's got our partner and ecosystem alliances organization, it's got our training and certification organization, which does all of our external customer and partner training. It's got a professional services organization, customer success and customer experience. And I think all of those teams are really inextricably linked in terms of making sure that we are aligned to that ultimate vision that I talked about in terms of, you know, getting our customers to value and getting our customers to success. And you know, and I think that purposefully structuring an organization, if we're in a SaaS company that is ultimately aligned to that value. And by the way, I view myself as the champion of the customer experience across the company because there's no way just kind of a partner and post sales organization can achieve that. It absolutely takes everybody, right? A product, a customer focused product mindset. Our go to market teams have to be aligned to that and even all of our GNA teams have to be, have to be aligned to that vision. And so that, that I think is also part of my, my role in this function is to sort of be that evangelist and, and drive cross functional alignment around there as well. And you know what, what I hear from customers, what customers ultimately want from us, and probably this is similar to what, what you guys hear, right? It's like help me get, help me get to value. Help me realize the value. Not like in my, in my language, in the business terms that I care about that are relevant to my industry. Help me tell you guys have lots of customers, tell me how to get there. What you tell me what best practices. Don't let me try to figure this out for the first time. I want the guidance from, I expect the guidance to come from you. You show me what great looks like and then partner seamlessly to get there. I don't want to have a meeting with you telling me one thing and a meeting with a partner telling me something else. I want us to all get in a room together. We're all in the same boat. We're all rowing in unison towards ultimately this goal because no one has time to mess around with that, right? And so let's not worry about organizational boundaries. Let's not worry about, you know, who's, whose paycheck, you know, who gets their paycheck from whom. Let's all be in, you know, on the same team. And so that I think ultimately is, is what my organization is designed to do.

I love that show up together message because I think that's where a lot of the power in partners is. When you as a company and you and partners are showing up so seamlessly together. I think that's amazing. The title of this talk was Partners on our path to 15 billion. And I actually saw one of the questions in the chat about which partners are important when. And so tell us a little bit about why partners are important on that path and what the strategy is for which and when.

Yeah, so yeah, we had a path to $10 billion that we had sort of been publicly talking about for a while and we just had our analysts say, and Bill, for those of you who know Bill McDermott, he is constantly raising the bar and creating, forcing you to look not just at the next horizon, but at two horizons kind of out. And so our public goal is now 15 billion. And so, you know, and we're well on our way there and absolutely, you know, partners are key to this. So let me talk about like why partners are such a big part of the strategy for our business. First of all, anyone selling to the biggest enterprises in the world, which we do, is going to need partners. The level of customization, integration, security, compliance, all of those requirements are really too high. And partners can provide that skill set at scale. Second, the role of partners in your growth is going to differ based on the type of product and your phase of growth. I think about this in my role at ServiceNow, I also joined Confluence board recently. And the way ServiceNow versus Confluent approaches partners is very different because the technology is different and because the phase of growth is different. Yeah, I was just speaking to the head of partners at Snowflake yesterday and her perspective is a little different on this too because ultimately it's all about being really crystal clear on the strategic intent, what you need at the time. And that is different. I think the notion of taking a playbook off a shelf from another company and then trying to apply that at your company and is folly. Like it's just not going to work. It takes more thoughtfulness than just doing that. So let me make that real. ServiceNow is an application software company. Right. And we're in that kind of phase four of growth that I shared earlier. And as a multiproduct global company that's selling to the enterprise, right. Partners are critical. They access digital transformation conversations that frankly not part of. Right. They're not looking to us as an application provider, as a SaaS provider to help them drive their digital transformation. That's what the accentures, the Deloitte, the eyes, the KPMGs of the world are really good at. They're having those big C suite conversations talking about these broad transformations that are multi technology things. And so obviously it's not one piece of software that's going to drive the business outcomes that these customers are getting to because they don't, they don't care about a widget. Right. They care about the business outcome, what they're trying to achieve. And so those kind of trusted conversations are what partners have earned the right to be part of. Over Many years, right. With come coming with that is access to the C suite. You know, one of the things that I've Learned from Bill McDermott, who obviously is an expert at enterprise software sales, right. Access to the C suite is the magic that unlocks your big deals. Like if you're moving from like a kind of land and expand strategy and your big deals are million dollar deals. Like well, what about a $50 million deal? Like how do you land a $50 million deal, right? And that is access to the C suite. And that's a different kind of sale, that's a different kind of motion. And you know, and, and, and being able to speak their language, understand their industry, understand the business problem and the business value that that unlocks for these massive organizations. That's what partners are really, really good at. So like think about, you know, think about like a big. Bill calls it a big dream, a big ambition would be to kind of move your company like to that. Like you're not going to do that alone. Getting there alone is really hard. So you need partners to do that. Obviously partners have scale, right? They have hundreds of thousands of sellers that take service now for us to customers, which is super important, right? Our cost model, our need to continue to deliver profitability to the street doesn't allow us to build that kind of scale. So these are again, force multipliers. They have scope, they operate in countries that we don't have a direct presence in and we don't intend to. Again, that doesn't fit in our costs serve model. And then finally implementations, you know, they, they no, no investor is going to want a software company to build a giant professional services firm. Like that's just not the margin profile associated to why they're investing in our companies. And so we do need professional services. It plays a very important role. And I'll get to that maybe a little bit later. But obviously the scale that they bring to drive that implementation success is really, really important. And so again, this approach is rooted in our customer. Our customers tell us that they appreciate our focus on partners, our close relationship to partners, and they want to leverage partners when they're working with ServiceNow because of the type of software that we are. When you compare our growth phase with a company like Confluent, for example, which is more infrastructure software in an earlier phase of growth, you'll see why their technology integration partners are critical to expand their footprint and enable their, their, their footprint and enable their use cases to be where their customers are. You know, I spent a lot of time with the head of partners at Confluent, Vinod. And he said, you know, something that I really, I really liked because it makes sense and, and it kind of punctuates my previous point that this is really about your company. Right. He said ServiceNow builds a car, Confluent builds the engine. And for that engine to deliver, it has to connect with cloud players, database players, analytics players and more. So that's a critical foundational part of their strategy. So again, for some companies it's about access to technology partners that increase your distribution, make you sticky, give you critical data sources that are absolutely foundational for your software to work. For others, it's about implementation, it's about co selling. And the key as you grow is to be intentional about how you spend your time. And at the beginning, if you're focused just on scaling your product to market, getting that product market fit, it's important to cast a wide net on the, on, you know, around those partners so you can make sure that you're getting a wide footprint. But as you grow, you have to focus your energy and investment on the partners that are driving the biggest impact for you. And what that could be, you know, net new bookings or revenue, it could be a number of customers, it could be something else. But you know, some of these technology elements that I talked about, but again, you have to be intentional about the role you need partners to play for your technology in your phase of growth and then build your processes, build your programs around that, that make sure that you're focused the energy on the sort of 20% of things that are going to drive 80% of the value.

I love that car engine example. I think it puts it into perspective that your goals of how you use partners is just really going to differ depending on what kind of product you are. And I, for me, I love, you know, I never know whether they're metaphors or analogies, but I always appreciate bringing, bringing them to life in some way. I think the, I've seen a few questions in the chat on like, you know, gosh, we're behind partners, but the how, especially, you know, some of the kind of sales versus partners dynamic that we see. Tell us a little bit about the how.

Yeah, I mean I've talked about partners being force multipliers and that's something we talk about with our partners externally and internally with our field. And you know, to me that's a force multiplication of both our sales capacity and our implementation capacity. And so let me give you an example on the sales side, right we have a close partnership with Accenture. They have over 8,000 ServiceNow experts. And people ask me, like, how can we afford to invest in our field sales team and in a partner ecosystem and can we do both? And of course, the answer is yes, we have to do both. Right. I think a strong partner ecosystem makes our sellers more effective. They prime the pump again. They introduce us into conversations that we can't get to on our own. They introduce us to new buying centers. And what's important is that we set up something we were very purposeful about, what we talk about as a co sell strategy and a co deliver. And so let me talk about co sell for a second. We need our direct team and our partner team working in lockstep from early part of the sales, almost like creating sales plans together. They need to see that they're not competing but that their messages are unified and they are united in front of the customer. And that step is not natural. Right. If you've built a direct salesforce that is used to going it alone and maybe has a little bit of, you know, scars on their back from having some competitive conversations kind of early on. But, but you know, understanding that that's really the thing that's going to unlock some of these bigger deals is really, really important, you know, and this takes time. It takes a lot of work. It takes building mindshare, it takes training, enablement, it takes, you know, building an alliance team a little that, that like, helps, you know, foster those conversations and helps make the connections that, that are required to make it worth everybody's time. The other thing I'll say is that when you're scaling the approach to kind of building these is not like getting your CEO in front of like, you know, Puneet at Deloitte or Julie at Accenture. Like, that's not going to happen when you're a small company, right? You're not going to get like a big business partner agreement that's, you know, top down at the early stage stages. Instead, you absolutely have to focus on, okay, what are the joint customers that we're going to go after, how do we get some real tangible wins under our belt and then market the hell out of it? Right? Just absolutely shout off of the rooftop, make sure people are aware of it, understand the momentum, etc. And you know, and then go to go on to the next five and just, you know, I had dinner the other night with our, with our head of our alliance at Accenture and you know, I was asking him, thinking about this, like, how do you Guys think about, you know, because we're in their sort of top six partners globally. Like, we're, we're in the top tier at this stage, but it's like, how do you think about tiers below that and how do you decide where you're going to invest and not invest? And they really look at sort of outside in market potential. They look at the macroeconomic trends that the tailwinds that are sort of behind your product and your company and they look at their own revenue, right? That kind of rational decision of like, how much business are we getting out of this and how much is it growing and how does all that fit in our strategy and where we believe the puck is headed? And so I would say be really thoughtful about understanding their strategies. Right. Like, I think too many companies go in with partners and like, reflect their own mess out as opposed to saying, you know what, tell me how you think about this, tell me what matters to you, tell me how you make your money. What, what, what is your strategic focus? And then frame up how your technology fits into what they're trying to achieve. Right. And what they believe with in their language, again, reflect the language of the customer, reflect the language of the partner. Talk about it in a way that matters to them and, and, and, and keep giving those real examples. Right. And that I think it takes time, it takes work, it takes building human relationships and interactions. But over time that flywheel will start to move. You just have to really invest in it.

I love that kind of nothing speaks like wins example. I think that's so powerful, especially as companies scale. That's the way to get people on board and get people excited about something. Show the impact, show the dollars, show the wins. And I think there's something so powerful. There's. You talked a little bit about the friction with the sales team. There's also possible friction with a professional services team and you know, between partners and professional services teams at companies. How do you handle that? Possible friction?

Yeah, you know, I think first you have to be really, really clear on the role of your professional services or your services business within, within a software company, within a SaaS company. And like, let's be very, very clear, right? That is not what drives our valuation from the street. They look at the services business as kind of a necessary evil because it's obviously naturally lower, much lower margin than your software. Right. And my opinion is that it shouldn't be too big, right. But it needs to be a minimum viable size to be able to deliver on what it's intended to Do. And the intention of a professional services business, right, within a captive professional services business, within a software company is you have to a. There's going to always be some customers that absolutely demand it from you, right? They want your expertise, they want your skin in the game. But you know, you need to have enough people there that you can make sure that you're building leading practices, that you're teaching the partners what great looks like, right? And that you're able to, you know, put people on as, as new products or new features come out, that you're able to sort of make sure that you're driving the first X implementations of that to make sure you understand what great looks like, give that feedback back to the product team if something's not working, you know that that sort of closed loop is super important and then again build those practices. So there's a really critical role there, but it's not too big, right? And, and so that's an important first point. And when I tell that to partners they're like, of course, I'm like, so I'm not competing with you, man. This is a rational decision and I have to build this business and I don't want it to get too big. And so being very clear about that I think is important. And by the way, having me on top of the professional services organization and the partner organization ultimately in service to the customer and the shareholder, I think builds a kind of credibility around that story that's really, really critical. So that's kind of number one. And I think to a certain extent partners and customers own professional services team are selling similar services, but it is different. Right. And we want to create this notion of collaboration because we bring different expertise coming from that sort of captive expert view from some, from somebody who's got like, you know, multiple practices that they're working on. And so I do think that you have to, that you have to be honest that there is some kind of coopetition but it's a much more for me complementary than it is competitive. Right. And so for me we've got this notion of co delivery which means that for certain types of implementations, new products maybe, or for our biggest customers, we are working hand in hand with the partner to deliver guidance, best practices, etc. While the partner delivers 90% of the services. So we have a little bit, we have a little bit in there, but again that's, that's there purposefully and our customers love this by the way, because it's like, Yes, I want ServiceNow to guide us. I want ServiceNow to have some, some again, some skin in the game. I want, I want to be able to hold them accountable for my success. And doing that in partnership with the partner also raises the bar for our partners. They start to learn, oh, that's a critical thing. That's what great looks like. And so that notion that we are solving something together and creating that kind of collaborative mindset is really, really important. And so that strategy, I think is kind of a unique one. But I think it's critical to helping us continue to raise the bar. And there will always be some level of healthy friction. You may get alignment at the kind of executive level with everybody, but when it comes down to signing the deal on the day and who has to give up a little bit of revenue because the bucket's only so big, you will definitely see some. But I think the more you are very clear about the strategic intent, the why, and ultimately if it's in service of the customer, that's the North Star. That is the true north here. That ultimately will get us in the right direction and keep us out of these sort of silly conversations about who gets this, who gets that. That ultimately is not the higher order problem here that we're trying to solve.

I think that's. And I know we want to leave enough time for Q and A, but I think that point about the customer is, is such a powerful one. And you recently talked about a wildfire example of the role of partners and how it can really benefit the customer. And for me that was such a powerful one. I know you're based in California and many people on the phone might be also.

Yeah, yeah. I mean there's lots of way examples like of how our partners have done an amazing job extending our products or creating example outcomes with customers that are absolutely incredible that I don't think we would have done before. There's lots of, as I, as I talked about in the space where you get more move from a horizontal company to more industry verticals, partners are super critical in that. So there's like a whole chapter to unpack there. But yeah, this, this, this California wildfire one is like incredibly touching for me. We have a partner, it's one of our regional partners. And you know, there were, as you guys know, there have been tremendous amount of wildfires. There were 50,000 last year. And this is a massive, often manual task. And you know, the way it worked before, it's like sometimes these stories when you hear them are like really mind boggling. You know, a dispatcher would have to manually enter the geolocation coordinates into 26 separate systems to, like, be able to fight a fire. I mean, can you imagine, like, the possibilities for a delay or error in needing to do something like that again? Our partner developed a solution which enabled aircraft equipment crews to be easily deployed in the system, which eliminated a lot of errors, it sped up response times, and ultimately, it has helped save lives. I just see this as an example of how our partners can broaden our product offering by layering their own expertise, their own relationships onto our platform, and in this case, build an entirely new product on our platform that's outside of, obviously, what we package up and take to market.

I love that. I'm also in California, and so that one just really resonates with me about the impact working hand in hand with partners can have. Lara, this is a journey. That slide, I think, says it all. It's a journey. So you've talked a lot. What are some of the big takeaways for the audience before we go into some Q and A?

Yeah, I think we wrote down on our last slide, like, a handful of them here. First, I would say you need to kind of be a believer, Right? Partners are critical to scale, but it is a journey. The second is that the role of partners absolutely needs to be. There's nothing like take one model and just like, rinse and repeat, apply it. You have to understand what kind of company you are, what partners can do for you. And obviously that will change depending on your phase of growth. And I think the approach to partners will become increasingly transformative and strategic as you grow, especially if you are selling to the enterprise and if you have aspirations to get to these massive deals that ultimately take C suite alignment and driving kind of business value for companies. That is absolutely critical. Partners will take notice of you, but you have to kind of earn it right. You have to go after specific wins. You have to celebrate them, you have to market them. You have to frame your story in a way that matters to them. So listen to them and understand what they care about and what they're working for. And then recognize. It would be Pollyanna. Ish of me to say that this is easy, and there's never friction. Of course there's friction. Everybody has their own business objectives that they're trying to optimize for. There could be friction with your sales team. There could be friction with your professional services team, both of which we talked about today. But you need to sort of be eyes wide open and recognize coopetition is, I think, inevitable in our industry and just keep an open mind that says that's okay, that's a 5% problem. What I care about is the 95% opportunity here. Right. And continue to frame that and be the sort of champion of that idea and, you know, just know that this takes work. Right. It is a journey. It does take work, it does take time, it does take investment. But it absolutely has an ROI at the end of the day.

Lara, thank you. That was amazing. I really appreciate all of those insights. Bethany, I see the lots of great questions in the Q and A, so I'm going to hand it over to you for some questions.

Thank you. Yes, everyone has been dropping in questions. Thank you so much for all of these great asks here. Reminder that you can keep dropping questions into the chat and we will get to as many as we can today. One that I think is super interesting just to kick things off is what are some of the attributes of the top leaders in your personal partnership team? Thinking more about the cultural side of it.

Yeah, you know, I think that's a great question because I think that ultimately, again, I think it goes back to this premise that I've been mentioning a few times, which is like, there's no model that's like. Right. And that's just gonna, you're gonna rinse and repeat and just plug it into your company. And so, yes, while it's important to have people who understand the partner, they don't need to have grown up in a partner organization to be a great asset to your firm. Right. You need somebody who naturally is a creative thinker, who is a strategic thinker, who is deal oriented. Right. Because again, it's all about those tangible wins and someone who understands how to navigate complex situations and can collaborate well with others. I think those are the attributes that you need. Does that person have to have a 20 year career in alliances and channels? Probably not. Right. And maybe in some cases, you know, for certain roles, you may not even want that. You may want something a little bit different depending on what you're trying to achieve. But I do think you have to think about those attributes. By the way, that is that I would say is a broad leadership lesson that I would say applies to a lot of things because that is how we're going to drive more diversity into this industry, which we absolutely have to do.

Absolutely. And looking at the past year, so scaling is a journey, but this past year has been crazy. How has your partnership strategy changed over the past year?

Yeah, I don't know that it's changed, actually. I think this notion of the inevitability of digital transformation and that it is of not just the buzzword but the business imperative which I've been seeing and I hear my partners saying as well, I hear my customers saying it. We've all been hearing the same things. We're all listening to our customers, we're all leaning in. And so I think that has just sort of amplified the need to like move faster and almost grab onto the opportunity. I would say the one thing that is different is customers no longer want an 18 or like 24 months like massive transformation program. They may still do that, but they need much more quick time to value. And we were able to pivot all of those implementations to digital work and it's much more agile now. And I think the notion of like, hey, no, no, no, I want this thing live in like weeks, months, not quarters, years. That is something that we're seeing very consistently. And so how do you continue to make sure, especially for something as big as some of our projects are, how do you make sure you're sort of chunking them up into deliverables that are absolutely aligned to the business value that the customer wants and making sure you're really clear with your, your partner and, and, and, and guiding the customer towards that to make sure that they're seeing value on the along the way is really, really important to that. I think it's amplified and I think it's definitely.

Yeah, great answer. Another great question here in the chat. Do you have any tips for the broader group on how to find the ideal partner profile?

The ideal partner profile, again I don't think there's a one size fits all answer here. I think a partner is one, an ideal partner is one that align, that serves what you need at that based on the kind of technology that you have, the kind of software that you're selling, the kind, the phase of growth that you're in that will ultimate and that has aligned goals with you, right, that you find like that win, win, win. That benefits the customer, that benefits you, that benefits the partner. That's the sort of magic moment and that changes, right? That will evolve over time and that won't be one answer. And so I think the other important thing, and this was actually something that I was talking to Colleen, who runs, who runs this for Snowflake. You need to continually refresh that. So that's like an exercise that you need to do probably every six months or something is being really clear about that. And you have to get cross functional alignment behind that. So it's like does Your product team agree? Do your sales team agree? Does marketing understand, like, you got to get everybody because you have limited resources. Right. You have to be strategic about where you're going to spend your time. And you have to get everybody on the same page. And they may disagree, but it's like, guys, this is what we have to focus on right now. We'll agree that that thing's important, but. But these things are more important right now, Right? So are we all on the same page? Like, this is what we're going to focus on. This is how we're going to define success. We will revisit this conversation in six months. That is actually a really, really important conversation to have in order to get everybody making the most impact on this journey.

That process and alignment you mentioned, Lara, is key because partners, your strategy with partners, have to be aligned with your strategy everywhere else internally. Otherwise, it's just ships in the night.

Yep.

I know we are running up on time here. So before we close things out, Laura, Anisa, any last things you want to share with the group?

No, I've really enjoyed this. I mean, I'm. Anissa and I are easy to find. It's just first, last. @servicenow.com you can feel free to reach out to us. I am, again, like, we're both kind of new to this. We both took. Took over this part of the business in last July. We are learning all the time and, you know, and the answer keeps changing all the time. So would love to connect with you, learn from your experience, and again continue to raise the bar on what we can do with partners in our industry.

Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us today. And to everyone in the crowd, there are a lot of great sessions still on the agenda today. So hope to see you there. Bye, everybody.