hello acquired listeners and welcome back to aq2 our interview series with CEOs and Founders building their companies in real time today we have a conversation with one of the all-time greats Bill McDermot bill is the CEO of service now where he has led the company for the past 5 years he was previously the CEO of global software giant sap and started his career way back at Xerox carrying a bag as a salesperson which we will talk about today yes we focus on something that uh kind of amazingly we haven't really covered yet here at acquired which is the art of Enterprise sales and how Bill does it so very well he's grown service now from 35 billion in Revenue when he joined to over 10 billion today and one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world with nearly a $200 billion market cap we also which is fun for us given how much we love Brands get into why he cares so much about brand building which is obviously usually reserved for Consumer companies not Enterprise software providers yep and many of you will recognize service now since they've been an acquired sponsor the last couple years and as we were thinking about who would be best to talk to about Enterprise sales we realize we actually have a direct line to one of the all-time greats bill is a fascinating guy to spend time with and if you want more of his personal War Stories after listening to this he also recently did a great interview with Ben Thompson over at Strater so with that on to our interview with Bill McDermot so Bill thank you for joining us thank you Ben we want to start I I'm saying thank you for joining us but thank you for having us over here to service now it's great to have you thank you for coming yeah we want to start all the way at the beginning there's a mythical company that we've only talked about on our show from oblique angles we've never hit it headon and that's zerox yeah and in particular Xerox and its Heyday and I'd love to hear from you one how you found your way to zerox because that's an amazing story and two what the path went from in your life to going from an individual contributor salesperson to the the youngest corporate executive in the company's history well thank you very much Ben and David I'm so happy to have you here was an amazing uh story because I was a teenage entrepreneur uh running a delicatess and I put myself through high school and college and obviously I had bigger dreams and one of those dreams was to make it into the Big Apple in New York City and get a job with a premier Corporation that had a great training program um and it just so happened that I sent out a direct mail campaign back then you had to do your own typing and put letters in envelopes and mail them out and Xerox was the company that invited me in there were others two but Xerox was the prestigious one I uh left my uh House in Long Island that day in the midst of a flood and I've told that story before um but I eventually uh make it into New York City and go into the interviewing process at the top of the sixes and that was like the building in Manhattan at the time rotating bar on the top floor overlooking the city very very cool um but the hiring center was somewhere in the middle of the ground floor and the rotating bar and that's where I interviewed for my first sales job and that day I got passed on to many different interviews and I ended up with the final interview at 9 West 57th um at iconic building iconic building back then they called it the Avon building now it's the 9 and a half building but it's right across the street from the plaza um and it's a a magnificent view to Central Park and I eventually get into the interview with the big boss and I have told the story before that I had promised my dad that I was coming home that day with my employee badge in my pocket after we had a very good interview and I never broke a promise to my father and the big boss looks over at me and kind of tilt his head a little bit and like what's up with this kid kid for real yeah is this kid for real and this was kind of a Longshot job right like this was a I mean you were a teenage entrepreneur but you were Scrappy you were not necessarily from Central Casting who they were looking for for this j i I wasn't coming out of an Ivy League school with a called corate pedigree in my family I was coming out of a Teenage entrepreneur who was Scrappy but when I showed up in that interview with my $99 suit it looked like a million bucks and and I was ready to go and you know you're absolutely right um when I first looked around the room you know I see Princeton and Notre Dame and Dartmouth and all these amazing colleges and you know kids that really obviously came from that corporate pedigree and most of them from wealth actually and um it was a little nerve-wracking in the beginning cuz I said damn I might have overshot it with my dad a little bit you know guaranteeing them I was getting the job but after I got in the interview and Mr fulwood said to me as long as you haven't committed any crimes you're hired I validated that because I hadn't committed any crimes I started my career at Xerox and they had at the time the most competitive training program in the information technology industry and Xerox was what today you would think of when you think of Google or Amazon or meta or any of the Great Tech compan tell us you we as Ben alluded to we've talked about Xerox and all the history we cover on the show many times but not directly like what was it what were the products what were they selling why was it the best back then yeah well you know David on the ride into New York City for these interviews I was reading the annual report of Xerox who at the time was being run by the CEO named David Kar and the magic at that time this is 1983 now um the magic of that company at the time was the reinvention to Total Quality Management and people don't realize in this Society we live in now that there once was a thing called total quality management and the way you managed the company the way you built products and the way you conducted your business was extremely formal and there were processes that were very carefully thought through and planned whether you were engineering a product whether you were selling something to a customer and then caring for them in the post sale process all of this was in a value chain built on quality and that was David Kern's gift to Xerox Corporation because Xerox was going through its own reinvention and he had benchmarked what was going on with the Deming principles in Japan Toyota exactly and at that time you know the most valuable companies in the world were from Japan Apple wasn't the most valuable a scary moment for the US right of course and and if you looked at the top 10 companies in valuation more of them were from Japan than the us back then electronics at Sony the automakers are coming in precisely and you know General Motors might have made the list then but Apple wasn't even on the scene at that level just to give you a feel for it and so I got very inspired by a CEO with a dream and as I'm reading this on the Ann the annual report on my way to New York it was forming a shape in my mind that this is where I wanted to be which is why I close so hard for the job but then once you get the job you go into a very serious training curriculum um it was built on something called spin which was situation problem implication and needs payoff and that's called spin and that was clearly this made an impression exactly with you to this day yeah it's still to this day I mean I don't even think about it it's just a um and so what happened was I graduated number one in my training class and why did that matter not because it actually mattered that I got more money but I got a territory and so my territory was 57th to 59th 5th Avenue to park that beautiful Square where you could wear a navy blue suit a white shirt and a nice tie and every day you walked in the most beautiful neighborhood in the the world and when you say you had a territory I mean you were your job was to walk into office building lobbies exactly cold unannounced unannounced and try and get meetings with Buyers exactly and so what I what I did is I realized early on that that was my patch like this was my piece of the world and I felt when I walked down that street I was the king of the world and when I walked in those buildings I knew every doorman I knew everything about them their families what interest they had what sports team was their favorite and I didn't miss an opportunity to drop a cup of coffee on my way up the elevator to the top floor in the building and now if you fast forward to today why is that so wild because today you can't even get in the building without ID and somebody vouching for you and security letting you through some things we had to go through to get right I think we signed an NDA before I even knew what was going on I mean exactly so I'm on the loose this A Lost Art right 100% but I'm on the loose and you know then it just came down to the number one rule in sales is it's a numbers game and I was not going to be outworked so that was not going to happen so I'd start at the top floor I work my way all the way down if somebody moved into into the building moved out of the building something was changing in the building there was a new Co forming I had all my webs around what was going on in my turf and this is a dumb question are you selling photocopiers I was selling photocopiers electronic typewriters faxes and Laser Printers and this was the very early day of those Laser Printers and then that manifested itself in something called you know document this and document that which were BAS basically what you would View today as um a beautiful Windows level computer that operated with the ease of a Mac and had gorgeous user interfaces and so on this is Xerox was so far ahead in so many ways um and didn't capitalize on all those Innovations which is another story um that I can get into but the sales profession is a magnificent profession and um I had worked my way up very quickly uh through the sales ranks and you know when you're number one in the country or number one in the world people give you promotions and I always tell people in sales and I said it then performance is the price of freedom I never wanted to sit in internal meetings and have a boss telling me what to do or how to do it so what I would just tell them is I'll be number one in the country or number one in the world just let me run because if I'm inside this building sitting in boring meetings looking at PowerPoints I'm wasting my day I need to be loose and on the loose and my managers to their credit were very happy with that because at Xerox they wanted to post up big numbers so is this bucking the culture at zerox or was this part for the course it was feeding the culture because the manag is like okay you know you got to come to my team meeting occasionally but I want people that want to be out there on the run on the loose so somehow corporations got very bureaucratic and I think we need to unleash that sales animal that animal Instinct in people and let them run but that's my opinion anyhow what I realized is after doing several of these jobs and getting promoted into bigger and bigger things I got my high on people coming into my little Bullpen when I was be sharpening my saw in the morning or at the end of the day asking me questions and I would tell them what I thought they should do and then when they were not performing or having difficulties they would ask me to travel with them as a favor and I was like I'd be happy to do that and I would go on calls with them give them pointers and then actually be on the call and kind of take over the call for them not so I do their job but just so I give them my you ask me my opinion this is what I think we should do and when I see that they're fumbling around I just did a forum and then I was like this is what makes me happy making them happy helping them be successful is kind of what I was called to do this is what I love doing so my first sales management job I wasn't even in my mid 20s yet took place when I interviewed against a lot of other folks that were probably more qualified candidly for the job than a guy in his 25ish yeah but in hindsight that was that's not true that's not true but at the time you know I felt that man I'd be a real stretch because there was a professional management training curriculum you had to study you had to be credentialed you had to interview in front of a panel of very accomplished Executives at the Xerox company and I felt like yeah I'm I'm a comer but these guys are and women are more experienced and they've been there longer and they probably deserve it more and I interviewed against all the other ones and got the job and when you were moving into this management job did that mean no longer carrying a bag and making sales calls or or is this a hybrid role or that that's a good question um it means that I'm the manager of 17 other people that are carrying bags and we were covering the Uptown of Manhattan from 57th Street to um let's say 242nd Street in the Bronx and we had both River to River so you had north south east west everything from 57 to let's say 242nd in the Bronx so everything from Park Avenue to Harlem to the South Bronx and so forth we were in it all and that was so cool um and and I think that people might be interested to know like why did you get the job and I got the job because I went in with a 100 day action plan and I laid out in very basic simple terms exactly what I would do in the first 100 days other people didn't have a wellth through action plan and then the final thing was I wanted it more and what basically happened with that team is it was so cool because we took young people right at a university we shaped them around the market in which we competed and served they looked like they belonged in the market and we had philosophies around being the best in the world around goal orientation we posted the top three goals that each person had on the team on a wall next to the bell and it wasn't just about your business goals it was your personal goals and what you wanted to achieve as a person what was the most important motivator inside of you and then we had a philosophy around discretionary effort so I might be best in class at proposals or I might be best in class at closing or I might be best at class as how to manage activities and do Financial Accounting or maybe in grammar and putting together the best letters and Communications we figured out who was the best at every single thing and then it was everybody's job to give discretionary effort so 80% of your job was for you personally the other 20% was for your team cuz we had to win as a team and nobody gets to fail so nobody gets to fail was the Mantra of the team and everybody has to make the president's Club at the time which was the top performers in the company and it was the only time you're saying everybody on your team had to make president's CL everybody so you're say I mean this sounds great this is very hard to do I mean you're getting people 17 people each of whom are trying to eat what they killt to now care about the team totally we were like a family we did everything together um you know for example my man in the Bronx was Everton Harrison he covered the north Bronx and Tony Garcia covered the South Bronx and Bill Atkins covered Harlem and you know it went all the way through the team and we were always on the loose we were always in front of the customer in fact one of the funny stories is Everton I love thinking about on the Loose as it's like well on the loose you know it should always feel that way right do you feel that way now I feel right now I'm so on the loose you know and I love being on the loose because I do my best work when I'm not confined and I try to empower everybody around me I don't want them to seek permission I was just in a meeting and I said look it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission you're a professional you're very good at what you do or you wouldn't be in this room make the decision make moves do things I'd rather have roughly right executed right now than perfect two weeks from now now roughly right is going to be good enough especially in a world that's moving as fast as this one but we knew each other I had a an email that came in this week from one of the members of the team and he said I don't know if you remember me I remember you and I said oh no I remember you cuz I remember when we had the team outing at your father's house in bayad New Jersey and we would do things like that as a team on the weekend I had my whole team at my first house and doing to sleepover and spending time together getting to know each other caring about each other building those friendships building that trust building that desire to be the best and that's what it takes you know Everton one of the great stories is he had this red Volo with a hole in the floor where the muffler is in the car and he used to love cocoa bread and meat patties and we'd stop at this place in the Bronx to get cocoa bread and meat patties and he would put it on the floor underneath the driver's seat to keep it warm so when we got to 57th Street the whole team could feast and it was you know all these things where Bill Atkins had this gym in Harlem that he could get to open up for us to play full court basketball so everybody had something but also it wasn't just work it was something personal that we could connect on and team up on and that team today is still you know in people's hearts and Minds has probably the greatest new business team of all time wow so I gotta ask you you are I mean David and I have had the privilege of meeting with a lot of leaders especially the last couple years as acquired has gotten big you are the best Enterprise sales leader we've ever come across like you were um you're in a whole another League H how did that happen like how did you become this incredibly unique person and I guess part two of my question is for all the entrepreneurs that are listening what should they take away if they want to become a great Enterprise leader well thank you very much uh first of all Ben for your kind remarks I I have to go back to my book wi is dream you know when I put wi is dream into print it was basically as a byproduct of losing my mom way too young um in 2010 and in doing the book I started think about these stories you know things that I live live through and I dedicated the book to my mother Kathleen mcder everything I was am orever will be I owe it all to you and then I followed that up with a quote from the great Robert Kennedy um and he was quoting George Bernard Shore at a speech he was doing at Kansas University in 19 uh 68 and he basically said some men see things as they are and say why I dreamed things that never were say why not so I think the whole sales thing came from you know really um early early stages you know delivering newspapers when you were too young to get permission from the Long Island press to actually do it that your parents had to sign off on it and then somebody had to trust you with the consignment of the first stack of them because each week you had to pay for the papers it wasn't like you get a privilege you're paying for them you're nothing more than a quote unquote agent and then you know pumping gas at Meritt gas station and just trying to stay awake on the midnight shift or busing tables or stocking shelves at a supermarket or working for the town painting fences or cleaning up garbage and many other different jobs and then ultimately Landing my dream job which was owning my own delicatess and all that gave me such humility and empathy for people and people are my love and superpower and so in the deli you know it looks accidental that I got the job at Xerox but I was the only guy to talk to 500 people a day and knew what they wanted knew what they liked knew what was important to them so I just simply went into being me mode and as long as you yourself going up and down the buildings in the doormen and the exactly but you know that only was made possible before because you got through the interviewing cycle why'd you get through the interviewing cycle why'd you get the job um and then why' you you know why'd you figure out that the doorman was the central nervous system of the building you know all that stuff comes from the Spidey instincts that comes from understanding people and loving people and being with people but being real with people and reading the rooms you got to be able to read the room uh otherwise you land but you don't expand because you have nothing interesting to say you're not in tune with the room so it's uh it's very funny to hear you say all this because um we've been waiting for the right time to bring this up but there's another major figure in acquired lore history who we've had on the show who has basically the exact same backr is yours and I believe you are also good friends Howard Schultz absolutely and that is exactly how he would describe Starbucks culture yeah Howard is uh like a brother from a different mother I love Howard and we're very very much alike and and I know that we both had the Xerox experience I stayed a little bit longer um did you cross paths there I don't we didn't cross paths I think Howard had you know already gone on to U bigger and better things um but I had talked to Howard probably 3 months ago when service now won the American Opportunity index out of the top 440 companies that Howard surveyed and this is his philanthropic unit they survey how the people are individually progressing and prospering in your company but also when they leave your company how do those people do and service now one two years in a row for top Tech technology company and top five regardless of Industry out of the 440 in the world so I think that's a true Testament to the fact that Howard's belief in people match mine so let's say I'm a founder of a company it's small at this point it's 10 20 people we're a B2B company we make some software we sell it to other businesses and I want to become a great Enterprise company right what's your advice to me the most important thing is you have to stop thinking about yourself and how great your Tech is and how much you're so proud of your Tech because nobody cares as much as you what you have to understand is what somebody is trying to do with their strategy the vision and dream they have for their company it can be Tactical where it might be an efficiency or productivity play or it can be strategic where it might be a business model Innovation play and they're going after a new market or thinking around corners that they haven't even crossed yet it could be a lot of things based on what your product is but they are hiring your product to do a job and the most important thing you can do is understand your product and understand the job that they would likely hire your product for four so on the outside looking in you already have a perspective of where it all fits because if you don't go to that table having a prescriptive notion of what might be possible delay the meeting until you get your act together because a lot of times people go into the meeting and they can't possibly read the room because they have no idea what the room might even think of for their product so everyone's dancing around thinking about where does it fit is never go in with just like oh this is my off the-shelf sales pitch you need like a need to understand the problem the customer has before you even walk in exactly they're hiring your Tech to do a job and they're not going to hire you Tech to do the job unless they have some Uris sixs on an expected outcome from this relationship meaning the time um the treasure and the value and I do apply the concept of design thinking in my mind to these meetings which is do we have the big idea a so you know this idea of the dream what is the big idea and then there's the feasibility like you know can we actually do it in a time frame and a return that makes sense and ultimately viability you know is there a business rationale or business case to get something done and usually you know those things desirability feasibility and viability are very manageable but you have to to know your business and you have to know the customer's business and you have to understand what they're trying to achieve and there's a lot of research that needs to go into these meetings there's a lot of things on the outside that you should study before you get on the inside and for God's sake when you show up read the room because because usually whatever you thought the meeting was going to be like when you first meet the human on the other side of a table it's going to change yeah you don't know what meeting they just had you don't know in what way their heads space just got frazzled how do you like to do this I mean you again you best know you walk into a room how do how do you like to read the room I just want to be in the room with you and I'm extremely comfortable in those settings and I want how you doing and what's on your mind today and tell me you know how's your business going tell me your story um I noticed something you know before IID come in about a different topic and it could be and it usually is completely unrelated to Capital interests but it's much more tied to human interests um there are philanthropic things people do there are social things people do there are all very knowable before you walk in the room precisely there are hobbies that people have that they find great interest in you know don't jump in to the deep end of the pool you can you can walk you can walk you know start out in the kitty pool and work your way up to the deep end um but people have this tendency to lay the Powerpoints out there and which I totally am against and Jump Right In um give it a few minutes to warm up before you go into these things do you ever read the room and your answer is my product has no place here and decide what we're not engaging any any any sale today would be an extremely rare occurrence I suspect it all right so let's let's Bridge it to service now in your mind what is the customer hiring your cooltech to do the most important thing that the customer needs is they need to automate the way work is done if you look at 20th Century companies I came in here to help make service now the defining enterprise software company of the 21st century and people would say what do you mean by that and why do you just say that because most of the architectures that we um work with in today's Enterprise have been out there for six decades and the 20th Century Corporation was designed in functional silos you had Finance you had HR you had sales you had customer service you had engineering but these are all silos of a corporation in those silos they heavily invested in silos specific technology my finance system my HR System my manufacturing system my sales system engineering and so forth when the iPhone moment hit it came after the internet and the move to the cloud it came into view with the iPhone in 2007 and we all had the iPhone moment which set off the rage for mobile business and they started to work more and more across these silos and they realized wow I can't execute my business processes properly because my system is built only for finance but I need to engage sales I have a people equation I might even have an a question for the legal department um the engineer might be building a product the salesperson might be selling it so I need to look at processes order to cash procure to pay hire to retire I mean these are normal phrases that you'll hear but the real issue is they're working across these departments these systems have entrenched thems so deeply in these companies that big scale Executives almost don't want to touch it these are the canonical systems of records your CRM your Erp your HR System you got it and CEO hris the CEO is busy and these are landmines that they know have a lot of complexity associated with them a lot of cost associated with them and they by the way each of those many many tens of billions dollar market cap companies associated with providing them exactly and these companies are all excellent companies in their own right my my issue is not that they're not excellent at what they do they wouldn't be as big as they are if they weren't excellent at what they do my point is where do we come in because they're going to do their thing and we're going to automate those business processes across all of those silos and in a sense my way of looking at it is make all those silos better in fact I think all of them if they chose to strongly push for service now would make their systems more relevant cuz then they could say hey I have a service now platform that resides above what I'm doing at the system of record level they highly cooperate with me they integrate with me and my data can be activated in that workflow and with a agentic AI you can use service now as the control tower for that work how it flows the connection to that data they don't care if that data is in hyperscaler cloud or it's in a a data lake or it's in a system of record they have Raptor DB which is the best database in the world that connects with structured and unstructured they integrate with all the large language models and they can run in any hyperscale of Cloud 2 so by using that as the control tower or the AI for business transformation we can actually make our story stronger because if your story is you paid me S 100 million to implement this system and now I'm back for sever several hundred million more to reimplement this system and it's the same basic system with the same challenges it had 50 years ago one might say that's not the best way to use my capital and and you're not saying it but I'll say it just for listeners uh you're referring to Erp implementations it could be Erp CRM it could be CRM it could be all these things that they're not there in their own right but what you have is you have these systems which are in a department yeah um many of these big companies have you might find this interesting up to a couple hundred different instances of these systems in each of these silos sometimes you'll have an HR System for every 1,000 employees in the government and you might say how can that even happen well think about six decades and every four years you have a new Administration that rolls in or some new leaders that roll in and every one of them wants to do it their way the old stuff never went away and so the mess just gets worse and then you put agentic AI into the equation where people are like hey buy my agents too so let's reimplement the new version of something that's been out there six decades and let me give you the agents that are going to make it work better and so now you have agents on top of something that's been there for six decades adding even more complexity to it because those agents are going to have to work with the other agents in the other departments just like people have to work with the people in the other departments and who's going to do this well that's why we design a business that not only integrates the department and the people but also the agents and so we think we're on the AI platform for business transformation road to inevitable success because it makes so much sense this makes so much common sense that I almost sometimes feel like wow how many times do you have to actually say it before it gets through to all these sea level Executives that you don't have to go on a force March there's a new and a better way okay Bill this sounds so obvious and correct and such a clean story what is the hardest part of selling service now the biggest thing is getting to the corner office because once the CEO hears this they actually get riled up because I had one on the phone uh yesterday which was the end of my business day which was very interesting cuz I had met him at a meeting last week in Washington and he asked me for a talk and we had we had a talk and I explained you know what's going on and he said yeah you know I'm so frustrated with the amount I put into that and it's been several years now and it's still not done and then my HR System is so unacceptable because my users don't like using it and all they do is chronically complain and I don't have visibility into my people their training their onboard in and how they're actually using the system in a way where they don't need the HR department they don't need 800 numbers they don't need to be looking around for information they should have a single view of anything that they have a question about in my company you know we have one platform where you can sell fulfill and service not several different platforms with hundreds of instances depending on what country and what industry you're in and you just think about this level of chaos and I've got a simple idea and Common Sense and simplicity is what this story is all about um so it sounds like from what you're saying this really service now has to be a CEO sale the the CEO is the only one who's going to be able to see across all these different they're they're the one that's going to be able to see simple um as D Vin once said the ultimate form of sophistication is Simplicity itself only the CEO has that clean glass purview to a clean glass platform that does everything I just said but there is good news even if it happens on a departmental level it Finance HR sales engineering you can tie it together with service now like a Lego set so you can't make any mistakes in the end you get to the same place where you're going to have one clean paint PL paint of glass that's your AI platform for business transformation you're going to be able to integrate all your procedures you're going to be able to put on WRA a DB the connectors for all your data structured and unstructured you're going to be able to integrate with all your systems of record flawlessly the top 700 in the world and you're going to have a beautifully run exceptional company why do I say the CEO is the preferred option only because they're paid to have a broad vision of the whole Enterprise they're paid to do what's right for the Enterprise the people the customers and the shareholders without any any appendage to the Past whereas underneath that everyone's well-meaning but they don't look at the World Through The Eyes of the CEO that's why companies have CEOs but um you know we work with the CTO the head of uh um the CIO of course the head of data the head of AI the head of all of these departments but we try to also use those relationships to work with each other and also to bring the CEO some good news that hope is on the way there's another way that you're unusual as a CEO and I think service now is unusual as an Enterprise company you care about brand in the way that some of the best consumer brands in the world care about brand where does that come from and why do you feel that that's an interesting strategy for a B2B Enterprise company yeah to be a brand Le company is what it's all about because the brand is your identity it's your DNA it's who you are and it's really what you're trying to convey to a broad group of customers in a global economy in the the simplest way possible and our Dream tagline for the brand is the world works with service now and that was my way of tying it to the defining enterprise software company of 21st century but you can't be that unless you're the World's company and you have to make things work you know when Ford works with service now the world works because Ford does so many things things for the world so always seeing the world through the customer eyes and what they're trying to do and being a brand Le company that has the empathy for the customer is what we want it to be all about and in our latest um iteration of the story is some really cool commercials out there with Idris Elba you know Idris is our brand ambassador and he will be for a multi-year level uh relationship because he believes in what we are doing and we're working with him on the reinvention of sherbro Island for example and really bringing that Tech knoow water um systems things that can create a more prosperous nation and we have a project going because that was very important to him because his dad was from Sierra Leon and he wants to give something back so it's not just about you're a brand ambassador it's that you believe believe in the brand and what the brand can do to improve people's lives and that's really what it's all about and in a new Ed you'll notice that Idris is talking about Ai and AI in every corner of the Enterprise which is talking to The Silo mess that I took you through in this conversation we're making the point we can bring it to every corner of the Enterprise and no one else can which is absolutely true so I think um being a brand Le company that makes great products the best products in the world that provides the best service in the world that brings the best team in the world to the relationship and that has the most prolific ecosystem standards it's not enough just to have Partners you have to have partners that are well trained that are committed to the brand that stand for the same shared values and goals as you do at service now and all of that has to come together to make a brand extraordinary to make the brand the best in the world and so my dream is in the not too distant future you already see us climbing the leaderboard toward the best brand but I believe that service now has the potential to be a top 10 brand I could say number one but I have to say top 10 because in this world of consumer brand and the notoriety of consumer brands most Enterprise companies aren't well known and this is not the standard playbook for a what what do you think the best existing Enterprise brand is well I mean it wouldn't be um too hard to to give Apple a lot of credit um because of the magnificence of the experience that you have with the Apple device and the the feeling uh that that brand gives you but it's that it's the power that comes from their consumer side that like of Enterprise companies Microsoft but I mean Microsoft again or Amazon right like you know yes they have these great Brands but like they have the consumer side the consumer side they all have the consumer side and everyone you mentioned is fantastic Google's a great brand Amazon's a great brand Microsoft's a great brand Apple's a great brand um and all of them do have an Enterprise side um the reason I probably just came with apple a little bit is just from my own bias because I have two in my pocket and you know whether you're whether I'm doing business or I'm on my private time I'm somehow associating with that brand and then that brand can take you into the apple plus experience and you know many different ecosystem partners that reside on the iPhone so this is an enormous complex ecosystem that they have made look and perform in a very simple way so I think that they deserve a lot of credit for that one other area I wanted to ask you about this is partnering uh you know service you hear Jess and Nvidia talk about service now all the time you guys are a great partner at the Enterprise that's um I'm realizing there conversation really necessary for your strategy right like you know if you're a CRM player you're not really incentivized to be a great partner like you want to displace the other crms right what you guys you know are trying to do here is convince all the other big Enterprise software companies out there that like no no no when your customers work with us we make you better like that that is the that's how do you do that as a CEO to convince those CEOs that like oh no I'm not your enemy here right well I I'm not so sure I've done that um not because we're perceived as an enemy but they perceive a zero sum game in the sense that they probably think well if service now is doing extremely well budget dollars are moving to them that would have otherwise been mine and I don't subscribe to that because I think the more closely knitted tech companies can be the more the prize is for the customer and the more that's left over of those winnings to be reinvested back into Tech where that Rising tide can literally lift all boats and it's a very small incremental piece of the value you deliver for the customer relationship that we actually get and that um um you know they should be very happy to see happen because again it's going to make their system much more relevant and much more current um and again I'm I'm not suggesting that those aren't fantastic companies they wouldn't be as big as they are if they weren't but I tell you guys the AI Revolution is a different ball game and it's moving so quickly and there's going to be a few platforms that really matter and the ones that really matter are the ones that are on the side of the customer and they're going to have to do things that they didn't used to do they're going to have to get used to the fact that service now is a company on the move and service now is on the side of the customer you're loose we're loose we're loose we're on the move I love it um well Bill uh the only other question that I sort of have here is do you ever find yourself understanding a customer pain point so specifically where you say ah we've got a feature for you there's an amazing feature of our product or do you think that that entire way of selling is just wrong and you must focus on the dream instead well it depends because you could have a a financial services company as an example that has a regulatory challenge that is extremely pressing to the CEO and in that moment in time if that CEO is worried about the regulator the feature or the capability of your platform in that specific domain might be incredibly important to just focus on because sometimes people are interested in the big picture and they want to hear the solution and the platform story but other times they're completely compelled or preoccupied with a specific issue but notice I didn't talk about the feature I talked about the regulatory environment and what they're absolutely focused on so in that case you would come you say spin situation ISS situation problem implication needs payoff okay I understand the situation this is the problem the implication of that problem is if The Regulators don't buy in to the way you're running the company we have a company at risk in billions that could be on the table um and the needs payoff is this little feature comes in there and fixes everything and I can have it up and running for you quickly my people your people and this is what it's going to look like when it's done but all that said you better deliver so the thing about um you know the very nice compliment that you pay me Ben is that you can't find anyone where I made a promise and I didn't keep it and what's interesting about you know having a word that matters on the street is it's not like when I show up they think I'm there to like do some knitting exercise they know why I'm there um but they also know that if I have something they can hire to do a job and we can have a common interest in an outcome and I can move my version of My Little World in Heaven and Earth to deliver for them and I do deliver for them then we use their time wisely and we did the right thing for them and for service now and for everybody that cares about you know this franchise uh so it's a win-win it's a virtuous Cycle World everybody should be aggressive on the loose on the move and guys I got to tell you the most important thing is the bureaucracy has to stop the you know the the canned this and that has to stop but at the same time you can't leave people behind I think what we're going to remember most about the era we're in right now is did we put the people first did we recognize that they came to work to win did we give them every opportunity to be trained to learn to be certified to home their craft did we give them the tools and also did we celebrate the joy of work I love work work clear but work for me work for me was like such a beautiful thing you know I can remember making 265 an hour I can remember making 20 bucks for 20 hours work on a New Year's Eve at Amato's Italian restaurant in amiva with a tuxedo on as a as a a floater I can remember a lot of things but what I also remember is all the great memories I have was moments like this where I was with other people and a lot of people waged the argument like hey man you got to get back to work you got to get back to the office and what is really happening out there is co did a lot of damage Co convinced people that they don't live to work that they work to live and that's a big change in society but what I did is I put out a LinkedIn story you know on my Monday motive ation and I basically said the biggest problem that we have in society today is the destruction of time and what's happening is people are burned out but they're burned out for the wrong reasons it's not where their domicile it's not necessarily where their body is it's where their mind is their mind is stuck inside a device it gets in there early in the morning and it doesn't get out out of there until almost the next morning and so the mind isn't resting but also where they spend their time is very isolated and to me the reason to get with people ideally on the street running around helping customers win is to be with other people because I've never met a person yet that loves to talk about their golf score without mentioning the other three people in the four do a great job we are social people we need to be with people we need to celebrate people we need to celebrate the joy of work again and that's what's at stake here building great companies that have amazing cultures where people truly want to be with the people and they want to learn and grow with the people and build that Bond of trust you know trust is uh built in drops it's lost in buckets and the the only place to find it is with your family your friends and your colleagues at work so I don't think you're going to find it in the Dead Space of a device because if that's the centerpiece of your world you're going to have a lot of Broken Dreams because in the end the device will still be sitting on the table and it won't miss you so close to AGI but not there yet yeah got it Bill thanks so much thank you very much appreciate it David you thank you so much appreciate you guys thank you