In the latest episode of The Platform Journey, Avanish sits down with Kevin Haverty, Board Member at Sprinklr and former ServiceNow executive.
This season will feature conversations with key decision-makers who have to support the journey to a platform or any ecosystem. We will talk to C-suite executives, board members, investors, and others who must be bought into the platform journey.
In this episode, Avanish and Kevin discuss:
Guest: Kevin Haverty
Kevin Haverty was formerly the Vice Chairman, Global Public Sector at ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW). In this role, he worked directly with CEO Bill McDermott on expanding ServiceNow’s strategic footprint in the public sector and mentoring the company’s next generation of early-in-career professionals.
During the past decade, Kevin successfully led and grew ServiceNow’s world-class go-to-market organization. He most recently served as the company’s Chief Revenue Officer, and also held the roles of EVP and SVP of Worldwide Sales and VP of Americas Sales.
Earlier in his career, Kevin held several senior sales leadership roles at EMC, Data Domain, Thomsen Financial, and Brocade. He also served 10 years in the U.S. Army National Guard, attaining the rank of Captain.
Kevin holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Providence College, where he was a distinguished military graduate of the Army ROTC program. He currently serves on the Board of Sprinklr.
Host: Avanish Sahai
Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow. From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase. Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.
About Tidemark
Tidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale. Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years. Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.
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Avanish: Today I’m absolutely thrilled to have a dear friend, former colleague, and former boss, on the show – Kevin Haverty. Kevin is a legendary leader in sales across a few companies – I’ll ask him to introduce himself – but also one of the most thoughtful people. And I think it’s just a delight to have the chance to hear his perspectives and share some of his lessons. So, Kevin, welcome to The Platform Journey.
00:31 Kevin: Thank you, Avanish. It’s great to be here. It’s great to see you. We worked together for so many years, it’s nice to reconnect in the next phase of our careers.
00:42 Avanish: Perfect. So Kevin, just for context, why don’t we take a couple of minutes and give us a bit of your personal background. You’ve had an amazing trajectory and history, so just talk a bit about that, your personal career journey.
00:56 Kevin: Sure. Yeah. I came up the ranks as a salesperson. I used to like to say I’ve never not carried a quota. That changed this year when I finally stepped away and retired, or semi-retired, I guess.
01:11 But I’m a career salesperson. I’ve carried a bag since day one, in the early years as a salesperson, and then eventually a sales manager, and over time an executive. Most of my career has been in tech. I spent a good long time at EMC, which is now part of Dell. A great company, really strong sales leadership. That’s where I really learned how to build and run a sales organization.
01:49 And then I went over to Data Domain. That’s where I met the executive team there, Frank Slootman, David Schneider, Mike Scarpelli. And we had a really great and innovative solution. Eventually, we were acquired by EMC, so I ended up back in the mothership, if you will. And then a lot of the executive team from EMC/Data Domain followed Frank Slootman over to ServiceNow. And I was one of those folks. I got to ServiceNow at the tail end of 2011 and spent an amazing 12 years there.
02:28 And just to give a little perspective on how big ServiceNow was at that time, 2011, it was about a hundred million in sales. It was a single-product company, IT Service Management. We had one SKU, IT Service Management Fulfiller. And today, ServiceNow is a $10 billion-plus juggernaut that just continues to grow at a fast pace.
02:54 So most of the time there, I either ran the America sales or worldwide sales, and most of the go-to-market functions that go along with that.
03:03 Avanish: Perfect. I mean, first of all, what a crew you’ve had a chance to work with. Obviously, I know all of them. Also, iconic companies. And now you’re doing some board work. So now you did mention you’re somewhat retired. I don’t think any of us retire.
[Laughter]
03:22 We rewire. So now you’re on a couple of boards, is that right?
03:25 Kevin: Yeah. I’m on the board of a small professional services company around artificial intelligence called Lydonia, which is based in Boston. And then I’m on the board of Sprinklr, which is a publicly traded software company based out of New York City. And I was on the board of Drift for three years, and then Drift was acquired by Vista Equity Partners. So I continue to learn and develop as a board member in my post-operating career.
03:59 Avanish: Yeah. So you’ve seen the operating role. You’ve seen the executive role. And now you’re seeing the board role. But you had a pretty significant role in driving the platform and ecosystem strategy at, again, one of the most iconic companies. I think ServiceNow is now hovering around a $200 billion market cap. Which is just mind-blowing, right?
04:26 So in that process, how has your thinking evolved around platforms and around how to bring value to customers through an ecosystem? I’d just like to get a bit of high-level thinking of how things started and how you perceive things now in the industry.
04:44 Kevin: Yeah. You know, the word platform is in vogue now. So you hear it a lot. Everybody wants to be known as a platform. But you have to really be a platform to claim that you’re a platform. And what I learned at ServiceNow was, the product was brought to market as a platform first, and then it had a set of applications built on that platform. So I think ServiceNow had the high ground on being able to say, authentically, from day one, this is a technology platform.
05:22 It was initially built to develop applications, and the first application that ServiceNow brought to market happened to be IT Service Management. So words matter. I used to like to think of ServiceNow as a platform company that’s selling an app on that platform. Not an app company. And so, once you understand that and what it means, that really helps you scale as a business and as a solution by adding more apps on that platform and basically capturing more market across the enterprise.
06:02 Avanish: Yeah. That, again, I think is absolutely critical. So that evolution, from being born as a platform and really coming to market as an ITSM app, and then the journey to multi-products with security and HR and customer service, and then re-exposing the platform. I mean, that’s a pretty unique journey. What are some of the signals that you, as a sales leader, whether within ServiceNow or whether now in other roles, you’d say – again, you did mention you have to earn the right to be and have the higher ground – what are some of the signals you look for and say, you know, this is both a potential platform opportunity, but also, what are some of those core internal signals or external signals that you look for to say, yes, this is a time to think about it, before you actually execute on that?
06:56 Kevin: Yeah. I think the most important thing is listen to your customers. So your customers use your solution for one particular use case, generally. And what happened at ServiceNow was, our customers very quickly would expand the use case. They would buy it for IT service management. In the early days they would buy it to automate their help desk. And then, all of a sudden, they would develop an app on ServiceNow and say, hey, we built this app to allow our employees to request new business cards, or whatever the function happened to be.
07:37 And so, over time, we noticed our customers expanding the use case. And once we saw some patterns, we said, okay – for example, human resources is an area where a lot of our customers were using IT service management to manage their human resources operations, to do their case management. And we were supportive of our customers. But eventually we said, we want to industrialize this. We want to become a human resources provider.
08:10 So we added functionality. We got the right nomenclature. We hired the right product management expertise. And the right marketing. And over time, we went from ServiceNow, a company that sells to IT, to ServiceNow, the company that sells to…name the function. In this example, human resources.
08:36 So there’s a lot to it, Avanish. It’s not just the product’s capability. It’s also all the things that go around that, that I’m happy to talk with you about and my experience with them.
08:51 Avanish: Yeah. So let’s dive into that a little bit more. As you see that input come from the customers, obviously, what you describe is a pretty substantial commitment of technology resources, other resources in the sales function and support function, etc. Are there particular milestones that you would say, hey, if someone is looking at it from a metrics perspective, size or number of customers, is there anything like that that should trigger that change? Or is it more just keeping a tight view of what the customers are doing and saying, hey, what kind of investment does this require?
09:32 Kevin: So the first thing I think, you need to think, number one, are we the right type of technology for this domain? And that’s table stakes. And so, in the case of ServiceNow, the platform was very flexible. Anything that had to do with approvals, requests, workflow, forms, those things we knew, that was the core functionality of the platform at the time. And so, that’s basically what human resources/case management is all about. So is the product appropriate for that space? Check.
10:11 And then, once you know that, is the market big enough to make it worth it? And so, we did a little bit of research on how big that marketplace is, and we determined that it definitely was.
10:24 And then, once you decide, yeah, the product would be a good fit there, yes, the market’s big enough, I would say the third thing is, does the market need you? Or are you just going to be yet another player in that space with a commodity product that’s on par with everybody else? And that’s a big one.
10:46 So I’ll use another example of a market that we didn’t go into with ServiceNow in those days, and we could have, and that was CRM. The ServiceNow platform was actually very well suited to develop a good CRM app on it. And, in fact, we used it internally as our CRM, and it was excellent. But when we looked at the market, in those days Salesforce was kind of the de facto standard in CRM. And we decided the market didn’t need us there. There were other areas where we could be a game changer as opposed to an also-ran. We didn’t see that we had enough differentiation to make it worth our while to go and compete in the CRM space. So we decided not to.
11:32 So just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. And that requires some discipline. And another area where we did decide to go is customer service management, or what’s known today as customer workflows. Now that’s another space where Salesforce actually was present. They were doing well. And we didn’t just run from it because, oh, there’s already a player there doing well. We felt like we had technical differentiation. Definable differentiation on the value proposition. Because of our roots in IT and all the assets of the company being in our CMDB and all of our information that we had and how we were helping our customers already. Service was a great extension for us.
12:24 And we had a service go-to-market that we felt was differentiated, that we felt the market needed. And that’s been a complete home run for ServiceNow because that’s a huge, multi-billion-dollar business now. So that’s another example of, is the product well suited for that? Yes. Is the market big? Yes. Does the market need us? In that case, yes. And that’s why we had success there.
12:52 Avanish: I love how you framed that, Kevin, because, again, I think both the customer centricity of it but also the ability and willingness to say no to what could look like big TAM. But, again, if we haven’t earned the right to play in that space for competitive reasons, market size reasons, whatever it may be, then I think that call is super important.
13:18 Which brings me to another related point, which is – and you mentioned this in the past – bringing in the right talent. What are some of the attributes that you think the team, broadly defined, from product to marketing to sales to customer success, etc., what are some of those attributes that need to start expanding, reshaping, etc., and how do you go about thinking about that?
13:52 Kevin: In our case, I think a pivotal moment at ServiceNow was when the company decided, in about 2015, to get serious about these other domains, outside of IT. And actually organize the engineering department and product department by product. And put a general manager over each one of the different product suites that we were going after. We had already sold some in those domains, but now we were saying, okay, we’re serious, we’re putting a general manager over each one of these products. They’re going to wake up every day, and all they’re going to think about is human resources, for example, in the case of HR.
14:34 And then product marketing. We’re going to hire experts who really understand this market. They really understand the messaging. They really understand the lingo. Because what we learned, Avanish, is you can’t show up, calling on a CHRO and talking to them like they’re a technology person. Like they were in IT. It’s just different language. It’s different lingo. It’s different business challenges.
14:57 So I think, from a product standpoint, you have to have product expertise on what the market’s looking for, what’s already available, and how we’re going to develop our product to be differentiated and add more value for our customers. And then your messaging needs to align. That’s where product marketing comes in.
15:17 And then everything, all the way down the line. Your website. You have to look like… If somebody from HR wants to check out ServiceNow, they have to look like they’re dealing with a company that sells to HR. Not a company that sells to IT.
15:33 Avanish: That knows their function and their business. Right.
15:35 Kevin: Knows their function and their business, speaks their language. And then that rolls through the go-to-market organization. We reluctantly built a specialty sales organization who were domain experts in HR, who could help our core reps be relevant in that space. And the reason I say reluctantly is, it’s expensive to have a specialty sales organization on top of your core sales organization.
16:00 Obviously, everybody would rather keep it simple, have one go-to-market team, and not have to have the complexity of specialization. But the reality is, if you want to penetrate that space, you have to really show up right. So there’s a lot to it. And the company has to decide, if you’re going to go into that space, you’ve got to go in to win, and you need to have a good understanding of what’s required.
16:31 Even the ecosystem. What’s the partner go-to-market that we’re going to need to be successful here? How are we going to get this solution implemented in our customers’ environment? So that whole 360-degree go-to-market needs to all be identified, resourced, and opened. And, like I said, that’s no small task.
17:00 That’s why, if I go back to the original three things – would the product work well there, does the marketplace need us, and is the TAM big – once you know those, now, I think the fourth one is, does the company have the conviction to go after the space and play to win? Because you can’t really just do it halfway. You have to really go in and give it everything. Otherwise, you’re not going to succeed.
17:27 Avanish: So, as often, it seems like you’re reading my mind. So you opened the door on ecosystem. So we talked about the platform and the platform decisions and building the new products aligning with the market. Obviously, I joined in 2016, once that transition was under way, with a focus on helping build out the ecosystem strategy.
17:53 Do you distinguish those two? Does a platform strategy require an ecosystem strategy? Do you think those can happen in parallel? Talk a bit about your perception from, again, a senior sales leader and now a board member. How do you think about – I sometimes think about those as two sides of the same coin. But that’s not always the case. I’d love to hear your perspectives on that.
18:15 Kevin: Yeah. You know, in our case, we always felt like, relative to other companies, we weren’t that big. And so, let’s say 2016, when you started, about a billion dollars in annual revenue. When we cracked a billion, we were really happy. We all celebrated. But we knew, compared to the other giants in the industry, we were tiny. And so, we felt like, yeah, if we tried to go it alone, we’re not going to get there.
18:49 So, for us, cracking the ecosystem and having the right partners was the other side of the coin. It was a have to have, not a nice to have. And we looked at it two ways. One was, we had some really big, important partners who we already had a relationship with, selling into IT. They already had practices selling into the other domains. Like the large global systems integrators. And so it was natural for us to expand our go-to-market relationships with those ecosystem partners.
19:22 But the others were pure plays in those spaces, where we had no relationship, or boutique players, or emerging companies that were willing to develop practices around our technology. So resourcing those, and putting the right amount of effort to help them succeed, is really key. But it’s also really challenging, Avanish.
19:50 Think about the largest global systems integrators. They have like a half a million people working for them. And you’re a billion-dollar software company. You have like a few thousand. So you could resource it to death and never have even close to the number of people that they have on it. So you have to have some discipline on how much head count are we going to assign to this partner? How much can we afford to assign for this partner? And how are we going to make that impactful and pay a return?
20:24 Because it’s a zero-sum game on how many resources you can afford to throw at the market as you’re going. And balancing those decisions, and going about it at the right pace, is really part of the art of it all. And in the moment, it never feels like you have it right. But in hindsight, it looks like a masterpiece. But day to day, it’s really hard to get those things right, turn those dials so that things are balanced the proper way.
20:54 Avanish: Yeah, no kidding. One thing I will say, Kevin, though, I think the sponsorship of someone like you, to make the ecosystem a core part of the go-to-market, is pretty clear. Without that type of leadership, and frankly pushing sales leaders and sales teams to say, hey, whose a partner? Who are we working with? Who’s helping us? Etc. Talk a bit about that mindset. Because I think, again, you exemplify how to bring that to the table and make that part of the core. Not an exception, not they’re going to get in my way, etc. So talk a bit about how you came to that mindset and how did you communicate that to your teams?
21:42 Kevin: Yeah. Let’s face it, partnering is hard. Okay? Just think about it. Even if you have two great companies, they decide they want to partner, they decide they can help one another, they want to go take a market, they’re two different companies. And they have two different agendas. And getting their goals to align without any conflict is just never going to happen.
22:06 There’s always going to be some level of channel conflict or some level of competing agendas. And then, at the individual level, in the field, an individual salesperson, they always can find a reason why they should cut the partner out, take it direct, not work with a partner. Because it’s simpler for them.
22:30 So you have to, I think, culturally just decide, we’re going to leverage the ecosystem, and this is what good looks like. And the things that we did was, we would take a salesperson who did it right, did it the way we wanted it done, leveraged the partnership for the good of the company, played the long game, and then we would put that person on a pedestal. And we would point to that person and let everybody know, look at what so-and-so did. They leveraged XYZ partner at this account, and they got this more strategic deal done, for more revenue and more value for the customer.
23:09 And then we corrected people who weren’t following the right thing, who were being a little bit short-sighted, and said, hey, you can’t cut that partner out just because it’s going to put a couple more dollars in your pocket for this one deal. It’s not about this deal. It’s about the greater good.
23:28 And so, it’s reinforcing great behavior. Communicating that. Correcting the wrong behavior, and addressing that, not walking past problems. And just culturally staying on message and demonstrating it in your actions, that yeah, we’re not just saying this. We’re actually living it. So I think it really helps to over communicate what your strategy is, make sure people understand, and then reinforce it with your actions.
23:59 Avanish: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And again, I think one of the things I’ve observed from you and David Schneider was the consistency of that. You mentioned the messaging, but the consistency of that across segments, across geographies, across size of customers, it was obviously very supportive of my team’s efforts, but I think it also just showed that, from the top, this is how we’re going to operate. So that makes a huge difference.
24:32 So, you alluded a little bit to this, but maybe take it a little deeper. What are some of the big challenges in going through this transformation for an organization that was – in this case, we’re talking specifically about ServiceNow – heavily direct sales oriented, with its transformation to multiproduct to platform to then working within the ecosystem? It’s a pretty big shift. It’s paid off in spades. I mean, the company is 10 times the size from 2016 to now, and 10x the market cap, and more. But talk a bit about some of those challenges that you think are broadly common. You mentioned some in the beginning, but any others that you would call out?
25:22 Kevin: Yeah. The multiproduct, multichannel, is a big challenge. It’s not like twice as complex. I don’t know what the math is, but it’s like multiples of twice as complex. Because you have to talk to different domains in the environment.
25:45 Earlier in this conversation, I was talking a lot about IT and HR. But in our case, it was IT, it was HR, it was security, it was customer service management, legal. Just go right on across the organization. And so the enablement of the go-to-market organization to be able to not only interact with those different organizations who all speak different languages, but to actually be able to handle objections and articulate the value and do cost justifications and return on investment analysis, and all those types of things that you need to do in an enterprise software to basically get deals done.
26:29 So that is the complexity across selling to multiple domains. And then the ecosystem complexities are the other vector of that. And those are equally as complex. You have different partners sometimes competing for the same deal. And that needs to be managed. These are all resources that need to be staffed.
26:55 And I think the one thing that needs to stay across the organization – this is another cultural thing – is communication. The need for communication. Shooting straight with your partners. Sometimes delivering bad news, but delivering it early, and delivering it clearly. Don’t leave people in the dark.
27:18 When people are left in the dark, that’s when people get paranoid, and they’ll start doing crazy things as a result. So all these things kind of multiply. But I think, Avanish, if you hire great people, and you let them know what culture you really want to have at your company, and you communicate that, and then you actually live it, the great people figure it out. They figure out how to navigate through the complexity as it comes.
27:51 There’s nobody at the top who has all the answers, who can just say this is exactly what we do in this situation or that situation. It really requires everybody to be bringing their best every day and to continue to hire the right people, who are aligned to your culture, who want to be part of that type of an organization.
28:12 Avanish: Yeah. And I think I would just add one – it’s implied in what you said – but I think it’s by building trust. It’s building trust internally with your peers and colleagues and others that we are going to do the right thing, particularly for the customer, and then subsequently to the partner. And also building trust with the partner, exactly to your point. If it’s not a win-win-win – a win for the customer, a win for us, a win for the partner – it’s not going to work. And you have to establish that trust mindset. Which, again, I think is not easy, but it’s how these things – when they work, I think that’s at the root of a lot of those successful outcomes.
28:55 So, speaking of outcomes. Any particular metrics – again, one of things I’ve always been pretty focused on is, hey, this is a long journey. It doesn’t happen overnight. Neither the platform transformation nor the ecosystem strategy. But as you look back, any metrics that you were observing, or on the lookout for, of hey, this is working, this needs tweaking, this needs changing? Let’s talk a bit about your perspective, again as the top sales leader, on how you saw this transformation?
29:38 Kevin: Yeah. We looked at it a lot of different ways. I think it’s very important to understand what the partner’s role was in the opportunity, or the campaign. Did they source it? Did they influence it? Did they do the professional services on it? So some of those are soft metrics, meaning it’s a judgment call. Some of them are black and white, like if they did the professional services or the implementation. We know that. And so it’s nobody’s opinion.
30:14 But I think it’s very important to have all those types of metrics and then look at your business through those different lenses. So, for example, in this geography, in the United States, our ecosystem go-to-market looks like this. How does that compare to France? How does that compare to overall? And so, if you can see things through that lens, and then also maybe through the product lens.
30:43 Like, oh, the customer service management solution looks like this in this market with these partners. Because ecosystem partners, they’re big companies. And they’re different in different parts of the world. So you could have a global systems integrator who’s your best friend in the United States and buddied up with your competitor in Germany. And so you can’t just say, yeah, they’re a good partner, we love them, or no, they’re terrible. It’s very localized.
31:16 And so, I think of it like a matrix. And you kind of need to be able to look at the product, the geography, the partner ecosystem. And it’s all very localized. And then, if you do have those insights, like XYZ partner is our adversary in Germany, and you have a good relationship with that company globally, off the top you can say, hey guys, how do we turn this around here? This is not optimal for our overall relationship. And you don’t know those things unless you have the measurement and the analytics to look at it and be thoughtful about it.
31:55 So those are ones that were important to me. Lead source was very important. The answer to almost every problem in sales is more quality pipeline. And if a partner ecosystem can help you produce more quality pipeline, the whole thing is going to be under less pressure. And it’s going to perform better. And so that would absolutely be a key one that I would have at the top of the list, as far as measurement goes.
32:24 Avanish: Yeah. Obviously, I won’t expose anything confidential here, but my recollection is, when we started that journey, the partner attach rate was in the low double digits. I think now it’s in the high double digits. I mean, it’s been a phenomenal scale-up and success. And the other thing that I always felt was quality over quantity. Which is the right partners are more important than just having a long list of different forms of partners across all categories.
32:53 Kevin: Yeah, and also I think having good discipline and rigor around being accurate on your reporting. Don’t just allow somebody to check a box and not have any type of scrutiny on it or challenging or whatever. Because you don’t want false positives on how things are going. You always want to somehow get to as close to reality as possible. And that sounds very simple, but it does require a lot of discipline. Again, it’s a cultural thing, where every layer of management needs to be on board with that. And it can’t just be important to the CRO or whatever. It has to be really respected all the way down the chain.
33:36 Avanish: Yeah, again, getting that data and the systems right, I might have lost some of my hair along that process.
[Laughter]
33:41 Kevin: You and me both.
[Laughter]
33:45 Avanish: Anyway, as always, Kevin, you’re fantastic. Any final words? I mean, if you were sitting next to a peer board member or another senior executive on an airplane and they bring this up, any final words of advice or guidance you’d give someone who’s considering this?
34:04 Kevin: Yeah. I think one of the really important things, Avanish, is, as you expand beyond your core, don’t neglect your core. Right? Because that’s the majority of your revenue. Even if you are very successful opening up these new domains and becoming a platform company and going across the enterprise, where you started is going to be the majority of your revenue for a good long time.
34:32 So you’ve got to find a way to continue to innovate there. Continue to add more value. Continue to grow there. Because if you take your eye off that ball, and you put all your energy on these new shiny objects that are very exciting, you’re going to be very disappointed, because your core revenue will start to decline, and that’ll drag it all down. You won’t be able to go fast enough in the new domains to make up for any type of revenue erosion in the core.
35:00 So I would – and this is something that ServiceNow did very, very well. IT service management, which was not the sexiest part of the market, and there were a lot of naysayers saying it’s saturated, there’s no more, we should just try to protect the revenue – disagree. Try to grow it. Try to continue to innovate. Bring more value to it. And that will serve you well as you add the other domains. So have it be an “add” and not an “or,” if you possibly can.
35:36 Avanish: That is worth gold. That’s a brilliant way to sum it up. And frankly, sometimes people, I do feel, they lose sight of that. So thank you. As always, Kevin, it’s a real pleasure. Thanks for both making the time and sharing your learnings and insights. And enjoy the rest of what looks like a gorgeous day in Boston.
35:56 Kevin: Thank you, Avanish. Great spending some time with you. Appreciate it.
36:03 Avanish: Aw, man. This was awesome. As always, you’re just a… Even having lived through it with you, it’s always fun to hear you tell the story. All right.