Bill McDermott 13 steps to build the world’s greatest software company

ServiceNow has become one of the most popular companies in the world, with a current market capitalization of more than $100 billion. CEO Bill McDermott shed light on the powerful and fascinating creation of a software company that can accomplish something other companies cannot achieve. A compelling vision.

In my weekly Top 10 Cloud Wars Ranking, ServiceNow is #7 After knocking on the door recently IBM Leave that place and descend to #9. )

I’ve definitely praised McDermott’s ultra-enthusiastic views before—for example, Quotable Bill McDermott: 10 Insights from the CEO of Soaring ServiceNow——But not only in the software industry, but also in Every The industry is changing so fast, McDermott’s inspiring prospects can provide value to all leaders.

So in this case, here are a dozen excerpts from McDermott’s conversation with Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss at a recent investment conference.

Take a deep breath-then we go.

1. The cloud is “the only way forward.”

“Obviously, digital transformation is an opportunity for this generation… The transition to cloud computing is definitely fierce, and its pace is accelerating, because this is the only way forward. Of course, if you consider business model innovation, the next three In 2015, 30% of the company’s revenue will come from businesses that they are not currently engaged in.”

2. See the world through the eyes of customers.

“One of the things I said at the beginning is that we have to be the top management favorite company. Now we will discuss automated financial services. Instead of having a product or even a solution conversation, we have a $600 million or A billion dollar conversation because it’s online for customers. When you start a meeting this way, and then you come back to how to help them, it changes the context of everything.”

3. The power of a customer-centric culture.

“The number of our executive briefings has increased by 80% year-on-year. We let the entire management team pay attention not only to our company, but also to our customers’ customers, and what their company needs to do to win. This has become our complete obsession… …When you have a customer-centric culture, your mission is greater than your own, everyone believes that they are in the workflow, they are automating the future of customers, you and I will be surprised how much a culture can get Inspired.”

4. The great “reordering” of the technological hierarchy is coming!

“Today we have very large, very awesome, very large technology companies. They may be very large-scale, or they may be a very unique part of technology. They have taken the world by storm and are worth trillions of dollars. This is great. . But you also have 20day——A century-old enterprise serving enterprises. And it has done a very good job in serving the enterprise. But they are already at 20day-Century style. I believe ServiceNow is a 21YingshiCentury Software Corporation. We want to work with everyone because we integrate seamlessly with everyone. So we can actually make 20day-Century Corporation behaves like 21Yingshi-Century Company…

“Therefore, we want to be the most innovative, fastest-growing, and most resilient corporate executive for global customers. I believe you will know when we get there, because I expect to re-order 20day-Century participant and 21YingshiAs a century leader like ServiceNow, I believe we will become one of the large and important global brands in the next few generations.

5. Make end-to-end adjustments around customers.

“If I look at the experiences of these customers, they have invested billions of dollars in IT over the past 30 years, but the complexity they have on their hands has become even more powerful. It is very complicated to go beyond systems and silos. It is really very complicated for people to work together. It’s hard work, because now they are optimizing for one department every time. But from the CEO’s point of view, they just want to win. They want everyone to come together around a common mission to provide their customers with unique and special things. At ServiceNow, we have created software factories that enable them to manage security, development, operations, service management, asset management, business management, operations management, and the entire IT backbone.”

6. Frictionless economy: myth or reality?

“We are in a frictionless economy. But in customer service, why is it so difficult? We should manage customer service in the enterprise as simple as sending DoorDash to your home tonight. This is what we do for Disney and AT&T and Many other companies that want to go directly to consumers and bypass the complexity are doing. There are billions of calls in the call center, and everyone in the call center can’t wait to leave their jobs. How is this possible? No virtual agent can take over And enrich people’s lives and simplify their work—but we can do it. We solved the root cause, we processed work orders, we closed the loop and satisfied customers, and we did it very quickly.”

7. Competitive differentiation.

“But they tend to be very good at one thing, they focus on one thing, which becomes their core business. It’s great. We didn’t quarrel with any of them. As I said, we created a new market , We seamlessly integrate into 550 systems of record, and we seamlessly integrate into all collaboration tools. We don’t play favorites because we want everyone to support customers to win. This is our internal call: We will not passively confront other companies, because we have created a new market-our market has never existed before us. No one else owns what we have. “

8. Expertise in vertical industries.

“How do you provide modern digital workflows to simplify personal and business loan services? If you have ever seen how complicated this is—I know it’s because I went through the review process—it really hurt your teeth. What we did It is to use AI to fully automate the process. Therefore, when you can find the bottleneck of AI and make business recommendations to business people, it means that this is not only a bottleneck in the process, but also reduces your productivity. Then if you change it Into dollars, that’s what it means—so change it! And that’s what they love.”

9. The power of choice.

“I think the decisive measure is that we never tell the customer,’You have no choice.’ We give the choice. If the value does not exist, they will not give us money. So what you have to realize is that the customer sees the labor The value of smart workflow automation is that they will not give us money. If they want, they can still get standard products, but they want Pro SKU. Now we have penetrated more than 20%. We still have nearly 80% of the work. To do-not bad. We are doing this for all solutions.

“So I really think we have the right culture and mentality. It’s all about customer-centricity, absolute faith, innovation, automation, and delivering value. If customers don’t get value, you won’t get sales.”

10. Workflow revolution improves CIO and CTO

“The power of CIO and CTO has been fully restored in the enterprise. For a while, there was a decoupling between business executives and CIOs or CTOs. That was in the early days of the cloud, and operating expenses were easy to obtain. The best-in-class solution lies in the line of business executives. It’s done very well. But what happened is that the CEO may realize together with the COO and the CFO, “We have a happy CHRO, we may even have a happy sales director, but because it concerns the entire company We have not gone very far in terms of performance. We have invested a lot of money in technology. Why can’t we innovate faster? Why are our people unhappy? Why don’t our customers buy more products and keep or stay with us And our retention rate has not risen?

“That’s because they didn’t work well across these silos. They didn’t work in teams to accomplish very specific things that were really important to the company. Now, with the workflow revolution, everything has changed radically. . This is the biggest change in empowering CIOs and CTOs.”

11. Wipe out the heartbreaking work

“Think about the operation and heartbreaking nature of the call center and the poor people who can’t wait to quit. No matter which company you look at, they actually have at least 20% of their annual turnover because they don’t have the tools at their fingertips. In this case, forget about up-selling and cross-selling-you get a crazy customer call and you are like,’Oh, by the way, do you want to buy my new service for $10 a month? But the client said, “I want to hang up now. “So they don’t want to be up-selling and cross-selling at critical moments—they want to be service.

“And I think this is really a compelling differentiator for ServiceNow. Now our imagination, our fantasies and their ambitions are unlimited. So I don’t want to limit our scope to $35 billion, but now this is The focus of our attention. Once we finish the work there, I believe we can springboard into new dimensions.”

12. Stimulate the imagination of the world’s largest SI.

The large global system integrator is “a very large power multiplier, Keith. When I first came to ServiceNow, I was eager to see all the CEOs, chairman and chairman of the board of directors of these large partnerships. I was surprised. The thing is, how limited the ambition is. We basically expanded the goal from hundreds of millions of dollars to 1 billion dollars. Then the next meeting is billions, and it keeps increasing. What you see is companies like Accenture built around ServiceNow A huge practice, and actually dedicated a global integrated management department to ServiceNow in its entire global practice.”

13. “What am I living for?”

“Listen, this is the purpose of my life. I was born to build a great team. There is nothing I like to do more than to win, and to participate in it to win. We are committed to winning it in 2021 and Keep all the promises we have made. But more importantly, we are laying the foundation for enterprise software companies in the 21st century. We will not get tired or stop working hard until we finish our work.”