#121 Lara Caimi: Aligning Ecosystem Strategy with Your Customer as the North Star

The new normal means that digital transformation is no longer a luxury but an absolute business imperative. With offerings at the center of digital transformations, ServiceNow works with their partners to deliver the best experience and outcomes for their customers.

In this episode, Lara Caimi, Chief Customer and Partner Officer, at ServiceNow joins Ecosystem Aces and discusses how she manages the company’s ecosystem strategy to deliver win-win solutions for customers.

Lara shares:

• How ServiceNow centers their ecosystem around the customer
• The importance of co-selling and co-delivering
• How partners help grow ServiceNow into new Verticals

Rallying Around Customers

Keep the customer as the north star when navigating your partner ecosystem. Partners, alliance teams and professional service teams may find friction points, but the customer should always be the tiebreaker for any differences. By keeping the focus on the customer, ServiceNow aligns all partners and stakeholders into a single team. The company ensures that everyone in the ecosystem understands that by rapidly delivering the best outcome for customers, both partners and internal teams will benefit from the customer’s increased business value and expansion.

ServiceNow also understands that their customers don’t want to deal with multiple partners separately. Customers expect that everyone involved in the opportunity is on the same page and are actively collaborating with each other. ServiceNow understands that their value isn’t as a services company but driving value by using their expertise to define the best practices for each opportunity and ensuring customer success.

Co-selling and Co-delivering

“Co-sell, co-deliver,” that is the mantra that ServiceNow adopts with their partners. Partnering is no longer about the channel and selling through resellers. Today, maximizing opportunities means collaborative and engaged co-selling. The company understands that this collaboration in co-sell is where the magic happens and how small opportunities can rapidly turn into huge win-win propositions.

ServiceNow and their partners recognize that creating a single voice for the customer to hear is the key to unlocking value. Customers trust in ServiceNow’s partners and the company leverages this trust with their technology expertise to co-deliver on solutions that become scalable and repeatable to drive maximum value for customers, and co-sell revenue for partners.

Expanding Into New Verticals with Partners

ServiceNow is a dominant force in the IT industry, providing ITSM offerings for 80% of the biggest companies in the world. Initially partners would collaborate with ServiceNow solely to help deliver on these IT solutions. But as partners became more knowledgeable of the capabilities and the offerings of the company, together, they found opportunities in verticals where partners have expertise. In the same way, ServiceNow partners have helped the company move into horizontal practices as well -- such as HR and customer service -- based on unique capabilities brought by partners in those horizontal solution areas.

ServiceNow benefits from their partners not only because they’re driving 95% of their implementation services but also because they can collaborate with partners to co-sell in areas that have expanded the market tremendously for the company.

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Audio Podcast Here:

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121: Where Customer & Partner Experience Intersect

We often talk about putting the customer at the center of everything we do — it’s an ironclad rule if you want success. And it’s just as important to your alliance ecosystem. Just ask Lara Caimi who, as Chief Custom...

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To contact the host, Chip Rodgers, with topic ideas, suggest a guest, or join the conversation about alliances, he can be reached by:

Email: chip@workspan.com

Twitter: @chiprodgers

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chiprodgers

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