Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with your hosts, me, Matt Best, andJonny Adams. In this podcast, we'll be sharing insights from our combined 30 plus years experience and hearing from other industry leaders to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business. We'll cover all aspects of leadership, sales, account development and customer success, alongside other critical elements required to
build an effective growth engine for your business. This podcast is aimed at leaders from exec all the way down to line managers. Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast. We're thrilled to have Damien Davies from ServiceNow joining us today. Damien, welcome and thank you for coming along.
Thanks for having me.
Brilliant Damien. We would love to kind of get into hearing more about your career, your personal life. I know you've got lots of things kind of going on in your world, and some really kind of incredible challenges as well, which we want to sort of dive into. But maybe before that, Jonny and I were debating this morning, actually, that a fun question to ask might be, if you had to select two people to be in your personal advisory board, so this could be anyone work outside of
work, personal, somebody that doesn't even exist anymore. Who would those people be? And why?
That's a good way to start.
Punchy.
Look, we're on the Growth Podcast here, right? We're talking about growth. And I'm a big fan of growth and learning. And someone that really inspires me is Stephen Bartlett, you know, from Dragon's Den and Diary of a CEO. Follow his content all the time on LinkedIn, and often it's almost like a daily feed to read. If I could have him in my corner. He's always advertising, isn't he? Is it? You know, he's always saying, Now, come and join my companies. And I'm like,
Yeah, I love you as my board advisor. And then second one be my wife, just keep feet on the ground. Right? I've enjoyed a very successful career with ServiceNow, and I know we'll dive deeper into that. And while I'm on this trajectory of growth and learning, I think the having the mantra of hungry but humble and keeping feet on the ground, Mrs. D, definitely keeps me grounded.
Hungry and humble. Yeah, that's fantastic. And Damien, you talk about your career so far, and obviously ServiceNow are a global enterprise business solution provider, and you probably do a much better job of introducing them than I just have, but maybe tell us a little bit about your role there and what it is that you do.
Yeah, well, I kind of feel like I'm on my third career within ServiceNow. I've actually been there nearly 14 years. They were a pre IPO startup when I joined back in 2011 you know, we had about 300 employees globally, and we've now got 26 and a half 1000 full time employees. That's quite some growth. I did my first six years working in the customer support organization, working in tech support. I did another seven years working in our IT service management business unit
as a product management leader. And now I'm on my third wave of career, and I now work in what's called our customer excellence group, or internally, we call it CEG, and my role is really to help ServiceNow customers unlock the value of their investment in our solutions.
Amazing, and I know that has you traveling around the world as well. And I guess trying to balance that is can be pretty tricky. I know as well you've told us. You told us previously that you've got this personal objective of losing 50 pounds by the time that you're 50. Talk to us a little bit about that. And I think, like, what I think really interesting for our audience as we think about growth is so often looking at that what that requires in terms of mindset, wellbeing both
inside and outside of work. So how are you juggling that, and how are you helping yourself get to that goal?
But for dial back first, my next birthday does start with a five. There's going to be a round number. And I've had this moment of realization and said, You know what, look, I'm late 40s. I'm not in great shape. I've got a successful career. I've got a young family. I have an older daughter as
well. I'm like, Look, if I'm going to be successful, both in and outside of work, I really need to pay a bit more attention to how I look after my body and you know, again, following lots of podcasts and various posts from, you know, inspirational individuals, and decided, You know what, if I'm gonna be in the best shape of my life, I need to change habits and processes. I've lost weight and gained weight several times in the past, and I've been too focused on the goal and the
outcome of hitting a target weight. And so often people come up to me, oh, yeah, what's your target? And I went more on the target is building better habits and changing my mindset so that I, you know, try and do it semi automatically, the weight will come off, and it will be a byproduct of changing those habits. But at the same token, you know, if you're going to track and measure anything, so I did the initial measurements, and you know the scales, if it was one of those talking scales,
would have said one at a time, please. And I realized that look realistically if I was going. Be in optimal shape. Body fat percentage was a big number, but how that translated into weight was around about 50 pounds in us three and a half stone, 23
kilos. And I don't profess to be a nutritionist or a personal trainer, but I'm following, you know, a really good program, and you know, I'm working out three times a week in the gym, I'm doing my cardio, getting my steps in, and I've completely changed my relationship with food, but I've already started to see some initial successes, and while it's still very intentional and very focused, I feel like I'm getting into the rhythm of building some of those better habits.
Just curious thinking about growth and that story. What's the thing that sort of triggered you to do this? Because I'm so hearing a few things that might have been the trigger.
I'm going to be brutally honest, right? You know, it'd be lovely to use some inspirational quote saying I just want to be there for my children and be in the best shape of my life. Look, I'm a man, and before is vanity, right? I looked in the mirror and I didn't like what I saw, and I'm still not completely in love with what I see, because I'm in the early stages of that journey, you know. And I was like, Look, I want to be like Ronaldo. I want to have that
body. And I thought, if I want to have that one, I'm gonna have to work bloody hard to get there. And then I sort of did a bit of a balancing act, and said, Is that sustainable? And I thought, You know what I know? What's sustainable, eating healthily, avoiding junk and making sure that I build a workout routine that I can sustain. Can I do six days a week in the gym for the rest of my life? No? Can I do every other day? Probably.
It sounds like, you know, you've got this very like you said, habits focused and someone who's clearly good and experienced at making those kind of changes. And we talk about this a lot in the context of sales and business development, and establishing those productive habits and that regular track and that cadence, and having access to those data points, be that data point, a photo of you in the mirror shows it applies in so many different concepts.
Well, it's the same process, right? You think about if you're working in sales with a customer and you've agreed on a mutual close plan, every day you're tracking that mutual close plan working out, right? What actions and next
steps do I need to take? Today, I've just applied that same methodology to my body transformation, and ultimately my mutual close plan is building better habits, eating healthier, working out, and the byproduct will be me being in much better shape in the same way that we want to go and close a deal.
I can almost hear the people screaming at this podcast, thinking, but I don't have the time. And you know, you're a senior leader in a large, significant business with lots of priorities. How have you found the time to not only start to sort of focus on these habits, but actually kind of follow through with that?
Yeah, so well, time is a commodity that we could all use more of, right? Time is not going away, and probably I'm going to continue to be busy until I reach retirement age. So do I want to put it off until then, or do I want to start now? And one of my really close friends who's actually a gym buddy of mine, big shout out to Fred, he said to me, Look, it's either one day or today's day one. So if you're worried about time, stop saying one day. Let's do it today, day
one. Let's work it out. And then if you're really worried about time, then just figure right. Look, in the morning, can you get up half an hour earlier? Can you right? You know, ask yourself, I just think, look, time is not going away. So how we deal with it, and how our mindset is in our approach to that? You know, let's not look for excuses. Let's find the time, make time. Was it Hannibal, I believe, find a way or make one, right? You know, when he was going over the
mountains to go and fight the Romans, right? It's like, literally, we'll either find a way or we'll make one. Let's find some time, or make some time.
Yeah, as you describe some of those things about time, there's also a great little snippet that I learned from a partner of ours, that if you take the population of the London Marathon, the majority have a an age that has a nine in it. So it's 2939 49 and the science behind it suggests that when you are about to hit a decade, that you typically are willing to do something that you're not willing to do in
those other years. And I wonder if there's a little bit of that going on, but a lot of people who run the math and all the math, and just because of...
I've not looked into that psyche, I wonder if that's what's spurring me on subconsciously. Yeah, I was thinking, when you hit that decade you normally, typically want to you go, you look back 10 years and go, What have I done? I'm not one digging. I want to look forwards. I don't want to look back, I want to look forwards.
And thinking about that as a sort of personal goal. Love to dive in a little bit to your career, the journey that you've been on with ServiceNow. And I think as we a lot of the time on the podcast, we talk about, what those frameworks, what are those things that can help our listeners? And a lot of our listeners are, are leaders in some in some sort of shape or form, senior leaders, middle management or just aspiring
leaders? What are the things? What's the advice that you would give to some of those leaders listening here as they embark on their journey from the career, the illustrious career that you've had so far?
Well, my number one giveaway or takeaway is it's all about the people. Nothing in business happens without relationships. You know, even in the tech world, we use technology in the service of people, to make people's lives
and certainly their work lives better. That's what enterprise software does it automates stuff, and it makes jobs better, makes companies more efficient, but it's all about the people, and as you build your grow, grow your career, you know, make relationships, find champions, open opportunities and open doors, both inside and outside of your organization, with your customers, with your business partners, stakeholders, and your internal colleagues, senior leaders, peers, even juniors
with like reverse mentoring. You know, I've spent the last decade expanding my network, really working, and focusing on my personal brand, because obviously our brand is what people see us as, right, or what people will talk about us when we're not in the room. And I think actually, every single one of us has the opportunity to control the narrative of our personal brand. Certainly, the last two years, I've invested very heavily in my personal brand. What do I want to be
known for? What do I want to be famous for? How can I be seen as someone that can enable and help others to learn and grow? And I like to think that I've done a reasonable job of it, because I get approached with questions, and, you know, asking for advice, and I feel very humbled that people are coming to me to ask for that career advice, and I can only talk through my own personal experiences, which has been my growth journey with ServiceNow, but it all comes down to the people.
I resonate with what you're saying, massive impact on myself, even the people around me who on that journey, who's been the person that's given you the most impact?
There's a few and it's interesting. Use the word impact. Impact is very important word for me for two reasons. Firstly, it's my personal mantra. If you look up my LinkedIn, yeah, I mean, my tagline is making an impact, and it's something that really resonates deeply with me. And secondly, servicenows flagship product for our customer success is also called impact. So it's something that just, it just
resonates deeply every day. And when I go to my career journey about people that have made an impact, honestly, there's been so many as I've built this network up, I've been very fortunate and very lucky to travel the world, working in my various roles at ServiceNow and in every city and every country that I've gone to, I've made new acquaintances, some of which have become really close personal friends. And that network expands, and then it opens opportunities, and then
someone will make another connection. And it's like a spider web. There's people of all walks of life. You know, once on a flight, I made friends with a CEO of a company. He actually boarded the plane late, was sweating profusely, sat down next to me. We started chatting for the flight, and we've become friends. And he now messages and comments on my LinkedIn posts
and invites me back to his place and stuff. And it's like, look, you know, there's all these lovely serendipity moments that I I couldn't really in this length of this podcast name too many individuals, because I've been humbled to have met so many great people that have had an impact on my life.
We talk about impact at SBR. It's our mantra. I guess impact can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, but I love the way that you talk about impact in the context of relationships, and I guess part of that is being impacted, and also, as you said, making an impact on the individuals that you meet. Like, how does that translate at ServiceNow? How does that translate to you in a sort of in a corporate way? Like, how do you deliver impact to your clients?
I mean impact as a product or a solution is servicenows Customer Success offering customers that have impact are not only buying enterprise software or, you know, subscription licenses, they're getting a success package as well. And we actually sell that in the form of a
digital product. It's part of the core platform where there are various tools and, you know, applications and modules on the platform that help customers realize value, adopt the technical products faster, and maintain their platform health. But what it also gives them is that human layer, and that's where it comes to relationships, where they get access to expertise, you know, governance, assurance, subject matter experts, product ninjas, as we like to call them. I think about
Apple iPhone. If you've got something wrong your iPhone, you want to go to the product ninjas. And that's the Genius Bar in the Apple Store. What impact is the Genius Bar for service? Now, that's obviously not brand endorsed or market endorsed. That's my personal analogy of how I would describe
it to friends and family. You know, I think there's probably some copyright around that terminology, so I'm just caveating that, but like, I mean, it makes sense, if something wrong with your iPhone, go and see the Genius Bar. If something's wrong with your service now or you want it to work better, go and see the impact, folks.
And is there a way that you measure impact at ServiceNow? It seems to be a question that we're working with our clients on. You know, is there metrics that you use? Is there certain things that you do to be sure that you're tracking impact?
Oh of course, I mean corporate metrics, right? And NPS scores, net promoter scores, CSAT, customer satisfaction. Internally, we have a metric of undeployed backlog. You know? We'll look at right customer a has bought service now they are licensed and entitled to X amount of modules. We look at right, what if they actually switched on?
What are they using? Again, we've got this great platform with an abundance of data, we can actually see what's been turned on, what's being used, and we can then identify gaps, and we can make recommendations based on that data, on how they can get more value. So yeah, undeployed backlog is an internal metric. Yeah, CSAT and Net Promoter Score are really sort of some of the driving metrics.
And we've had someone on this podcast before a great gentleman called Mike, who talked about the leading way to retain clients is about having great employee engagement. So how are you impacting your employees, to create engagement from them? Because, as a byproduct, if you get great employee engagement, in theory, your customers are taken care of. If you've got any sort of ways in which you do that as ServiceNow?
Absolutely. So one person comes to mind is Richard Branson. He made the famous quote, if you take care of your employees, they'll take care of your customers. And I think that's been quoted a billion times. It's in his books service. Now we have what we call our people pact. And our Chief People Officer launched this people pact a few years ago during during the sort of the pandemic years, and it was really about employee engagement. I'm very fortunate.
You know, we have a huge culture of employee well being. We get allocated a number of well being days each year, which, you know, is giving people time off in addition to their, you know, their personal time off, holiday allowance and corporate public holidays. So we have well being days. Then there are various initiatives and programs based on physical and mental well being, and then the employee engagement mantra is like, bring your authentic self to work. If anyone lives and breathes that
is me. 14 years I haven't been fired yet, and I'm just me. You know, what you see on LinkedIn is what you see here in the studio and what you'll see down the Powerball in the gym, right? I don't feel I have to switch on some form of corporate persona, and I can just be myself. And I feel empowered to be myself, thanks to that rich culture, bring your best self to work.
You know, doing what you love, making an impact. All of that, that corporate well being mantra, you know that that's what I think is, first level employee engagement.
Well, if you had to refine and summarize your sort of journey from on a chronological aspect, just for the listeners and the guests to understand a little bit more about your journey, what employee number you were and just give that sort of little potted history, would that be all right?
Yeah, sure. Well, my badge number is in very small number of digits. There's 125 in the entire company that have been there longer than me. Now there's two ways to look at that. One, I've been there a long time in relation to most of the company. Two, despite the fact that I've been there nearly 14 years, there's still 125 people that have been there
longer. They've also chosen to stay as long as I have, which is testament to, you know, the opportunities and the culture that the company has provided us with.
So if it was Hunger Games, that would be an interesting setup, wouldn't it? 125 Have you tried to see who survives? I remember watching a YouTube clip about how work day grew, and they grew from zero to 10 million, and they talk talk about the commercial function, and the commercial function had X amount of people in it. Had this type of competence in it. It had these types of processes in it. And then you go from 10
million to 100 million. There's a theory within the marketplace that you need to find the new team leadership capital, for example, is a term that's used where you need to change your leadership team. You've clearly been on the journey and stayed on the journey. So there must be some secret sauce out there. Could you describe? Because you know how you might have bucked that trend, or how you've stayed within the organization throughout that.
It's funny you say about, like, those growths and stuff like our CEO, our C suite, are internally referred to as the p5 which is Phase Five of growth. And you know, there are obviously companies that you know, naught to 1 million, naught to 100 million or whatever. I don't I can tell you what the thresholds are, but we're now on that journey, having hit 10 billion US dollars of revenue. So we're obviously in what we call Phase Five of growth, and we've done it
organically. We've made acquisitions ServiceNow. I mean, obviously I was there when we made our first acquisition, back in 2013 when we acquired a small technology company, replatformed it and launched it as performance analytics as a core capability of the platform. We've made several acquisitions, particularly over the last six years, as we build our AI capabilities. A number of AI acquisitions, starting with virtual agents, chat bots, you know, predictive intelligence,
being able to predict fields on tables. You know, generative, AI, agent, AI, it's all this lovely AI themed technology, but this growth now, I think if I go back to the very early days when I started my career at ServiceNow in the basement of our then office in Richmond, our UK, I workforce was 80 people, eight zero UK, I now has over 1000 People. And like I say, you know, obviously in Europe, Middle East and Africa, we're at nearly 5000 and globally, you know, 26 and a half 1000 full
time employees. I don't think I could have imagined that in my wildest dreams in the early days, but I've also seen four chief executive officers, and we were the first tech company to I go through an IPO since Facebook. So it was very high profile, and the IPO took us onto Wall Street on the New York
Stock Exchange. We've just gone through the stratosphere, and it's all about flawless, relentless, elite execution in every corner of our business, right from the C suite, our p5 team, right I say down, or you can flip it whichever way you like, from every junior individual contributor right up to every senior leader. Everybody is focused on people and elite execution, and that's what has been a big contribution to Servicenows trajectory in our growth.
Are there things for you having gone through those different phases that not have kept you at ServiceNow? I think what's really interesting is you talk about that authenticity. And I think we see this a lot of the time, and I see this in the mirror when I think about that my career, there's definitely been times where I've felt that I needed to be something else at
work. What is it? There may be sort of one or two things that on that journey have been consistent at ServiceNow that have that have been the things that you've sort of anchored to, like, I'm curious as as you go through a lot of change in a relatively short amount of time, how you've been able to sort of navigate that, as it were?
I'd like to say, we spoke earlier about hungry but humble, keep feet on the ground. I feel very blessed, very lucky that I actually have a role that is deeply fulfilling and gives me a lot of job satisfaction. The company has given me tremendous opportunity, very lucky to have gotten in the early days. So it's given me financial stability and security for my family. He's given me a career. I've grown and been promoted into a senior leader from a junior individual
contributor. He's given me the opportunity to travel the world. I get to meet people. And I'm a people person. I I crave in person contact. You know, when we all had to pivot to fully remote during the pandemic, I was like, Ah, lovely to see people again. And now, as you know, we've come out the other side of that, and if anything, my travel is back to pre COVID levels. You know, I've got a very supportive family that empowers and enables me. That's why I said about Mrs. Davies
being one of my board advisors. You know, I've got a wife that is managing my family at home while I'm on the road, but I also get that lovely balance. And I think, you know, if I was to put metrics around it, I'm home half the time and I'm traveling half the time now, those travels could be off to glamorous locations across the world or or to some northern cities. We don't have to name drop Sheffield, right? Anyone who thinks business travel is glamorous hasn't done it enough,
the actual travel can be exhausted. You know, long journeys, different time zones. It's not a complaint, it's an observation. I know some people are saying, Yeah, try doing it 26 hours in economy teaming. And I'm like, Look, I've done that,
but it's time away from the family. But what's worth it is when I get there the other end, and let's say, the relationships and the opportunities and that in person engagement that it gives me and my actual role, I get to evangelize what impact does, what our customer excellence group do for our
customers. But I also get to listen. And you might be surprised, because I talk a lot, but listening is such a gift, being able to hear feedback and then drive actionable insights, working with our customer experience organization, documenting that feedback, working out which funnel that needs to go in. Is it a complaint? Does it needs to be addressed? Is it someone's very happy? Does it need to be turned into a case study or a marketing story? Or does someone need
something? Do they need some help? So hearing that feedback, I can channel that into different buckets and drive some actual tangible actions from just listening. So it's really rewarding as well.
Perfect. Thank you for joining us on the Growth Workshop Podcast, and we hope that you join us again for part two of this conversation. For more insights, make sure you subscribe, and if you enjoyed the journey, don't forget to leave us a review. Your feedback fuels our growth until next time, keep up that forward thinking mindset. Goodbye.