May 12, 2025 • 37 mins
Just because it’s B2B doesn’t mean it has to be boring.
This week on Soul & Science, Jason sits down with Jim Lesser, Chief Brand Officer at ServiceNow, the enterprise platform helping organizations simplify workflows and put AI to work across their business.
Before stepping into the world of B2B tech, Jim led award-winning campaigns as CEO and Executive Creative Director at BBDO San Francisco, including the well-known "Imagine the Possibilities" campaign for Barbie. He shares how creative thinking, operational reinvention, and a people-first approach have shaped his leadership path.
Jim talks about what it really takes to build an emotional connection in B2B marketing, why “marketing the marketing” matters more than ever, and how making yourself useful can unlock the next opportunity in your career.
What’s Inside:
✅ Lessons from Jim’s rise from agency receptionist to CEO to Chief Brand Officer
✅ Why managing creatives is harder, and maybe more valuable, than mastering spreadsheets
✅ How ServiceNow is building a more human, recognizable brand in the B2B space
✅ The thinking behind ServiceNow University and the company’s growing community of users
Memorable Moments:
💡 “Make yourself useful, and your next opportunity will find you.”
💡 “Cool sh*t with cool people. That’s the billboard.”
💡 “If the product is innovative, the marketing should be too.”
Brought to you by Mekanism.
This week on Soul & Science, Jason sits down with Jim Lesser, Chief Brand Officer at ServiceNow, the enterprise platform helping organizations simplify workflows and put AI to work across their business.
Before stepping into the world of B2B tech, Jim led award-winning campaigns as CEO and Executive Creative Director at BBDO San Francisco, including the well-known "Imagine the Possibilities" campaign for Barbie. He shares how creative thinking, operational reinvention, and a people-first approach have shaped his leadership path.
Jim talks about what it really takes to build an emotional connection in B2B marketing, why “marketing the marketing” matters more than ever, and how making yourself useful can unlock the next opportunity in your career.
What’s Inside:
✅ Lessons from Jim’s rise from agency receptionist to CEO to Chief Brand Officer
✅ Why managing creatives is harder, and maybe more valuable, than mastering spreadsheets
✅ How ServiceNow is building a more human, recognizable brand in the B2B space
✅ The thinking behind ServiceNow University and the company’s growing community of users
Memorable Moments:
💡 “Make yourself useful, and your next opportunity will find you.”
💡 “Cool sh*t with cool people. That’s the billboard.”
💡 “If the product is innovative, the marketing should be too.”
Brought to you by Mekanism.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
I always start with make yourself useful. If you can
make yourself useful, inevitably one hundred percent of the time,
your boss will say can you do this too? And
whatever that is becomes the next opportunity. And if you
do that and you're useful at delivering on that, you'll
get the next opportunity. That's how I went from being
a receptionist to being a CEO to being now a
(00:23):
brand person here at Service Now.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
In today's world, how does a brand break through the
noise and become iconic? Join me Jason Harris as I
speak with the world's leading marketing experts about how they
use sole in science to build an iconic brand.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Think of it as EQ meeting IQ.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
So let's lock in and together fast forward our marketing
minds on the Soul and Science Podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Welcome to the Sole and Science Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I am so excited to talk to Jim Lesser today,
and I'm excited to talk to Jim about the soul
and science of automation and how AI is going to
impact business operations across slew of industries and a little
bit about his journey and what Service Now is birthing
and how it's changing and what it's all about.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
So, Jim, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Thanks Jason, great to see you.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Great to see you too.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
All right, Jim, before we get into your current state,
I'd love to know your backstory.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Did you fall into marketing or were you a born marketer?
Speaker 1 (01:36):
A little bit of both. My father was in the
advertising industry, so it was like the family conversation at
dinner every night, and I from the time, I literally
from the time I can remember, the conversation was like
talking about campaigns and so I mean I memorized jingles,
I knew every word of commercials. It was just kind
(01:58):
of you know, some families like you weren't allowed to
watch TV, and we probably watched the commercials more than
the TV.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
You know.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I think when your parents do something, you either admire
it and go into it, or you it it kind
of repels you and you want to do something completely different.
It sounds like the way maybe he spoke about it,
romanticized it, and drew you in into the business.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Definitely. And you know that the before it was called
take your kid to work Day, it was just take
your kid to work someday and I would go to
work and it was like it was for a you know,
an eight year old or a ten year old. An
agency is a pretty cool place to hang out. Like
there's every polar of magic marker and pads as big
as a wall, and you can draw, and you know,
(02:42):
like play games and everybody's super relaxed and cool and
there's creative people running around on skateboards or whatever. Like
it's just a you know, an agency environment. You created
one as an impressionable young kid, it's yeh, like it's great.
I mean as a young kid. I remember the first
time I went to my dad agency. You get off
the elevator and the elevator doors would close, and they
(03:04):
had this massive photograph that covered the entire elevator bank
of the company softball team, and so it was just
it was just a great vibe.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
You know. I love that. And did you go to
school for marketing or did you go to school for
something else?
Speaker 1 (03:19):
No? I didn't. Actually I didn't see that as necessarily
my my path, although it ended up being my path.
And I went to school and somehow stumbled into philosophy
class and loved that and I ended up doing that
as my degree. But I did I did do a
lot of English a lot of writing, a lot of
(03:39):
creative writing, a lot of film studies, you know, all
kind of mixed up, and in some weird way, it
turned out to be the perfect background to, uh, to
become a copywriter.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Did you do something before you were a copywriter?
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah, I mean I got out of school. You couldn't,
you know at that time, you didn't come out of
school with a portfolio. There was no you know, there
were no undergraduate programs for portfolios. And so basically the
path was go to a city, get your foot in
the door, and start going to night school to put
together your portfolio. And so that's what I did. I
moved to New York and then got myself a job
(04:17):
in New York as the receptionist in a terrific ad
agency at that time doesn't exist anymore, but Scyley McCage
Slops was like a legendary agency of like the seventies
and eighties.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
And.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Just the way to get at my foot in the
door was to be a receptionist. And I took that
job and went to school at night, and then from
there worked my way up actually to being then it
was called an assistant. It was basically an executive assistant,
a secretary and admin, whatever you want to call it.
And I was working for like six or seven creatives,
(04:54):
two of whom were executive creative directors, so they were
really the ones I kind of had to spend time
on doing travel and expenses and things like that. But
I helped everybody, and I just sat out in this little,
you know, open cube area at this grade agency. And
that's kind of how I got my start. I was
going to school at night working on my portfolio. I was.
(05:16):
I made sure that everybody knew that I wanted to
become a writer and that I was working on my
I was always working on my book, sitting there and
I was, you know, I guess from the very beginning,
I probably worked hard. That was probably a key element
of the beginning of my career was I was always
(05:36):
the first person in the creative department and always the
last to leave, and I was always there working on something,
and I was always trying to get input on my book,
and you know, pick up little tidbits of input from
creative directors who would spend a minute with me.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
And that throughout your career, did you go over to
the business side or did you stay in the creative side.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Stayed on the creative well, I did both. I stayed
on the creative side, became a creative director. I had
moved to California just wanted to check out California and
you know, never went back basically, but I came out
to San Francisco just really wanted to be a part
of this like burgeoning San Francisco ad scene and was
(06:24):
a creative Then I became a creative director. And then
after I think I was executive creative director of BBDO
both San Francisco and LA for about ten years, and
then I had the chance to go to kind of
the business side, meaning I became the president and CEO.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Was that transition hard for you going from hell yeah, yeah,
it was right hard.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
I mean you had to learn, so you know what
it was. It was It was less like the the
tools and.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Tricks.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
It was more the understanding of where my skills could apply,
you know, and really understanding like what my strengths were
and how I could help the agency grow, and also
realizing some of the things that had previously seemed mysterious
were not so hard or mysterious. They just were things
that required time and focus, you know. Excel as a
(07:17):
perfect example. Like, you know, the math you do running
an agency is not calculus. It's addition and subtraction. You know,
Like it's not hard math. You just have to pay
attention to it.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
What's something you brought with you that you think made
you really good at the business side or running an agency.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
As a creative director, you sometimes think that you're managing
this one piece of the agency, which is the creatives,
the producers, you know, maybe the project management depending on
their structure. But then there's HR and there's finance, and
there's you know, the contracts, and there's how to manage
the clients and the strategists. There's all these other things,
(07:56):
and I think as a creative director, you think like,
oh man, that's the that's not in my wheelhouse. What
I the big unlock for me was realizing that the
hardest part of running an agency is actually managing the creatives.
That's the hardest part. Like you know, I mean, for
the most part, people in the finance team know what
(08:19):
they're doing and they do it when they're say when
they say they're going to do it. And the same
with the project managers and a lot of other disciplines. Like,
the creative part is that's the magic trick, and if
you can manage that, that's the hardest part. So you
just have to then wrap your head around the broader scope,
you know what I mean, because with creative people, you
know I used to. I mean, one of the things
I found fascinating was you get into contract discussions once
(08:43):
I had to start negotiating contracts, and you have these
discussions with clients or with the sourcing departments at your
client where they want to talk about like, well, how
many ideas are you going to show us in order
to get to the idea and how many rounds are
we going to do? And also how are we going
to build the creatives because we need you know, we
(09:05):
need Jason's time eight hours a day, five days a week,
et cetera. And it's a it's a really interesting discussion
because you might get your best idea in the shower
after thinking about it for two weeks solid, but you're
not at the office, you're not working, but that's where
the idea comes. And then you call your partner and say, hey,
(09:27):
I have this idea. What do you think of this?
And the flip side of that is sometimes you sit
down with five people on your team and start debating
ideas and you come up with something in the first
half hour and it's great. Is it less valuable because
it didn't take you two weeks?
Speaker 3 (09:43):
That's such an interesting thing to think about.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yeah, at bbdo did you turn that into a new
way of a new model or a new way of charging?
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Yeah, well we sure did. Actually, we made a lot
of kind of structful changes, basically deconstructing the processes of
the agency to figure out where we were being efficient
and where we weren't. And the goal was from the
get go to figure out if this model of like
copywriter and art director working together for x period of time,
(10:15):
sharing it with their boss, going back through the revision cycle,
the model that had been basically invented at Doyle Daneburn
back in the sixties, if that model was still still valid.
That was our hypothesis, like, is there a different way
to do it? And so we deconstructed it, and we
came up with a bunch of different ways to look
at the process, and we pulled the agency into the
(10:37):
whole idea of what we were trying to do, which
was reinvent ourselves. And we had everybody participate, which was
really rewarding, I think for everyone to kind of get
on board of like, we're going to try to innovate
the whole process of how we do advertising. And we
came up with four or five different models and then
we started testing them. We had a feedback loop. It
was very like we were taking the inspiration from Silicon
(10:58):
Valley and saying, how do we apply this to the
process of creating campaigns. And we had everyone feedback on
the things that we're working and not working, et cetera,
et cetera. And through that process we drastically changed the
way we worked. And you know, the result was during
that time period that I was I was leaving the agency,
(11:21):
we tripled the top line of the agency and like
six sex to the bottom line because we doubled our
operating margin. And that was really because we took out inefficiency.
It wasn't because you know, we were making people work
the weekends or something, which is typical at some agencies.
It was because we took the waiste out, Like you know,
(11:42):
the senior people are here and you've got all these
teams and a lot of times there was just a
ton of waste in the system. As people were doing revisions,
coming up with ideas, presenting them, going back doing more revisions,
and we said, let's get the ideas quickly to the
decision makers and then decide which ones we're going to
bring to a client and then go totally changed the
(12:04):
way we worked.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
Well, I think that's a great segue to how you transition.
You were at bbdo, I think like almost.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Twenty years, Yeah, and then you moved client side to
service now. I think you've been there like four years
and you're the chief brand officer now, And it just
made me think, did that efficiency translate into service now
(12:31):
kind of being attracted to you, or did that have
nothing to do with it and you just decided it
was time to go client side.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
There is a mindset of transformation that I think I
adapted as a creative person. You're always looking at the
brief and trying to figure out how you can do
the best thing inside that brief. When I became CEO,
I think it helped me understand that you can look
at the business that way. You can look at the
whole business in the same way. The brief is how
(13:01):
are we going to grow the agency? How are we
going to change you know, step change, the growth model
and what do we have to do to get there?
And then coming to Service Now, it was a similar
brief how are you going to transform an organization and
help to build a brand. And I think the fact
that I had had the experience of building a creative culture,
(13:24):
knowing how to manage a creative culture, understanding what good
looks like in a creative world, that all translated into
what I'm doing now here at Service Now, and it's
it's been an awesome transition. I you know, Service Now
was my client, so it was kind of a little
bit awkward at first.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Oh wow, I didn't know that. That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Yeah, funny story. Actually Service Now called me to pitch
the business when I was at BBDO and some really
lovely people just called me out of the blue and said, hey,
we want you to come down and pitch the business.
At that time, this is twenty sixteen, I've been know
I hadn't yet heard of service Now myself, and so
I said two weeks tell me more. They wanted to
(14:09):
do a competitive pitch. They had a bunch of agencies
lined up, the typical bake off you'd been in a
million of them, and I passed. I said, you know,
I think I'm going to have to politely decline. It
sounds fascinating and your business sounds amazing, but two weeks
is not the way that we pitch, and that's not
the way you're going to get the best out of
my team. So I don't think it sets either of
us up for a good start. There was like a
(14:30):
long pause and they said, well, how would you want
to do it? And so I said, well, I'll come
down there tomorrow and we can talk about what you
need and then if there's a good match, we can
talk about a timeline and lay out a process. And
so we did that. I went down the next day.
Wonderful people. They had this really big ambition to start
to build the brand, and lo and behold, we laid
(14:53):
out a timeline that was going to set us up
for success, and we went in and pitched the business
and they gave us. They gave it to us on
the spot. So then cut to a couple of years
later and our CEO, Bill McDermott, who as we talk
about building a B to B brand, I can't stress
(15:13):
enough how important it is to have the C suite
aligned behind the idea of building a brand, not just
the theory, but like actually wanting to do it. And
so Bill McDermott, you know, and I had a conversation
where in the course of an hour we talked about
the possibility of a job and a role building the brand.
(15:33):
And by the end of the conversation he had given
me the best brief I've ever gotten in my life,
which was, I think it's time for you to leave
BBDO and come and paint your brand masterpiece. And when
he said that, I was like, oh my gosh, that
is the greatest freaking brief I've ever gotten. So here
I am Jim.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
I'll always love to ask every guest what makes Jim
lesser Jim lesser? In other words, what are you particularly
good at that makes you successful that maybe other people
are not as good at.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Some of the things that probably have helped me. Number
one is energy. I'm like, I'm really passionate about fitness
and food and making sure that I'm like full on
every day. And I take that really seriously. And I
think you can't transmit energy to your team if you
don't have it to give. And so I really care
(16:29):
about about making sure I show up at like one
hundred percent every day for my team. And then I
think the people side of the business is something that
I learned learned to get good at when I was
in the agency world, and I actually when I when
I became CEO, I realized pretty quickly that all of
the big problems in an agency called problems like whatever
(16:52):
comes up in the day, like an escalation, all of
them are people problems. Somehow you didn't find the right
person to put against the right team for the right client.
And so early on as a as a CEO, I said,
I got the leadership team together and I said, this
(17:12):
might be a little uncomfortable, but I want to meet
every single person we hire. And the reason was I
wanted to be vested in that person's success myself. I
want to be the one who made the call that
this is the right person for the job, because ultimately,
what would happen you let an agency. You know, sometimes
(17:33):
people will come to you and they'll say this person's
not working out. Well, it's easy for that leader to
sometimes feel like they made the wrong call, so they
don't want to come to you, Jason. So then the
problem festers, right and it might just be they need
to be on a different team. That might be they
need to be on a different client. What I learned
was by owning that decision, like, Okay, all the people
(17:53):
decisions stop with me. And so ultimately, if the person
is not working out for some reason or they're not
on the right team, that can come to me, and
that person should feel really comfortable bringing it to me
because I ultimately made the choice yes, And I think
that that was the game changer for our organization, and
I brought that here to the brand team at Service Now.
(18:14):
So to this day, I meet everyone we hire.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
I do not do that. That's probably something that they
should be doing. That's smart. I know what.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Service Now is pretty much, and I've obviously done some
prep for this podcast, But can you explain Service Now
to me, like how you would explain it to your mom?
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Sir? Yeah, Well, what Service Now does is both incredibly
complex and incredibly simple at the same time. So it's
one of those things that you can you can go
deep on over the course of a career, but it
also is quite simple when you kind of elevate the story,
(18:55):
and that's what we try to do. So the simplest
way to think about it if I was explaining to
my mom, is why we do what we do, what
we do and how we do it. So the why
behind everything is we want to make the world work
better for everyone. And that goes back to our original
founder's vision, Fred Letty, who had this epiphany when he
(19:20):
was a young coder that that he knew this woman
Phyllis who had to fill out a form for every
single order that went out in this factory he was
working in, and he was watching or do this repetitive
thing over and over again, and that night he was like,
I wonder if I could just automate that, and he
literally wrote a bit of code overnight and came back
(19:41):
and he said, here, Phillis, just instead of doing that
whole form, just press F eleven and it filled out
everything from the prior one and then she just finished
it off, and the story goes she cried tears of joy,
she was so happy. So he realized the pow of
technology to make people's lives better. So that's the why.
(20:03):
Then the what what we do. We're putting AI to
work for people, and that is our consistent message. That's
you know what we're known for out in the market.
We're putting out of work for people, which which really
builds on that why, because when people have challenges in
(20:24):
a big organization fortune, five hundred companies, governments, et cetera,
oftentimes it's like it's so frustrating to get things done.
Like if you've been in any big organization, you've probably
faced something where you're like, why is it so hard
to just submit my expense reports? Or why is it
so hard to fill in the blank right time sheets.
What we do is put AI to work across your whole.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Business, connecting it so there's no silos.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
That's the how. Yeah, So it's the why, the what,
the how, the how is that we have the AI
platform for transformation, for business transformation. We don't just work
with businesses, we do work with governments as well, but
we call it business transformation because that's the easiest way
to explain just what you said, which is that in
(21:11):
any big organization, any big company, there are literally hundreds
of different technology parts, apps, and anyone who runs a
big technology organization has this hornet's nest of complexity, just
an absolute crazy web of complexity. And the Service Now
platform is like this clean layer of simplicity that lays
(21:33):
on top of it. It's like the iPhone interface for
all the apps underneath it. And that ability to connect
everything else is why our CEO, Bill McDermott always says
no one else has to lose for us to win,
because we actually make all that other stuff work better.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
I can't believe Service Now is almost called F eleven.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
That's a funny, funny story about Fred. Just an amazing
guy as a founder. He's I got a chance to
spend a lot of time with him when we launched
the world works with service Now as a brand idea
four years ago, and I said to him, how does
it feel now that the company is At that time,
it was about twenty thousand people. Now it's twenty six thousand.
I said, how does it feel to be employee number one?
(22:18):
And he said, actually I'm not. And I said, what
do you mean. He said, Well, when I started, it
was just me and my laptop in my living room,
like coding away. And then over the next month or two,
I got a few friends who I convinced to work
for free, kind of moonlighting for me and helping me
write code. And then cut to we get our first
(22:40):
customer who actually paid us money and when the check
came in, I said, well, I'm not going to take
the money. I'm going to give it to employees number one,
two and three first. So he's actually employee number four.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Oh wow, that's awesome. That cool. Yeah, that's so cool.
That's a great story. All right.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
So tell me you've done a lot in you know,
marketing for a lot of brands, primarily B two C brands.
You're now doing some type of B two C marketing
for a B to B brand. Tell me the difference
in you know, how you have to switch your mindset
between B two C and B to B.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
This is this is a really interesting area of discussion,
and cut me off if I go too long, because
I think about this every day. There are some things
that are just playing different about B to B, which
is the person who buys your product is not a person.
It's generally a group of people. We call them buying centers.
(23:39):
And all that means is that if you're in a
big pick your for Fortune five hundred company that comes
to mind. In that company, it's probably eight ten people
who actually are part of the process of kind of
going through this review to look for the right solution,
and so there's a bit of a group mindset of
getting people to kind of agree on the brand that
(24:03):
they want to invest in, and all of their careers matter,
you know in terms of that, Like they're betting their
careers on your brand if they choose you. So it's
a little bit of a group dynamic that you have
to think about. But one of the reasons that I
came to service now is because I think the mold
is so stale when the way most companies think about
(24:25):
B to B. There's a couple of companies who do it,
who have done it historically very well, And what we're
trying to do is break that mold and think of
those customers in those buying groups as still the same
individual human beings that buy soap and toothpaste and sneakers
and all the stuff. Right, they're just consumers. And ultimately
(24:47):
I always think we're in the end competing with all
those other We're not competing with just our software competition.
We're competing with the world of consumer products who are
all trying to get their attention. I mean, when you
talk to the C suite, the most you know, the
most obvious places to go the media, the media venues,
(25:09):
that you know where c suite executives sit, or live
Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Well, what are the other
ads in there? They're not just software ads. It's Ritz Carlton,
it's you know, Mercedes, Benz, et cetera, et cetera. This
is probably the most challenging and most expensive audience to
reach in the world because everybody wants the c suite
(25:33):
executive's attention, and it's their attention we're competing for. So
what we do has to not just be clear about
our proposition as a brand, but we have to make
them like us. We have to make them remember us.
We have to be noticed, we have to be remembered,
and we have to be understood.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
So in some ways it's similar, but in a lot
of ways there's another layer of complexity on top of it,
because you still have to be likable.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Entertain, create awareness, but be famous, be a famous brand
that people recognize, but then also have to add the
additional layer of playing to different need states because it's
this group decision making.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Well said, and there's also a very long buying cycle, Jason,
So if you think of from consumer world, if you
think of how often do you buy insurance? Right how
often do you buy a car? How often do you
buy a home? I mean our buying cycle can be
eighteen months. And so when you're marketing to your you know,
your prospective audience, ninety five percent of them are not
(26:37):
actually in market at that moment. So you've got to
be building the brand so that when they do come
into the market and say they they make what's called
the day one list, which is, hey, we need a
solution for this. Who should we talk to company one, two, three?
We have we need to be on that day one
(27:00):
because if you're not on the day one list, you
have a very slim chance of being chosen for the project.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Yeah, what are some of the biggest challenges you faced
in building the brand?
Speaker 1 (27:13):
The biggest challenge is that the platform is so powerful
that it's hard to imagine something it can't do. But
that makes it very hard to describe a use case.
So if I say to you, Jason, here's a classic
use case. You are about to have a baby, congratulations.
You're going to go onto your company portal and you
(27:33):
work at a Fortune five hundred company, and you need
to understand what is the paternity leave policy and how
do you schedule that you go into your portal, our
chat you know, our chet window pops up, you ask
a question. You not only get an immediate answer, which
is here's the policy and you can do this. You
get a button that says, would you like to request
(27:56):
your schedule, your your paternity Okay, just giving you one
use case, there's a thousand use cases. If I tell
you that, you think of us as like a company
that does company portals and manages you know, time off.
That is one time, one use case, and there's so
many that I think one of the biggest challenges for
(28:17):
us is the product is so innovative. How do we
do marketing that's as innovative as our product? How do
we not say we're innovative? How do we show up
as an innovative company? And that's probably the single biggest challenge.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Every company is going to have different bespoke needs to
use the platform in different ways, and that's almost impossible
to articulate, right.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
That's the beauty of it, and that's the challenge.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
So you know, we can talk about use cases all
day long. If I give you one use case, you
have a dot. If I give you two use cases,
you have a line. If I give you like a
solar system, then you can start to see oriyon right.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Obviously, this podcast about the soul and science, or you
could put that as brand and performance. How do you
think of brand and performance or so in science for
what you have to do at your job as the
chief brand officer.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
I love that question.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
I think.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
It really encapsulates the duality of what brand marketing is.
And I think there's if you look across the whole
marketing organization, all my partners across marketing, there's some that
lean more towards the science side. What's the data? How
are we speaking to the right audience at the right
time and the right moment when they need us, How
are we following up with them? There's all the marketing
(29:42):
science aspect of it, and then the sole side of
it is how am I making them feel? Yeah, so
to me, the soul side of it is are we
telling moving stories? Are we showing them the customers that
are using our product in fascinating ways? Those are the
things that really make them feel like, Hey, that's a
(30:02):
brand that I want to be a part of. We
did an interesting project over the past couple of years
which was creating a documentary film for the Tribeca Film Festival,
and it was a great example of soul and science.
We found use cases and stories that were really special
(30:25):
and created a thirty minute documentary that literally, you know,
you got to get your box of tissues out because
it's so emotional. But then we created an event around
it and we got our customers into the room and
we created an experience that on the science side is like,
those are people who are important to our brand. We
want to give them a special experience. We want to
(30:46):
make sure we know who they are, how we follow
up with them. And there's a balance I think every
day in that soul and science.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Is there anything coming out that you're building its service
now that you can talk about that you're super excited about.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
We have a really exciting thing happening right now which
is called Service Now University. Just to do them out
before I tell you about what that is and how
we're launching it. I mentioned how many people work at
service now. Twenty six thousand people work at Service Now
plus growing every day, but almost a million people work
(31:24):
on service Now. That means they make their living because
they either are in a partner company that can be Deloyde, Etcentric, KPMG,
all the big, big strategic partners that you've heard of,
but there's also hundreds of those types of partners that
(31:46):
do different specialty implementations, and those people are all trained
on the service now platform. Then there's also our community
of people who are all over the world who know
how to get things done on the platform. They're trained
on the platform, and that community is some of our
most passionate brand evangelists. I mean, Jason, I'll tell you
(32:10):
when you if you came to our event at Knowledge,
you would see people with custom made clothing, custom made jewelry,
our logos, everything like tattooed on their arms. They cut
with all kinds of like homemade creative cool things, light
up sneakers and backpacks and it's wild and it's so
much fun because they the reason they're so passionate is
(32:32):
because the transformation has been in their life. It's not
you know, transforming a fortune five hundred business. We talk
about transformation at that level. This is like I make
my living on the service now platform and I used
to do fill in the blank that could have been
This is I've always wanted to be a technical person
(32:53):
all the way to I used to be a school teacher.
We have people who used to be musicians and now
they're on the service Now platform, you know, making a
great living. So that transformation drives this passion for the brand,
the passion for the company. They believe in the mission.
And so we're we're launching Service Now University to help
(33:14):
train those people and more to build that community. And
it's it's really an exciting new development because it's basically
asking the question, what if learning didn't have to look
like learning? Like, is there a different way to do this,
a new way to do this, an innovative way to
do this learning. And that's both for employees and for
(33:37):
our external community who will be able to for free
take courses in AI, take courses in the platform, develop
their skills, become admins, become architects, and they can do
all these things on the platform at Service Now University.
So it's really exciting, and we're doing the big launch
the first week of May in Las Vegas at our
(33:59):
event Edge twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
That's awesome. I can't wait. Follow up on that.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
All right, I have two more questions for you and
then I'll let you go. Thank you, for being generous
with your time. If you're if someone's listening to this,
and they are, you know, they we've talked a lot
about your career. Maybe they're at an agency, or they're
you know, at a mid level at a at a
brand or a client side. What advice would you give
them to kind of make the most of their career
(34:27):
or to stand out in an organization.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
I always start with make yourself useful. That's a simplistic
way to look at it, because it depends on what's
useful in your organization. But if you can make yourself
useful in the job, you're in inevitably one hundred percent
of the time your boss will say can you do
this too? And whatever that is becomes the next opportunity.
(34:51):
And if you do that and you're useful at delivering
on that, you'll get the next opportunity. That's how I
went from being a copywriter to being a you know,
from being a receptionist to being a CEO to being
you know, now a brand person here at service. Now,
that's great advice.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Do you have a personal mantra or a personal quote
that you've always had or that you live by or
that you think about all the time.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
I don't have it like tattooed on my arm or
anything like that. But for me, it all boils down
to the simplest way I try to live and work
is I want to do cool shit with cool people.
Like that means not cool, trendy, cool, important, culturally relevant, creative,
(35:38):
super clever, like deliver the value for the business, do
something as innovative as the product you're selling, and you know,
do it with people you love. Doing it with like
cool shit with cool people is about as simple as
I could phrase it if it was going to be
on a billboard.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
I have.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
It's kind of a good tattoo, all right, Jim, thank
you so much for your time, and we can't wait
to see what comes next for Service Now with you
guiding the brand. But it's been great to see the
rise of it and I'm sure you're the Service Now
university is going to be a big, a big next step.
Thanks for taking the time to be on the Sole
(36:17):
and Science podcast, Jim Good.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Jason, thanks for having me man, it was really fun.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Thanks so much for listening to Soul and Science and
we'll see you next week. Sole and Science is a
mechanism podcast produced by Maggie Bowles, Ryan Tillotson, and Lili Jablonski.
The show is edited by Daniel Ferreira, with theme music
by Kyle Merritt and I'm your Host Jason Harris and Mechanism.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
We build iconic brands with soul and science. The soul is.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Culturally relevant brand building, and the science is the always
on marketing activities that drive the bottom line.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Learn more at mechanism dot.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Com, stink
Speaker 1 (37:02):
St change
I always start with make yourself useful. If you can
make yourself useful, inevitably one hundred percent of the time,
your boss will say can you do this too? And
whatever that is becomes the next opportunity. And if you
do that and you're useful at delivering on that, you'll
get the next opportunity. That's how I went from being
a receptionist to being a CEO to being now a
(00:23):
brand person here at Service Now.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
In today's world, how does a brand break through the
noise and become iconic? Join me Jason Harris as I
speak with the world's leading marketing experts about how they
use sole in science to build an iconic brand.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Think of it as EQ meeting IQ.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
So let's lock in and together fast forward our marketing
minds on the Soul and Science Podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Welcome to the Sole and Science Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
I am so excited to talk to Jim Lesser today,
and I'm excited to talk to Jim about the soul
and science of automation and how AI is going to
impact business operations across slew of industries and a little
bit about his journey and what Service Now is birthing
and how it's changing and what it's all about.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
So, Jim, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Thanks Jason, great to see you.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Great to see you too.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
All right, Jim, before we get into your current state,
I'd love to know your backstory.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Did you fall into marketing or were you a born marketer?
Speaker 1 (01:36):
A little bit of both. My father was in the
advertising industry, so it was like the family conversation at
dinner every night, and I from the time, I literally
from the time I can remember, the conversation was like
talking about campaigns and so I mean I memorized jingles,
I knew every word of commercials. It was just kind
(01:58):
of you know, some families like you weren't allowed to
watch TV, and we probably watched the commercials more than
the TV.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
You know.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I think when your parents do something, you either admire
it and go into it, or you it it kind
of repels you and you want to do something completely different.
It sounds like the way maybe he spoke about it,
romanticized it, and drew you in into the business.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Definitely. And you know that the before it was called
take your kid to work Day, it was just take
your kid to work someday and I would go to
work and it was like it was for a you know,
an eight year old or a ten year old. An
agency is a pretty cool place to hang out. Like
there's every polar of magic marker and pads as big
as a wall, and you can draw, and you know,
(02:42):
like play games and everybody's super relaxed and cool and
there's creative people running around on skateboards or whatever. Like
it's just a you know, an agency environment. You created
one as an impressionable young kid, it's yeh, like it's great.
I mean as a young kid. I remember the first
time I went to my dad agency. You get off
the elevator and the elevator doors would close, and they
(03:04):
had this massive photograph that covered the entire elevator bank
of the company softball team, and so it was just
it was just a great vibe.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
You know. I love that. And did you go to
school for marketing or did you go to school for
something else?
Speaker 1 (03:19):
No? I didn't. Actually I didn't see that as necessarily
my my path, although it ended up being my path.
And I went to school and somehow stumbled into philosophy
class and loved that and I ended up doing that
as my degree. But I did I did do a
lot of English a lot of writing, a lot of
(03:39):
creative writing, a lot of film studies, you know, all
kind of mixed up, and in some weird way, it
turned out to be the perfect background to, uh, to
become a copywriter.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Did you do something before you were a copywriter?
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah, I mean I got out of school. You couldn't,
you know at that time, you didn't come out of
school with a portfolio. There was no you know, there
were no undergraduate programs for portfolios. And so basically the
path was go to a city, get your foot in
the door, and start going to night school to put
together your portfolio. And so that's what I did. I
moved to New York and then got myself a job
(04:17):
in New York as the receptionist in a terrific ad
agency at that time doesn't exist anymore, but Scyley McCage
Slops was like a legendary agency of like the seventies
and eighties.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
And.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Just the way to get at my foot in the
door was to be a receptionist. And I took that
job and went to school at night, and then from
there worked my way up actually to being then it
was called an assistant. It was basically an executive assistant,
a secretary and admin, whatever you want to call it.
And I was working for like six or seven creatives,
(04:54):
two of whom were executive creative directors, so they were
really the ones I kind of had to spend time
on doing travel and expenses and things like that. But
I helped everybody, and I just sat out in this little,
you know, open cube area at this grade agency. And
that's kind of how I got my start. I was
going to school at night working on my portfolio. I was.
(05:16):
I made sure that everybody knew that I wanted to
become a writer and that I was working on my
I was always working on my book, sitting there and
I was, you know, I guess from the very beginning,
I probably worked hard. That was probably a key element
of the beginning of my career was I was always
(05:36):
the first person in the creative department and always the
last to leave, and I was always there working on something,
and I was always trying to get input on my book,
and you know, pick up little tidbits of input from
creative directors who would spend a minute with me.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
And that throughout your career, did you go over to
the business side or did you stay in the creative side.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Stayed on the creative well, I did both. I stayed
on the creative side, became a creative director. I had
moved to California just wanted to check out California and
you know, never went back basically, but I came out
to San Francisco just really wanted to be a part
of this like burgeoning San Francisco ad scene and was
(06:24):
a creative Then I became a creative director. And then
after I think I was executive creative director of BBDO
both San Francisco and LA for about ten years, and
then I had the chance to go to kind of
the business side, meaning I became the president and CEO.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
Was that transition hard for you going from hell yeah, yeah,
it was right hard.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
I mean you had to learn, so you know what
it was. It was It was less like the the
tools and.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
Tricks.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
It was more the understanding of where my skills could apply,
you know, and really understanding like what my strengths were
and how I could help the agency grow, and also
realizing some of the things that had previously seemed mysterious
were not so hard or mysterious. They just were things
that required time and focus, you know. Excel as a
(07:17):
perfect example. Like, you know, the math you do running
an agency is not calculus. It's addition and subtraction. You know,
Like it's not hard math. You just have to pay
attention to it.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
What's something you brought with you that you think made
you really good at the business side or running an agency.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
As a creative director, you sometimes think that you're managing
this one piece of the agency, which is the creatives,
the producers, you know, maybe the project management depending on
their structure. But then there's HR and there's finance, and
there's you know, the contracts, and there's how to manage
the clients and the strategists. There's all these other things,
(07:56):
and I think as a creative director, you think like,
oh man, that's the that's not in my wheelhouse. What
I the big unlock for me was realizing that the
hardest part of running an agency is actually managing the creatives.
That's the hardest part. Like you know, I mean, for
the most part, people in the finance team know what
(08:19):
they're doing and they do it when they're say when
they say they're going to do it. And the same
with the project managers and a lot of other disciplines. Like,
the creative part is that's the magic trick, and if
you can manage that, that's the hardest part. So you
just have to then wrap your head around the broader scope,
you know what I mean, because with creative people, you
know I used to. I mean, one of the things
I found fascinating was you get into contract discussions once
(08:43):
I had to start negotiating contracts, and you have these
discussions with clients or with the sourcing departments at your
client where they want to talk about like, well, how
many ideas are you going to show us in order
to get to the idea and how many rounds are
we going to do? And also how are we going
to build the creatives because we need you know, we
(09:05):
need Jason's time eight hours a day, five days a week,
et cetera. And it's a it's a really interesting discussion
because you might get your best idea in the shower
after thinking about it for two weeks solid, but you're
not at the office, you're not working, but that's where
the idea comes. And then you call your partner and say, hey,
(09:27):
I have this idea. What do you think of this?
And the flip side of that is sometimes you sit
down with five people on your team and start debating
ideas and you come up with something in the first
half hour and it's great. Is it less valuable because
it didn't take you two weeks?
Speaker 3 (09:43):
That's such an interesting thing to think about.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yeah, at bbdo did you turn that into a new
way of a new model or a new way of charging?
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Yeah, well we sure did. Actually, we made a lot
of kind of structful changes, basically deconstructing the processes of
the agency to figure out where we were being efficient
and where we weren't. And the goal was from the
get go to figure out if this model of like
copywriter and art director working together for x period of time,
(10:15):
sharing it with their boss, going back through the revision cycle,
the model that had been basically invented at Doyle Daneburn
back in the sixties, if that model was still still valid.
That was our hypothesis, like, is there a different way
to do it? And so we deconstructed it, and we
came up with a bunch of different ways to look
at the process, and we pulled the agency into the
(10:37):
whole idea of what we were trying to do, which
was reinvent ourselves. And we had everybody participate, which was
really rewarding, I think for everyone to kind of get
on board of like, we're going to try to innovate
the whole process of how we do advertising. And we
came up with four or five different models and then
we started testing them. We had a feedback loop. It
was very like we were taking the inspiration from Silicon
(10:58):
Valley and saying, how do we apply this to the
process of creating campaigns. And we had everyone feedback on
the things that we're working and not working, et cetera,
et cetera. And through that process we drastically changed the
way we worked. And you know, the result was during
that time period that I was I was leaving the agency,
(11:21):
we tripled the top line of the agency and like
six sex to the bottom line because we doubled our
operating margin. And that was really because we took out inefficiency.
It wasn't because you know, we were making people work
the weekends or something, which is typical at some agencies.
It was because we took the waiste out, Like you know,
(11:42):
the senior people are here and you've got all these
teams and a lot of times there was just a
ton of waste in the system. As people were doing revisions,
coming up with ideas, presenting them, going back doing more revisions,
and we said, let's get the ideas quickly to the
decision makers and then decide which ones we're going to
bring to a client and then go totally changed the
(12:04):
way we worked.
Speaker 3 (12:05):
Well, I think that's a great segue to how you transition.
You were at bbdo, I think like almost.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Twenty years, Yeah, and then you moved client side to
service now. I think you've been there like four years
and you're the chief brand officer now, And it just
made me think, did that efficiency translate into service now
(12:31):
kind of being attracted to you, or did that have
nothing to do with it and you just decided it
was time to go client side.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
There is a mindset of transformation that I think I
adapted as a creative person. You're always looking at the
brief and trying to figure out how you can do
the best thing inside that brief. When I became CEO,
I think it helped me understand that you can look
at the business that way. You can look at the
whole business in the same way. The brief is how
(13:01):
are we going to grow the agency? How are we
going to change you know, step change, the growth model
and what do we have to do to get there?
And then coming to Service Now, it was a similar
brief how are you going to transform an organization and
help to build a brand. And I think the fact
that I had had the experience of building a creative culture,
(13:24):
knowing how to manage a creative culture, understanding what good
looks like in a creative world, that all translated into
what I'm doing now here at Service Now, and it's
it's been an awesome transition. I you know, Service Now
was my client, so it was kind of a little
bit awkward at first.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Oh wow, I didn't know that. That's amazing.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Yeah, funny story. Actually Service Now called me to pitch
the business when I was at BBDO and some really
lovely people just called me out of the blue and said, hey,
we want you to come down and pitch the business.
At that time, this is twenty sixteen, I've been know
I hadn't yet heard of service Now myself, and so
I said two weeks tell me more. They wanted to
(14:09):
do a competitive pitch. They had a bunch of agencies
lined up, the typical bake off you'd been in a
million of them, and I passed. I said, you know,
I think I'm going to have to politely decline. It
sounds fascinating and your business sounds amazing, but two weeks
is not the way that we pitch, and that's not
the way you're going to get the best out of
my team. So I don't think it sets either of
us up for a good start. There was like a
(14:30):
long pause and they said, well, how would you want
to do it? And so I said, well, I'll come
down there tomorrow and we can talk about what you
need and then if there's a good match, we can
talk about a timeline and lay out a process. And
so we did that. I went down the next day.
Wonderful people. They had this really big ambition to start
to build the brand, and lo and behold, we laid
(14:53):
out a timeline that was going to set us up
for success, and we went in and pitched the business
and they gave us. They gave it to us on
the spot. So then cut to a couple of years
later and our CEO, Bill McDermott, who as we talk
about building a B to B brand, I can't stress
(15:13):
enough how important it is to have the C suite
aligned behind the idea of building a brand, not just
the theory, but like actually wanting to do it. And
so Bill McDermott, you know, and I had a conversation
where in the course of an hour we talked about
the possibility of a job and a role building the brand.
(15:33):
And by the end of the conversation he had given
me the best brief I've ever gotten in my life,
which was, I think it's time for you to leave
BBDO and come and paint your brand masterpiece. And when
he said that, I was like, oh my gosh, that
is the greatest freaking brief I've ever gotten. So here
I am Jim.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
I'll always love to ask every guest what makes Jim
lesser Jim lesser? In other words, what are you particularly
good at that makes you successful that maybe other people
are not as good at.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
Some of the things that probably have helped me. Number
one is energy. I'm like, I'm really passionate about fitness
and food and making sure that I'm like full on
every day. And I take that really seriously. And I
think you can't transmit energy to your team if you
don't have it to give. And so I really care
(16:29):
about about making sure I show up at like one
hundred percent every day for my team. And then I
think the people side of the business is something that
I learned learned to get good at when I was
in the agency world, and I actually when I when
I became CEO, I realized pretty quickly that all of
the big problems in an agency called problems like whatever
(16:52):
comes up in the day, like an escalation, all of
them are people problems. Somehow you didn't find the right
person to put against the right team for the right client.
And so early on as a as a CEO, I said,
I got the leadership team together and I said, this
(17:12):
might be a little uncomfortable, but I want to meet
every single person we hire. And the reason was I
wanted to be vested in that person's success myself. I
want to be the one who made the call that
this is the right person for the job, because ultimately,
what would happen you let an agency. You know, sometimes
(17:33):
people will come to you and they'll say this person's
not working out. Well, it's easy for that leader to
sometimes feel like they made the wrong call, so they
don't want to come to you, Jason. So then the
problem festers, right and it might just be they need
to be on a different team. That might be they
need to be on a different client. What I learned
was by owning that decision, like, Okay, all the people
(17:53):
decisions stop with me. And so ultimately, if the person
is not working out for some reason or they're not
on the right team, that can come to me, and
that person should feel really comfortable bringing it to me
because I ultimately made the choice yes, And I think
that that was the game changer for our organization, and
I brought that here to the brand team at Service Now.
(18:14):
So to this day, I meet everyone we hire.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
I do not do that. That's probably something that they
should be doing. That's smart. I know what.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Service Now is pretty much, and I've obviously done some
prep for this podcast, But can you explain Service Now
to me, like how you would explain it to your mom?
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Sir? Yeah, Well, what Service Now does is both incredibly
complex and incredibly simple at the same time. So it's
one of those things that you can you can go
deep on over the course of a career, but it
also is quite simple when you kind of elevate the story,
(18:55):
and that's what we try to do. So the simplest
way to think about it if I was explaining to
my mom, is why we do what we do, what
we do and how we do it. So the why
behind everything is we want to make the world work
better for everyone. And that goes back to our original
founder's vision, Fred Letty, who had this epiphany when he
(19:20):
was a young coder that that he knew this woman
Phyllis who had to fill out a form for every
single order that went out in this factory he was
working in, and he was watching or do this repetitive
thing over and over again, and that night he was like,
I wonder if I could just automate that, and he
literally wrote a bit of code overnight and came back
(19:41):
and he said, here, Phillis, just instead of doing that
whole form, just press F eleven and it filled out
everything from the prior one and then she just finished
it off, and the story goes she cried tears of joy,
she was so happy. So he realized the pow of
technology to make people's lives better. So that's the why.
(20:03):
Then the what what we do. We're putting AI to
work for people, and that is our consistent message. That's
you know what we're known for out in the market.
We're putting out of work for people, which which really
builds on that why, because when people have challenges in
(20:24):
a big organization fortune, five hundred companies, governments, et cetera,
oftentimes it's like it's so frustrating to get things done.
Like if you've been in any big organization, you've probably
faced something where you're like, why is it so hard
to just submit my expense reports? Or why is it
so hard to fill in the blank right time sheets.
What we do is put AI to work across your whole.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Business, connecting it so there's no silos.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
That's the how. Yeah, So it's the why, the what,
the how, the how is that we have the AI
platform for transformation, for business transformation. We don't just work
with businesses, we do work with governments as well, but
we call it business transformation because that's the easiest way
to explain just what you said, which is that in
(21:11):
any big organization, any big company, there are literally hundreds
of different technology parts, apps, and anyone who runs a
big technology organization has this hornet's nest of complexity, just
an absolute crazy web of complexity. And the Service Now
platform is like this clean layer of simplicity that lays
(21:33):
on top of it. It's like the iPhone interface for
all the apps underneath it. And that ability to connect
everything else is why our CEO, Bill McDermott always says
no one else has to lose for us to win,
because we actually make all that other stuff work better.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
I can't believe Service Now is almost called F eleven.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
That's a funny, funny story about Fred. Just an amazing
guy as a founder. He's I got a chance to
spend a lot of time with him when we launched
the world works with service Now as a brand idea
four years ago, and I said to him, how does
it feel now that the company is At that time,
it was about twenty thousand people. Now it's twenty six thousand.
I said, how does it feel to be employee number one?
(22:18):
And he said, actually I'm not. And I said, what
do you mean. He said, Well, when I started, it
was just me and my laptop in my living room,
like coding away. And then over the next month or two,
I got a few friends who I convinced to work
for free, kind of moonlighting for me and helping me
write code. And then cut to we get our first
(22:40):
customer who actually paid us money and when the check
came in, I said, well, I'm not going to take
the money. I'm going to give it to employees number one,
two and three first. So he's actually employee number four.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Oh wow, that's awesome. That cool. Yeah, that's so cool.
That's a great story. All right.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
So tell me you've done a lot in you know,
marketing for a lot of brands, primarily B two C brands.
You're now doing some type of B two C marketing
for a B to B brand. Tell me the difference
in you know, how you have to switch your mindset
between B two C and B to B.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
This is this is a really interesting area of discussion,
and cut me off if I go too long, because
I think about this every day. There are some things
that are just playing different about B to B, which
is the person who buys your product is not a person.
It's generally a group of people. We call them buying centers.
(23:39):
And all that means is that if you're in a
big pick your for Fortune five hundred company that comes
to mind. In that company, it's probably eight ten people
who actually are part of the process of kind of
going through this review to look for the right solution,
and so there's a bit of a group mindset of
getting people to kind of agree on the brand that
(24:03):
they want to invest in, and all of their careers matter,
you know in terms of that, Like they're betting their
careers on your brand if they choose you. So it's
a little bit of a group dynamic that you have
to think about. But one of the reasons that I
came to service now is because I think the mold
is so stale when the way most companies think about
(24:25):
B to B. There's a couple of companies who do it,
who have done it historically very well, And what we're
trying to do is break that mold and think of
those customers in those buying groups as still the same
individual human beings that buy soap and toothpaste and sneakers
and all the stuff. Right, they're just consumers. And ultimately
(24:47):
I always think we're in the end competing with all
those other We're not competing with just our software competition.
We're competing with the world of consumer products who are
all trying to get their attention. I mean, when you
talk to the C suite, the most you know, the
most obvious places to go the media, the media venues,
(25:09):
that you know where c suite executives sit, or live
Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Well, what are the other
ads in there? They're not just software ads. It's Ritz Carlton,
it's you know, Mercedes, Benz, et cetera, et cetera. This
is probably the most challenging and most expensive audience to
reach in the world because everybody wants the c suite
(25:33):
executive's attention, and it's their attention we're competing for. So
what we do has to not just be clear about
our proposition as a brand, but we have to make
them like us. We have to make them remember us.
We have to be noticed, we have to be remembered,
and we have to be understood.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
So in some ways it's similar, but in a lot
of ways there's another layer of complexity on top of it,
because you still have to be likable.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Entertain, create awareness, but be famous, be a famous brand
that people recognize, but then also have to add the
additional layer of playing to different need states because it's
this group decision making.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Well said, and there's also a very long buying cycle, Jason,
So if you think of from consumer world, if you
think of how often do you buy insurance? Right how
often do you buy a car? How often do you
buy a home? I mean our buying cycle can be
eighteen months. And so when you're marketing to your you know,
your prospective audience, ninety five percent of them are not
(26:37):
actually in market at that moment. So you've got to
be building the brand so that when they do come
into the market and say they they make what's called
the day one list, which is, hey, we need a
solution for this. Who should we talk to company one, two, three?
We have we need to be on that day one
(27:00):
because if you're not on the day one list, you
have a very slim chance of being chosen for the project.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
Yeah, what are some of the biggest challenges you faced
in building the brand?
Speaker 1 (27:13):
The biggest challenge is that the platform is so powerful
that it's hard to imagine something it can't do. But
that makes it very hard to describe a use case.
So if I say to you, Jason, here's a classic
use case. You are about to have a baby, congratulations.
You're going to go onto your company portal and you
(27:33):
work at a Fortune five hundred company, and you need
to understand what is the paternity leave policy and how
do you schedule that you go into your portal, our
chat you know, our chet window pops up, you ask
a question. You not only get an immediate answer, which
is here's the policy and you can do this. You
get a button that says, would you like to request
(27:56):
your schedule, your your paternity Okay, just giving you one
use case, there's a thousand use cases. If I tell
you that, you think of us as like a company
that does company portals and manages you know, time off.
That is one time, one use case, and there's so
many that I think one of the biggest challenges for
(28:17):
us is the product is so innovative. How do we
do marketing that's as innovative as our product? How do
we not say we're innovative? How do we show up
as an innovative company? And that's probably the single biggest challenge.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Every company is going to have different bespoke needs to
use the platform in different ways, and that's almost impossible
to articulate, right.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
That's the beauty of it, and that's the challenge.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:46):
So you know, we can talk about use cases all
day long. If I give you one use case, you
have a dot. If I give you two use cases,
you have a line. If I give you like a
solar system, then you can start to see oriyon right.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Obviously, this podcast about the soul and science, or you
could put that as brand and performance. How do you
think of brand and performance or so in science for
what you have to do at your job as the
chief brand officer.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
I love that question.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
I think.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
It really encapsulates the duality of what brand marketing is.
And I think there's if you look across the whole
marketing organization, all my partners across marketing, there's some that
lean more towards the science side. What's the data? How
are we speaking to the right audience at the right
time and the right moment when they need us, How
are we following up with them? There's all the marketing
(29:42):
science aspect of it, and then the sole side of
it is how am I making them feel? Yeah, so
to me, the soul side of it is are we
telling moving stories? Are we showing them the customers that
are using our product in fascinating ways? Those are the
things that really make them feel like, Hey, that's a
(30:02):
brand that I want to be a part of. We
did an interesting project over the past couple of years
which was creating a documentary film for the Tribeca Film Festival,
and it was a great example of soul and science.
We found use cases and stories that were really special
(30:25):
and created a thirty minute documentary that literally, you know,
you got to get your box of tissues out because
it's so emotional. But then we created an event around
it and we got our customers into the room and
we created an experience that on the science side is like,
those are people who are important to our brand. We
want to give them a special experience. We want to
(30:46):
make sure we know who they are, how we follow
up with them. And there's a balance I think every
day in that soul and science.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Is there anything coming out that you're building its service
now that you can talk about that you're super excited about.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
We have a really exciting thing happening right now which
is called Service Now University. Just to do them out
before I tell you about what that is and how
we're launching it. I mentioned how many people work at
service now. Twenty six thousand people work at Service Now
plus growing every day, but almost a million people work
(31:24):
on service Now. That means they make their living because
they either are in a partner company that can be Deloyde, Etcentric, KPMG,
all the big, big strategic partners that you've heard of,
but there's also hundreds of those types of partners that
(31:46):
do different specialty implementations, and those people are all trained
on the service now platform. Then there's also our community
of people who are all over the world who know
how to get things done on the platform. They're trained
on the platform, and that community is some of our
most passionate brand evangelists. I mean, Jason, I'll tell you
(32:10):
when you if you came to our event at Knowledge,
you would see people with custom made clothing, custom made jewelry,
our logos, everything like tattooed on their arms. They cut
with all kinds of like homemade creative cool things, light
up sneakers and backpacks and it's wild and it's so
much fun because they the reason they're so passionate is
(32:32):
because the transformation has been in their life. It's not
you know, transforming a fortune five hundred business. We talk
about transformation at that level. This is like I make
my living on the service now platform and I used
to do fill in the blank that could have been
This is I've always wanted to be a technical person
(32:53):
all the way to I used to be a school teacher.
We have people who used to be musicians and now
they're on the service Now platform, you know, making a
great living. So that transformation drives this passion for the brand,
the passion for the company. They believe in the mission.
And so we're we're launching Service Now University to help
(33:14):
train those people and more to build that community. And
it's it's really an exciting new development because it's basically
asking the question, what if learning didn't have to look
like learning? Like, is there a different way to do this,
a new way to do this, an innovative way to
do this learning. And that's both for employees and for
(33:37):
our external community who will be able to for free
take courses in AI, take courses in the platform, develop
their skills, become admins, become architects, and they can do
all these things on the platform at Service Now University.
So it's really exciting, and we're doing the big launch
the first week of May in Las Vegas at our
(33:59):
event Edge twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
That's awesome. I can't wait. Follow up on that.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
All right, I have two more questions for you and
then I'll let you go. Thank you, for being generous
with your time. If you're if someone's listening to this,
and they are, you know, they we've talked a lot
about your career. Maybe they're at an agency, or they're
you know, at a mid level at a at a
brand or a client side. What advice would you give
them to kind of make the most of their career
(34:27):
or to stand out in an organization.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
I always start with make yourself useful. That's a simplistic
way to look at it, because it depends on what's
useful in your organization. But if you can make yourself
useful in the job, you're in inevitably one hundred percent
of the time your boss will say can you do
this too? And whatever that is becomes the next opportunity.
(34:51):
And if you do that and you're useful at delivering
on that, you'll get the next opportunity. That's how I
went from being a copywriter to being a you know,
from being a receptionist to being a CEO to being
you know, now a brand person here at service. Now,
that's great advice.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Do you have a personal mantra or a personal quote
that you've always had or that you live by or
that you think about all the time.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
I don't have it like tattooed on my arm or
anything like that. But for me, it all boils down
to the simplest way I try to live and work
is I want to do cool shit with cool people.
Like that means not cool, trendy, cool, important, culturally relevant, creative,
(35:38):
super clever, like deliver the value for the business, do
something as innovative as the product you're selling, and you know,
do it with people you love. Doing it with like
cool shit with cool people is about as simple as
I could phrase it if it was going to be
on a billboard.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
I have.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
It's kind of a good tattoo, all right, Jim, thank
you so much for your time, and we can't wait
to see what comes next for Service Now with you
guiding the brand. But it's been great to see the
rise of it and I'm sure you're the Service Now
university is going to be a big, a big next step.
Thanks for taking the time to be on the Sole
(36:17):
and Science podcast, Jim Good.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Jason, thanks for having me man, it was really fun.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Thanks so much for listening to Soul and Science and
we'll see you next week. Sole and Science is a
mechanism podcast produced by Maggie Bowles, Ryan Tillotson, and Lili Jablonski.
The show is edited by Daniel Ferreira, with theme music
by Kyle Merritt and I'm your Host Jason Harris and Mechanism.
Speaker 3 (36:46):
We build iconic brands with soul and science. The soul is.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
Culturally relevant brand building, and the science is the always
on marketing activities that drive the bottom line.
Speaker 3 (36:56):
Learn more at mechanism dot.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Com, stink
Speaker 1 (37:02):
St change
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