In this episode, Damien Davis, a customer success leader at ServiceNow, shares his insights on balancing career growth with personal wellness. He discusses his journey of maintaining healthy habits while managing a demanding executive role, emphasising the importance of sustainable routines and mindset shifts. Damien also highlights how building strong relationships, focusing on personal branding, and leveraging AI-driven solutions to drive impact for both businesses and customers. With a people-first approach, he explains how ServiceNow measures success through NPS, CSAT, and customer value realisation, reinforcing the link between employee engagement and client impact.

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.