foreign the oldest podcast is brought to you by all this International supplying your expert Ai and digital transformation staffing needs across the U.S and Europe today you are listening to our servicenow Series where we interview the best and brightest of the industry to share their story advice and views on the exciting world of servicenow and digital transformation [Music] hi everybody it's Mark Eddie here Chief customer officer and co-founder of all this and you are listening to the oldest podcast as part of our servicenow series and I'm delighted to welcome Ben person CEO and co-founder of Tandem Ben is do you like to have them on the guests on the show I actually met with Ben at k23 a good few weeks ago Ben thank you very much for being guest on our show today thank you so much Mark looking forward to the conversation we get straight into us can you share the story behind the founding of tannin and then the second part of that question would be what inspired you to start this venture yeah absolutely so what got me to Tenon was truly a need in the market to address Enterprise marketing needs I was a CMO in my last role and ran a Global Marketing business I also worked 12 years in the servicenow ecosystem and saw an opportunity to bring Enterprise marketing teams alongside their counterparts to be able to deliver campaigns projects and tasks all built on service now and that's what we set out to do with tenant fantastic so the great thing about that is you had that kind of problem yourself in terms of you actually knew what the challenge was because you're you're in that kind of day in day out why do you think you and how did you grow and scale so fast yeah for sure I mean we partnered with two great investors one was high alpha and they're the previous Salesforce marketing Cloud executive team who started Adventure studio so having that martech background from one of our investors and then obviously servicenow Ventures also backing us you know that was such a horsepower behind us and so for us we were able to launch both the company and our first product on the servicenow store in just a matter of four months which is just unheard of and the fact that we built on servicenow gave us a platform that we could start with that really accelerated our company launch another way to think about that is it's it's like 16 weeks right 6 16 16 weeks uh yeah truly incredible so when you look at your background and your previous experience and when you how did that approach to being an entrepreneur kind of come together with the development of tenant yeah I've always wanted to run my own business and you know this opportunity we actually got a phone call from servicenow and I I picked it up they were asking us if we would be interested in building marketing Tech on their platform um I couldn't have said yes fast enough because one my background is a CMO and two my background was serviced now it couldn't have been a better fit and so that's what ultimately led us to building this and starting this and you know for us the fact that we had the Strategic backing and the Strategic solution I knew this was going to be something that would be really really impactful for our Enterprise clients so people don't actually know tenant what the P what do you believe sets 10 and apart from the orders in the industry and what is your unique value and proposition I mean the biggest thing is we're building marketing project management by marketers you know I spent six months trying to solve marketing project management across digital marketing and field marketing and content and all the functions of marketing I needed a single Enterprise level solution that I could scale my business with and that's truly what sparked this whole thing you know what got us interested in getting this into Market and can you discuss any significance Milestones or achievements that tenant has read since its exception yeah I mean we already have clients on the product not only do we have a product in the servicenow store for marketing Work Management but now we already have customers running this solution we're also looking at some very large strategic accounts that we're looking to partner with um one of the key things that we did as well marked is to set that stage was we're also partnered with over 30 Fortune 500 companies that have an Enterprise need for this that raised their hand and said we want to be a design partner with you so we built a product advisory Council from day one where we started to have phone conversations with customers and they said can I be part of this I have the problem too can I help you reach the the same outcome I want to get to and so I would say that the product advisory Council for us definitely was a strategic uh differentiator for us yeah you get so many different inputs in terms of to helping Define the problem that needs to be solved and that's allowing for that mvp and the iterations that that come about too taking into consideration what are some of the most valuable lessons you've learned as a founder and is there any advice you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who are thinking about taking the children but for whatever reason just hold back on us yeah I mean some strategic decisions we made one finding the right early team uh I can't emphasize enough like that was my first before I even launched the business in December of last year I already had a number of folks lined up in my network so you know knowing who you would bring in if you're a Founder who are those people that you trust to be at your side because you're going to have a small team that wear a lot of hats early on so finding the right people so important early on so I'd say that's number one you find the right team and almost anything's possible number two would be making sure you're building the right solution and we got on the phone with over a hundred Fortune 1000 companies and asked them like we're talking about product and product roadmap and direction going after martech there's over ten thousand martech tools we could go solve and build on service now we got to make sure we're building the right one and so you know talking to over a hundred major Enterprises they all steered us back to this initial product that we launched they said just get us to be able to deliver campaigns and projects and work on an Enterprise grade solution and so that was a key because obviously building the first right product is going to set you up for success to get to the next potential outcome so yeah and when you've been involved in a startup and you know I've been involved in this startup myself and an interview from people within startups all the time it's the order problems or making the decision which problems are the work wants to work on because what you find is there's no one actually worse than perfectly executing on a problem that doesn't need to be solved exactly and and people are thinking you know from a team perspective their moral is dropped because they've just wasted a lot of effort where people are kind of going that's kind of cool but you know that's not going to help me solve my my time management problem or make me more productive or save as safest costs and I kind of It kind of comes under that wouldn't it be close there that it's got so many so many senior leadership teams in in trouble because the investment is wasted and what what it does is it also hampers future projects because you're kind of really really cautious to go after them and you may not get the the investment to do that so you know interviewing over 100 people and getting their insights and perspectives and and I suppose being ready for their feedback to say actually you know this is what you're saying and you want to keep that bias away because I think yeah key Cunningham once said there's no ugly babies exactly exactly I mean the most important thing is you talk about the two kind of key things is starting a company the most important thing is listening and listening to the companies you're talking to what pains do they have what problems are they trying to solve I would I I you know obviously I had my gut because I knew problems I was needing to solve for myself as my CMO role but you know I'm only one person you got to talk to the real you know hundreds of large Global Enterprises and they're going to tell you what they want what they don't want and uh you know listings a key to that and that was certainly a strategy for us and you know it set us on a good trajectory yeah most importantly will they pay first and you know as a co-founder you you need to you need to I suppose understand that if people are actually going to willing to pay money for this service that's all the proof that you need and if they're not that you know you're working on a problem that's not that doesn't need to be uh quickly solved can you talk to you about any Innovative or exciting projects or initiatives to tenant is currently working up yeah there's just two big ones right now at the moment one is this move to Agile marketing um you hear agile agile has been around forever when you think about the I.T side of the house development shops like everybody has been using agile for a very long time marketing organizations are just now getting to this point of getting into agile now there's certainly some that have more mature than others that have been doing it for for a while but this is a set of capabilities that marketers need now we're not forcing customers to use agile but now having the capabilities to do more agile marketing within our product is our part of our next release that'll be available here at the end of June and we have some fairly large clients that said you build this we'll buy it to your point earlier that need to have agile marketing functionality so that's one big one is agile marketing you hear more on that here later this month in June the second is some big Integrations and we are working in conjunction with a very large pharmaceutical organization and they have some business needs around tying in with their compliance system called Viva and uh so we're actually going to be building a bi-directional integration in partnership with Viva and that has a dramatic impact in that compliance and regulated regulated industry so really going deep in industry is another area that we're thinking about and so Pharma we're seeing a real big interest in this need for our technology yeah such a highly regulated environment and trying to get that set up I can see the amount of efficiencies and value we would actually add within within that type of business so when you look at the future of tannin what are some of your long-term goals and aspirations the long-term goal we are the Enterprise marketing Work Management Solution that's being leveraged so that's the most important thing so if you're one of the 10 000 and growing servicenow customers already seeing that as a strategic platform adding your marketing team is just a natural extension of that that investment you've already made so for us we want to be the the marketing Work Management solution marketing works on servicenow because of tenant and for us our outcome is I want to see marketing organizations coming off this island playing a more transformative role in an organization and being part of the c-suite at the same level is the rest of the the CIO CTO CFO cro you name it feeling that they're up here at the at the table and giving them Enterprise level solutions that allow them to share their value share the ROI story around every marketing dollar that they spend and what the value is contributing back to the company's bottom line so for us that's the bigger Story how do we impact these Enterprise level marketing organizations with technology that empowers them to deliver and execute at speed and scale and when you look at the the broader industry how do you see tenant contributing to the broader industry of making a positive impact in the world because I know that's important to you yeah yeah for sure I mean we we keep hearing and we're we're at the knowledge event together actually and you probably heard up on stage these large Global organizations talking about their Global Business Services strategy GBS we talked a little bit about this on the side in the word you don't hear when they're talking about GBS unfortunately is marketing and you know if you look back into like the late 90s dating myself a little bit you'd hear about this Enterprise shared services story right bringing HR Enterprise share and services it Enterprise to shared services you never heard that really around marketing and in the last two decades you've seen this transformation of companies deciding to take and build their own strategy and pull most of their marketing back in-house actually run historically you'd see marketing being agency-led it'd be outsourced to an agency and they do all your marketing for you most organizations have certainly still Outsource some but most organizations have brought that back in-house because it's a strategic differentiator for them because this GBS strategy is taking place organizations want to take care of this quote unquote messy middle they want to have their business services running and truly delivery for the business marketing is going to come along on that journey and they're going to have the opportunity with tenant to be able to do that what a great way to finish the podcast you've been listening to all this podcast as part of our servicenow series I've been chatting with Ben Pearson CEO and co-founder of tenant Ben thank you very much for your time today thank you very much [Music] thanks for listening to this episode of the oldest podcast if you enjoyed today's episode don't forget to subscribe rate and review we are available on Apple podcast Spotify and any Android podcast of choice you can also 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