ServiceNow has revamped its partner program over the past year and a half to fully engage its ecosystem and drive growth. The company aims to create conditions for more effective collaboration between its sales and products teams and partners, to simplify the partner experience, and to meet the complex needs of end customers.
ServiceNow recognizes that success doesn’t come solely from producing great products sold with and through partners. Instead, it sees the need to bring more partners into engagement to solve the varied needs of end customers.
As Erica Volini, senior vice president of global partnerships, told Channelnomics hannelnomics, “I don’t see a path to $11 billion this year, $15 billion by 2026, $20 billion by 2028 without our ecosystem delivering. And it’s not just about them helping to implement our platform. It’s about them evangelizing our platform, bringing it to customers across all aspects of the enterprise, delivering it, and then innovating to continue to bring our customers that transformational value. Bottom line: We couldn’t do anything without our ecosystem.”
The ServiceNow ecosystem consists of over 2,200 partners across the Resell, Consulting, Service Provider, and Build tracks. While the program is built around these distinct partner types, there is recognition of the overlap in their roles in developing customer solutions.
ServiceNow believes its role is to create conditions for partners to work together with competent peers to complete complex workflow automation solutions. Partners agree that ServiceNow is achieving this objective, with various partner types collaborating in the field. Global systems integrators (GSIs) design processes, consulting firms implement solutions, and service providers deliver ongoing support.
The ecosystem’s collaboration extends beyond partner types. Even the best ServiceNow partners acknowledge the need to work together, leveraging each other’s strengths and offsetting weaknesses to deliver on all of the end customer’s needs.
Making such relationships work — especially where there’s so much overlap in capabilities and pressure to acquire new customers — is difficult even in a curated ecosystem like ServiceNow’s. Partners attending the ServiceNow Knowledge 24 conference in Las Vegas shared three essentials for successful ecosystem engagement: collaboration, clarity, and confidence.
- Collaboration: Partners should seek mutually beneficial collaborations, with each contributing its unique strengths, expertise, and resources to create value and complement one another’s capabilities. From there, partners must collaborate on their respective contributions to the customer engagement.
- Clarity: While working together, partners must maintain open and candid lines of communication. Everyone working on a customer project needs to know their role and expectations, and to accept accountability for their actions and products. Without clarity, there’s no efficiency.
- Confidence: All partnerships are built on trust. Partners working together must have faith that their peers are doing the jobs they accepted, and that none in the engagement will disrupt the others. Confidence and trust happen over time, but they start with a foundation of mutual expectations that trust is the result of their collaboration.
ServiceNow’s thriving ecosystem is built on these principles. Partners recognize that these crucial elements are the key to successful multi-party engagements and go-to-market strategies. Without a strong sense of teamwork, well-defined roles, and trust in one another’s capabilities, ecosystem collaborations can quickly become unstable and unproductive.
ServiceNow has earned praise from its partners for actively cultivating these essential qualities within its ecosystem. By fostering an environment that encourages cooperation, clear communication, and mutual trust, ServiceNow has created an ecosystem where partners can work together effectively to achieve their goals.
