>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE,
covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference.
Brought to you by Girls in Tech.
(upbeat music)
>> Hey, welcome back, everybody.
Jeff Frick here with theCUBE.
We're in Downtown San Francisco at Bespoke.
It's in the Westfield Shopping Mall,
kind of a cool event space up on the fourth floor,
and we're at Girls in Tech Catalyst.
We were last here a couple years ago in Phoenix,
and we're excited to be back.
700 people, really great event,
and the program's pretty simple.
You've got great women leaders telling their story,
and the stories are varied and really cool,
and we just got out of Christina's story.
She's Christina Kosmowski, global head
of customer success at Slack.
>> That's right.
>> Christina, really good job up there.
>> Thank you.
>> There was a couple of things I wanted
to really kind of jump on that I thought
were so important.
In the first one you talk about early
in your career and raising your hand.
When opportunities come up, don't be afraid,
raise your hand, go for it.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
I was always saying, yes to everything.
And now I work on saying no to some things.
(laughs)
>> That's a whole other conversation--
>> I think it's really important that you know
there's all those cliches around the fact that you
know you've got to go through the window
sometimes or you know opportunities are
masked and they really are and so just
saying yes to everything and really being
open to trying new things and learning
new experiences will give you opportunities
you didn't even realize you had.
And so, I always raised my hand, you know,
in college to start the soccer team.
I raised my hand in my first job to go to Europe
and start the London office.
I raised my hand to come to Salesforce,
at every single point, Salesforce had something new,
I said, oh I want to do it and so I was
kind of known as the person who always liked to
start and build things from scratch.
And so, I always wanted to be that yes person
and experience these new opportunities.
>> And that was huge, I think you said when you
started Salesforce, revenue was like 20 million
and when you left it was--
>> Almost 10 billion, yeah, it's crazy.
It was quite a ride, quite a ride.
>> But great, cause then you get those opportunities.
>> Yeah.
>> Another story you were telling which I
thought was pretty impactful was, your college
soccer experience, you're a soccer player
and you know, the difference between putting in
your own work and time to achieve something
and, you know, nobody ever sees the work that happens
when they're not there, but more importantly,
bringing along the team. >> Yeah.
>> And getting everybody else to buy into
your work ethic to raise the performance of the team.
I wonder if you can expand on that a little bit.
Cause then you said you've used that
throughout your career over and over again.
>> I have, it was an important lesson.
I think, for those that didn't see
that speech, I talked about the fact that
my freshman year in soccer, it was the first
year of the varsity program.
We won three games and I was very angry
about that and so I spent the next year
kind of working my butt off.
And so I got to this level but my rest of the team
didn't get to the level and so I was able
to challenge them to match my level and we were
ultimately able to get, you know, into the top sixteen
in the country at the end of my career
and that was the first time that I realized
it's not just about me.
And I've seen that in every step in the way
is, I can get there, I can get my idea there,
I can work as hard as I can but if I can't
empower the team and I can't bring all the cross-functional
leaders along with me, we aren't going to
achieve what we need to achieve.
And at Slack, I've even seen that to be
even more of the case, because I've come into
a function that's brand new, it started very much
as a product-based company versus Salesforce
was a little more sales focused.
And so it's really important that people understand
what our mission is, why it's important,
how we can bring these other organizations with us.
>> Right, so a great kind of business theme that touched
both on Salesforce and at Slack, it's kind of
the subscription economy.
>> Yes.
>> And we've done this conference and we all
switched over to our paid Adobe subscription
versus trying to find a friend who'll get you
a license for a deal at the end of the year.
(laughs)
But I think the really important thing
that you touched on, when you go to subscription
economy it really changes the dynamic between
you and your customer.
And you run customer success. >> I do.
>> Because it's not just take the check
and send 'em the 15% maintenance bill anymore,
now you've got to build a relationship,
you've got to deliver value each and every month
cause they're paying you each and every month.
And so you've translated that into actually building
an organization that supports this very different
relationship. >> That's right.
>> So why don't you tell us, you know,
how did that transform?
How hard of a sell was that and what's
the ultimate outcome with your relationship
with the customers?
>> I think it's so important to realize that
technology is really important, but if we can't
apply that into the business setting
and to specific outcomes and use cases,
it doesn't become valuable over time.
And so, we've built an organization that really
focuses on customer maturity and value.
And so we take it in steps.
And so we look at what are those things
we can do to give value and outcomes
and affect people the way they're working today?
And then what does that look like tomorrow,
how do we build upon that, and then
what does it look like to, they can get
to this fully transformed state,
and we've done that through a combination
of working with product to build features
and in-app education, we work with
all of our customers to understand
what are their needs, we bring people
to the table, we bring one to many programs,
we've really created this champion network
where we are able to allow these peer to peer
relationships, and really have this network effect
with our customers, and so there's lots of different
methods and vehicles that we're doing
to really ensure that our customers
are getting that outcome.
>> Yeah, it's interesting, we cover
a lot of the AWS shows and, you know,
Jeff Bezos will talk about them just
being maniacally customer focused,
and lots of companies like to talk
about being maniacally customer focused,
but most of them are not, they're product focused
or they're competitor focused or they're
kind of opportunity focused, they're not customer focused.
So, how do you build that culture,
can you switch if it's not there
or does it got to be from the top down at the beginning?
>> You can, you can, I think, you know,
at Slack, we've been really fortunate
it also has that extreme customer focus,
but our organization started about 15 months ago,
so we brought even more rigor to that,
and so there's lots of programs you can do
to affect the culture.
So, one of the programs we have is a red account
program, and one of the things there
is really about bringing all the company
together to swarm around issues or risks
that our customers might have seen,
and that's one way that we can start to talk
about customer importance.
>> What do you call it?
>> We call it the customer red account program.
>> Red account, so red like treble, because,
so you basically--
>> We swarm.
>> Swarm, swarm, what a great, swarm meaning
a lot of people from a lot of different places.
>> Lot of different places, and there's full
accountability on all parts of the organization
to solve it, because my organization
can't solve everything, we're really
just the advocates and the facilitators
back into, back into Slack, and so
that's important that we have that accountability,
and we're swarming all around the customer.
We have product feedback sessions
where we're able to bring that advocacy back,
we have a lot of surveys and that promoter
score, things where we're measuring
and looking for accountability
about how we're doing with out customers,
and so there's lots of different programs
that you can help bring this to light,
even in just tactical ways that help ultimately
build this culture of customer success.
>> See, so like I said, you've got
a lot of sniffers in the system
to see when you need to call a code red.
So, I'm just curious, when you get everyone together,
are people surprised where the problems
are, is it like, oh, I thought we were
doing a great job, and this group's like,
no, no, no, you know, you're the problem?
>> Sometimes, sometimes, but I think
it is really around it being a team effort
and really understanding that
when issues or challenges expose themselves,
there's multiple root causes and you can
really understand, okay, part of it could
be a product, part of it could be
how we supported them, part of it could
be in some of our marketing and messaging.
And how do we all solve that in a more
universal experience?
>> All right, last question before I let you go.
Just your impressions of the Catalyst today,
you said it's your first time here.
>> This is my first time here, I am blown away
by the energy and excitement and really
the quality of speakers and conversations
that are happening, I've been hanging
around all morning, and just really
powerful conversations, and I think
I said this in my speech, but we are
in a really fortunate time right now,
and I think our time is now, and it's so great
to see all these women come together,
and we, you know, we're the ones
that can do this.
>> Excellent, we'll see you Amplify later this year.
>> Absolutely.
>> All right, Christina, well, thanks
for stopping by and sharing your story.
>> All right, thanks.
>> All right, she's Christina, I'm Jeff,
you're watching theCUBE, we're at Girls in Tech
Catalyst in downtown San Francisco.
Thanks for watching.
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