Redefining Intimacy In Business

^{As the lines between our personal and professional lives blur, business relationships are becoming more familiar.}

Google “intimacy” and a few images invariably appear: A young couple clasping hands. Parents embracing their child. Two old friends sharing a secret laugh.

Then add “business” in front of “intimacy” and see what appears. Gone are the pictures of happy couples and embracing families. In their place come sterile stock photos of employees shaking hands.

This should come as no surprise, yet the stark difference masks a shift in how businesses must operate today. Part of that shift is happening inside the four walls of the organization. Spurred by the pandemic, leaders are opening up, sharing more of their personal lives, and realizing that employees are engaged and inspired by this newfound authenticity.

It can’t stop there. In a world beset by complex challenges—from Covid and geopolitical upheaval to broken supply chains and transient employee bases—no one organization can go it alone. Success depends on our ability to build intimate relationships with partners, suppliers, and customers as well as co-workers.

For us at ServiceNow, the lesson of this new world is simple. To become a true platform company and bring the power of our ecosystem to bear on our customers’ most pressing needs, we must establish intimacy as the pinnacle of our partner experience.

From transactions to co-creations

I define intimacy as a harmonious, engaging, and familiar relationship. It’s a relationship in which a joint mission and mutual trust and understanding leads to objectives, interests, and strategies that align.

ServiceNow and our partners share a single-minded focus on getting our joint customers to value. That means we can do more than just show up in the market together. Instead, we can co-create solutions that drive innovation and value far beyond what we can deliver individually.

Unfortunately, that’s rarely how vendor-partner relationships work today. Instead, vendors typically supply the technology. Partners pick up where vendors leave off by providing the “hands-on keyboard” resources needed to implement and operate it.

In a previous article, I discussed what this transactional approach misses, and I explored the opportunity partners and vendors have to collaborate to better serve their joint customers’ needs.

At its core, this opportunity is about our collective expertise—in the form of methodologies, frameworks, data, and insights—and its potential to combine into “better together” ideas and solutions. It’s the classic “iron sharpens iron” approach, but it requires the involvement of true platform companies like ServiceNow that have the technology and cross-enterprise reach to codify and disseminate innovation across an organization.

Moving from transactional hand-offs and “1+1=2” thinking to co-creation and “1+1=exponential” requires a level of intimacy rarely achieved…at least, until now. 

When this occurs, it’s a win-win-win—elevating the role of partners, helping technology companies transform into true platform businesses, and driving comprehensive transformation across silos for customers in every industry and geography.

But moving from transactional hand-offs and “1+1=2” thinking to co-creation and “1+1=exponential” requires a level of intimacy rarely achieved…at least, until now.

One step at a time

Building intimacy in business is ultimately no different than building intimacy in our personal lives. Engagement leads to familiarity and familiarity to trust, understanding, and intimacy. That’s how we build harmonious strategies that maximize the benefit for all stakeholders.

At ServiceNow, we’re taking steps to build that intimacy with partners.

1) Share insights and challenges and solve them for mutual benefit

This first commitment is hardly earth shattering, but it’s an essential first step.

We are all dealing with the same challenges. This creates opportunities for engagement and even joint solutions.

Take the talent gap that every organization faces. Traditionally, vendors and partners have competed for the same employees, fighting over an ever-shrinking slice of the same pie. But what if we instead worked together to grow that pie?

ServiceNow is leaning in to do just that, investing in programs that create new sources of talent for us but also for our partners and customers. That’s how we all move forward and continue building and transforming on the Now Platform.

2) Improved access to data and roadmaps

Greater engagement is a necessary but basic first step. The next step is increased sharing of data and product roadmaps.

In the tech industry, for example, partners rarely have access to customer satisfaction data that vendors routinely collect. Partners also have little insight into so-called “critical apps”—the solutions that drive an outsized share of customer value and satisfaction. At the same time, partners don’t generally share information on implementations and deployments. This often leaves vendors blindsided when things go wrong.

This same lack of transparency extends to product development and roadmaps. But just as a shared challenge can lead to a joint venture, shared roadmaps can lead to joint solutions and offerings.

ServiceNow Impact is a great example of this principle in practice. By providing customers, partners, and our own teams a single pane-of-glass view into where a customer is on its value and transformation journey, it allows us to collaborate—using the same data and insights—to accelerate value.

3) Build strategies together

By sharing insights, data, and roadmaps, we build the foundation of a shared strategy and harmonious partnership. This is the ultimate form of business intimacy. At ServiceNow we’re formalizing it with programs that embed partners at the heart of our go-to-market strategy.

Our goal is true co-creation in the form of partner offerings and solutions that deliver a whole greater than the sum of their parts. You get there by redefining business intimacy.