Splunk Inc, San Francisco, California, United States: David Zimmerman, Group Vice President, Customer Success Management and Renewals, Public Sector

Written answers to the questions

Total 200 words used.

Over his 9 years at Splunk, Dave has matured into a world class leader.  In the role of Global Vice President since August 2021, Dave and his Public Sector Customer Success Manager team have consistently exceeded corporate net retention goals and their work with key government organizations has played a significant role in protecting our nation from cyberthreats and to create a better citizen experience when interfacing with Agency systems and websites.  

Dave instills a passion to put the customer and their mission at the center of everything, and in doing so, his team consistently exceeds customer retention targets and customer satisfaction. This year, Dave took building customer value to another level by implementing the online Splunk Value Platform (SVP) to accelerate customer value through defining business objectives, measuring capabilities, providing a prescriptive plan to meet customer goals and capture success. Dave also enhanced the SVP with customer telemetry data to create automated adoption alerts to keep customers on track and measure their Splunk capability.

Dave fostered a collaborative ‘village’ approach to customer success, partnering with sales and engineering leaders to ensure holistic customer account management and has been instrumental in creating better processes internally to better service customers externally

Total 250 words used.

Dave Zimmerman has revolutionized business at Splunk.  

Internally, Dave’s creation of high touch and scaled customer success models along with the reorganization of the Customer Success Manager role and formation of a pooled resources team has resulted in higher renewal rates and ultimately customers that can do more with Splunk.  Rethinking Splunk’s structure and processes has allowed his team to better align to business needs.  

Externally, Dave established trusting relationships with customer CIOs and CISOs when he partnered with the Splunk Business Value Advisory Team to institute a STAR (Situation Task Action Result) system to articulate the value of Splunk to executives.  As an example, a US Government Customer executive recently remarked "I didn't know Splunk could do something like this” after being presented with Dave’s STAR report at the Executive Business Review.  

Similarly, Dave transformed Splunk Customer Success when he introduced the Value Stack which provides a best guess at a customer’s objectives and goals.  For accounts that had no historical knowledge available as a result of Splunk team turnover or losing their Splunk champion, the Value Stack provides a baseline to spark two-way conversations on what is most important to the customer and often leads to active adoption of services and expansion in other parts of once struggling accounts.  The Value Stack has direct ties to Splunk’s faster customer time to value, Splunk’s ability to provide consistency at scale, a 15% higher renewal and expansion rate, and the best annual renewal rate for Splunk’s Public Sector team ever!

Total 239 words used.

As Group Vice President Leader of the Public Sector (PBST) Customer Success and Renewals Team, Dave Zimmerman oversees a team responsible for 3,500+ customer accounts. Over the past two years, Dave has increased quarterly and annual PBST renewal rates from 83% to over 90%.  With 554% growth in cloud customer accounts across PBST, Dave has led his team to a growth rate of four times the baseline in recurring revenue even as Splunk transitioned from perpetual to term pricing.  Dave’s leadership has resulted in 225% growth in the customer’s average ingest and the team consistently exceeds corporate retention goals.  Dave truly has an innovative approach that is working to provide best-case outcomes.

While there are many examples of Dave’s impact on the Splunk Customer Success team which has resulted in milestone moments for Splunk customers, the significance of the Value Stack can be seen in the win at one specific US government agency customer: Dave advocated the Value Stack and not only was the customer happy to have a better way forward to address their security and IT operations shortcomings, they also valued the ability to periodically gauge their maturity levels as they made progress. Ultimately the customer’s value from Splunk increased and they elected to continue to expand their use cases with Splunk resulting in a 200% increase in their spend.  The Value Stack implemented by Dave has, across the board, driven better alignment with customer priorities.

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1. Slide deck "Customer Praise and Testimonials | David Zimmerman"

2. Video Testimonial from Toni Pavlovich, Chief Customer Office, Splunk Inc

3. Video "Splunk: A Federal Civilian Agency Partner"

4. Written Testimonial from Christian Smith, Chief Revenue Office, Splunk Inc

5. LinkedIn Profile: David Zimmerman