Quick Interview with Vernon Irvin on There’s More To Do

Vernon Irvin is Co-CEO and Chief Revenue Officer of Everbridge (Nasdaq: EVBG) a leading SaaS company and global provider of Critical Event Management (CEM) solutions formed in the wake of 9/11 to help save lives and keep businesses and society running. You can watch his Everbridge COVID-19 Road to Recovery 2 Symposium panel “Managing COVID-19 from the CEO/President Perspective” with panelists Jim Hackett (Special Advisor to Ford Motor Company, Formerly President & Chief Executive Officer, Ford Motor Company) and Jim Whitehurst (President, IBM) on-demand here.

JM: Vernon! Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to do this quick interview with me. I've been enjoying getting to spend time time with your incredible team of enterprise sales professionals.

Vernon Irvin (VI): Hello John, and great speaking with you today. I really appreciate how quickly you jumped into our intense 12-week sales qualification training program alongside the whole team. It looks like you will be completing it in record time. Success definitely favors those who aim to compete — I've definitely learned that lesson throughout my career.

JM: Since joining I've read how you’ve spent over thirty years in the enterprise and SaaS space for both public and private sectors at multi-billion-dollar scales. You’ve led enterprise sales organizations and traveled across 60 countries.

VI: I’ve been very fortunate in my career and I’m grateful for the people and mentors with whom I’ve worked over the years. My parents taught me a strong work ethic early in my life, and that has served me well.

As you noted, I have held executive vice president roles at several major public companies reporting to the CEO and managing up to 4,000 employees. These roles allowed me to visit over 60 countries, meet members of the Royal Family, greet, and dine with Bishop Desmond Tutu and more.

JM: Dining with Bishop Desmond Tutu? Amazing!

VI: And I’m definitely pleased that my career has led me to Everbridge where we live and breathe our mission of keeping people safe and organizations running faster. That work is ongoing, and in terms of things I am itching to get done, I’m passionate about helping our customers succeed while supporting Everbridge’s transition to its next stage of growth as a world-class global enterprise.

Today, over 5,400 global firms rely on Everbridge to keep their people safe and organizations running in anticipation of or amid critical events, whether natural, digital, or manmade.

In response to COVID-19, we launched our COVID-19 Shield?: Contact Tracing and Return to Work solutions, which help our customers reopen economies, while most safely returning people to public spaces, offices and campuses. The platform is getting good engagement from customers as it helps them mitigate the impact of the pandemic.

I’m proud of the work we do, especially when you consider Everbridge offers the broadest, purpose-built contact tracing solution for organizations to understand their COVID-19 risk, protect individuals from virus exposure, and mitigate operational risk while automating an end-to-end recovery process – and that’s just one example of the ways we’re helping customers manage a wide array of crises.

JM: Like all executive leaders that I've partnered with in the past, you are incredibly passionate about your team.

VI: I have an amazing team, which we continue to grow. I enjoy helping my group reach their career goals. In fact, I recently promoted one person to Senior Vice President, elevating this person to a direct report managing worldwide customer success. It’s very rewarding to set the bar high, provide the right coaching, and see people rise to the occasion. I enjoy supporting my team’s growth and development. That’s a big priority for me.

I’m also a strong proponent of diversity and inclusion within and outside of Everbridge. I think it’s important to give back. I recently joined the board of Eforall, which offers immersive small business training and mentorship for underprivileged communities.

Other ways we’re giving back as a company include our charitable contributions. Earlier this year we formed a charitable collaboration to support the CDC Foundation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

JM: Given your storied career, is there anything you haven’t done yet that you’re itching to get done?

VI: Looking longer term, I’m excited to drive continued rapid growth at Everbridge to make it a multi-billion-dollar revenue company.

For now, I’m focused on work and my family, including five kids: two are recently out of college (law school) and the other three will soon be there too.

JM: Your dedication to the power of growth, learning, and development is evident in how you've approached crafting and scaling your enterprise sales team. What events in your career made you so committed to training as a key aspect of their experience as a Bridger?

VI: It’s crucial to lead by example. I remember being a new-hire seller and what it feels like not to have the support or training needed to be successful. I vowed early on to give my teams the tools they need to excel.

At one of my previous companies, I remember walking through the office and overhearing a sales rep say: “Great! It’s time to do call blitzes, but I don’t even have any prospects. What am I going to do now?”

That stuck with me. We should hire salespeople to sell, not to prospect – that’s why I take a very supportive approach to leading the sales team and provide ample amounts of training.

When you give sales teams the tools they need to succeed, everyone wins. We recently received the Best Customer Experience Award from The Help Desk Institute (HDI), part of HDI’s prestigious annual Service and Support Awards.

HDI showcases individuals and teams that excel at service and support and elevate their businesses by maintaining the highest standards. We received The Best Customer Experience Award in recognition of an organization that “best leverages its people, processes, and technology to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty for the brand.”?

The award also honors “organizations that set high standards for customer interactions and instill that culture in their employees.”

JM: That's terrific! I've been thinking also how at Everbridge we have been expanding our efforts internationally. Which regions in the world strike you as experiencing the most pain points, that without Everbridge’s suite of solutions, will most certainly need them in the future and why?

VI: The coronavirus pandemic is global. Severe weather remains on the rise throughout the world. We’ve seen record-breaking fires in multiple countries this year. Cyber-attacks are a real threat everywhere. So, it’s not a matter of IF a critical event will happen. It’s a matter of WHEN in every part of the world.

It’s important for business, healthcare and government organizations to be prepared, not just for seasonal critical events, but also highly improbable ones like COVID-19. Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses “black swan” events like these in his book. At Everbridge, we see the pandemic as a black swan event.

All organizations require a complete transformation for how to manage risk in their organizations, for their people and their assets.

Consumerization of the internet and business has happened, and we continue to work to make our solutions as easy to implement as possible. The Everbridge CEM solution leverages 225 out-of-the-box, pre-existing integrations, more than 100 communication modalities, and 22,000 risk data sources to provide a unified enterprise-wide, end-to-end platform that digitally transforms the critical event management process.

JM: As a co-leader of our Bridgers of Color initiative, what do you hope that a cloud SaaS company that’s devoted to saving lives and keeping businesses and society running can do in the space of diversity, equity, and inclusion?

VI: Everbridge leads by example. We can and do show the world how companies can transform their workforce to foster diversity and inclusion, not least because our customers expect that our workforce represents their own diverse people and needs.

I believe we have a responsibility to live by and demonstrate our values: we are a team of leaders, obsessed with customer success, fueled with passion, and guided by integrity. We’re also fortunate to have a CEO, David Meredith, that supports these efforts.

We have launched Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to connect various communities within the company (e.g., women, veterans, LGBTQ, etc.) and host an ongoing series of talks. In fact, I recently led one talk about equal justice that was tremendously well attended.

We continue to work to ensure that diversity and inclusion is woven into how we think about our people programs – from talent attraction and recruiting to development to performance management and everything else.

While this will always be an evolving process and the work is never done, it’s tremendously rewarding to hear new job candidates say they took an interest in Everbridge not only because of our mission, but also our commitment to diversity and inclusion throughout the company and on our management team.

JM: Thanks for sharing your stories and for letting me train alongside your team, Vernon!

VI: Definitely, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to partner with you on the future of Everbridge!