SellingSherpa

B2B Sales Best Practices

Busting Silos (Book Summary)

Busting Silos: How Snowflake Unites Sales and Marketing to Win its Best Customers by Hillary Carpio & Travis Henry

PART 1 WHY

1 Do the Unthinkable: Marry Sales and Marketing

  • We have a whole team dedicated to selling into a few of our most prominent media clients, comprising one global account manager, two account executives, one territory account manager, one sales development representative, three sales engineers, and three professional services folks. These people only support selling initiatives for a single, high-priority company. They work on no other accounts.
  • Sophisticated, global buyers require a truly personalized buying experience.
  • Wide nets aren’t exactly obsolete, but they’re definitely ill-suited to the current fast-paced, information-flooded marketplace.
  • WHAT IS ACCOUNT-BASED vs. ABM vs. ONE-TEAM GTM?
    • Account-Based: We refer to “account-based” as the strategic practice of identifying a set of accounts and executing activities against them. Sales, demand gen, field marketing, SDRs and beyond can all be account-based without being aligned and orchestrating across functions. This is where we see the problem.
    • ABM: Account-based marketing (ABM) is the marketing team dedicated to executing account-based programs that range from one-to-one to one-to-many.
    • One-Team GTM: One-team GTM is the unified, scaled strategy and execution of an account-based motion across GTM teams. Which teams are included in this GTM mix will vary based on your org structure, company size, and account-based maturity. The core of this strategy involves sales, sales development, and account-based marketing. Do not use as: a targeted demand-get effort limited to dynamic, segmented ads at scale without sales input.
  • The [customer buying] committee often consists of three tiers:
    • Ultimate approvers who own the decision
    • a core buying committee that does the research and runs the process
    • internal influencers, including end users, who provide comments on vendors and products.
  • Bridging the gap between tools and tool-users isn’t as simple as just hiring more bodies. You need people who have bought into the philosophy of targeted prospecting, solid playbooks and strategies, and the collective energy to tackle a whole lot of execution and orchestration.
  • We define one-team GTM as the unified, scaled strategy and execution of an account-based motion across GTM teams.
  • According to a study by Marketo, companies with aligned sales and marketing teams are 67 percent better at closing deals. Involving sales in the definition of MQLs can help create a more accurate definition that leads to higher quality leads and more closed deals.
  • We see marketing as a team that drives demand by spreading awareness of products and services at a high level. Marketing educates on why to buy. We see sales as a team that is responsible for bringing in revenue and engaging with customers. Sales enables the buying.
  • That said, we still make this crucial distinction: marketing’s work is focused on pipeline generation and sales’ work is focused on forecasting revenue.
  • Leads are not that interesting for sales. Their language is accounts. They want to know exactly what marketing has done for them within each of their accounts.
  • Instead of creating our own goals in a vacuum, we began meeting with salespeople to say, “Let’s discuss what you need done in the twenty accounts that you own.” And we’d find out that some of them need a first meeting, some of them need pipeline acceleration, some of them need a cross-sell to be introduced into another functional area. We got them to describe that for us. And then we took that information and acted on it. We used ABM tactics and SDR motions to get them the meeting, the acceleration, the introduction to that other functional area, whatever they needed.
  • We could never have gotten sales excited about ABM unless we went in saying, “We are committed to doing this for a relatively large cross-section of the accounts that you own.”
  • If you ask one hundred account executives, they will have one hundred different opinions about what an SDR team is supposed to be doing.
  • In close partnership with the sales team, the ABM team identifies a handful of prime accounts that merit pursuit.
  • Once key people at the accounts have seen bespoke messaging for long enough across online and offline channels to recognize the value add, the SDR team is waiting to reach out to these leads, qualify them, and push them further down the sales funnel.

2 Find Your Why

  • It’s worth noting that for recurring-revenue businesses, dedicated account-based efforts increase the cost of customer acquisition, which puts a greater burden on the value of each customer.
  • The bigger the TAM, the more impersonal you can afford to be. The smaller the TAM, the more you need to roll out focused, customized outreach tactics.
  • I didn’t want us to mindlessly pile on logos, thinking any logo was a good logo. That’s not how you win markets. That’s not the psychology of markets. When you go into a city or country or a vertical or a subvertical, there are accounts there that will dominate the direction of that market by their choices. For example, hypothetically if you’re targeting Minneapolis you might start by trying to secure 3M. It’s hard to do, but once you get 3M, everybody in Minneapolis pays attention. If you land Cargill, everybody pays attention. You take three more, you lock them down, you own Minneapolis. You don’t even have to work at it anymore; they will fall into your lap.
  • Prioritizing must-have accounts is not an optional thing.
  • You must [win marquee logos] as soon as you can, because otherwise momentum is against you. The world is always full of momentum. It’s either with you or against you; it’s never neutral.

3 Forget Attribution and Focus on Metrics That Matter

  • On top of being tricky to calculate, traditional attribution drives a wedge between sales and marketing.
  • The right question is, “What is the total revenue that we drove for the company together?”
  • As a tool for understanding success over time, pipeline strikes the balance between a leading indicator that provides quick feedback on tactics and a lagging indicator that determines if strategies are paying off.
  • For most companies, it simply takes too long to understand how your marketing efforts are driving actual revenue.
  • Frank Slootman: “A wise sales manager once told me that a good quarter is not just one where you make the numbers, but also one that sets you up for the next one.”
  • Build a “pipeline creation schedule” that tells your GTM teams exactly how much pipeline should be produced at any point throughout the fiscal year.
  • Localizing Goals: If your business operates in multiple countries or maintains multiple sales segments, you may have radically different pipeline assumptions in different parts of the company. You can waterfall the global pipeline coverage and creation goals down to those groups to provide more surgical targets.
  • A big part of what we do is try to forecast as accurately as we can how much revenue our group will be making. We try to be within a 3 to 5 percent variance on the call from week one, month one of each quarter.
  • I personally don’t care about the attribution. Because at the end of the day, if we’re adding pipeline, that’s what we care about.
  • At Snowflake, we divide our account funnel into six stages:
    • Target Accounts are accounts receiving any ABM treatment at all. (This is our largest pool, at the top of the funnel.)
    • Engaged Accounts have a high likelihood of becoming sales qualified opportunities based on engagement. We also refer to these as MQA’s or Marketing Qualified Accounts.
    • Working Accounts have at least one logged SDR/AE activity in the past ninety days.
    • Meeting Accounts have had at least one meeting completed with the sales team.
    • Opportunity Accounts have at least one open opportunity.
    • Won Accounts have at least one closed won opportunity.
  • For us, pipeline is generated at the point when accounts move from Meeting Accounts to Opportunity Accounts.
  • A Working Account is going to get different treatment from us (invites to live events, custom emails from SDRs) than a Target Account (customized landing pages, retargeted ads). So to determine measurements that matter and continually improve the work we’re doing, we need to use different inspection metrics for each stage.
  • Account Propensity: How likely is this account to respond positively to sales outreach and take a meeting based on technographic and firmographic data that closely mirrors past companies that took the desired action? At Snowflake, we represent this “fit “with a machine learning score.
  • Intent (First Party): At Snowflake, we break this down into anonymous and known engagement.
    • If an account has a high volume of web traffic to your site that is identified through a de-anonymization tool, this would be anonymous intent.
    • Once individuals in the account have provided their contact information for an asset or event or responded to a piece of direct mail, we consider this known engagement.
  • Intent (Third Party): Does this account have an abnormal increase in behavior signals outside your company’s properties that indicate a buying cycle is approaching?
  • Set up a notification on LinkedIn for when your ideal accounts post job descriptions or when a current customer moves companies.
  • The chart below shows an overview of all six stages and how we think about moving accounts from one level to the next.
  • Meeting Accounts have had at least one meeting with an AE completed, so they’re now getting attention from SDRs in the form of emails and discovery calls. So to generate useful metrics, we ask ourselves the question, “How effective are our discovery calls?” The measurements we use to answer that question are number of meetings per account, meeting hold rate, and number of touches.
  • The ultimate measure of your success is, “How much total revenue sales and marketing drove for the company,” with pipeline coverage serving as the best leading indicator.
  • At Snowflake, the ABM group, SDRs, and field marketing are all presenting together at QBRs, which is a multilevel signal that we’re well aligned.
  • How many meetings are coming out of ABM-targeted accounts? Focusing on the number of SDR meetings coming out of ABM accounts allows you to both see clear alignment between sales and ABM and to ensure SDR outreach is as effective as possible.
  • Our account executives (AEs) were accustomed to choosing a list of accounts for an SDR to call into, but those accounts were different from the ones they were prioritizing with the ABM team. So the SDRs and ABMers were being sent in multiple directions at once. Red flag for our goal of aligned execution.
  • We recommend keeping an eye out for these red flags:
    • Volume Exceeds Quality: If you or your team are fighting bandwidth constraints yet lack measurable results, the value of the approach is getting lost in scale.
    • People are consistently saying, “I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.”
    • Sales and SDRs are consistently saying, “I didn’t have time to prioritize these accounts.”
    • Off-message content is being used.
    • You notice a marked lack of activities.
  • We believe the biggest warning signal of all is diving into the account-based world without setting clear goals around how it will move your company forward.
  • Now here’s a plot twist for you: We don’t actually believe that all attribution is evil and useless. In our opinion attribution is for comparing tactics, not measuring your strategy. And it shouldn’t be attached to people and their individual performance, but instead associated with specific plays and campaigns. This will make more sense with an example. Let’s say Hillary wants to know which campaigns are doing the best job of grabbing attention from people who have never heard of Snowflake. The company uses first-touch attribution — tracking which marketing activity the person engaged with before offering up their personal information for the first time — and Hillary can see which efforts led to the largest number of responses. If LinkedIn Messaging outperformed webinars in getting first-time responders to click or sign up to get more information, that’s incredibly helpful to her. If she wants to build a new campaign around brand awareness, she can replicate what’s already worked. First-touch attribution is a tool she can use. On the other hand, Travis may want to know which campaigns are best at building credibility with buyers who are actively evaluating solutions. In this case, he could use last-touch attribution — tracking which marketing activity the person engaged with immediately before an opportunity was qualified — to understand which campaigns are best at teeing up a prospect for a qualifying conversation with the SDR team.
  • Tracking touch points and understanding how they impact customer actions is still extremely valuable.
  • In the case of sales and marketing, what matters most is quite simple: it’s total pipeline growth. It’s finding deals. It’s overall revenue generation. If you’re measuring and rewarding people using metrics that don’t connect back to the pipeline, it’s time to reevaluate.
  • We honestly believe if you’re using attribution models to allocate bonuses and compensation, you may be doing more harm than good.
  • It’s much harder to bust silos when people are rewarded for claiming their specific role in a group effort. (Remember: No one at the car factory wants to be compensated for their percentage contribution to each car.)

PART 2 WHO AND WHAT

4 Segment the Market

  • Before you customize landing pages or reach out to anyone, you’ve got to get a clear picture of which accounts you want to target. And also which ones you don’t want to target.
  • At its core, marketing is about understanding who needs your offering and speaking directly to them. You can’t do that without excellent segmentation.
  • One-to-Many: At Snowflake, we limit this category to time-sensitive plays unique to a specific region or set of regions that are applicable to 50 – 250 accounts.
  • One-to-Few: At Snowflake, we don’t leverage this segment often, but when we do it is for joint-partner programs where we agree on a list of ten to twenty accounts ripe for joint messaging from ourselves and our partner.
  • Verticalization is segmentation plus everything else that comes afterward. The actual dividing of accounts, vertical by vertical, is across other business functions. What about products? What about engineering? Are they building technology that solves verticalized problems? Is legal behind you? Is professional services behind you? When you think about truly deploying a vertical strategy, that’s the long tail that everybody forgets about.
  • it became glaringly apparent that bringing organizations in that are alike — think alike, buy alike, talk alike — can drive growth in a much more meaningful way faster. If you’ve got a salesperson that all they do morning, noon, and night is talk about manufacturing, and all of the benefits that Snowflake can drive into a manufacturing organization, they’ll get better results. So we started by finding the most influential accounts in a couple of industries and creating verticals around them.
  • Understanding capacity means you start by considering how many accounts an account executive can reasonably work at one time.
  • At Snowflake we target SDRs to complete between eighty and one hundred nonautomated touches per eight-hour workday.
  • If your ABM team is doing one-to-many outreach: Each ABMer can usually handle between fifty and one hundred accounts. This is actually drawn from the capacity of the SDR team, since ABMers should only go after accounts that SDRs can support.
  • If your ABM team is doing one-to-few outreach: Each ABMer can usually handle between ten and fifty accounts.
  • If your ABM team is doing one-to-one outreach: Each ABMer can usually handle no more than twenty accounts.

5 Know Your Personas by Name

  • Personas:
    • Role
    • Titles and Aliases
    • Tenure: Say you’re selling to a CMO, and their average tenure is two and a half years. If you have a one-year buying cycle and a one-year contract, you’re likely going to get ripped out the following year.
    • How They Get Information:
    • Role in Buying Committee:
    • Performance Metrics:
  • To generate truly useful personas, we also recommend doing a few customer interviews. Pick up the phone, call a customer that you sold to six months ago, and ask them two questions:
    • What was the thing that made you want to spend money with us in the first place?
    • What have you discovered about using our product in the last six months that surprised and delighted you? Plug their answers back into your personas so you can surface it in your messaging.
  • Sales and Marketing Must Align on Persona Messaging
  • Map out how the value add for each persona translates to keywords, copy, content and sales activation material BEFORE launching any programs.
  • Personas may seem like helpful-but-optional tools, but believe us when we say that your account-based efforts will struggle without them. Building multidimensional personas and attaching core messages to them is vital work.

6 Design a Hyper-Targeted Content Ecosystem

  • Content sits at the heart of any account-based program.
  • Instead of slapping a company name on a topic-relevant web page as personalization, relevancy looks like including five to seven pieces of content on that microsite that speak to different elements of their business (think tech stack, partners, and company references from industry peers) and CTAs that match their stage of the buying cycle (ex: Book a meeting with your expert vs. join our community).
  • All the content in your ecosystem should fall into three buckets based on the buyer’s journey:
    • Problem Education [Why buy?]
    • Solution Research [Why buy now?]
    • Solution Selection [Why buy now from us?]
  • Creating content for all three stages is critical, but you also have to realize that people are going to enter the content journey wherever they feel most comfortable.
  • The way to address that unpredictability is by making sure your content ecosystem covers a range of topics and offers multiple different types of content delivery tactics.
  • Some people really like to read, some prefer demos, others need a combination. I suggest including instructor-led and self-led options. Let people learn about things step-by-step or through an e-book or a blog.
  • I would always start with a webinar. It’s easier for people to put slides together than write a full e-book.
  • For problem education, I would always start with numbers: Five ways to do something, eight signs you need to upgrade, etc.
  • The basic, fundamental tags we suggest [for content] include:
    • Persona
    • Industry
    • Solution
    • Journey Stage
  • If any of the tags are not relevant, create an option for “No Persona,” “No Industry,” etc.
  • Be sure to align all content creation and library-building between marketing and sales.
  • At Snowflake, we create this alignment through what we call a “content committee.” This is a group composed of SDRs, product marketers, sales executives, and other subject matter experts (where necessary).
  • The committee is directed by SDR leadership and has exclusive permission to publish sequences that the rest of the organization can view and use. That’s right, we recommend locking down sequence-creation from everyone except the members of this committee.
  • Remember that the content in sequences themselves can and will be customized by SDRs to each account and/or individual.

PART 3 HOW

7 Calculate Timing (Unless You Don’t Need To)

  • We also acknowledge that there are accounts you have to go after regardless of timing: the “must win “logos of the business.
  • For large, complex accounts with multiple buying centers and subsidiaries, intent can point you to which subsidiary or which line of business is the best place to target based on specific keywords or personas.
  • in customer accounts, intent can help you determine the right time to pitch a cross-sell opportunity, to which department, based on changing behavioral signals within the product and research they are doing online.
  • Intent data encompasses a variety of signals. We consider everything from responses to our marketing campaigns to product-usage data and third-party content consumption.
  • First-party intent data: This is activity data that your company owns and has access to and that is relevant to your contacts. It includes firmographic, technographic, and behavioral data.
  • First-party intent data includes:
  • Web traffic:
  • Engagement with marketing:
  • Engagement with sales:
  • Product telemetry:
  • Competitive renewals:
  • Third-party intent data is activity data supplied by external sources that’s highly relevant to your contacts.
  • Third-party intent data includes:
    • Third-party research activity
    • Job changes
    • New hires and job description postings
    • Funding rounds
    • Corporate news and announcements
    • Social media engagement
  • Third-party activity should be tracked as growth from the baseline. Has it changed? Increased? Look for surges in activity, since those are more likely to be meaningful.
  • To evaluate the reliability of a model, we use a measure called AUC or area under curve.
    • AUC scores range between zero and one, and anything that rates at about 0.8 is pretty good.
    • In my experience most third-party solutions get a 0.6, which is just slightly better than random guessing. So instead, I’d recommend that companies hire an agency or data science professionals to build some custom models for them.
  • On the marketing side we have the MQA, a marketing qualified account, which predicts the likelihood of opening up an opportunity on targeted accounts. And the second model is maturity scoring, which predicts how likely it is that an opportunity will be converted into a closed deal for sales.
  • We use the XGBoost algorithm [for statistical scoring].
  • The sales-facing output is an action board (our version of a dashboard designed so users don’t just look at it, but take action from it) called Arctic Insights that shows all accounts in an AE’s territory. It delivers insights and topical intent data that capture all of the activity in the accounts owned by the viewer.
  • We monitor all accounts owned by sales and if they surge at an extra-high score — like in the top 5 to 10 percent of the scoring range — we pull them out based on sales’ approval and target them with ABM, SDR, and sales touch points. We do this on a weekly basis in some regions.

8 Plan Your First Plays

  • We use the term “experience” to capture the end-to-end touch points a prospect or customer will receive. They can span across digital, physical, events, etc.
  • What is a play? A defined series of tactics executed between ABM, SDRs, and sales to drive a specific outcome within a target account.
  • Establish Baseline Metrics and Program Goals: Identify SDR and marketing baseline metrics and program targets. Examples include:
    • Account engagement rate with marketing
    • Contacts sequenced
    • SDR response rate
    • Account to booked/completed meetings rate.
  • Identify Roles and Responsibilities: Depending on your account mix, you may want sales, SDRs, and ABM to play different roles to achieve your desired outcome outlined above. Identify who is responsible for what, in what time frame.
  • Calendar Reminders: Place calendar reminders for each of the following steps on a shared calendar with all parties involved for each quarter moving forward.
  • Select Accounts: Use data to choose the most-ripe accounts for your effort. Refresh the accounts included in your TAM at least on an annual basis. Select the specific cohort of accounts to activate four weeks ahead of SDR launch.
  • Complete Targeting and Messaging Matrices: Associate personas, products, messaging, and intent keywords with baseline outreach sequences for seamless execution.
  • Work on Program Development: Develop messaging, choose content, build experience touch points, and enrich contacts in accounts if needed three weeks before SDR launch.
  • Launch Advertising: Launch marketing activities to selected accounts with identified 1: 1 or 1: Few ads 2 weeks prior to SDR launch.
  • Launch SDR Prospecting: Kick off sequence using recommended throttling and personalization at start of quarter or agreed upon date.
  • Optimize: Measure sequenced contacts, response rate, booked/completed meetings, and opportunities weekly. Adjust for optimization.
  • SDR outreach should be to senior director level and below, AE outreach to VP level and above.
  • We find the one-to-one approach to be most successful for accounts that have open opportunities. This is particularly important for accounts with robust buying committees, known to take many layers of approvals with lengthy contract reviews.
  • Avoid appearing disjointed by executing “tag-team” outreach between the SDR and the AE. This can range from simply copying the AE on email outreach to dovetailing AE emails into the same communication threads that SDRs initiate.
  • One-to-Few Play #1:
    • Feature Adoption: We recommend this play for engaging high-value accounts that are either current customers, or using a trial/freemium version of your product. It also works best when your product serves multiple distinct use cases or user groups. Ultimately the goal is to position the value of another product feature or encourage the account to adopt an upgraded version of your product.
    • Consider positioning offers such as limited-time feature access, hands-on learning sessions, and paid pilots that offer immediate value.
    • If your product has a user interface, work with the product team to implement light in-app call-to-actions. Physical events are also a powerful lever for this kind of one-to-few play, providing the opportunity for customers who have already adopted the feature to influence target accounts who have not yet made the switch.
  • One-to-Few Play # 2: Competitive Takeout:
    • The thrust of your message should highlight success stories of similar customers who’ve migrated from this competitor over to your camp.
    • The gold standard for timing competitive takeouts is striking just when your competitor’s contracts are up for renewal.
    • New executive hires or decision-makers joining the company also open the door to rip-and-replace conversations.
  • One-to-Many Plays
    • Each quarter, you will kick off a set of cross-functional activities prior to quarter end, effectively warming up accounts before sales and SDRs activate on the same accounts with the same message at quarter start.
    • This play works best when you use third-party web intent as the primary qualifier for account selection. It can work two ways: Sales teams can request a topic and marketing can provide a list of accounts surging on that topic, or marketing can provide a list of topics surging, and sales can pick which one they want to use.
  • Target the contacts who are active in sequences for the sales and SDR teams but have not yet responded to the outreach. Think of this as a “play within a play.”
  • A quick play that the sales development representatives (SDRs) could execute: reaching out to people who had clicked on, commented on, or liked the ads, and following up with them.
  • Don’t exhaust yourself making a huge library of content first or get mired in indecision; try something! And then keep experimenting, measuring, and learning from your results. Let yourself fail fast, pivot, and adjust. Then recalibrate and keep iterating until you’ve got a practice you can scale.

9 Activate

  • Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman’s mantra, “Execution beats strategy every day of the week.”
  • Before you build any landing pages or schedule any sequences, gather all of the stakeholders on the accounts you plan to target.
  • The ABM team typically begins activating the content experience by building a microsite or landing page for visitors from the target account. This will become the destination that everything else points to, from digital ads to SDR and sales emails, which is why it gets built out first. At Snowflake, it’s a page with varying degrees of personalization, from the entire industry at minimum to the prospect’s name and title on highly customized pages. We include a section encouraging visitors to connect with any questions, and a section with hand-picked content including invitations to webinars and live events, relevant in-house articles, demos, and case studies.
  • Here is a content mix we recommend:
    • Seven to twelve content pieces. Include a variety of formats like video, interactive, and PDF and a variety of content like competitive, partner-related, and relevant customer use cases. These assets are ungated because you already de-anonymized the visitor, which means you can track what they engage with.
    • Two or three CTAs. Include a variety of formats like in-person events, recorded webinars, and demand-centric options like joining the community or booking a demo.
    • Link to the sales rep’s calendar to book time directly.
    • At the absolute minimum, the microsite must include at least one customer reference.
  • In my mind, ABM is 50 percent gaining cross-functional buy-in to rally support for proven programs, and 50 percent actually doing it.
  • In addition to digital touch points and outreach, one-team GTM encompasses offline tactics like direct mail, events, and billboards.
  • Create an experience like hiring a food truck to serve lunch at your customer’s campus.
  • Show them you know them by referencing what they’ve said.
  • Strategic personalization: Ask yourself, “Would the reader immediately feel that a human wrote this specifically for them?”
  • Don’t let anything go live or get sent without first agreeing on measures of success.

PART 4 SCALE

10 Build Your Organization

  • At Snowflake our SDRs and ABMers are both consolidated under marketing, and marketing has been assigned the charter of pipeline generation.
  • To scale marketing’s alignment with sales, consider segmenting marketing resources by whatever model sales uses.
  • As your team of SDRs grows, we encourage you to add an SDR operations position to your org chart.
  • Your average SDR is early in their career and therefore requires a higher level of enablement and coaching.
  • Once you have two SDR managers and about twenty people in the SDR org, that’s when you can justify an ops and/or enablement position.
  • Expecting a newly minted three-person ABM team to fulfill the needs of a few hundred seasoned salespeople is a recipe for disaster
  • Allot around 5 percent of your ABM budget to innovation and experimentation.

11 Learn to Love Cross-Functional Marketing

  • If you aren’t confident that you can secure a budget for additional head count, or have the head count and are ready for what’s next, you can take another approach to scaling: collaborating across marketing functions.
  • At Snowflake, our demand-gen team doesn’t measure volume alone. In addition to inspection metrics like cost per assigned lead (CPAL) and SLAs generated and accepted, they measure an account-centric metric: percentage of qualified leads from target accounts.
  • Surface your SDR’s or AE’s calendar on the [webinar/event] registration confirmation page so that registrants can book a time that works for them if they are interested.
  • At Snowflake, field marketing, ABM, and the SDRs are the three sales-facing teams. All three support sales directly, are aligned to their territories, and are mapped to their sales leaders. (As opposed to demand gen and partner marketing, both of whom support the company as a whole.)
  • The 3 x 3: The entire agenda would be handcrafted for the individuals in that organization and the specific challenges they were facing, as well as Snowflake’s solution to their challenges.
    • Part 1 would feature a session led by our head of sales, generating excitement for what it means to be a part of Snowflake.
    • Two weeks later, session 2 would be led by the sales engineering team, detailing technical specifics relevant to each group.
    • Part 3, two weeks after that, would include breakout sessions across the buying committee to discuss everything from migration plans to product road maps.
  • Partner organizations, especially consulting partners, thrive on building relationships across enterprise business units, so they have the ability to make introductions to C-level individuals in particular. This group can help get sales into the conversation.
  • At Snowflake, partner marketing has coordinated getting subject matter experts from our partner companies to come into Snowflake to provide validation to Snowflake’s positioning and value to customers and train our reps on highly technical topics.
  • We find that integrating partner content and messaging into existing plays is the easiest fit for this relationship.
  • There is one caveat that we stick to without exception: The request to include a partner has to be sales driven. This ensures that sales is fully engaged in the activation and that we do not unintentionally cause any political friction.
  • Gather or create one to three co-branded pieces of content that speak to the joint value you add. We recommend including a joint-customer case study in this mix.
  • Relying solely on product marketing leads to messaging that’s too lengthy and doesn’t capture a human tone. We recommend that the ABM and SDR teams collaborate with product marketing, understand the key points they want you to mention, and then engage your sales development leader or tenured salespeople to transform and massage and distill those messages down to the point where they’re super concise.

12 Using Data to Bust Silos

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