Make It Snow (book summary)

Make It Snow by Denise Persson and Chris Degnan

Foreword

• If you’re selling to eight billion people, like Apple, marketing is the lead and sales follows marketing. If you’re selling enterprise software, and you have tens of thousands of customers, sales is the driver and marketing serves sales.

PHASE I: Stealth

1 Embed Sales and Culture Early into Your Startup

• Product marketers have some level of technical know-how, so they’re great at explaining the technical features of your solution. But they’re not so great at revealing a customer’s business pain points such as declining revenue, profits, and efficiencies, and how your product can help reverse those trends.
• Product managers and product marketers have zero experience generating demand, which is critical to generating interest and feedback during your product’s development phase and then capitalizing on those relationships when your product is available for sale.
• At the same time, avoid hiring the relationship-only sales professional. These are seasoned sales folks who are more band leaders, when what a startup needs is a one-person band.
• They should also take the time to learn about your product even when there is no product training or documentation available. If they can answer the majority of a customer’s questions on the spot, that builds credibility and accelerates the sales cycle.
• Connecting one of your engineers with a key technical buyer can help unstick a deal and move that customer faster through the sales cycle.

2 Develop Your Sales Strategy

• The first thing you must determine are the major features your product offers over your competitors’ and what problems they solve for customers.
• According to John [McMahon], you have to answer the following questions to determine [your ideal customwer] profile:
  • What are the major differentiators in my product?
  • What pain points does the product solve for the customer?
  • Inside of which use cases do those pain points emerge?
  • Who (which personas) owns those use cases?
  • In which companies are those personas and use cases located?
• At some point, you need to flip the switch so customers stop rolling their eyes when they’re hearing about features and functionality. Instead, tell them first the big problems you can solve for them that other products can’t.
• Convincing engineers which new features they should add based on customer feedback is a no-no. The list of product features customers want added to your product will never end.
• At this stage, engineers are best to prioritize this list.

3 Hiring and Deploying Your First Sales Reps

• Start with Who You Know
• We sold $500 evaluation agreements for the first six to seven months in order to find all of the big deficiencies.
• In the beginning, none of the sales reps were on commission. I structured their compensation as salary plus additional payment for meeting a level of a predetermined set of MBOs, such as the number of qualified leads, customer meetings, and evaluation agreements that they generated.
• If you recruit good people and you develop them, the rest will take care of itself.
• Hire a Hiring Expert. I reached out to a sales recruiter, Chad Peets.
• We didn’t allow any negotiating over compensation packages. It just wasn’t efficient.
• The best interviews I had with potential sales leaders were people who put me on my heels and peppered me with questions, versus someone who hadn’t researched the company and wasn’t excited about what Snowflake was doing in the market.
• The Sales Rep Profile: Gunslingers But Not Cowboys. We created an assessment that we had candidates fill out. It included about 100 questions and we asked the same question more than once.
• The questions asked them to rate themselves between 1 and 10 on certain characteristics. We were looking for 1 (which was an absolute “no”) on a lot of the questions that most hiring managers would consider a 10 (an absolute “yes”) to be the best answer:
  • “Do you consider yourself an objective thinker?” We wanted reps who go with their gut.“
  • Are you manageable?” We searched for those who question everything.“
  • Do you do what you’re told?” Kyle was a “1.“There were almost no resources available then to help train new sales reps. They had to be resourceful and find ways to learn about our technology and that of our competitors. We had no marketing team, so they had to find their own leads and write their own emails to prospects. If a rep needed to be told what to do in order to start selling Snowflake, they were at the wrong company.
  • Is having a chip on your shoulder bad? We wanted that chip. The competition was out there. They were waiting to crush us, and prospects were ready to discard us. Our sales reps had to jettison any inhibitions that might creep up on them in the face of that eventuality. No matter their thoughts, they had to wake up every day with the mentality that no one was going to stop them from approaching the right prospects, getting a meeting with them, and pitching the Snowflake story.
  • Do you work well with others? We wanted good people but a “1” was ideal. This was about self-reliance. We needed mavericks early on. If they believed they could handle anything on their own, they belonged at Snowflake. Sales opportunities move faster when fewer people are involved. If only one person has to engage a customer, all the better. That’s rare in big sales organizations but it’s necessary in a startup.
  • Do you need evidence to support your beliefs? We hoped not. We were selling religion before we actually had a product. And the religion we were selling was too good to be true. There was decades of evidence to show that what Snowflake promised, prospects wouldn’t believe. When that happened, our reps had to properly convince them that what was coming with Snowflake was real and it would forever change how they managed and analyzed their data.
  • The assessment also included sections they had to complete on math and reading comprehension.
• If they made it to the interview stage, we would ask them to tell us about something difficult they’d been through in life.
  • “What challenges have you faced?”
  • “When you ran into an obstacle, what was it and how did you respond?”
  • “Tell me one thing I should know about you.”
  • “Tell me where you went to elementary school.”“What sports did you play in high school?”
  • We needed people who were more than just self-starters. We needed people who had a strong belief in themselves. They believed they were going to make themselves successful, versus relying on someone else for that.
• They also had to be somewhat technical because we didn’t have any pre-sales engineers who would normally handle the demo and address a customer’s technical questions.
• Sales reps had to be super smart, self-reliant, driven, coachable, somewhat pessimistic, and wanted the opportunity to be promoted to a second-tier or third-tier manager, with people working under them.
• We wanted hunters, not gatherers, who were willing to pick up the phone and cold call.
• We were closing $30,000 transactions back then. We hired young hungry people who had three to five years’ experience and had experience turning prospects into customers.
• I was strong on ethics, morals, and values with the sales team in those early days.
• We were open to hiring from our competitors to build our sales team. We used the same criteria as we did with non-competitive candidates. Yet, we chose not to hire sales reps who had worked for the legacy data warehouse providers. The legacy data warehouse providers spent more time upgrading their existing clients than seeking out new ones.
• But we did hire [legacy data warehouse providers’] top pre-sales engineers who were successful in that environment and keen to work for Snowflake. Those sales engineers were critical to the development of our competitive migration guides, which marketing created until we established a formidable professional services organization.
• Any sales rep who worked for me had to go to eight face-to-face meetings each week.
• We didn’t recruit whale hunters (enterprise sales reps) because we didn’t have the resources if we hooked a whale. Once you start selling to large accounts, all of the product requirements grow — data security requirements, new feature demands, and integration with their existing environments.
• We sold customers on Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse. We didn’t sell them on the cloud. They had to already be in the cloud, or at least believe in the cloud, before we arrived.
• As we grew, the MEDDPICC sales qualification process became the cornerstone of our sales qualification methodology.
• John McMahon helped bring this framework to life in 1996, with Dick Dunkel and Jack Napoli, when he led sales at Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) in Boston.
• The Metrics should be clear.
  • What are the customer’s goals?
  • Do they want to increase revenue, market share, efficiencies, and/or productivity?
  • Do they understand the value your product provides?
  • You want to discuss what you bring to the table in terms of solutions, so they can see how you will improve their metrics and help them make the case inside their organization for establishing a relationship with you.
• The Economic buyer is the person with the authority to say “yes” or “no.” They usually have their own budgets and can influence or determine the size of the deal. Not having them on board is a serious risk to landing a deal.
• The Decision criteria have to do with the technical aspects of the solution you are selling.
  • Does it provide enough value?
  • Does your solution deliver what you say it does?
  • Does it satisfy the customer’s concerns around infrastructure, data security, and other features?
  • Will it use up too much of the customer’s resources to manage?
  • Is your company a strong partner in the customer’s industry?
  • Every customer and their decision-makers will have their own criteria. Your sales reps must find out from the customer what criteria are important to them.
• Next, do you know the Decision process within the customer?
  • Who is involved?
  • How do they evaluate and choose which company to work with?
  • Is there a validation stage and an approval stage?
  • When does that take place?
  • What are their criteria?
• Is there a Paper process that you need to be aware of? A customer’s procurement process can be a labyrinth of approval steps and one of the main reasons a deal can slip past its expected close date.
• Look to Identify the pain points inside the company. Is the pain great enough that they are motivated to evaluate competing solutions and choose one within a specific window of time? That’s the kind of pain you are looking for in order to help them alleviate it. Without a pain point, there isn’t the urgency to budget for and solve the problem.
• Do you have a Champion inside the company?
  • Someone who is convinced your product is the best possible alternative and will promote it to their fellow stakeholders who will also see its value?
  • Do your competitors have a champion? If so, who are they? How can your champion counter theirs?
• And finally, who is your Competition? This includes competing vendors and the option of the customer developing their own solution to address their pain instead of choosing yours or that of your competitors. I encourage our sales reps to focus on the benefits and strengths Snowflake offers and avoid denigrating the competition. Attacking a competitor’s solution head on is just not an effective strategy.
• John [McMahon] encouraged me to think of each stakeholder within the customer as having a sign on their forehead that says, “What’s in it for me?”
• Once they’re hired, check in with them because the quickest exit happens after the shortest tenure.

4 Target One Competitor, for Now

• It’s rare that a large customer will execute a wholesale dump of an incumbent product. Instead, they will buy a competing product for a few specific features.
• A head of sales shouldn’t shortchange themselves or their opinions by failing to tell their CEO what they see going on.
• Choose One or Two Adversaries and Win Over Their Business. Focus on a competitor that has the right vision but a technology yours could surpass. It also has to be a product that’s easy for you to replace.
• As your product is undergoing development, choose one or two competitors that meet most or all of the following criteria:
  • Market leader
  • Lacks many features customers need
  • Requires a large upfront investment
  • Needs a number of people to manage
  • Requires complementary products to address new business needs
  • Was adapted from older technology
  • Is priced low or free when purchased with other products
  • Is easily replaced by your product
• Your product will lack many features initially, but you can overshadow that shortfall by providing features and functionality that your competitors don’t offer and that your customers value more than the features your competitors do provide. When it comes to investment, making it easy for a potential customer to trial your product for little money will help you seed the market fast. Charge a nominal fee for a trial of your product so prospects have a commitment to peeking under the hood.
• We focused on making our customers incredibly successful and then making them advisors to our product road map via our customer advisory boards, so that they too had a stake in Snowflake’s future.
• We were one of the first to offer consumption pricing, and that made us one of the first to deploy data science teams in our sales and finance organizations to help accurately forecast revenue.
• We compensate our sales reps partly when a customer signs a contract but mostly at a rate that aligns with when the customer consumes storage and computing resources.
• The standard in the industry was a three-to-one spend ratio [of services to software]. For every dollar spent on software, you had to spend three dollars on consulting to get it up and running.

5 Scaling with Partners

• During our five-year relationship, our co-marketing and co-selling strategies resulted in a third of our customers also using Looker.
• Partners would be more wary of your partnership if you didn’t align with their competitors.

6 Scale Your Culture

• We settled on eight values for Snowflake.
  • Put customers first.
  • Integrity always
  • .Think big.
  • Be excellent.
  • Make each other the best.
  • Get it done.
  • Embrace each other’s differences.
• Best to remove all of those deemed as threats to your values.
• Of all the teams in an organization, sales seems to have the highest ratio of people who choose not to live a company’s values.

PHASE II: Build

7 Enter Marketing

• Hire someone who has bragging rights but doesn’t brag.
• Snowflake hired me [Denise] for a number of reasons, including the promise I made to Chris that marketing would serve sales if I was at the helm.
• Sales doesn’t have the time to generate all of their leads, but marketing should.
• I needed to shift the focus of the team to realize that we are here to help the sales folks sell. That’s our job. Not to tell sales what to do. We had to give more to the other side before they would reciprocate. That’s how you get trust from sales. You can’t come in and demand trust. Trust is built. It took about six months to accomplish this.
• They had to know their craft, be self-starters, and be ready to huddle with no notice. They had to come up with great marketing ideas on the fly that would grab prospects’ attention and leave a lasting impression. They also had to be committed to the Snowflake cause, meaning, they believed in Snowflake to such a degree they would remain for at least five years or when Snowflake failed, whichever came first. And they had to know people — people whom they wanted to be their first hires.
• The CMO is someone who has to generate sales leads. It’s the number one most important thing a company in growth mode can do.
• You must create a pipeline with a steady flow of leads so reps can work on them each day in a very predictable way.
• A solid demand gen machine requires a great deal of value-driven content.
  • The genesis of your content strategy isn’t about delivering a bunch of white papers, ebooks, and product briefs.
  • You need a company-wide editorial process, plain and simple, and it has to start at the very beginning.
  • I hired Vince Morello to lead content because marketing today is about education.His mantra is to always grab readers with the first three words, provide a fresh angle, and then deliver value throughout every piece of content.
  • He was originally tasked with jump-starting Snowflake’s content marketing,At the very top of the sales funnel — content designed to provide insights into your prospects’ problems without pushing your products or services.
  • Marketing is about promoting great educational content and spending time with sales reps to make sure content always addresses the things prospects want to learn about.
  • Every Friday, Vince sat down with sales engineers to learn about the conversations they had that week with prospects. This helped him understand how to position Snowflake to address their technical and business challenges around data and how to advance their data strategies overall.
  • For content, it was our journalism style of writing and our newsroom style of envisioning and producing content.
• Customer Marketing
  • Eszter Szikora
  • She produced dozens of short, sharp, and simple customer videos.
  • That first wave of interviews was done so simply. They happened during our customer advisory meetings at local, mid-range hotels.
  • We had to get the videos approved by each of our customers’ legal teams,
• Field Marketing: Caitlin Griffith DeMartini
• Partner Marketing: Saqib Mustafa
  • Even though we positioned Snowflake bigger than a startup, we always piggybacked on the credibility of much larger partners.
  • Many startups strike partnerships with other technology companies and promote those relationships on their websites. That’s not easy but it’s the easiest part of a go-to-market strategy with partners. The true challenge is messaging around that partnership — how each of your products works, how the technologies integrate, the value customers receive, and how that integration and value from that partnership differ from a competitor’s relationships with other partners that market a similar joint solution.
• We started by deploying a multi-level strategy by aligning our ABM people with named account sales reps. Later, we aligned ABM with our sales development reps (SDRs),
• Tier 1 ABM:
  • Our regional sales vice presidents identify up to five prospect accounts each that they see as having significant deal-size potential. These are huge organizations that could generate a multitude of sales opportunities. They have many use cases that span departments, subsidiaries, and geographic regions and could benefit from deploying our product.
  • We create events, custom emails, advertising, microsites, and other forms of one-to-one custom content. The topics focus on the prospects’ technical and business pain points, the topics of interest they share with our sales reps, and the challenges they often encounter specific to their vertical industry.
  • We also leverage SaaS products that capture intent data to reveal the topics the people in these accounts are researching.
  • The cross-functional team you assemble and assign to execute your ABM strategy for each of these accounts should include someone from ABM, sales development, field marketing, partner marketing, and field sales.
• Tier 2:
  • Have your account executives in field sales identify between five to seven prospect accounts that would be strategic to their sales pipeline.
  • Then deploy a one-to-few approach with custom ads for each group, a microsite they can visit that features existing but curated content and events, personal outreach from your field sales rep, and tailored outreach from your SDRs.
  • Invite these prospects to field marketing events with their region and include content about your product and services that can help address their technical and business challenges.
  • Assemble a cross-functional team similar to your tier one approach. But because this is a one-to-few strategy, swap out your ABM person for folks from your demand generation team.
• Tier 3:
  • This is also a one-to-few approach, but based on intent activity within a specific region and led by your ABM managers, district sales managers, and SDRs.
  • This cross-functional team identifies top themes within a geographic region and uses intent data to choose three to five accounts in a region that are actively researching those themes.
  • From there, create engagement, establish first meetings, and reveal new opportunities in these prospect accounts.
  • Your programs for these accounts should take advantage of the alignment and scale you continue to develop across and between marketing and sales.
  • Your ABM team can launch targeted ads that point to a microsite focused on a region or theme. Build this personalized microsite to turn visitor insights into page customizations upon page load.
  • This is not a one-to-many approach that offers the same experience to all accounts within a single segment. Instead, it allows you to deliver a one-to-one ABM experience at scale.
• Public Relations: Once we developed a robust PR strategy and hired enough people, we moved nearly all of that function in-house at Snowflake.

8 The Five Pillars of Marketing

• Pillar 1 — Define Your Market Position
  • Startups often focus on categories that take too long to explain.
  • The most successful brands in the world are also the most consistent brands. Consistency builds trust, and people buy from brands they trust. Therefore employees, partners, and customers all need to describe you in the same way.
  • It’s best to revisit your overall position every two to three years in the early stages of a startup. Even if your product doesn’t change, your competitors’ products will.
• Pillar 2 — Be the Most Customer-Centric Marketing Team in Your Industry
  • You need to take the pulse of your customers’ needs all the time.
  • Start an annual customer engagement survey as early as possible.
  • As a startup, as soon as you have actual customers, do everything you possibly can to put them at the forefront of your marketing.
• Pillar 3 — Build for Automation and Scale Early On
  • Any company of any size can relate to the enormous number of requests for customer references it receives. The demand gen team transformed this traditionally manual process when they introduced a weekly office hour during which prospects could ask questions of a customer in a live, non-scripted way about anything related to our product.
• Pillar 4 — Be Bold
  • Positioning and brand experience go hand in hand.
  • We wanted to be the market disruptor, but we also wanted to look cool. Our other aim was to become the company everyone wanted to be part of, to work with or work for.
  • Startups have to stand out, but what you do can’t be stupid. It has to reflect your culture and the culture of where you’re located.
  • Bob once quoted his former Microsoft boss, Bill Gates, “Never get in a fight with someone who’s got more money. “Oracle had a lot more money.”
  • Many startup CEOs aren’t interested in being the face of a company or helping sales close deals. CEOs with that mentality shouldn’t be CEOs.
• Pillar 5 — Alignment with Sales
  • You succeed only when your marketing programs align 100% with your sales strategy.
  • Marketing must develop a strategy and execution plan for stuffing a sales pipeline with solid opportunities that will convert to deals.
  • A rep can get too much demand — more opportunities than they can handle, depending on the territory. And sometimes other reps are sitting there hungry, not getting much of anything.
• Each of our marketing pillars emerged from asking ourselves one simple question.
  • Positioning — What is your product and your company all about?
  • Customer-centric — Where will you focus to deliver absolute success?
  • Automation — How will you accomplish everything, efficiently?
  • Boldness — At what level will you deliver?
  • Alignment — Which partner will you serve in order to deliver the most spectacular and measurable results for your company and your stakeholders?

9 Advance Your Sales Team

• EMC’s commercial sales division and others like it were a “goldmine,” according to Chad, in terms of finding great talent.
• I required reps to have eight sales calls a week and two calls a week with new customers, and to acquire a minimum of two new customers each quarter.
• We promoted [from] within and had five to seven reps working for each manager.
• We continued to hire sales engineers and had each engineer supporting two reps.
• At one point, our finance [team] wanted me to take on partial quotas for reps who were still in their six-month ramping-up stage. John McMahon told me: “You do that and you’re going to get fired.”
• Climbing the many rungs of state and federal compliance certifications in order to deploy and sell to these organizations takes years. Think about hiring people who have done this at other SaaS vendors. Otherwise, you will allow your competition to grab market share in government while you sit on the sidelines waiting to enter those markets.
• It’s a lot of work for a SaaS vendor to deploy in a different region and a huge endeavor to deploy in another cloud for the first time.
• Instead of hiring sales managers from outside, we took our best performers and promoted them.
• Reps would take their managers on sales calls to learn how to sell the product and close deals.
• One thing I screwed up was not establishing a professional services organization sooner.
  • Create your professional services team early because product training is just the tip of the iceberg.
  • Without a services team, I had to lean solely on our content marketing team to produce our first competitive migration guides.
• The other thing I screwed up was establishing a sales operations team too late.
• We built an account propensity score (APS) — the likelihood that a customer will buy. We developed a method to measure lifetime value: If they buy, how much will they spend? Then, we just push those data points back to our CRM, rather than all of the data from the data providers.
• Not long after we launched sales operations, we had a 13-to-1 ratio.
• John McMahon put it this way: If you can’t hire someone better than yourself underneath you, then we’ll hire someone better than you and above you.
• Early in your startup, you don’t have to hire a CRO. You probably wouldn’t be able to attract that level of talent so soon. Hire someone who loves sales, has received great training, always exceeds their number, and, as a manager, has always led their teams to success, which is much more challenging than an individual blowing out a quota on their own.

10 Absolute Alignment Between Marketing and Sales

• When we discover a problem, we identify it and agree on it, together. There’s no finger-pointing. Of course, we’ve had our challenges but we fix them, one way or another, because we had a great working relationship.
• The activation of a free trial was probably our strongest signal that an account was ready to engage sales. It included $400 worth of free consumption of data storage and computing. The offer attracted a lot of prospects but resulted in very few trial activations.
• We created a virtual office hour that taught prospects on how to get started with Snowflake and how to create a proof of concept within the dollar limit of the trial.
• We made it marketing’s responsibility to increase traffic to the website, enable a scalable process for product demos, and have each prospect speak with a live customer in a very transparent way. With everything we did, our goal was to take prospects through that journey. At that point, the prospect was ready to have a conversation with sales and vice versa.
• Today, trials result in 30-to-40 percent of our lead flow.
• If a sales person comes to you for something, you can’t say ‘no.’
• Alignment has to come from the top. In the early days, we [the heads of sales and of marketing] met three times a week and we worked to make that happen down to the next level, and the next.
• Sales efficiency is not about having 30 percent of your reps blowing out their number. It’s about having at least 90 percent of your reps meeting their number. When your efficiency reaches that level of productivity, you continue to hire. We had metrics for the reps — such as how many qualified meetings they were getting each quarter from our demand gen efforts. We didn’t look at whether or not a sales district was successful. We looked at sales success at the rep level.
• It’s misguided to have salespeople prospecting on their own. Having them working on junior level tasks, such as following up on potential sales leads, is inefficient. The best use of [sellers] time is having conversations with qualified prospects and advancing those opportunities.
• Organizations that thrive only hire under the people you’ve developed because they’ve succeeded in taking the next step. If you have to hire over them, then it’s time for them to move on from your company.
• We scheduled the week in such a way that we had different nurturing points that generated new demand every day, moving existing prospects further down the sales funnel.
• We chose Lars and his demand gen team to own the website. It served us well.
• Normally, 3 percent of website traffic converts into a lead. After we redesigned ours, conversion shot up to 10 percent.
• You can’t go out and claim that you are the new leader in a category if people type in “data warehousing” and other companies’ websites are listed above ours.
• Our live product demos, self-service product trials, and virtual and instructor-led labs to get up and running on Snowflake are some of our franchises.
• Our sonic booms came soon after marketing arrived. They are our biggest programs and events that deliver the most impact. They serve many purposes, such as establishing market presence and brand awareness, generating demand, and making a startup appear much bigger than it is. Early on, we created Data for Breakfast. It was our first event series and something we’ve been doing since 2018. It happens in a morning and includes about five impactful sessions led by Snowflake product folks, partners, and customers.
• Product marketing drives Summit and enlists and orchestrates every other marketing team to make the event a massive success. Our Events team handles planning and logistics. But at its heart, Summit is where we announce to the world what new technologies will be available with our product.
• Also in 2019, we started what is now our Snowflake World Tour — that happens globally to get our message in front of potential customers, and educate them with a one-day version of Summit. It’s a compressed version of our annual conference and focuses more on prospects versus existing customers.
• We only schedule a live event in a city if we have a sales presence there, that person or team is ready and able to attend, they have their own prospects attending, the reps eventually respond to the leads the event generates, and marketing nurtures to a point when sale engagement makes sense.
• You don’t need to waste time or money on a channel that isn’t performing
• We typically partnered with one or two partners on marketing campaigns, content, and events. We paid equal portions and shared the leads with all partners involved.
• Our sales and marketing teams align for weekly sales calls, with all levels of stakeholders to discuss pipeline and forecasts.
• Marketing owns the scoring model that looks at people who register for or attend our marketing events.

11 From Product to Platform

• Customers use your product based on how you position it.
• Snowflake has only ever sold one product, with new workloads being added every so often based on how customers continue to use our product and how we continue to evolve our product.
• At Snowflake, product marketing is responsible for developing sales enablement tools — training materials, sales pitch decks, competitive guides, and host of other content that educates your sales team and helps them educate prospects.

PHASE III: Scale

12 Hiring, Retention, and Parting Ways

• Values are so important when you’re scaling a startup. If you mis-hire from a culture standpoint, you impact the entire team.
• In the early days of your startup, hiring people who you have worked with before is key.
• From there, you can trust that your first hires will choose those who have worked for or with them previously. When you build an organization as a sales or marketing leader, your personal reputation is super important. You need to have a following of people who want to work for you again and again.
• Who do managers and senior executives learn from? We spend time with other sales and marketing execs who lead bigger organizations and learn from them. We read and listen to other influential people whose experience and wisdom will benefit us as leaders.
• When you become bigger, you must have a certain level of patience for things. People who shoot from the hip and are very emotional often don’t work at the speed a successful startup requires. When you work with more people, you have to be level-headed.
• Don’t say “those people in finance. “If you take that approach, you’re dead. It’s “our friends” in finance.
• If you have to choose, hire for aptitude over experience.
• Hiring managers have to determine who has the will to succeed.
  • How hungry is this person, really? So many people are not.
  • Are they willing to learn?
  • Are they willing to put in the work?
  • Will they work well with others?
  • Do they fit in with our values?
  • Do they have integrity?
  • Most importantly, can you say “yes” about them to all of these questions?
• They also need to be experts in their domain — so much so that senior leadership may, but shouldn’t, feel intimidated by the aptitude and skills of a frontline manager or a senior individual contributor.
• Smart But Humble: No matter how smart they are, everyone must balance their intelligence, aptitude, and accomplishments with the humility and gratitude your coworkers deserve.
• Say “no” to the wrong candidate even if executive management or your board recommended them.
• The more senior the role, the longer it takes to determine if someone is going to be successful.
• When you know it’s not going to work out, be swift with that decision. Then, question yourself as to what you could have done differently.
• One aspect of our jobs is to hire the right people at the right time and in the right roles. Soon after, we ensure they are in the right roles, or not, and adjust accordingly.
• The questions we often ask ourselves are:
  • Is such a meeting necessary, and what will we achieve?
  • Am I inviting only the essential people?
  • Why should I attend that meeting?
  • Is my presence essential to the meeting’s success?
• When we discuss a strategy or program, we encourage input and get straight to the matter. When we make decisions, we start executing from that moment forward — not next week, next month, or next quarter.

13 Build for a Billion

• Leadership is really about three things: strategy, structure, and people.
• We reorganized our existing structure into three new sales teams:
  • Inside sales – A high-velocity team of reps closing about 12 new digital-native customers a year that were startups and could sign a deal with us after a one-or two-month sales cycle.
  • Enterprise – Field reps who were productive after about six to nine months, focusing on mid-market sized customers.
  • Majors – Field reps who covered our top 250 global accounts, which could spend $10 million or more a year on Snowflake.
• In the early days, if we went into an enterprise of any size and said to them, “We’re going to replace your legacy system,” they would have laughed us out of the room.
• Soon after the reorg, we added a vertical sales element to the majors team. We created teams for financial services, media, entertainment, telco, and tech. We also had persona-based selling within each of these industries, selling to the CEO, CFO, and down the line.
• During all phases of your startup, your CEO has to be involved in sales, whether your head of sales requires your CEO’s help or your CEO has the clout to get a meeting with a CEO at a top customer.
• Each SDR is mapped to two account executives at Snowflake.
• SDRs and demand gen were not always targeting the same accounts. This had to be fixed.
• What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency and intensity.

14 Bottom-Up Sales

• When people respond to an offer, visit our website, download our content, or sign up for an event, and they have a relevant title at a company we care about, our SDRs engage them further, educate them, and qualify them. You can’t afford to let that play out organically and hope that prospect keeps heading down that journey on their own. The SDR team is there to shepherd them into their next engagement with your company and potentially into a conversation with an account exec. The second motion of SDRs is to execute highly targeted and highly sophisticated outbound motions to accomplish the same goal.
• For SDRs to be successful, they need dedicated onboarding and enablement with a curriculum built just for them. It’s centered on:
  • product training and the sales pitch
  • competitive differentiation
  • how to position your product
  • learning about the space and your customer personas.
• We put them through rigorous onboarding, training, and certification.
• Then there’s intent around your competitors’ products that you have to listen for and intervene early and often in those competitors’ deal cycles.
• Demand gen by nature is broadly focused by vertical industry, product, and use case.
• Enterprise sales team: Each of these account execs will manage between 20 and 100 accounts.
• Then we have majors, the strategic segment of sales, which is very heavy with existing named accounts and big prospect accounts we want to pursue.
• Historically, we’ve had looser SDR coverage on [Major] accounts because it’s just a different type of relationship.
• The product of an SDR, first, is meetings. Within meetings, we track things like what percent of those meetings are with people who have director-plus titles.
• Another key conversion point is how are those meetings converting into new opportunities

15 Scaling a Data-Driven Marketing Organization

• Marketing ops handles project planning, marketing research, implementation, analyzing campaign performance, and data management.
• You need to have data scientists on your marketing team.
• Strive for an automated process that stores all of your marketing data in a single and fully managed cloud data platform that provides efficient access from any location and enables all forms of business intelligence and the most advanced analytics possible.
• Today, marketing is more about continuously optimizing. The more you can hyper-personalize something, the better results you’re going to get.
• At Snowflake, we ran with the concept that our customers are our product marketers.
• We maximize customer happiness because people don’t necessarily trust sales people and their marketers. They trust their peers, so we let those peers do the marketing.
• Our first industry targets included financial services, healthcare and life sciences, retail and consumer goods, advertising/media/entertainment, and the public sector.
• To make your product sticky and make yourself a long-term partner, you must capture the hearts and minds of the people who comprise your user and developer communities.
  • Provide technical content, such as sample code that your community needs and from people whom they trust and respect.
  • It’s about creating very hands-on, how-to technical content for people to use, and being there to help answer questions as people in your communities run into difficulties.
  • Reach into those communities and tell them a story that doesn’t lead with your product or services but with the scenarios and the problems your community members are trying to address.
  • The content you deliver to a user or developer community is often a combination of free structured learning delivered by an expert. Connect developers with the person who has created that content so they’re not just learning from you. It’s about an individual expert teaching people.
• If your company tone is informative, insightful, disruptive, or a combination of elements, so should be your brand.
• It’s easy for teams far from your headquarters to produce prospect-facing content without regard to brand continuity. Stop this before it starts.
• When [CEO] Frank [Slootman] arrived, he impressed upon his direct reports that they should all be involved in sales opportunities that would benefit from their experience. If a prospect was considering Snowflake as the backbone of the finance and accounting, then our CFO should make themselves available to support that opportunity.
• We set in motion a program to bolster our executives’ thought leadership by elevating their prominence in the market or leveraging the prominence they established before joining Snowflake.
• Most want to help, but you have to accomplish three things in order to gain their approval. First, you have to prove to them their time will be well spent.
• Second, you have to raise at least one of their eyebrows. For example, if you propose an interview or a blog post with a view on a topic that’s been written about widely by others, or is outside their own domain, they’re going to understandably shut the door on you.
• Third, they will halt everything the moment they realize you’ve engaged them in any part of the process that is better suited for someone further down their management chain.

16 Going Global

• “Don’t go global until you hit $100 million in US annual revenue.“
• The initial stage [in going global] is pure response mode. Companies abroad heard about us on their own. We dedicated an inside sales rep in Silicon Valley to cover interest from Europe that was coming our way without a demand gen strategy.
• Startups that spend big early on in other countries before they have any substantial revenue risk shutting down those operations even faster.
• Latin America has been a slower uptake for us due to instability of governments.
• If you have aspirations to sell to one of the biggest banks in the United Kingdom as one of your first 50 customers in Europe, good luck with that.
• You just have to create this ecosystem of local, referenceable customers. That’s your focus each and every time.
• The best strategy is to go local. The three key elements for success are to build teams that work locally, speak the local language, and understand the local business practices.
• The first hire in an APJ country is your general manager (GM), which is the most crucial role. That person must hire local people and figure out how to sell your technology, set up order forms, and get partners and resellers signed up.
• It’s important to treat each region or country as a distinct geography — not as a sales outpost but as an actual company with a GM leader who hires a head of sales, a head of marketing, a head of services, and a head of business strategy (BS). These organizations must be self-sufficient and engage directly with customers and partners.
• The countries that comprise the EU, specifically your first targets, can be jump-started with a local sales rep and sales engineer. Marketing support for these countries can happen from the United Kingdom, initially.
• Middle East and African nations resemble more the APJ model and need a GM as the first pair of boots on the ground.
• Each country’s GM must be a builder. Ideally, this person has a strong background and a record of success in the country, and has established relationships with C-suite leaders at big companies. You want somebody who has the presence of a local executive. He or she should be capable of scheduling conversations with high-level executives at companies, without requiring the presence of your CEO in order to get the meeting.
• Good GMs don’t simply paint a picture for the next three to five years of the kind of organization they want to build. They deliver startup-level growth on a quarterly basis to justify the investment they’re looking for long term. Snowflake’s primary hiring criteria is to find someone who has built businesses before and wants to roll up their sleeves and do it again. A person who has taken something from scratch, made it big, and loves the building phase. The GM must be willing to do everything from hiring, to sales, to briefing media and analysts, and establishing a culture within their own teams.
• The base hiring criteria in non-native English countries is that everyone must be at least bilingual.
• Once you have successfully onboarded customers, acquired some reference logos, and developed a reputation in the country, the deal sizes start to get bigger. The customer conversations change from technical benefits to a business discussion.
• To get traction with enterprises, you need to both sell the vision to the end user while selling the tech to partner companies, which means getting them on board and excited about your technology so they encourage sales to customer enterprises.
• Consider running a pilot program in one country and for one vertical before rolling out to an entire region.
• Sales reps learn best by doing something and then practicing it. Reading and watching are never enough.
• Use Your Partners’ Industry Experience
• A vice president of marketing in EMEA is not the first person you hire. Instead, hire a demand gen/field marketing person.
• We grew APJ in the same way. The first person we hired was a demand gen/field marketer who reported to our vice president of demand gen in the United States.
• Over time, and as those organizations grew, we broke Europe off into a separate unit. A year later, APJ broke off, and that became a separate unit with their own marketing vice president.

17 Alignment for the Ages

• A data analyst and a data scientist use different tools and different programming languages. In terms of marketing, we have to speak to them in different ways.
• If we had an issue with someone in the other person’s team, we told each other. If we thought it was time they exit Snowflake, we told each other that too.
• We were each on a rolling, three-month work contract, in our own minds.