Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions (eBook)

How Snowflake Scaled its Go-to-Market Organization

Denise Persson, Chris Degnan (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
294 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-394-25421-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Follow along on the journey of the founding, development, and breakaway success of a multi-billion-dollar tech company

Founding Snowflake CRO, Chris Degnan, and CMO, Denise Persson, have one of the longest executive sales and marketing relationships in history. They each built their teams from the ground up to help catapult Snowflake from a startup to one of the fastest-growing technology companies. Along the way, they evolved, innovated and executed as a single entity to deliver impact, while aligning with Snowflake's number one company value: put customers first. Learn how Chris and Denise united two historically divided teams in Corporate America to achieve long-lasting customer relationships and enduring company success.

This book covers Snowflake' sales and marketing evolution through three phases of the company: Startup, Build and Scale. Readers will learn:

• How and when to jumpstart your sales and marketing teams.
• How to develop product market fit and your competitive strategy.
• Why business partners are critical to sales success.
• The importance of establishing a culture early, and how.
• Why demand gen should be marketing's northern star.
• What success looks like when hiring, retaining and saying goodbye.
• Building for a billion: restructuring sales, scaling a data-driven marketing team.

This book targets startup founders and executives, venture capital partners and the boards of directors of early- and mid-stage technology startups. Sales and marketing are often neglected in these companies, with focus squarely placed on engineering and product teams that determine sales and marketing functions. There is a better way. Armed with the strategies and tactics contained in this book, senior stakeholders of startup companies can jump-start and align their sales and marketing go-to-market strategy sooner and with more impact.

DENISE PERSSON is a four-time chief marketing officer and has been Snowflake's CMO for nearly a decade. From the ground up, she built a team of 700 who own the sales pipeline and create global brand awareness for Snowflake.

CHRIS DEGNAN was Snowflake's first sales rep and spent more than 11 years as the company's Chief Revenue Officer. He grew Snowflake's annual revenue from zero to more than $3 billion, while expanding his organization to thousands of employees that span dozens of countries.

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Embed Sales and Culture Early into Your Startup

“Holy crap! What have I done?”

—Chris Degnan

THEY SAY IT’S better to have never flown first class then to have flown it and then be shuffled back to economy. That was my young life in a nutshell. I grew up in an upper-middle-class family. My father was a stockbroker when the market crashed in 1988. As I entered high school, we went from front row seats at Celtics games to a divorced family and my dad headed to prison. I had two choices—blame him for my future failures or pick myself up, get a job, and grind. I started bagging groceries at age 14 and I haven’t stopped working since. I love winning, but I also fear losing everything based on my family experience. That’s part of what drives me—fear of failure and someone taking something from me and my family.

I planned on finishing my college degree in the fall of 1997, but my roommate convinced me we should move to Seattle in the fall instead. With his help, I figured out how to take four classes during the preceding summer semester and graduate before our departure. We planned to spend six months in Seattle, but ended up in the San Francisco Bay Area. I never left. I was desperate to pay rent because eviction meant someone taking something from me. That also meant I was always on the lookout for the next best job. In seven short years, I bounced between five companies, taking jobs as a corporate recruiter, a finance trainee, an advertising sales guy, and as an entry-level sales rep in the software industry, which is how my career really got started. One day a friend asked me to take a meeting with a sales manager at the multinational data storage company EMC. Next thing I knew, I was in front of the head of EMC’s North American sales. He looked me in the eye and said, “Your career is a mess. Come build a career with EMC.” So that’s what I did.

EMC was an amazing place to train and succeed as a young person, selling enterprise hardware and software solutions. I spent eight years there, working for the same boss the entire time and ascending to the position of district sales manager for Northern California. He taught me the fundamentals of selling and how to lead sales teams. His mantra was to recruit and develop great people, and to drive revenue. He was great at the sales journey—understanding a customer’s decision process, identifying champions within an account, and discovering the customer pain that EMC solutions could help alleviate. But I realized I did not want my boss’s job. I needed to make a career change.

I had a number of job offers but I chose the security software startup Aveksa. They hired me as vice president of sales for the West Coast. The product was a hard sale but I loved the challenge. Unfortunately, that challenge didn’t last long. About a year later, EMC acquired Aveksa. My heart sank. I did well at EMC and learned a ton about selling but I didn’t want to go back. I realized that I needed to be passionate about what I sell. I’m a lousy liar, to be honest. If I don’t love what I sell then people will see that from a mile away. I was convinced EMC had missed the boat by investing in hardware for on-premises data storage. In Silicon Valley, the data storage industry was heading to the cloud, however long it took to get there.

During my search for a new opportunity, a mutual business contact connected me with Mike Speiser. He was, and still is, a venture capitalist for Sutter Hill in Silicon Valley. Mike is fairly unique. He often bypasses the typical VC approach of waiting for software engineers to come up with new product ideas and then provide them with initial funding. Instead, he envisions a solution that could disrupt a sector of the tech industry and elicits input from experts to hone a product road map. That’s how Snowflake was born. Mike pitched a raw idea to Benoit Dageville, who is a world-class database architect but was languishing at Oracle, plugging holes in its decades-old legacy database product. Benoit recommended a somewhat different approach and introduced Mike to his good friend and fellow Oracle database architect, Thierry Cruanes. Soon after, they started Snowflake in August 2012. Marcin Zukowski joined five months later as a co-founder. He was an expert in vector computing, which would become integral to Snowflake’s product strategy.

Mike helped in a big way to assemble the first group of Snowflake engineers who would spend their days whiteboarding the product architecture and coding software. He was also the company’s interim CEO, working one day a week in our tiny office and establishing a great working relationship with the team. The engineers often teased Mike for telling them: “Type faster. You guys need to type faster!” But selling Benoit and Thierry on hiring someone like me took some effort. It was November 2013 and Snowflake had 12 employees, including an office admin, who established Snowflake’s office culture early on. The engineers didn’t see a need for someone like me this soon at the company. A product-ready version of Snowflake for customers was still two years away. But Mike was keen to embed a salesperson to help the engineers. Sounds like an odd match—hiring for two areas of a company that couldn’t be any further from each other in terms of the entire product chain.

The reluctance inside of Snowflake to hire me paled in comparison to my own trepidation. By day two at the company I thought, “Holy crap! What have I done?” I was in this small office in downtown San Mateo, California, with a small team of engineers. I spent a lot of time in a conference room with some knowledge about a product that didn’t exist yet. I started cold calling. I thought the walls were somewhat soundproof but I could hear the engineers laughing. I found out later that 90 percent of what I first said about the technology was wrong. But that didn’t matter. I was working with humble people who were aspiring to build something great.

Hire a Head of Sales While You’re Still in Stealth

Mike Speiser basically forced the engineers to hire me. He wanted customer feedback while Snowflake was still in stealth mode—the period when the software engineers were building the product. Mike believed that if you’re going after a huge market you have to nail the product market fit. That doesn’t happen by sticking to your initial product development plan all the way to general availability (GA), hoping you will then sign a bunch of customers. We wanted to find out what architectural elements and product features Snowflake needed while our engineers were still pounding out software code. I started pitching to prospects what we had planned for the first public release of Snowflake. After that, but before GA, we had a beta version that prospects could trial. We gained a ton of feedback, so the list of desired features kept growing. Our engineers had to make architectural changes because Snowflake wasn’t scaling well even though we were building it for the cloud. There was a lot of valuable customer feedback that took months to incorporate during stealth mode.

Choose Wisely

Your founders and founding engineers are your first product managers and marketers. They make all product decisions based on initial feedback from the market. That also means they often prefer a product manager or product marketer to lead sales and someone similar to lead marketing. Don’t let this happen. Product managers determine which features and functionality the product will include. They likely have a degree in computer science or mathematics but never spent much time as a software engineer. 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. Those conversations will surely emerge as you move horizontally and hierarchically through all of the purchase influencers at a prospective customer. Even moving up a customer’s engineering organization, those vice presidents want to hear about increasing engineering productivity, while reducing risk and time to market. They don’t want to hear about new features. That’s four levels down in their organizations. Moreover, 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 orchestrate and rely on a group of colleagues to conduct the sales motion. They include pre-sales engineers to meet with a customer’s technical buyers, industry experts who know a customer’s specific pain points, and professional services people who can understand a customer’s existing computing environment and recommend training for technical and business users. They may also recommend a third-party service provider that offers necessary integration and implementation services your company doesn’t offer. All of these roles are important when positioning and selling a technology but they don’t yet exist at a startup....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.9.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Unternehmensführung / Management
• Schlagworte: company culture • Company Ecosystem • company values • Customer Centric Marketing • Executive Leadership • growth company • hiring and firing • IPO • Marketing • principles of building a company • Sales • snowflake • Startup success story
• ISBN-10: 1-394-25421-0 / 1394254210
• ISBN-13: 978-1-394-25421-7 / 9781394254217