Building a Sales and Marketing Capability for Data Applications with Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake, and Chris Degnan, former CRO at Snowflake

Richie Cotton: Hi, Denise and Chris, welcome to the show. 

Denise Persson: Great to be here with you, Richie.

Chris Degnan: Richie. Thanks for having us. 

Richie Cotton: Let's kick off, get right to the heart of it. So how do you get to a billion dollars a RR? Uh, what's, what's the secret? I think we get super lucky. 

Chris Degnan: It's a lot of, you know, people I think had a lot of, uh, perception that it would, it was a lot easier than it was.

I think there was a lot of rolling up our sleeves and doing some, um, really hard things, uh, especially early on. When, when I joined, there was. Zero customers. And when Denise joined, we were just at $million in revenue. So a lot of, lot of things have to go right and, uh, and, and get a little lucky and then, and take advantage of that luck.

Denise Persson: Yeah. At, at the heart of our growth. Right. Is uh, of course an incredible, you know, product. Our founder had, um, you know, a big vision, you know, for Snowflake, it took me three years to develop, you know, the platform. So it's, it's really their, their product and of course, and in a relentless customer focus.

That has been kind of the consistent thing at Snowflake has really, it's always been about customer obsession here and always doing the right, uh, thing for the customer. 

Richie Cotton: Uh, okay. Uh, I love the idea of, uh, customer obsession. Uh, yeah. Uh, it's maybe something we get into a bit more depth later, but, uh, I think one of the recurring things throughout your book is all about trying to have some kind of alignment between the sales team and the marketing team.

So I'd love to know how that happens. Uh, maybe, Denise, do you wanna go first this time? 

Denise Persson: Yeah, I mean the, uh, unfortunate thing is that, uh, in most companies, right, there's often a lot of tension between the sales and the marketing function, but not just, you know, among those functions, right? There could be tension, you know, across the entire company, right?

And if you wanna build, you know, a hundred million dollar, a billion dollar business, um, beyond. You all have to align around one mission for the company, and you really need to have a culture of, of alignment, having, uh, competing with each other, you know, internally or having tension internally. It kind of distracts everyone from what the focus should really be.

The focus needs to be on your mission, your focus needs to be on the customer. And again, that tension and, and um, that often exists. Right? It, uh, takes a lot of energy from people. 

Richie Cotton: Absolutely. Uh, yeah, certainly you don't really want, uh, each other to fight. Uh, Chris, do you have a, a take on this as well, uh, from the sales side?

Uh, how did alignment work? 

Chris Degnan: Yeah, I, I think, you know. When Denise came in, uh, in, in, in previous lives or previous, uh, prior to Snowflake, uh, Denise arriving at Snowflake, there was friction between sales and marketing because we, we really struggled with getting leads and getting meetings. That's really all I, I cared about was getting qualified meetings for the team.

And so I would argue over the definition of what, what an MQL was. And, and, um, and then Denise came in and, and recognized that friction. And said, listen, Chris, like you are my customer. You're the number one most important thing in the company because if we hit our revenue targets, all things are good. And so she took that approach and that was really the approach that we, we went through at Snowflake.

And so that was a, that was really important. And her treating me as a customer and caring about the quality of, of meetings that the sales team was having, not even the definition of an MQL. So I think that was, that was the beginning of like, you had me at hello type thing of like, you know. Okay, great.

Let's talk about qualified meetings 

Denise Persson: and also, and Snowflake is, uh, an infrastructure company, right? Our deals are sold through a sales organization. We, we have, there is a POG component of Snowflake as well, but again, that's not where the largest deals are coming from, right? So. It's really sales is the distribution channel for Snowflake.

You know, primarily, we also have a very big, you know, partner ecosystem as well, but marketing's role where you in, you know, an infrastructure play like, like Snowflake is really about how do we make our sales organization in a more efficient, then you need to really kind of integrate yourself right with the self motion and not try to kind of.

For sales to do something different, right? I mean, it's really, uh, again, um, having that exact same priority, you know, sharing the same, you know, objectives and making sure that, uh, marketing isn't measured on metrics. It doesn't make sense for the company. Many companies, snowflake, uh, marketing has been measured around this MQL metric, right?

MQL is a metric that is easy for marketing to deliver on, right? And we sort of determine what that qualified uh, marketing lead is. A lot of marketing departments just goes out to third party. Content indicators and essentially buys a thousands or, or a thousand or MQL a month, right? I mean, that is not what marketing is all about.

You wanna create your own contents, right? So you kind of, you, you build up the house. It's like renting a home versus, you know, buying a home. So you really wanna deliver incredible educational content that kind of draws your audience in, right? That's about, you know, the pipeline metric, right? That is the most important metric.

That is kinda where marketing sales really intersects not on, on the number m qls you're bringing in. 

Richie Cotton: Uh, that's interesting. So I, I guess, um, if I've understood this correctly, when you've got these sort of, uh. Big pieces of software where you're selling very large deals. All that goes through a sales organization, which your accountant executives are selling.

So very different from, uh, selling stuff on a website or in a shop. So there, I guess the, the sales side of things lead stuff, whereas marketing is. Would you say marketing's more of a support function then? Uh, as opposed to the other way around? If you're selling to individuals, 

Denise Persson: I don't wanna calling it a support function.

I think what has been unique also at Snowflake is that we are first and foremost a customer driven organization. If you look at many tech companies in Silicon Valley, they would say, oh, we are a product driven company. We're an engineering led company. We're a sales-led company. Snowflake has always been a customer led business.

And every department essentially is equally important, right? So I think we're all here in support of the customer. That's kind of the culture, uh, that we, that we live, you know, by here. Again, from a, from a go-to market standpoint, again, we are all here to make sure that you, our sales organization can sell as efficiently as it possibly can.

From a marketing standpoint, essentially, I would say that we have two objectives. One is of course around the positioning in the market. I mean, we are leading that, we're leading the perception of, of snowflake and driving kind of the education right in, in the masses. So when the sales team, of course, at some point come in, right, the customers already kind of educated.

They know how Snowflake is positioned. Many, many people in the organization knows about Snowflake and will support a decision, right? So it's not that we're just, I mean, just a support function per se. But again, our goal is to make the selling motion as uh, efficient as possible. And Chris can share a little bit about the metrics, right.

We've had over the years as 

Chris Degnan: well. I double down on that. Richie is like, I definitely would not consider marketing as a support function. I think, you know, and building an enterprise, a company that's selling to large enterprises, I think. It's a machine, like you have to have a great product. So it's, it's on the, on the product team to develop a, a product that customers wanna buy, number one.

Number two is it's on the sales team to get and, and tell as many people as they can to get out there and tell them, tell the story about why the product is so great, why it's differentiated, et cetera, et cetera, and, and marketing. Helps get the, the brand awareness out there helps get the, the, the, the sales team in front of those, uh, those customers to tell the story.

And, and so really what Denise focused on, and I think what she developed at Snowflake was, was a world-class account-based, uh, marketing. Uh, system. And I think one of the things that, that, like every sales leader, every sales person that we brought in after Denise and her team developed this a BM program, it, they were like, I can't believe what an amazing marketing team we have.

Um, it was, whether it was. Taking case studies and putting those case studies in front of prospects, whether it was a field marketing event that we would have and we would generate a bunch of interest in, in, in, in future prospects of, of having a customer get on stage, tell them why they love Snowflake so much.

Those things were invaluable and that was really the kind of the. My sales team loved Denise's marketing team because they were just help. They were like, how can we help and how can we drive revenue? And that was like the number one focus. 

Denise Persson: When we say that, oh, you know, sales is our, our customer, I'm sure some will be.

Well, that doesn't sound like a partnership. It's more just a mentality. Right on, on the marketing side and being in sales, it's really, really, really hard, right? You have a number to deliver on, you know, every quarter. It's not an easy job, but if you feel that the entire organization is behind you, and it's not just marketing, right?

I mean the, it's the product organization, it's the finances organization, it's legal, right? Legal is also very, very important business partner to sell. And also up to the CEO, right? Our CEO is out on sales calls, have helping the sales organization in a close, um, close deals. It's more like a mentality that we're all here to support the customer.

And of course, it's a sales team who leads the process 

Richie Cotton: ish. Uh, you mentioned the idea that, uh, some companies describe themselves as being product led, and so certainly, uh, on a lot of the data framed audience are people who are building, uh, things either with data or with ai as we have a lot of product people.

One of the big challenges, okay, I've got a product which is technically amazing, and then I have no idea how to sell it. Um, so I'm curious as to like how you go about finding that, uh, the, the market that you product or finding product market fit. Uh, maybe, uh, Chris, do you wanna stop this? How did you approach this at, um, at Snowflake 

Chris Degnan: we had a, a investor in, uh, Mike Visor from Sutter Hill, who, who, who firmly believed in hiring a sales person prior to the engineering team, believing that they actually needed a salesperson.

So Mike's kind of pitch to me was. Come and, uh, help define the product direction, um, at Snowflake and, uh, go talk to a bunch of customers. So I joined Snowflake like. No one, no external people had ever touched the product. And my initial pitch was not like, try the product 'cause I couldn't give it to anyone.

It was like, Hey, uh, do you have minutes for me to tell you about this company that has no website that is in stealth mode where we've built this brand new architecture and uh, for a database and here's what we've done. And so that was my, the, the initial like, Hey, do you believe in this architecture?

Do you think it will solve pain points that you have? That was my initial conversations. And then. As I found people that were interested. Then I started and the product matured a little bit. I was like, okay, well hey, you know, Mr. Or Mrs. Uh, first or second Alpha customer, will you try the product? And then we started getting people to try it.

And during that process, uh, we, we, we broke the product, uh, a lot. So like, you know, before I ever got a purchase order or signed agreement for anyone to give us any money, the earliest customers were beating up the products. And, and what, what ultimately. You know, uh, the, the founders and, and Mike Speer were looking for was, we wanna build a product that people cannot live without.

So that was really my goal is like, get people to try it and then they got addicted to it and then we could start figuring out pricing and then we could figure out how to build out scale to go to market. But it was at first like, hey, shaping the, the, the direction. 'cause early on I had, you know, delusions of grandeur, like, hey, I would go out to like, uh, a large enterprise that was stuck in the s.

Who would say, Hey, when will Snowflake deploy in our cloud, in our private cloud? And, and the founders would say, never. Okay, so there was two options there. It was either, uh, continue to badge of the, the, the founders, which I knew would, I would lose and I would get fired or go find, you know, the right customers that only were in the cloud because those were the ones I didn't wanna sell.

The religion of the cloud I wanted to sell why I had a better product than anyone else in the market. For cloud, uh, data warehousing. That was the, the initial intent. And that really helped honed in the messaging that helped us, even as Denise came in and she helped to find, you know, product marketing and, and, and, and all the, how, what markets did we specifically wanna go after?

It was really our earliest customers that led us to this direction. And that's, and that was the beauty of me joining as early as I did. 

Richie Cotton: I love that you're trying to sell a cloud, uh, data warehouse and the customer's saying, well, can we have it on premise? 

Chris Degnan: It happened a lot, trust me. 

Denise Persson: And also that concept of ideal, uh, customer profile.

It's got, it would change, of course. Right. And in the early days, right. Of course, we had wanted to sell to the large enterprises immediately. Right, but they don't trust, you know, a company with no customer, right? They can't experiment the way those early customers at Snowflake did. So we were, in the early days, we were big in the ad tech space, in the gaming space, and these were customers that really.

Pushed the, the product to the limit, right? And helped of course, develop Snowflake to what it is. Uh, today. They were the early pioneers and everyone else was looking at them. They were envying them, right? Because the big companies couldn't do what they did yet. Right? But when they saw that, okay, it's really working from them, right?

Then they started believing snowflake as well. So I think being a startup is really about. Finding the early believers, right? It's even when you hire people, our, our founders had to get, inspire people to believe, to move from very big companies to come and join this company, right? And then it's the same thing with customers, right?

How do you find those really early believers who are willing to bet on this? And then, right. You, you, when you start crossing the cast, right? It's about those people who believe in the believers. The anxious people, right. Who are not willing, who cannot take the risk, right. Early on. So, um, so of course the ideal customer profile really evolves.

You know, over the years 

Chris Degnan: we hired this amazing CEO, uh, Bob Muglia, uh, you know, early on, like nine months into my tenure of being at Snowflake and. Bob invented our, our pricing model. I, I was, I took a crack at it and failed visibly. And, uh, what really Bob's genius was, uh, around, around the product was, okay, we ultimately wanna sell to large enterprises.

And early on, you know, our board members were like, this isn't a great business. Because all I was selling to was, as Denise said, was ad tech and online gaming. And they're like, this is not sustainable. If we, if, if that is the market we're going after. We're not, this isn't a real company. And so Bob did, he came from an enterprise background.

He said, okay, well what does the large enterprise need to, to, to, you know, to use this product? And so he then. Came up with that list and every week in our company, all hands meeting, he, he had a list of all the enterprise features that any, any large enterprise would need. And then he'd assign it to an engineer.

And in the, in the all hands meeting, he'd point to every engineer who, who, who is responsible for that feature and say, how is it coming? And every week. And the engineers hated it. Selfishly as the salesperson, I loved it because my accountability was in the nu the number, and I never knew like if engineers were gonna, you know, develop the product or not, and for them to be held accountable in a public forum, they didn't like that.

But it, it actually got us to what we declared GA in, in June of to become a generally available product because of the stuff that Bob took into, 'cause I think it's. Important. How to figure out how to sell the product. What are the differentiators? That was what our earliest customers showed us, and in fact, that was helpful.

As I brought on salespeople, I actually understood. To a deep level on what the pain points were that we were solving for these customers, these earliest customers. And I would then say like, these are the things you have to look for. Mr. And Mrs. Sales rep that we've hired that has not never sold Snowflake before.

And that was incredibly valuable because then it gave us, like, I could actually tell them these, this is an A account, a B account, or a C account. And that's where Denise and I partnered up and said, let's go after the A accounts. Let's keep each sales rep a hundred accounts each, and then let, let's go get them a bunch of meetings in those a hundred accounts.

And that's where we kind of started to really focus our time and energy. 'cause if a sales sales rep has thousands of accounts, they're just gonna like, be super reactive. But if, if there's. Here are the A accounts, here's why they're a Denise. Help us get into these accounts and, and, and like, let's get meetings, qualified meetings in those accounts.

That's what we centered our kind of focus on and partnership in on, on driving, you know, ultimately, uh, you know, world class revenue growth. 

Denise Persson: So on the marketing side, before even the sellers had started, right. Since it was so clear, which accounts were the A accounts, I mean, we went in, did all the contact discovery, all the mapping of those accounts in terms of who were all the different decision makers.

Influencers that we need to engage with in this account. So we want the, it was usually about maybe a hundred different roles, right? Within the company. And then it was about, okay, how do we drive engagement with or of those? So when the seller joined, right, they got, okay, here you accounts. But.

This accounts you should focus on. 'cause there's already really strong engagement here. They already wanna, they already wanna hear from Snowflake essentially. 

Richie Cotton: This is fascinating. And I'd say, uh, the idea of making, uh, product people like stand up in a meeting and say, this is where I want you on that feature.

I'm sure that I just kind of like really, uh, terrify all and solve them. But, uh, both you mentioned that you've focused early on, on ad tech and online gaming. Uh, so. Why did you decide that? I, I'm curious as how you go about trying to figure out these, uh, this industry is gonna be our best customers. Like, how do you choose 

Chris Degnan: this?

As I said, I had customers, I, I'd go to these like Fortune companies and they'd say, when are you gonna the private cloud? And so, you know, our founders are like, never. Okay, great. I'm not gonna go sell to those right now. So, you know, it's either like I, I, I accept defeat in those accounts for now. And I, like I said, I was not selling the religion and the, the people that were selling the religion were Amazon or Microsoft and Google of the Cloud.

That was their job. My, my job was to say, I have the best product in the space. And so I, I quickly then figured out that, uh, I was only gonna sell to customers that were in Amazon because Snowflake only existed at the beginning, only on one cloud, and it was AWS. And so I, I looked, I went on job boards and, and looked for people that were a, you know, advertising for people that were on AWS using a particular product from a, or a couple different products from AWS, and then find the head of data, find the VP of engineering, and then send them emails.

And the, what, what I realized is we didn't have like basic enterprise features, so we didn't have things like encryption, like, hey, we didn't have SOC two type two. These are things that large enterprises care about. Guess who doesn't care about that Ad tech and online gaming. So it's a bunch of log file data.

And so I quickly, you know, focused my time and attention on log file data that, that people didn't care about encryption. Now, eventually we added the encryption that allowed us to go after, you know, regulated industries and, and like HIPAA compliance and also other stuff. But in the earliest days it was just deduction of like who I could sell to and, and that was really it.

Obviously, the IICP of Snowflake, ideal customer profile. Change over time. As Denise said, it wasn't gonna be ad tech and online gaming forever, but that was like what kept us alive as a company. And one of the, the beautiful things of that was that. One of the ad tech companies that, that we sold to got bought by a huge perspective, like a Fortune company, and that Fortune company actually then decided to use Snowflake as the backend to their, their marketing cloud.

And because they did that, all of a sudden then. Another, you know, uh, massive Fortune retailer heard that this marketing company was doing that. And all of a sudden boom, you know, we get that customer talking to that customer, talking to that customer, and then all of a sudden you start to see that flywheel of the Fortune go and the earliest adopters of, of the cloud in, in 

You know, those were the ones that we focused on. If we were gonna go to like. A bank and convinced them that they needed to move their on-premise data warehouse into the cloud. Uh, and they had not even talked to Amazon. We, we, that was like a c account that was not an account that we'd go after. 

Richie Cotton: Uh, that's very interesting because I think like, uh, banks are some of the, the big adoptive ai, like, so they're sort of.

Cutting edge in this way, but like, maybe they were a lot more hesitant in terms of the infrastructure. Uh, interesting. Uh, okay. Uh, so, uh, just talking about like, trying to find your best customers. I mean, uh, you've gotta get a lot of signal on like, who's gonna be good at buying, I guess from the marketing side of things, uh, Denise, do you wanna talk us through like what, what do you learn about like, who are potential customers from your marketing efforts?

Denise Persson: I mean, uh, we run everything on Snowflake, right? So we run everything, you know, on, on data here, and that has been also instrumental to our growth as well. It's one of the big reasons why I joined here. Data was always my challenge. I had to go in it, knock on the door, Hey, can I get this data set? You get it sort of three weeks later, right?

That was the case years ago. Still the case from many, many companies, uh, today. So in terms of then that ideal profile, right? We built those models in Snowflake so we can identify more. It was always about them finding the twins right to the early. Early successful, uh, customers and, uh, again, start building out engagement within those.

So it, it was a entirely data-driven process in terms of how we identify the twins of our, of our ideal customers. And then we started sort of expand, um, expanding from there. And often what happens right in BB infrastructure is that the sales team had had a set of accounts right at the previous company.

So let's say they were running different accounts. They moved to another company and they, they're start selling into those same accounts, but that wasn't relevant to Snowflake in the early days, right? They came in here. Those customers, again, could have been those customers who says, oh, when are you moving it on-prem?

So you really had to kind of deliver to the sales here, here, or in your patch here, or again, that to counts you should focus on. Based on, on data, based on almost the intense data that we're sort of buying from, from third party as well. So we really had a formula for how we developed that ICP list for cells.

And also usually right in cells, you go out and list hire in all territories. There were territories that we just didn't hire in because there were not enough ideal customer profile prospects in those regions. Right. So also sales hiring was really determined on them. The volume of ICPs in different, you know, territories also, that, that, uh, that model was an entirely data-driven model where again, usually, uh, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Chris, but usually was a sales leader, go out, goes out and hire maybe previous leaders in different territories and that's how you build, we really built it from an outside in standpoint, really from where, where are the, um, ideal Yeah, customer.

Profiles and, and the volume of those. And that's how we built the sales team as well. 

Richie Cotton: Okay. I I, I love that there's, uh, such a data-driven approach to kind of building out, like, uh, well, I guess to making all your decisions, to building things out and actually. Just think about marketing. I mean, there's a lot of different, uh, areas of marketing.

Like, uh, actually I think one of the things, your book is the idea that it's like five different, uh, departments kind of glued together. So maybe Denise, do you wanna talk us through like the, the different, uh, research? So we've covered some of the terms already, like we talked about account based marketing, field based marketing, like what are all the different areas of marketing and where is sort of data.

Most amenable to, to, uh, being used 

Denise Persson: again, data's absolutely used, you know, everywhere. And especially today, even more. I mean, every function is, uh, running on data. And also, there's some recent numbers here across our marketing team shows that % of all marketers are using AI on a day-to-day basis in the work today.

And they're, they're saving hours, uh, on a daily basis, right? Using, you know, AI. Especially, of course from a performance marketing standpoint, the growth marketing teams, it's very, very data driven, right? Again, we were datadriven in the way we identified the right prospects to targets. We were data driven in the way we, of course, you know, engaged with those, you know, you know, audiences.

It's really data throughout the entire, um, sales process as well. 

Richie Cotton: Wonderful. Uh, yeah. Chris, how, how about on the sales side? Uh, talk me through why are you using data? 

Chris Degnan: As Denise said, like it would say to me is like, no, no sales reps left behind. She would always look at, you know, where leads are coming from.

Uh, making sure that we could then at attribute them to a territory. And if someone was starving, uh, from a, from a lead perspective, um, she would, you know, focus there. So I think number one is we'd look at, you know. From a territory perspective where were leads coming from and that tho those are obviously good metrics to look at as you start to hire.

You know, I advise companies now that I'm not a, don't, don't work at Snowflake anymore, I advise 'em went to startups and a lot of them, you know, are eager to go, you know, just geographically to different places. And what my comment is. Take a look at where the leads are coming from, geographically first, who's raising their hand?

If you're an early stage startup who's, who's raising their hand saying, I wanna buy. And I think you have to think about that, that before you say, I'm just gonna randomly put people in Europe, or randomly put people in the Midwest or or wherever you wanna really focus on that. So I think we focus there.

And then on the metrics side. There are basic things that I, that have been consistent that Denise knows that I've, I've said from day one is, hey, every sales rep, and I would say this to, even at my, like as I was, you know, towards the end of my tenure of Snowflake in the last year, you know, I would get in front of new hire classes and a lot of these people would come and Snowflake thinking, oh, I'm gonna ride this wave of this amazing company.

'cause it is an world-class company, world-class product. And I would say it's. The, the misperception of Snowflake is that it's easy to sell because we are, it's a knife fight. Um, every single time you're going out and you're competing with some of the biggest companies in the world, you're competing with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and then there's some other very well funded startups like, like Databricks and, and others that, that are like, you're, you're literally in every deal knife fighting.

And so, which is still true to this day, is go on eight sales calls every single week. If you hold yourself to that metric. Then and, and you have a great product and you tell that story and you understand how to, how to tell the story, then guess what? You'll put yourself in a position to win. But if you're waiting for, you know, marketing to send you a bunch of leads and you're waiting for something to happen, good to happen to you, it won't, I promise you.

And so I would tell salespeople, there are people in this room that think it was easy. It's easy to sell Snowflake when it actually is not. If you go out and tell the story eight times a week, you will hit your number. If you do not do that, you know, flip the coin and you may or may not make it. So I was very, you know, kind of very brutally honest with, with people when they came on.

And that is kinda what I tell everyone is hold yourself accountable to these metrics and then like. If you have a good product and you're, and you know how to sell that product, the revenue will come. And that's, that's what I've learned through, through the years of building the team. 

Denise Persson: I mean, if we fast forward also to, we are today from a, from a data perspective, the challenge in marketing has always been, there's always some marketing investments that goes to waste, right?

'cause your, you're, you're, you're targeting the wrong. People, you know, it's not the right time, right? All about that. Marketing is of course about being the one who's the most relevant is gonna of course, you know, win, win the the deal essentially. But the ability today to do predictive forecasting or everything.

So the way we can today predict what our pipeline is going to be in different. Territories is game changing. Often in the BB world, you end up in a quarter where you realize, oh, okay, there are certain territories that they don't have enough pipeline. This quarter in the pipeline is very, in the quarter is very little.

You can do, you know, in marketing, right? The, the work we do in marketing is setting us up for success. So maybe six months from now. But the be now today with predictive forecasting of, of our pipeline to see, okay, let's say California is not gonna make it in six months from now, if we continue doing what we're doing today and to fix that problem before you, you're in, in the problem essentially, that has been a game changer.

So for us to be able to al reallocate resources to where they're gonna have the most impact, right? That really makes every single dollar work for us in a whole different way. The way we run our digital spend, for instance, we can in real time, see which digital channels that are working or not. You know, which messages that are working and just adapt all of that, you know, in real time where before and still for most companies, right, they will know maybe months or weeks, you know, later what worked and didn't.

And that there's so much money that goes to waste. There's no better time to be in marketing today because of data. 

Richie Cotton: Yeah. Uh, I love the idea that, um, you can in real time make decisions about how to resource it because it seems like an incredibly important thing about just, um, making sure that you have operation to, uh, running optimally.

Okay. So, Chris, you mentioned that, um, se selling stuff is easy. Uh, since you've both built out departments, I'd love to hear more about like, uh, what kind of do you hire, what kind of like skills you look for, uh, and I guess, has it changed over time? 'cause I mean, you, you both took the company from kind of.

Scrappy startup, the multibillion dollar company. So yeah, I guess, uh, who do you look for when you were hiring and, and did that change over time? 

Chris Degnan: We actually, early on found like people that were successful, um, and not successful at, at Snowflake. We actually went the, to the next, uh, degree of metrics and actually made, uh, everyone do an assessment.

And so I made all like the, the best and the worst performing people do assessments. Uh, and, and it was both. On intellectual, uh, assessment and personality assessment. And it turns out like, okay, we were selling a technical product, so you had to have some intelligence, right? Like you didn't have to be a, a rocket scientist.

You know, that's not what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for someone from Stanford or Harvard that, you know, jump into sales, but I want some sort of intelligence. Um, and so I'm looking for that. And then on the, on the personality traits. I'm looking, ironically for early stage startups, I'm looking for people that are, are maybe pessimistic, uh, distrusting of people, maybe even like, uh, or very competitive.

So competitive athletes, stuff like that. But, but just are you competitive? And you can get that in these, uh, personality assessments. A lot of times they were, they were kind of not like everyone has a perception that salespeople are like these hyper social people. Um, and in our earliest days, a lot of our, our, uh, our, our earliest salespeople weren't like trying to be best friends with everyone.

They were not like these people that were the lives of the party. They were people that like. Were very driven. Didn't trust what, what you, uh, buyers were telling them. They would have to validate it upon across the organization. Be and, and you're looking for that because, you know, at, at, at our scale when we were small, I couldn't be in every deal.

And so I needed the, the, the, the sales team to do their job on qualifying these deals to do their job on not trusting that, you know, Johnny Procurement person is going to actually buy when, when they say they are. 'cause procurement people are traditionally not. Don't do it that way. They don't buy on our calendar.

So we have to, you know, do what, you know, we do in sales to make sure we do that. And so, yeah, there were some commonalities of, of people that, that I was looking for as we grew. And, and by the way, they, the people that I hired early on, they had to have experience, open up net new customers, net new prospects, or turning prospects into customers in the last months of their job.

That was really important because if I was gonna hire someone that, that was, uh, you know, selling to like two accounts. In our earliest days, that would not have been, that wouldn't have worked, uh, for Snowflake because I, I, you know, that we, we were not, we were doing like $transaction, $transactions.

A whale hunter is not gonna do well in that environment over time. It changed dramatically because Snowflake has, you know, customers that are, you know, signing over a hundred million dollar contracts today. And so like that, that now you might have like, you know, three reps on one account and they're selling use cases versus like acquiring a new bunch, new logos.

They, there's an acquisition team at Snowflake that's separate. But really the profile of, of the human on the account changes wildly, um, as you mature as a company for sure. 

Richie Cotton: Usually when I ask people about, uh, like what skills you look for when you're hiring, they're just like, oh yeah, I just want someone with good communication skills.

I love that. He's like, I want someone who's very competitive. Distrust other people. Uh, I love that, uh, a refreshing answer. Uh, okay. Uh, interesting. Uh, Denise, is it the same on the, on the marketing side? What kind of profiles were you looking for? 

Chris Degnan: For record Richie, I still give, uh, Denise Ccra crap about this.

She hired, uh, uh, one of my best SDRs. She, you know, liked a lot of our salespeople coming into market for, for, yeah. She's today. 

Denise Persson: Yeah. At this sdr she actually runs field marketing for the Americas for Snowflake today. I mean, she's in a very, very, yes. In your position. And, um, yeah, on the marketing side, I also were looking for people who also could build that relationship with sales as well.

There were, there were some people on the team when I joined who just couldn't, uh, couldn't do that to really, I mean, um, piss people off for, uh, lack of better words here. So you had to be very extremely collaborative. Be again, humble and understand that I don't know everything, you know, I, I, I be, you wanna be.

Motivated by constantly learning new things. A very curious, you know, mindset. Those are the type of people we're still looking for today. But in the early days, right, you, you're looking for those with a very entrepreneurial mindset as well. 'cause when you got in here, right, in the early days, again, you got your laptop, you got your account list, and yes, there were some training, right?

But that's it. You had to go out there very much as a figure out yourself. And it's what we're seeing today is that many of those. Who were with Snowflake in the early days, they're now running their own campus today. They have, they're, they're running startups today. They thrive in that kind of startup environment where you just go out and figure things out on a day-to-day basis.

Right. At Snowflake today, there's more, there's more process in place, right? There's a framework for how, how we do things and. People have to kinda fit into that, right? Today, you cannot come in and kind break processes, break our framework. That's gonna impact our scale, right? At some point you need that to scale, right?

You need to fit into to a system. The people in the early days are those who, again, they were out breaking the system essentially. 

Richie Cotton: It always amazes me like how mu, how many, how startups actually function. Like they're all held together with like string and glue and like, uh, there's no processes for anything.

Uh, so yeah, uh, I, I certainly say yeah, there's a very particular mentality for that. 

Denise Persson: I mean, in the early days, especially in marketing, right? You need people who can wear many hats. They can do help out on the PR side. They can get test customer testimonials, right? They can, you know, also run an event, right?

Very like they will go in and figure anything out essentially. And where we are today is that everyone now have landed in a place of specialization. So they're truly, those people are still here today, right? They landed in an area that they're truly passionate about, that they, that they love again today where you cannot have people running around.

Wearing different hats, right? It would create sort of chaos in the environment we are today. But I think also it's great to see today that there's a great blend of those people who've been here early on. They have great dinner, tribal knowledge, right? They bring the culture forward and that we're combining that with people who bring in more large enterprise experience.

They know how to build systems, processes that can help the company scale further. So it's so important. To have both today and the thing that everyone has in common, it's extreme collaboration, teamwork, respect, you know, for one another. 

Richie Cotton: Yeah. Uh, I do think, uh, being able to collaborate with others is incredibly important.

'cause like the so few projects where you can do this on your own and be done, it's like er can have to, uh, collaborate with others. Okay. Uh, so I mean, you both talked about, uh, the importance of, uh, data both in marketing and sales. So I'm curious as to what, um, data skills you look for during hiring. Like, uh, I, maybe, Denise, you wanna go first?

Like, what, uh, data skills do you look for when you're hiring marketers? 

Denise Persson: We can actually teach people data skills today and today It's easier, right? It's easier. Those skills are less complex than they used to be years ago or, or before. Snowflake. Snowflake made it easy, right? For organization to, to work with their data.

Uh, in the early days, we built our own center of data excellence within the department. So I had a data scientist on the marketing team in the early days who were really close to the business problem. They completely understood what we were trying to do. Sell, uh, sales had its own team. Everyone had its own team.

Now, actually, that is a centralized center of excellence for the company. When these teams were built, we ended up, they ended up being some applications of work also. They, their, um, are special competencies, a unique area right today in terms of data science and ai. So that function is today a centralized function that work then really closely with those that are very close to the problem that they're trying to solve.

But again, you need to, we are hiring people that are love data, right? That really leaning to the data, uh, want to make data-driven decisions. So it was more the mentality of. Loving data, wanting to work with data rather than have any specific technology skill sets that, that we can easily teach people today.

Richie Cotton: Okay. Uh, I love that idea that, uh, yeah, you can teach people on the job because, um, they're gonna have to use data, presumably if they're working at Snowflake. Uh, but yeah, uh, they just need, uh, a little bit and, uh, they're willing to learn. Was that the, the same, uh. Thing you've found on the, on the sales side?

Chris Degnan: On 

Richie Cotton: the sales 

Chris Degnan: side, you know, the, there's the sales operations and sales strategy org. Um, and it, it's very similar to Denise had her, her marketing operations team. I had, I had my sales operations team. So there's commonalities between each organization. They're looking at data different ways, but they're looking at the data.

And then a lot of times they're looking at the shared data, figuring out how we can fix certain things from a, from a sales leadership perspective. I think especially, um, uh, uh, as you get, as the company gets big, uh, like, like, like, you know, I, I had people, uh, when I left working for me at, at Snowflake, and I think.

That organization, even my job was, was dramatically different. And I think it's, it's almost better to have someone who, who is very operational, very numbers driven, because it's no longer like this intimate affair of like, I know every single person I, I'm going on all the sales calls, I know all the customers.

It's a numbers game. And I think that's the difference in the job from like early days to where it goes. So I think leadership. Sales leadership needs to have an operational mindset, uh, especially as the company gets big, you know, snowflake's, you know, well over $billion in revenue. And because of that, there's this massive scale and you need people to think, uh, in terms of numbers, not just like, you know, I would always think about like each deal and I'd be involved in every deal, very tactical, and then you kind of have to be strategic around what, what, what are, what do you see in the data?

And so having good operations teams, and I think Snowflake's done a wonderful job of. Under shridhar Ram's, uh, guidance of really having this centralized data function to look across the entire organization to make data, data centric decisions. And I think that's, I'll give Shridhar a ton of credit on, on helping the company in that, in that, um, frame.

Richie Cotton: I love the idea that, um, data just really helped you scale because you need to like run your operations more efficiently. And you said that, so, uh, Sudar came on the show last year and yeah, he just seemed like a very, very data-driven guy, 

Chris Degnan: so, oh yeah, that's another thing. And he is great at it. I mean, I've never seen anyone a better, so he is great at it.

Denise Persson: And building a company, it's about making a bunch of decisions every day. What are you gonna do? What are you not gonna do? And if you do make the wrong decision, it's gonna set you back and you might develop, kind of fail as a company. Having data to make those decisions, that has been absolutely instrumental to our growth and making the right decision.

Richie Cotton: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, such a competitive advantage just make. Less stupid decisions than your competitors, and that's gonna be, uh, a, a really good way forward. Um, okay, so we talked a ton about data. Uh, somehow we've got like three quarters of an hour in, we're barely talking about ai. So, uh, I guess one of the big, uh, use cases of AI that a lot of people pushing moments around, uh, AI for automating things, uh, and to stock about scaling.

Like how have you made use of AI for scaling snowflake? 

Denise Persson: I mean extensively. And we've used AI for, for many, many years at Snowflake and, uh, across the entire marketing in our process. Uh, what's unique today is today we have actually agents up and running now. So we have agents, uh, for, uh, running all our different campaigns.

We have an agents for, for, um, compute analysis, for instance. So instead of, um, the sales. A team having to be trained on every single competitor out there, they now a new agent, they can ask a question, I have a meeting tomorrow with this company. I believe I'm competing against this company. And these are the different use cases and, and problems we're gonna talk about.

And the agents, you know, give some all the talking points back. I mean, that's a complete game changer, right? In terms of time saving and equipping them, you know, with the right message at the right time. And then of course we use AI for everything, for content creation. We, I mean, we do a lot of, you know, customer interviews.

I mean, we've kept the time in terms of developing interview scripts and um, and, and editing and all of that, you know, with ai. So it's, it's truly used across every function in marketing today. 

Richie Cotton: Wonderful. I mean, I, I do love the idea of having, um, an agent that. Prepares all your talking points for you. So, uh, you go into a conversation and you're like, oh, I know what I should be talking about.

I should probably try that on podcast sometime. 

Denise Persson: Truly, I mean, we're truly at the point now where we are. We're talking to all, all data. I haven't, uh, looked at the dashboards in months. Now we have actually a product coming out here November in Ja, snowflake intelligence, right? It really lets you. Have a conversation with all your enterprise information, your structured data, and all your non-structured, you know, data.

So for me, where I usually, you know, some, some queers are more complex, right? That I didn't do myself before. I would have to go to someone, Hey, can you look in deeper into this? Right? You always wanna dig deeper into a dashboard and get more and more answers. You know, back now we're just go into snowflake intelligence.

Um, I can ask the question, I get all the answers, you know, back, so I don't have to go and ask anyone for. To go, go deeper into the data. I can go very deep and and wide across all the information on Snowflake. 

Richie Cotton: Wow. Uh, I mean, that's a surprising radical shift like that you don't need dashboards as much. I mean, I think pretty much every company like the.

Analytics it, it, it is dashboards. It's hundreds and hundreds of dashboards and that's how a lot of leaders get their information. So 

Denise Persson: you always more from that dashboard. You always want to, but I wanna answer why, why did this happen? Why did we increase sales with, um, % right in this region? What happened?

Fund, which, which, which products contributed to that, which sales reps contributed to that. So to be able to ask that question and get the answers back, and again, if you get the answers back, you're gonna be able to make the right decision, you know, quicker. And that's what I was gonna help you to meet, uh, move at, at speed and um, focus on the right thing.

Richie Cotton: Okay. Um, yeah, I, that, that's the dream right there is just being able to ask a business question, get a sense of answer back just so you can meditation. Wonderful. 

Chris Degnan: Chris, do you have anything to add that I think, um, be Denise, hit it is, you know, snowflake's, you know, always customer zero for all snowflake's products and, and you know, so, so snowflake's rolled out Snowflake intelligence and they call a product they internally call Raven, where it actually, each of the sales leaders can, can actually ask questions about.

For example, what's happening in this customer. So historically, you might have to go to Salesforce, you might have to go to actually Snowflake, because Snowflake's a consumption model. Snowflake can actually look at how, how healthy the customer is. Well, what this Snowflake intelligence tool does is goes out and says, here's what's happening across all the different.

Sources of data, and then it tells you like, Hey, this customer's doing this. You're, they're doing that. And, and, and then I, I, I foresee a day when you're interacting with like a tool like Snowflake, snowflake intelligence, where you're saying, Hey, what has changed in my business in the last. Week in the last day, in the last month, in the last quarter, and actually giving me questions that I could go ask my sales leadership around what's happening.

So I think, you know, I think it's just gonna help people be more on top of the data versus, like, historically old school sales was well about your intuition. Like, Hey, I, I intuitively think this is happening based on like what I'm, you know, reading the tea leaves. Well now you don't have to like it. It's, that's still gonna help people buy from people, but.

If you can be smarter about those decisions, you know, and, and AI's helping you understand your data more, you know, more effectively. And you don't have to go to the data team every time to build a dashboard to hope that you're actually looking at the right data. I think that's the, the neat part. As, as Denise said, interacting with your data more frequently and, and in your own way is, is something that's changing really in, in real time right now.

Richie Cotton: Okay. Yeah. So, uh, that cross team communication talks like someone in sales asking someone from the data team, and maybe they're busy at the moment and goes back on the report. I can certainly see how that slows things down. So, yeah. Uh, being able to cut that out the cycle 

Denise Persson: and operating on the same data, right.

It's so incredibly important to have that unified platform for your company, you know, that is governed, you know, secure. Connected is gonna be really hard for companies who don't have their data in order to do anything with ai, right? I mean, do companies do understand today that you cannot have an AI strategy without the data strategy?

Still, some companies are behind on getting their, uh, data AI ready, and that's gonna, that needs to be priority number one now for every organization. 

Richie Cotton: Um, data quality, um, it gets glossed over a lot. I think. It's like, it's not the fun stuff. So, uh, yeah. Uh, that can g cause problems later on when you're like, uh, trying to build that with ai.

I'm curious, what does kind of like, what's, what's your ideal tech stack then for marketers or salespeople then? I mean, I know you're gonna say snowflake, but so. It's what, just a database and a load of agents, or is there more to it? 

Denise Persson: I don't think we can predict exactly how things are gonna look at, uh, in, in a couple years from now.

What we're seeing in the marketing space is that everything needs to be connected from a data standpoint. So all these different applications you need in marketing, you need, of course, you need a data platform. You need, uh, to have a ca three, customer, View, you need, um, uh, applications for ACT activating data.

You need, uh, systems for doing identity management, right? There's a lot that you need. The key thing is that all these applications needs to be connected from a data standpoint. That's what we're seeing now. A lot of these marketing applications are built, being built directly on the data. So they're being built, you know, on the Snowflake AI data cloud, you know, for instance.

Because you don't wanna start fragmenting your data again, right? If you start buying these point solutions again, right? You're creating more data fragment, fragmentation, and that is gonna hinder you really from realizing the value of ai. So the importance is really that all these applications are connected from a data backend standpoint.

Chris Degnan: Historically, it was you had this data and send it to the application. That was like how everything has kind of been built. Oh, I need to put in Salesforce, or I need to put it in. Workday or whatever it is. I think the inverse will happen over time, and it is happening is where you're bringing the application to the data.

And I think that's what you know, uh, snowflake is really focused on, is allowing, you know, the application to sit on top of the data and that, and having that kind of, all that data accessible by any application. Is incredibly powerful because you can actually, like in, in, you know, earliest days, you could look at a data set that I don't have access to.

Like Denise could look at a data set from Marketo and, and I don't have access to the Marketo data. Um, and I'm gonna look at data from the Salesforce perspective. And, uh, that was the case. And now like, you know, it's like, Hey, we wanna look at the same data and you can ask. Different questions of it, but because we're, you know, snowflake's doing a wonderful job of bringing the application to the data or AI to the data, then all of a sudden you can ask the question seven different ways, but it's still looking at the same data and that's really important.

Denise Persson: Yep. Data is truly the new infrastructure that applications need to be built on. 

Richie Cotton: Yeah. It just seemed like, um, the sort of historical idea that you want the data as close to the application as possible is just course all these data silos. It just doesn't work anymore. So I do like the idea of just making sure that whatever application you're working with, you're gonna have access to, like data from different sources.

'cause. Most questions are gonna involve, uh, data from multiple places. Alright, uh, super. So, uh, before we finish, I'd love to talk a bit about, uh, snowflake build. Uh, so you've got a whole week of developer events. Uh, so, uh, yeah, I'd love to hear what it, what it's about and what you're most looking forward to at the event.

Uh, so this is something, uh, data camps, uh, heavily involved with as well. So, uh, yeah, Denise. Tell us about it. 

Denise Persson: Build is actually an entire season, or, or, or, or build, you know, activation starting November th with, um, a virtual build event. It's, that's also the midyear, uh, event where we're making all our midyear product announcement.

So there's gonna gonna be a slew of new, incredible product coming to market, uh, including, you know, partnership announcements, et cetera. Uh, a lot of customers talking as well. Uh, it's very much of a peer to peer. Learning events. And, uh, then there's gonna be in-person, uh, build events all around the world.

Many of them are in India, but also in locations like London, for instance, in, uh, in early next year. And it's really, uh, our events here is primarily for developers. But also practitioners, uh, data practitioners as well. 

Richie Cotton: Wonderful. Sounds exciting stuff. Uh, Chris, you wanted to add to that? 

Chris Degnan: The beauty of my job now is I don't actually work at Snowflake anymore, so, so, uh, I don't have to, I'm not attending these, these, uh, big, big events, uh, that Denise promotes anymore, and I.

I really miss, uh, seeing her at these events, but don't miss, uh, traveling around the world, uh, you know, uh, on a plane. So, uh, so I get to, uh, wave at Denise and say, uh, have fun. And I I'm gonna go to the golf course after this. So. 

Richie Cotton: Nice. Living the good life, eh? 

Denise Persson: No, no, no. Golf for me. We have, uh, lots to do here.

Yeah, 

Richie Cotton: no, uh, build does sound very exciting. Uh, yeah. Uh. I the fact these virtual, but we've also got in-person events as well, uh, those in the area. So, uh, yeah, uh, lots of fun stuff just to wrap up. I always want more people to follow. So, uh, who's work are you most excited about at the moment? Is there anyone I should be looking into?

In terms of companies, in terms of what, who, who do you read about, uh, people in, uh, companies who's doing exciting stuff, 

Chris Degnan: as Denise said, is, I, I, you know, or as, as I said, it's, I'm, I'm, um, I'm on the outside looking in, in terms of, I, I now advise early stage companies. Um, and so I, I'm super excited about what's happening in the next generation of AI companies.

I'm advising a, a company called Factory. Ai and they're, and, and they're developing co-generation tools and, and they have really a different way of doing it than the cursors of the world in, in cognitions of the world. So I'm, I'm excited about them. I'm, I'm, I'm helping a, a voice company, uh, that has a voice AI agent, um, that.

It's incredible, uh, a company called Gig ml. They're super early and they've got these huge customers that they're replacing customer service agents with, and there's a real return on investment. So stuff like that, I mean, look, I, I still love Snowflake. Snowflake has a wonderful story, and, and it'll continue to be a wonderful company for years to come.

Uh, but yeah, it's, it's fun getting back in the early stage. And so that's where I'm spending a lot of my energy is with early stage startups. 

Richie Cotton: That's cool. And yeah, certainly, uh, more ways of doing better, uh, co-generation, like improving software development. That's, uh, that's a really, uh, important thing. Uh, Denise, uh, who are you, uh, looking at at the moment?

Denise Persson: Uh, I mean, I, I do think open AI is doing tons of exciting, you know, things we look forward to, um, using many of the products coming out of, of, of them. But again, they're a range of different in know startups as well, you know? So, yeah. 

Richie Cotton: Wonderful. Alright. Uh, yeah, opening. I obviously, uh, been dominating the headline for a few years with all the progress, so yeah.

Uh, hope, hoping the innovations keep coming out. Alright, wonderful. Uh, thank you Chris, and thank you Janice, for your time. 

Denise Persson: Thanks Richie. 

Chris Degnan: Richie, thanks for having us. Great talking to you.