Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR

Harry, thanks for having me. Great to talk to you.

Yeah. I I moved out to California in in the late nineties and there’s a mutual fund company called Franklin Templeton. So Franklin has a a thing called the management training program, and you basically rotate through departments for four months increments. And so my first rotation was in HR. So I I got into this management training program. My my first rotation was HR, and I absolutely hated HR. I was like, this is not a career for me. And then my next rotation was in sales, and it was like, click.

I love this. Now I I didn’t necessarily love the mutual fund sales side of things. A lot of the the the salespeople that I supported. So I was an inside salesperson effectively supporting a a field rep. Those field reps had giant territories, and they were on the road five days a week. And they all typically were divorced once or twice, so I figured that wasn’t a a good career move. But I slowly made my way into technology. But I think it’s at Franklin where I realized I love sales.

You know, I’m a competitive human, and I think getting on on with someone and teaching them why or explaining to them why whatever I was representing could improve their job, could make them better at their job or whatever it is. That’s when I started to realize I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed more than the business to business sale. I found it There’s a lot of competitors out there, and gets me up out of the out of bed every day. Even to this day, competition is what drives me.

So I think that’s really probably what I love the the most about it.

The immediate gratification is is definitely something that that I enjoy. But it’s always like it never ends because once you have a good quarter, it’s on to the next quarter, and you’re a loser all over again. So

I was actually hired at the time. They didn’t have a website. They didn’t actually have a CEO at the time. So there’s a a venture capitalist by the name of Mike Speiser from Sutter Hill. Mike’s an incredible recruiter, incredible venture leader, and I got introduced to Mike. I I had been selling at EMC and through my storage connections got introduced to to Mike because he had he had started a company called Pure Storage. He’s like, hey. I’m building this company called Snowflake. And I was interviewing with a lot of other companies.

Some of them went public, like AppDynamics got bought by Cisco. And what got me excited about Snowflake was the the concept of the cloud. People were gonna move analytic workloads to the cloud. The data warehousing market was a huge market at the time. It was a 10 to 12 billion dollar market. And I like the founders. They were just good humans. And as opposed to me going to work for another sales dude, I was to go work for some cool founders, and and that’s I came on as the director of sales, not even the VP of sales.

So I started in And Mike Speiser was our theoretical CEO at the time. He showed up one day a week. So it it was me and a bunch of engineers that was the beginning of Snowflake.

He he is totally under the radar. He is brilliant. And when he’s on, I don’t think there’s anyone better. And I think a lot of venture people look up to him, for sure.

Yeah. Ten years younger, Chris. You know, I showed up and I and I had a, you know, WTF moment. I was like, what am I doing here? Me and a bunch of engineers, there was some insinuation that Netflix was a customer. They were not. There was zero customers when I showed up. And I think I had a panic moment of like, man, did I make the right decision? But I think that panic, anxiety, whatever you wanna call it, is what made me figure out what to do.

So what I would say to myself is just do what you did, but don’t worry. It’s to work out. Because I think there was a lot of sleepless nights that I had. I had a good paying job before, and Mike Speiser convinced me to take a huge pay cut cash wise. He’s like, you gotta bet on the equity, which now it was a great bet, but back then, it didn’t feel that way. And so that was a big, big deal.

We put a lot on the line. To her credit, she let me do this. So I I give her a lot of credit for letting me.

I still say this. So I just did a new hire training this week where I I presented to a bunch of new hires, and I say the same exact thing today that I said when I started at Snowflake is but I was I was the original BDR. I was the original sales rep at Snowflake is you must go on eight sales calls a week, and you must be a student of what you sell. So for me, I I wasn’t a 100% certain on what I was selling.

So I interviewed the founders and stuff like that to better understand the value proposition. So, again, a student of what you sell and go on eight sales calls a week. And if you do that and you have a good product, you’ll be successful. And if you have a crap product, you will be.

You you gotta leave time for prospecting. You to be able to prospect. And and that’s the other thing is if you don’t figure out how to plan for the next week, it’s all about time management. I think for me, going to college or university is all about time management. If you’re not to be a, you know, an engineer, you’re not to be a a doctor or something like that, you’re you’re you’re going be a stupid sales guy like me, it’s all about figuring out how to manage your time.

And I think for me, it was, okay. I could do go on eight face to face sales calls a week and still have time to follow-up on all that stuff, on all the emails that I need to do to to follow-up on the eight sales calls, go on two to three net new business meetings a week, and prospect. So if you think about just time management, that’s really what’s in the realm of possibility. I I worked at a place at EMC where my sales manager, if it was super intense, required 15 meetings a week, and that was not possible. it it it was not possible.

Eight is good. Eight is good.

So I started off I had a a basic premise of of our value prop. And and our basic premise was we separate storage from compute, and we natively ingest semi structured data, and we’re SQL engine. That was kind of the the premise. And so I would just send out an email and say, I’m not looking to sell anything at this point. Mike Speiser was like, for two years, you’re not selling a thing. Like, I don’t want you to sell anything. I just want you to get customer feedback.

For two years, I really focused on just getting customers to try the product or tell us if they would buy it and that kind of stuff, which was hard because you’re trying to get people just to try a product for free that doesn’t really exist. There’s no website. And so what I did was I would go out and I talked to, like, GE, and I’d say, hey. This is what we built. And GE would go to me and say, hey. When are you gonna run on the private cloud?

And I go to Benoit and Thierry, our founders, and say, when are we gonna run the private cloud? And they they say never. So I was like, okay. That’s that’s a good good idea. I’m not gonna go to someone who’s gonna require me to run the private cloud. And luckily, in 2013, Amazon had had launched Amazon Redshift, which we compete against. And they had signed up a thousand customers in nine months. And so what I realized is they actually they created the market. They just Redshift was not a good product at the time.

And so I basically figured out that customers had pain associated with Redshift. And so then I started really just focusing on digital native customers, customers that were already in the cloud as opposed to me convincing someone to move to the cloud. Amazon and then now Microsoft and GCP, they’re convincing people to go to the cloud. That’s not my job. My job is to say we have the best data warehouse in the cloud. That was really how I figured it out. And it took me a bunch of iterations and a bunch of nos from the founders until I figured out our our ICP.

The number one thing that that I think Speiser taught me was that he likes to go after huge markets, and it’s important from a sales perspective. The reality is is that if you’re out there trying to convince people that they have a problem, that’s an eighteen month to twenty four month sales cycle. If they already know they have a problem, they buy data warehousing and it’s expensive. And so that gave us a a real opportunity to go after a specific market, and that was helpful for me.

Well, so the founder has to have a vision. But I also think that they also have to be very open to customer feedback. And if if there’s arrogance at the founder level that they know better than a customer, then you lose. Our culture at Snowflake to this day comes from our founders, and it’s put the customer first. So I would say that I help them improve the product. I helped them figure out exactly, you know, what are the features they needed to build. But ultimately, it was their vision.

So it was this combination of myself and then Bob Muglia, who was our first real CEO, and he created our pricing and all other stuff. So I think a founder, you know, who thinks they know all, I don’t wanna work for that person. I think you have to be very much open and very much have to take feedback. And if you’re open to that, whether you’re the head of sales like, Mike Speiser didn’t hire me to be the chief revenue officer of Snowflake. And and in fact, I I think he probably said to each of the board members, we’ll probably fire Chris in in a year or two.

I was the director of sales. So whether I was the VP of sales, the the chief revenue officer, that came later. It it was more like help us build a product that lasts. And then I think he figured he’d hire someone more experience than me.

If you can find the right person who has something to prove, that’s important. And I and I felt, look, this was an opportunity that I did not wanna fail at. So I think I I approached it very much like, I don’t want them to take the ball away from me. Therefore, I’m gonna hit every metric I need. And that’s what I that I focused on is hitting every metric. And I think the founders, if you can get someone who’s been a sales leader who will go back and roll up their sleeves and go on eight sales calls and do prospecting, wonderful.

Sometimes, if you ask me to do that now 10 years in, if you ask me to do that again, I probably wouldn’t do that because I don’t need to. Right? But I I was a little bit desperate. And so I think if you can find that right sales leader who has that energy to go out and do all the basics of sales, then I think it’s great. But I think it’s it depends on the person. I think hiring a a VP of sales, I think it’s a mistake for a founder to hire a chief revenue officer right away because, like, getting rid of a a chief revenue officer is gonna be more painful versus, hey.

You have a VP of sales, and you can hire over them, and you can make that VP of sales head of North America or head of the east or West or whatever it is, wherever they are.

So, again, so so I I I spent eight years at EMC, and then I went to a small startup where I was running the West for this company called Aveksa. This is where we really came up with real metrics of eight sales calls a week. And I figured when I when I showed up, I was holding my sales team at Aveksa to that metric. That worked, by the way, and that was reasonable versus the 15 that my my sales manager at EMC had me do. So I said, Eight sales calls a week, that’s what I’m gonna do.

And so how I held myself accountable was I’d go on eight sales calls a week, and then at the end of every week, I’d send an email to the entire company on the eight sales calls I had. So it was to the founders, to the engineers, to the board of directors. Some of the engineers still have those emails because they love to hear what people are saying about our product. And so the feedback that I got was part of us building the product, and they love that feedback.

So I was their feedback loop, if you will, in the field.

Yeah. So I just hired a new head of Europe. So I was running Europe for a quarter this year, and I even have what I have now is every major account in Europe, I have each sales rep send me a weekly update on how is it going in that account. So I still re I I was just reading one of those this morning on one of our larger accounts. I love that because now I get a feel for what’s happening in the business. I get a feel for the good and the bad, and and they give me, like, what’s green and what’s red.

And I look at the red right away. I go to the red and say, what’s the problem? So you should absolutely do that. If you’re kinda not doing that, then you’re basically keeping stuff to yourself. In fact, I think one of the one of the problems that I didn’t realize, but a lot of heads of sales don’t effectively communicate in larger companies with products. Sales and product have to be really close, and that that’s a huge thing.

Again, if you think about it, I’m going on eight sales calls a week. I’m trying to go on two to three net new business meetings a week. So I I structure on okay. If I’m going on two to three net new business meetings, I I went to ABC company. I met with the chief data officer or director of IT or whoever it is. Here’s who I met with, and here’s the conversation I had and the next steps. And I try to get next steps in every one of them.

And then when I go back to ABC company and I meet them again, I’m trying to set up a pilot and convincing them to try our product at the time. And then they’re giving me objections on why they can’t give us data. You don’t encrypt data or you’re in the cloud or whatever the objection is. And I’m putting those objections in the email to the company so that the founders, the engineers hear that. And a lot of features, like, I remember we went early days. I brought Thierry, our cofounder, up to a customer, and there was this technical feature called windowing that we needed that we didn’t have.

And the guy guy’s like, well, you need windowing. I need windowing. I have no idea what windowing is, to be honest with you, but I’m like, okay. We need windowing, Thierry. And that night, the brilliance of Thierry goes home and builds the basic concept of what is Snowflake’s windowing functionality today. That’s the beauty of the relationship between sales and product is I bring them to water, and they have to drink it, and they can figure out if they’re gonna drink it or not. And I think that’s what that’s what Thierry did in that example.

Well, I think you put product in the room with the customer to give them direct feedback as opposed to me writing it down and just saying, we need this windowing functionality. That would have been one thing. But for Thierry to hear from the the mouth of the customer, this is why I need it. Because ultimately, he was a founder that he didn’t care about being the CEO of the company. He didn’t care about making billions of dollars. All he cared about is creating a product that people use.

He he came from a background of of database. He knew that he needed to eventually have that, so he went and build it. So I think it’s not for me to decide. I don’t decide the product roadmap. map. The the the early engineers used to jokingly refer to me as the shadow CTO. There’s not one piece of code I’ve ever written at Snowflake. There’s no no technical decisions I’ I’ve ever made. All I’ve done is brought the product team to the customer, and the product team makes the decision.

That’s kind of the job that I view I have.

Well, I I mean, I I was just listening to Tom Brady as he was just saying, look. I looked at the the other team as my enemy. I didn’t have friends on that team is what he said. Now I think after the game, there were guys that he went to college with and stuff like that. In that moment, he’s like, they’re my enemy. So a 100%. In fact, ten years into this job, that is what gets me up out of bed. I love having an enemy.

By the way, I have multiple enemies. I don’t wanna call them all out on this call, and that motivates the heck out of me for sure.

So early on with Snowflake, the challenge is that we we were competing with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. And so the cloud native solution was always the default solution. So early on, I actually wouldn’t let the sales team put an opportunity in Salesforce to forecast it unless the customer had tried the product. And so now the forecasting is is about the compelling events. Like, is there a compelling event? The the biggest hole that you can poke in a forecast is what is the compelling reason or compelling event that the customer gonna do something?

Especially in a in a weird economy, people are not gonna do anyone any favors. Like, sales like, oh, I have a good relationship with this customer. No. You don’t. They’re they’re gonna care about themselves and their job and their family. Not you, mister sales rep, missus sales rep. What is the compelling event? Do you have a ROI, some reason that the customer gonna buy? Otherwise, that that’s the easiest thing to poke a hole in. And by the way, there are a lot of sales leaders that don’t ask that question.

Why why are you going to do this deal? Why? That’s really the the number one thing that I that I look at from a forecast perspective.

Rarely. Rarely. Because people don’t ask hard questions. So I was in New York last week going on on a sales call on a net new prospect, and I’m in there in the building and I’m like, the guy’s this customer is like just talking in circles and I’m like, hey, dude. Do you wanna do something or not? That basically summed it up. It was like, well, I don’t know that I’m the guy. Okay. Great. I figured that out really quickly. He wasn’t the right guy. Who is the right guy?

And so you kind have to be very direct. and don’t waste my time. I’m not gonna waste yours. There are lot of people that will take meetings but do nothing. You shouldn’t waste your time. You should ask the hard questions.

Well, if you can find the compelling event and you basically create a a a backwards timeline of saying, hey. You wanna get this migration done? You wanna get this project done? Whatever it is by this date, here’s what has to happen. In order for us to get it there, here’s the following things that have to happen. We have to go through contracts. Our our average time for a contract to get signed is is three months. We have some customers who are small customers who will take sixty days.

But we have customers that will take like, in a large enterprise, their procurement departments, they crush innovation by just their process. Large organizations have crazy Three process. Oh, yes. Even longer. We’ve been in procurement for six months. It’s crazy. It’s great.

Yeah. Sometimes. Depends on the project. Like, if you’re selling to a digital native company that already has their data in the cloud and this other stuff, yeah, easy. But if they’re if they’re an on premise legacy company, they have all these security hoops, they have a procurement department that is wagging the dog, they can crush projects, careers, they’re really

No. Mm-mm.

So what I realized early on is that selling to a large financial institution is super interesting because you look and you you can see stars. You can see dollars. And you say, that’s amazing. But those large enterprises, especially in an early stage startup, they will suck the life out of that startup because they will say, I need these 100 features. And the founders might say, well, I’m gonna build these 100 features. And then guess what? That that person who said they were gonna bring in, they got fired.

Or eighteen months later, they’re off to a different project. They don’t care about you anymore. But if you can find someone that is in your ideal customer profile that you can actually sell to in a relatively short period of time and get them using the product quickly, that’s really what I’ve I focused on, and that’s that’s important for any startup is what is your ICP? Who is gonna be your fastest buyer? The large financial institution, they’re gonna send you off in a in a different direction.

And and if it’s a different direction that you don’t wanna go, don’t waste your time. And by the way, that’s not a sustainable model that you as the CEO of the company, you as the head of sales, you’re gonna get fired because what ends up happening is you get one quarter where you have this incredible revenue jump if you get that deal. And then guess what? You have to have how many more of those deals do you have in your pipeline? Not many.

Well, it’s a volume game. So going back to what I said earlier, eight sales calls a week, two to three net new business meetings a week. If you send the sales team towards the right ICP, all of a sudden, you’re getting customers who are using the product and you’re finding them faster. And then you might then stumble across the large financial institution that is something that you can keep in the pipeline, but you’re not gonna hug that deal and and going think it’s gonna be the only deal you’re gonna close that quarter.

And you can slowly build the large enterprise pipeline while you have the velocity pipeline keeping you afloat.

Well, I think now in in the size of Snowflake is, I think a lot of our sellers, they can go build themselves the technical champion. So they they identify the technical champion. And a good way to test that champion, if they are real champion, is will they actually bring you to the economic buy? And they may not bring you, Harry, if you’re the sales rep. They might say like, hey, dude. I’m not gonna introduce you to my boss’s boss. Right?

But if Chris Degnan, the chief revenue officer of Snowflake is in town, or I can get a Zoom call with Chris or Frank Slootman or Mike Scarpelli or some senior person within Snowflake, then, yeah, they use us, and a good sales rep uses us as a pawn. I always say, I’m an actor in the sales rep’s movie. They’re the director. They can use me however they want. If they make me the director, good luck. You’re probably gonna fail. But if you’re the director and you’re you’re putting me in the the right position to say the right things, that’s a good director.

That’s the beauty of of what Frank Slootman brought to Snowflake is he said to me, Chris, you’re a deal jockey. And he said, that got Snowflake to where it needed to be, but that’s not gonna get Snowflake to where it it needs to go. And so that stuck with me, and he said, you gotta figure this out, dude, or I’ll figure it out for you, which means I’m I’m out.

So every major deal I was involved with, every single major deal I was involved with. And and what you just said, you’re the bottleneck. If I’m the bottleneck in my schedule, I can’t get to Europe. I can’t get to Asia. I can’t be in Texas or whatever it is. Guess what? I’m slowing down the deal. So now what I tried to do is focus on finding sales leaders that work directly for me that have the same sense of urgency. So I have a guy who runs our our largest customers working for me.

He runs those transactions. I don’t run those transactions anymore, and he tells me what he needs from me, and I trust that he’s doing that job. Building that trust, giving the keys to your your baby, if you will, is is sometimes hard. But, man, when you find those great leaders, you feel super lucky, and and that’s that’s how you create scale. And that’s what I’ve done with my organization today.

So you have to find people that kind believe in the foundation that you believe in. Be a student of what you sell. If I have a sales leader who wants to sit in their office and manage a spreadsheet, that’s not for me. I’m a lead from the front type sales leader. I want my sales leaders to to be the same, and finding that out is is hard. And so you can get faked out by people too. They can tell you that they’re doing those things. And then what happens is when you go into the field and you go meet with the people that work for them, all of a sudden you realize they’re not doing that.

You’re doing that. And so all of sudden that becomes a problem. That has happened to me multiple times. I’ve been faked out by sales leaders who who say they’re doing that, but they’re not. I wouldn’t say, Harry, it’s an easy thing to figure out. It’s something that I still struggle with to this day, but you spend time and effort and you figure it out.

Well, I tell this to founders all the time. They actually it’s on the marketing side is where they make the mistake. Founders love product marketers. They understand the product, and they’re gonna build this marketing literature and stuff like that. That’s a waste of time. The marketing team needs to generate pipeline. They need to generate leads, meetings, whatever it is that, the metric that you want come up with. And founders, they’re they’re like, I don’t want some pipeline generation machine. I want a great marketing page of telling the sales team why the product is so good.

Let the sales team and you, founder, figure that out together. Don’t rely on the product marketer to do that because they’re not in the field. The sales team’s in the field. You’re in the field. To me, the the number one thing that I I say to sales leaders, dude, go hire a world class pipeline generation marketer. That is what you need because then you’ll learn from the sales calls, then you’ll that’ll help you develop the product. So I think that’s the number one issue that I see in in startups.

When we hired our our CMO almost seven years ago, Denise, I was arguing with the previous marketing team over what you know, an MQL was, what an SQL was, and all this other stuff, and it was driving me crazy. And she said, great news. We’re never gonna talk about MQLs or SQLs anymore. We’re just to talk about qualifying meetings. That’s that’s all you should hold me accountable to. And And that’s what she did. So she would sit down with we had an SDR organization that that was initially under me and that I three years ago, that to her.

But we talked about just generating good quality meetings that converted to pipeline. That’s all that we we talked about. And to this day, that’s what we talk about is qualified meetings. And so that’s the thing that I would say is, yeah, if you fill my funnel full of this is where the the the friction with sales and marketing becomes is you start talking about what the definition is of an an MQL, and you have this definition, and you’re sitting down with the CEO, and the CEO saying, oh, that’s yeah.

Look at all this pipeline. The sales team’s not following up on it. And the sales team’s like, yeah. That’s so so I think it’s it’s having integrity in the pipeline is important.

So this week, I met with some of our our SDR leaders. They were in town, they were doing a quarterly review and some training. I say to them, I was Snowflake’s original SDR because I built my own lists. I I scraped websites. I prospected. By the way, I still use that to this day. I still do my own recruiting. When I when I hire people, I pick up the phone and I call people. I send emails on LinkedIn. So prospecting should never die. Cold calling should never die.

You gotta find find champions. The way you find champions is you’re gonna say, hey. I heard you have this issue. Anyone who who says that’s dead is crazy.

Yeah. A 100%. If you’re waiting for marketing to hand you the golden leads, if you get two leads from marketing a quarter, you’re welcome. Go pick up the phone and cold call into your prospects. Go to go to conferences. Show up. Go to partners. Ask them how they can introduce, but that’s the hard work. And if you can actually do that and the hustle, you’re be successful.

So with Snowflake being a a consumption model, you could see the dial turn real time. I look at revenue on a daily basis. And if a customer goes up really fast or down really fast, it sets off alarm bells because I don’t want them to overspend because all of a sudden, they’ll be really mad at me. And I don’t want and if they’re underspending, then I go right to the sales team why? What’s happening? And so I get real time feedback on churn. When a customer is to churn, we know.

Now they might be going out of business or maybe we lose a workload, but not the entirety of it. There are stuff like that that happens too. But we see that real time, and that’s the beauty of a consumption good or bad, that’s the beauty of a a consumption model.

Look. People have to do business. You’re either to keep moving or you’re die. I call BS on that. And I think if you don’t have a good value prop, yeah. If you have a if you have a nice to have, like, a sales tool, that’s to be hard. A nice to have forecasting tool. Like, I got someone who tried to introduce me to some sales forecasting tool, and I’m like, you’re barking up the wrong tree here. I I don’t have that pain, and I’m not doing that.

The reality is is that’s that’s not a huge pain for me. I’m not to go buy a nice to have something that would be additive. But find a pain, and CFOs are spending right now. And I see that real time.

You know, I am humble enough to know that, like, I’m lucky to be selling the product I’m selling. I take feedback, and I act on that feedback. I feel like I learn a ton from my own sales leaders. Like, people who work for me, they teach me something every single day. I was on a sales call at a customer recently with one of our long longtime, actually our very first sales rep, this guy Tom. And I was on a sales call with him, and I learned from him.

And so I think the thing that that you you learn about is if you’re open to feedback and then you can give those other people feedback onto how they’re doing and what you’re seeing others do, then geez, it’s it’s awesome. And I think what I try to do is get others to talk to. So, like, we just thrown at a guy to be the head of of The UK. And one of the guys who runs, you know, a huge business for me in North America, Mark Fleming, he spent time with Jimmy helping him out of the goodness of his heart.

And Mark is a wonderful sales leader, and he’s given Jimmy time and helping Jimmy develop. So I think it’s about it’s like a family. It’s like you’re having a family raise people versus just, like, being a single parent. And I think because I do it one way, doesn’t mean it’s the best way. And I think that’s the kind of the way that you kind I I view it is if I can get others to help me raise the family, I think that’s the way I look at it.

They they absolutely need pressure. Look. I never feel safe. I’ll I’ll be honest with you. I never feel safe. To this day, I don’t feel safe. And and I think when I see people, like, who are laid back, don’t have the sense of urgency that I have, it drives me crazy. The answer is no. Going back to the the the comment I made earlier about the new hire training that I I I went in, I said, if you do not go on eight sales calls a week, if you do not become a student of what you sell, you will fail.

You might be a really nice person, but if you don’t do those two things, you’re going fail. And I say that to everyone.

Well, if you go out on a sales call and the person doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about and they’ve been on the job for six months, yeah, you’re to be in a world of hurt, and you should just cut bait. To quote Frank, he he has this saying, when there’s doubt, there’s no doubt. And I think in your gut, you see it. And I think a lot of times, because you’re a human, you because you have empathy, you to help people along and and you want them to succeed.

But at some point, they hit ceilings, and you either have to, said, no. say, you’re you’re not scaling. You’re not doing this. And in in your gut, you see it. And that’s the hardest part is how fast can you make that decision. I think you see it pretty quickly. It’s just do you have the the guts to go and make that tough decision quickly because it’s not it’s gut wrenching.

So we say you you talk about productivity of sellers. So we have different productivity numbers per division that they’re in. So corporate seller, so who’s more of a junior seller, they’re to become productive within three to six months. Meaning, they’re be they should be closing deals because their sales cycle is sixty days. So if they can go and prospect, find a customer, they they have a sixty day sales cycle, boom. In a smaller contract value, you’ll you’ll do that. In in a mid-sized enterprise, it’s six to nine months, and in the large enterprise, it’s twelve months.

That’s what we see. But there are basic things. Like, I’ll give you example. I think you did some homework prior to us talking. You spoke to Kyle Rourke. So Kyle Rourke was one of my first he actually was the first guy I recruited to Snowflake. He ran the West for me. And at the time, I I had all direct reports of sellers. And then when I had Kyle run the West, Kyle takes over, basically, for me and comes to me and says, hey. Guess what? I’m to hire two people on LA.

I’m like, really? I’m like, we can’t get arrested in LA. He’s like, we’re doing it. And sure enough, he was right. He had three people down there, and two of the people became super productive and were selling. And that one person, he couldn’t get out of his own way. And so I think that’s when you realize is, like, he was waiting for the leads to come to him versus the leads going and making things happen.

100%. Like, that’s a that’s a good lesson is, like, a single person should not be the litmus test because you don’t know if they’re doing the things that you do. As the sales leader, you should be be a leading from the front sales leader. You should understand how to sell the product. You should understand what works. But then if you hire and choose and you put people in the field and you see one person successful, one person’s not, it’s not because of the territory guaranteed. It’s because one person’s doing something different.

So find out what that person that’s succeeding is doing, and then either make that person do that same thing or cut bait.

I mean, Kyle and I have had tough conversations before, and he’s a good friend of mine. Look. You don’t have to be an asshole. You don’t have to be mean to people. Frank always says this to me. He says, do you think the board of directors are my friend? And the answer is no. He he he answered it for me, and he said no. He said they fired me in a heartbeat if they didn’t think I was doing a good job. I saw that firsthand when when when the board of directors fired Bob Muglia.

Bob thought they were his friends, and they weren’t. Right? And I saw that happen, and I think you you kind have to know that in the corporate world, no one’s really your friend. You have a job to do, and you have an obligation to shareholders. And if you operate that way and you understand that’s the premise that you’re operating on, that’s that’s how I operate.

It’s awful. When you build a startup, you’re building it from scratch. You know these people’s families. You’ve traveled the world with them. You become friends with them. But then at some point, there becomes a point where it doesn’t work anymore. And I think that’s the awful part of the corporate world.

I I think CEOs, founders like to blame other people for failures. Sales sales is probably the first person to get the finger pointed at. For me, what was incredibly helpful is having John McMahon on the board of Snowflake. Because when Mike Speiser came in to Bob and said, hey. You’re to go hire someone over Chris. Bob was like, no. And why? Like, what am I to get that Chris isn’t giving? And John was helpful because John gave me feedback. Like, if you don’t do these things, you’re to get replaced.

And by the way, what I said earlier is I took his feedback real, and John was very direct with me. You’re either going keep this job or not, and here’s what you have to do. So I think to founders, if you can have a sales leader that has done this before on your board or as an advisor whatever, it’s incredibly helpful because they’ll help you identify, can this person scale? And sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t. But the number one thing is you have to give them feedback if they are doing that, and do they act on that feedback?

I’ve seen both. I’ve seen that, you know, the board of directors are saying this person stinks, and they don’t. It’s more that the founders aren’t listening to customers. They’re not building the right product. I’ve I’ve seen everything. Like, Frank always says there’s no playbook. It’s situational. It’s like, what is the situation you’re in? Do you have product market fit? Are you convinced of that? Do you have the right marketing leader? Are they generating the right amount of leads? You have to investigate that stuff. Does your sales leader actually communicate with product?

Like, there’s a bunch of questions you should ask yourself.

I’m I’m on to the next. I’m like, okay. That was a good quarter. Because sometimes you’re gonna have bad quarters, and you have to diagnose and be honest with yourself on what happens. Why did we have a bad quarter? And there’s things like COVID. There’s things like inflation, And you have to you have to decipher between is inflation having an impact or is it your sales team?

Every quarter, I do a a quarterly review with the entire sales team. I celebrate the top performers. We have spiffs. We have president’s club, you know, where we bring the top performers every year. So the answer is, yeah. I do celebrate that. 100%. And I celebrate them. And I say, great job.

I think you’re honest. You’re saying, like, here’s what we’re seeing in the market. We really had to think through what was happening in the market. Was it sales? Was it product? And as we looked at it, we saw dude, as you said earlier, CFOs were were cutting back, and the behavior was was changing. So you you have to be measured in in how you look at these things, not emotional, and you have to really look at the metrics and understand what’s happening.

Well, well, when you say CS, that’s a naughty word. So I I don’t believe in customer success.

Because what does customer success do in most companies? They’re basically either renewal people or they’re guiding the customer around to how to use the product. But if you ask the tough question of customer success, could they sell the product? No. Are they, you know, technical enough to be a sales engineer? No. You know, what are they doing? So me, I’d rather take that money that you’re spending on customer success and invest it in either, you know, professional services people that are paid for that you can use as free resources, but they’re technical, sales engineers or sales reps.

So you’re getting something as opposed to this weird thing that you can’t really quantify. We have a a business value engineering group, which they actually are more of an enablement group for the sales team to help actually, what we do is build business value plans for the customer. Hey. You were doing x before. You’re doing y with Snowflake. Here’s the benefit, but it’s an enablement. It’s the sales team should be you’re teaching the sales team how to fish. It’s not like they’re gonna do this for every single sales rep across the company.

The sales rep should end up doing that for themselves.

Yes. Get rid of them. Build a build a professional service organization. Hire more SCs who can do it. Customer success look. People think that’s blasphemy. I get it. I don’t believe in it. I inherited our customer success when Frank came in. He gave it to me. I got rid of it. It was an expense that I didn’t see the value in. Yeah.

No. Because the sales rep can do that. You give the sales rep a renewal quota. I mean, it’s a basic thing. basically a

No. Because if you if you’re hey. Guess what? You have a renewal quota and you have a a growth quota. That’s easy. Here. Go sell. And if if you’re too too busy to do the renewal, great. I’ll just take away, you know, half your accounts.

Well, on on the go to market side, it really is about I think professional services is incredibly helpful, but we don’t we don’t you

So our our professional services organization is a single digit profit margin business. It is not something Wall Street cares about in terms of our services revenue. It’s an enablement function. It remains profitable, but at a at a low margin. So we’re not losing money on this organization, and they’re getting customers to use the product and consume the product. Also, what’s what’s coming out of that organization is the training for our customers and our partners. So all of the content at Snowflake for training and enablement comes from our professional services organization.

That content is then distributed out to our partners and customers to make them successful. So I’m a huge fan of our our services org for sure.

You rip the band aid off and just do it. And by the way, that’s something that’s just constant at Snowflake is change. If if you’re not changing, you’re dying. And I think I’m always evaluating how we can become more efficient. So even at our scale, I am constantly saying, what do we need to change for next year? It’s always a lot more than I thought. So do it now, and it’s painful, and people don’t like change. And but, man, you got do the right thing for the business.

And so that’s how how we’ve always operated.

Yeah.

Well, especially early days prior to us being public, there are product commitments that we had to make to get Snowflake out there. There were new deployment models. So so Capital One was an early customer of ours that we had to invent a new deployment model to handle that some of their security requirements. You have to do that. At our stage, I can’t do that as much. Like, there isn’t that because that would be called, like, a side letter or some other thing. So you really have to stay within the bounds of a as a public company, you can’t do that stuff.

Depends. I mean, like I said, I was in New York last week. I went on an 80k first logo deal. I love that because I love opening up new customers. I love developing the sales team, leading from the front. So and again, it just depends on, you know, how this, as I said, I’ll go on a large deal if the sales rep wants me to play a certain role. That is what I love the most about my job of going on sales calls. So I’ll go on whatever the sales team wants me to do.

Going on eight sales calls a week and becoming a student of what you sell. I mean, what I’ve said over and over and over and over again.

What

The taking people golfing and and wining and dining to get a deal. Again, if if you’re, like, relying on the relationship sale, that you’re in trouble.

Do it now. A high sense of urgency. Now.

Yeah. I for sure thought I was to get fired. And there was probably nine months of me wondering, and then I get an email from him at Christmas. He says, Merry Christmas, and he gave me a bunch of stock. And I’m like, wait. What? I’m not getting fired? You want me to stay? It was a shock. So, The answer was nine months of a lot of anxiety.

I I don’t know. I think people look at salespeople as the dumb sales guy. I actually joke is saying I’m the dumb sales guy. And I think a lot of times, the relationship that I’ve built with the engineering team is incredible. And I think that’s what’s part of what’s the magic that has made Snowflake is it’s not the dumb sales guy. It’s this it’s the sales guy that actually is or saleswoman who’s who’s bringing you customers. If you create a great product and and it’s not selling, you got a problem.

And so I think the marriage is is super important, and there’s a huge value in in sales. And some some founders kind look down upon salespeople.

I’d I’d say Amazon. Amazon, they invented the cloud. They invented how to work with companies like us. We we were hard for them because we competed with a a product of theirs or multiple products of theirs, but yet they make us successful. So it’s a hard thing to do, but for them to be this uber successful platform, they have to have companies like us succeed. And so even though we compete with certain products, they not only let us be successful, they, like, invest in our success.

And I think they’re the they’re the best.

Thanks, Harry. It’s it’s great to meet you, and and thanks for having me on your show. Appreciate it.