YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Degnan

lines on the record: 65
first: 2023-11-10
most recent: 2023-11-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'd say Amazon. Amazon, they invented the cloud. They invented how to work with companies like us. We were hard for them because we competed with 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 best.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for sure thought I was going 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 yes, the answer was nine months of a lot of anxiety”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Taking people golfing and whining and dining, you had a deal. Again, if you're like relying on the relationship sale that you're in trouble.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 yet again, it just depends on, as I said, I'll go on a large deal if the sales are up 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.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Capital One was an early customer of ours that we had to invent a new deployment model to handle 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.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You ripped the band-aid off and just do it. And by the way, that's something that's just constant at Snowflake is change. 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. But man, you got to do the right thing for the business. And so that's how we've always operated.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So 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 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 coming out of that organization is the training for our customers and our partners. So all of the content at Snowflake for training and enabling 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 services work for sure.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, on the go to market side, it really is about, I think, professional services is incredibly helpful. Why do you think professional services?”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because if you're, hey, guess what? You have a renewal quota and you have a growth quota. That's easy. Here, go sell. And if you're too busy to do the renewal, I'll just take away half your accounts.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, get rid of them. Build a professional service organization. Hire more SEs 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 and he gave it to me. I got rid of it. It was an expense that I didn't see the value in. Yeah.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Benefit, but it's an enablement. It's the sales team's teaching the sales team how to fish. It's not like they're going to do this for every single sales rep across the company. The sales rep should end up doing that for themselves.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 technical enough to be a sales engineer? No. What are they doing? So me, I'd rather take that money that you're spending on customer success and invest it in either 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 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”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, as you said earlier, CFOs were cutting back and the behavior was changing. So you have to be measured in how you look at these things, not emotional. And you have to really look at the metrics and understand what's happening.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every quarter, I do a quarterly review with the entire sales team. I celebrate the top performers. We have SPIFs. We have President's Club 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.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm on to the next. I'm like, okay, that was a good quarter because sometimes you're going to have back 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. And you have to decipher between is inflation having an impact or is it your sales team?”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen both. I've seen that, you know, the board of directors is 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 seen everything. Like Franco 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.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Spizer came to Bob and said, hey, you're going to go higher and someone over Chris. Bob was like, no. And why? Like, what am I going to get that Chris isn't giving me? And John was helpful because John gave me feedback. Like, if you don't do these things, you're going 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 to keep this job or not. And here's what you have to do. So I think the founders, if you can have a sales leader that has done this before on your board or as an advisor or 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.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 answered it for me and he said, no. He said, they fire me in a harpy if they didn't think I was doing a good job. I saw that firsthand 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 kind of 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 as shareholders. And if you operate that way and you understand that's the premise that you're operating on, that's how I operate.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. That's a good lesson 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 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 into 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.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 leagues to come to him versus the leads going and making things happen”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we say 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 going to become productive within three to six months, meaning they're going to, they should be closing deals because their sales cycle is 60 days. So if they can go and prospect, find a customer, they have a 60 day sales cycle, boom, in a smaller contract value, you'll do that. In a mid-sized enterprise, it's six to nine months. And in the large enterprise, it's 12 months. That's what we see. But there are basic things. Like I'll give you an example. I think you did some homework prior to us talking. You spoke to Kyle Rourke. So Kyle Roarke 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 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 going to hire two people on that LA. I'm like, really?”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to be in a world of hurt and you should just cut bait. To quote Frank, he has this thing 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, because you have empathy, you want to help people along and you want them to succeed. But at some point, they hit ceilings and you either have to say you're not scaling. You're not doing this. And 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 guts to go and make that tough decision quickly? Because it's not, it's gut-wretching.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They absolutely need pressure. Look, I never feel safe. I'll be honest with you, I never feel safe. To this day, I don't feel safe. And I think when I see people 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 comment I made earlier about the new hire training that I went in and 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 to fail. And I say that to everyone”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I am humble enough to know that, like, I'm lucky to be selling the product that 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 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 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 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 the UK. And one of the guys who runs a huge business for me in North America.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, people have to do business. Either they're going to keep moving or you're going to die. I called BS on that. And I think if you don't have a good value prop, yeah. If you have a nice to have like a sales tool, that's going 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 don't have that pain and I'm not doing that. The reality is that's not a huge pain for me. I'm not going 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.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So with Snowflake being 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 and say, why? What's happening? And so I get real-time feedback on churn when a customer is going 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 consumption model.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 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 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 going to be successful.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this week I met with some of our SDR leaders, they were in town and 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 scraped websites. I prospected. By the way, I still use that to this day. I still do my own recruiting. 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 got to find champions. The way you find champions is you're going to say, hey, I heard you have this issue. Anyone who says that's dead is crazy.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is like, yeah, that's so I think it's having integrity in the pipeline is important.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we hired our CMO almost seven years ago, Denise, I was arguing with the previous marketing team over what 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 going to talk about MQLs or SQLs anymore. We're just going to talk about qualifying meetings. That's all you should hold me accountable to. And that's what she did. So she would sit down with, we had an SDR organization that was initially under me and that I three years ago transferred that to her. But we talked about just generating good quality meetings that converted to pipeline. That's all that 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 friction with sales and marketing becomes is you start talking about what the definition is of an MQL and you have this definition and you're sitting down with”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to 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 to come up with. And founders, 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 scenes in the field, you're in the field to me that the number one thing that 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 that'll help you.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have to find people that kind of 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 be the same. And finding that out 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 a sudden that becomes a problem. That has happened to me multiple times. I've been faked out by sales leaders 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 a lot of effort and you figure it out.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Though every major deal I was involved with, every single major deal I was involved with. 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 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.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the beauty of what Frank Slootman brought to Snowflake, 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 going to get Snowflake to where it needs to go. And so that stuck with me. And he said, you got to figure this out, dude. We're all figure it out for you, which means I'm out.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think now in the size of Snowflake, is I think a lot of our sellers, they can go build themselves the technical champions. So 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 buyer? And they may not bring you hairy if you're the sales rep. They might say like, hey, dude, I'm not going to introduce you to my boss's boss, right? if Chris Agnes, the chief revenue officer of Snowflake is in town or I can get a Zoom call with Chris or Frank Sloopman or Mike Scarpelli or some senior person within Snowflake, then yeah, they use us in a good sales rep uses us as a pawn. I always say I'm an actor in the sales reps movie. They're the director. They can use me however they want. If they make me the director, good luck. You're probably going to fail. But if you're the director and you're putting me in the right position to say the right thing.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to hug that deal and going to think it's going to be the only deal you're going to close that quarter. And you can slowly build the large enterprise pipeline while you have the velocity pipeline keeping you afloat.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different direction that you don't want to 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 this head of sales, you're going to 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.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what I realized early on is that selling to a large financial institution is super interesting because you look and 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 hundred features. And the founders might say, well, I'm going to build these 100 features. And then guess what? person who said they were going to bring you in, they got fired or 18 months later that 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 focused on. And that's important for any startup is what is your ICP? Who is going to be your fastest buyer? The large financial institution, they're going to send you off in a different direction. And if it's a”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 all this other stuff, yeah, easy. But if they're on 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 everything.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you can find the compelling event and you basically create a backwards timeline of saying, hey, you want to get this migration done, you want to 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 average time for a contract to get signed is three months. We have some customers who are small customers who will take 60 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 Slow process. Oh, yes, even longer. We've been in procurement for six months. It's crazy. It's great. Large enterprises”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rarely, rarely, because people don't ask hard questions. So I was in New York last week going on a sales call on a net new prospect and I'm in there in the building and I'm like the guys, this customer is like just talking in circles and I'm like, hey dude, do you want to do something or not? Now 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 got to have to be very direct. I don't waste my time. I'm not going to waste yours. There are a lot of people that will take meetings but do nothing. You shouldn't waste your time. You should ask the hard questions.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So early on with Snowflake, the challenge is that 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 about the compelling events. Like, is there a compelling event?”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I was just listening to Tom Brady. He was just saying, look, I looked at the other team as my enemy. I didn't have friends in 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. But in that moment, he's like, they're my enemies. So 100%. In fact, 10 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 want to call them all out on this call. And that motivates the heck out of me for sure.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Tieri to hear from 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 came from a background of database. He knew that he needed to eventually have that. So he went and built it. So I think it's not for me to decide. I don't decide the product roadmap. The early engineers used to jokely refer to me as the shadow CTO. There's not one piece of code I've ever written at Snowflake. There's no technical decisions I've ever made. All I've done is brought the product team to the customer and the product team makes.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the 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, Terry. And that night, the brilliance of Terry 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 going to drink it or not. And I think that's what Terry did in that example.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 structure on, okay, if I'm going on two to three net new business meetings, 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 co-founder up to a customer and there was this technical feature called windowing that we needed that we didn't have.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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 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 kind of not doing that, then you're basically keeping stuff to yourself. In fact, I think one of the problems that I didn't realize, but a lot of heads of sales don't effectively communicate in larger companies with product. Sales and product have to be really close. And that's a huge thing.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So again, so I spent eight years at ENC and then I went to a small startup where I was running the West for this company called Avexa. This is where we really came up with real metrics of eight sales calls a week. And I figured when I showed up, I was holding my sales team at Avexa to that metric. That worked, by the way. And that was reasonable versus the 15 that my sales manager, EMC, have me do. So I said, okay, eight sales calls a week. That's what I'm going to 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'd 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 loved that feedback.”
2023-11-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source