YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Degnan

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65
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2023-11-10
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2023-11-10
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  1. “If you can find the right person who has something to prove, that's important. And I felt, look, this was an opportunity that I did not.”

    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

  2. “Probably Fire Chris in a year or two. I was a director of sales. So whether I was a VP of sales, the chief Rabbito officer, that came later. It was more like help us build a product that lasts. And then I think he figured he'd hire someone with more experience than me.”

    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

  3. “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 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 helped them improve the product. I help them figure out exactly what are the features they needed to build. But ultimately was their vision. So it was this combination of myself and then Bob Mugliov, who was our first real CEO, and he created our pricing and all that other stuff. So I think a founder, you know, who thinks they know all, I don't want to 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 Spizer didn't hire me to be the chief revenue officer of Snowflake. And in fact, I think he probably said to each of the board members, well,”

    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

  4. “The number one thing that I think Spizer taught me was that he likes to go after huge markets. And it's important from a sales perspective. The reality is that if you're out there trying to convince people that they have a problem, that's an 18 month to 24 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 real opportunity to go after a specific market. And that was helpful for me.”

    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

  5. “Someone who's going to require me to run the private cloud, and luckily in 2013, Amazon 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 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 no's from the founders until I figured out our ICP.”

    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

  6. “So I start off. I had a basic premise of our value prop. And our basic premise was we separated storage from compute and we natively ingest semi-structured data and we're a SQL engine. That was kind of the premise. And so I would just send out an email and say, I'm not looking to sell anything at this point. Mike Spizer 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 product for free that doesn't really exist. There's no website. And so what I did was I would go out and I talk 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 going to run on the private cloud? And I go to Benoit Interior, our founders, and say, when are we going to run the private cloud? And they say never. So I was like, okay, that's a good idea of I'm not going to go 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

  7. “You got to leave time for prospecting. You got to be able to prospect. And that's the other thing 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 going to be an engineer, you're not going to be a doctor or something like that. You're going to 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 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 worked at a place at EMC where my sales manager, it was super intense, required 15 meetings a week, and that was not possible. It was not possible. Eight is good. Eight is good.”

    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

  8. “I still say this. I just did a new hire training this week where 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 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 wasn't 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 a 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 won't be.”

    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

  9. “Yeah, 10 years younger, Chris. You know, I showed up and I had a 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 want to 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 going 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, Spizer, convinced me to take a huge pay cut cash-wise. He's like, you got to 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.”

    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

  10. “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.”

    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

  11. “VP of sales. So I started in tune in Mike Spizer was our theoretical CEO at the time. He showed up one day a week. So it was me and a bunch of engineers that was the beginning of Snowflake.”

    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

  12. “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 venture capitalist by the name of Mike Spizer from Sutter Hill. Mike's an incredible recruiter, incredible venture leader. And I got introduced to Mike. I had been selling at EMC and through my storage connections, got introduced to Mike because he had started a company called Pure Storage. He was like, hey, I'm building this company called Snowflake. And I was interviewing with a lot of other companies. Some of them went publics, like App Dynamics got bought by Cisco. And what got me excited about Snowflake was the concept of the cloud. People were going to move analytic workloads to the cloud, the data warehousing market was a huge market at the time. It was a $10 to $12 billion 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 going to go work for some cool founders. And that's, I came on as the director of sales, not even 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

  13. “The immediate gratification is definitely something 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.”

    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

  14. “You know, I'm a competitive human, and I think getting 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 that business to business sale. I found it. There's a lot of competitors out there, and it gets me up 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 most about it.”

    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

  15. “Yeah, I moved out to California in the late 90s, and there's a mutual fund company called Franklin Templeton. So Franklin has 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 got into this management training program. 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 didn't necessarily love the mutual fund sales side of things. A lot of the salespeople that I supported. So I was an inside salesperson effectively supporting 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 good career move. But I slowly made my way into technology. But I think it's at Franklin where I realized I loved sales.”

    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