Denise Persson and Chris Degnan used their sales and marketing skills to turn Snowflake into the first cloud-based data storage pioneer as it scaled its revenues and sales by listening to customers.
Snowflake Pioneered Cloud-Based Data Storage by Cooperative Innovation
Snowflake Inc. was the first cloud-based data storage company when it started in July 2012 in San Mateo, Calif., with venture capitalist Mike Speiser as CEO. A year later, Chris Degnan came on as the chief revenue officer and Denise Persson joined as chief marketing officer in 2016, a year after Snowflake's first product was released. At that time, there were 100 employees and annual revenue was $3 million.
In September 2020, Snowflake went public (SNOW on the NYSE), raising $3.4 billion in the largest software IPO ever. Snowflake is now headquartered in Bozeman, Mon., with more than 50 offices around the world, 9,000 employees, and fiscal 2025 revenue of $3.63 billion. More than 12,000 customers include many startups and many of the largest companies, including HP, McKesson, Capital One, and PepsiCo.
As Speiser, who stepped down from the CEO role in 2014, noted in his foreword to their new book, “Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions, How Snowflake Scaled Its Go-To-Market Organization,” Degnan and Persson worked side by side at Snowflake for nearly nine years—one of the longest working relationships between a CRO and CMO.
"Hundreds of books exist about how to sell and how to market," Speiser wrote. "Many of these deliver great strategies and some go further on how to execute. But there’s nothing I've read that explains why these two organizations should be in perfect alignment, how to create and deliver on such a relationship, and what could happen to your company once you accomplish this."
With startups often founded by engineering and product teams, inadequate sales and marketing skills are major contributors to the 90% startup failure rate, while in corporate America sales and marketing often don’t work well together.
Degnan grew up in an upper-middle-class family. His father was a stockbroker, but the 1988 crash led to a divorce and dad up in prison. "I could have blamed him for my future failures and I do fear losing, but I decided to get my first job at 14 bagging groceries and I've never stopped working since and I do love winning," he told Startup Savant.
He earned a BA in human resources at the University of Delaware in 1997 and worked in sales and recruiting for a series of companies until spending nine years in sales and management for Dell's EMC storage hardware in the San Francisco region.
Creating a Scalable Startup
"Mike Speiser basically forced the engineers to hire me because he wanted feedback during stealth mode, the period when software engineers were building the product," Degnan wrote. "He believed that if you're going after a huge market you have to nail the product market fit and that doesn't happen if you stick to your original plan until general availability, when you can test your product widely. We had a beta version to trial and got a ton of feedback, but we weren't scaling well. Engineers often prefer a product marketer to lead sales and someone similar to lead marketing, but don't let that happen because they're not great at understanding customers' pain points, such as declining profits and how your product can reverse that."
Product marketers and managers also lack experience generating demand. Degnan warns against hiring "relationship-only sales professionals, who are like band leaders when a startup needs a one-man band." The first hire (even before the CEO) should be the head of sales, who has a proven record of making cold calls all day long and is used to prospects saying no thanks. Snowflake was software-as-a-service (SAAS) and one of the first to offer consumption-based pricing instead of subscriptions, so it was another challenge for experienced reps to understand the advantages.
"At every level, executives need to be coachable and able to take critical feedback constructively, not personally, but many aren't and they need to be motivated by constant learning," he told Startup Savant.
No matter how small the startup, it needs a culture, he said. Working long, demanding hours becomes more sustainable when teams bond, such as sharing weekly meals and talking about life beyond work, as Snowflake’s early employees did. They also took group outings, including ski trips. These rituals led to almost no attrition and earned the company repeated recognition as one of the best places to work.
As the company grew, Snowflake intentionally scaled its culture around shared values: putting customers first, acting with integrity, committing to excellence, collaborating effectively, delivering results on time, owning commitments, and embracing differences across the organization.
Developing a Sales Strategy
Snowflake was the first data warehouse built solely for the cloud—others built for the hardware customers managed on their premises. The temptation with new products and services is to overwhelm prospects with too much detail about what you are offering, Degnan said. Develop profiles for different kinds of customers in the first target industries and provide easily understood explanations about the pain points your products and services will address.
"I explained the 15 tasks they had to do, which would take them a weekend, which we did automatically as a service," he wrote. "And don't be bothered by all the things prospects may want and you can't yet offer."
To generate leads, reach out widely to anyone you have ever known for those in their network who might have an interest. Degnan contacted 2,000 people a week and would look at job boards for competitors. His office manager recruited a college student to make initial calls. "You have to be patient, remain focused, and be humble," he wrote.
"Hire gunslingers, not cowboys, as sales reps. We had almost 100 questions for candidates that would reveal which ones would be proactive, independent, and do things without being told. You should also feel confident that they will do well in the face of adversity."
Snowflake eventually incorporated the MEDDPICC process for sales qualification, which Degnan had used while with EMC. It stands for using Metrics, understanding the Economic buyer, the customer's Decision criteria, their Decision process, their Paper process, Identifying their pain points, your Champion within their organization, and identifying your Competition (Degnan goes into detail on exactly what needs to be done).
Don't try to tackle more than one major competitor early on, potentially turning it into an infrastructure partner, he advises. Snowflake decided to run on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which launched in 2006 offering to rent virtual computers and storage in the cloud for their data and to run software applications. Snowflake saw they could run on it, but then AWS launched its own data warehouse, Redshift, long before Snowflake was ready to go to market.
Investors thought this would kill Snowflake until they realized AWS had made a major mistake: Redshift's database was designed for those with on-premises computing. However, it did make the concept of database cloud services attractive and when Snowflake was fully launched, being on AWS made it easy to convince Redshift's customers to switch.
Degnan devotes more chapters to scaling with partners and customers, such as Microsoft's Azure in 2018, and Snowflake powered its growth through the Microsoft Partner Network.
Persson Lays the Marketing Foundation
Denise Persson grew up in Sweden, where her father was a construction engineer and her mother a teacher. They urged her to get a degree in business, as did her older sister who was working in marketing and advertising when Persson was in high school. Persson would often go to her office to do homework and read the trade journals.
After graduating from Stockholm University, she joined the pioneering conferencing software company Genesys in 1996. It had been founded in 1990 and joining a startup out of college was unusual. Persson was a marketing executive with the company for 12 years, moving to France and then the US, serving as the lead global EVP of marketing from 2005–08, when it was acquired by ON24. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, this was a cloud-based communications platform where she served as the chief marketing officer for over five years. She then became the CMO at another Bay Area company, Apigee, a software provider helping customers create digital experiences for partners and employees from 2013-16, when it was acquired by Google.
"I promised Chris that marketing would serve sales if I was at the helm, because they desperately needed to increase their trickle of leads so the reps could establish Snowflake as a serious competitor in tech, where huge companies were dominant," Persson said. "At the time we only had 100 total people, most of them in sales or engineering, but the few in marketing had little experience in lead generation. I began hiring people I had worked with before and knew they were self-starters who would make a commitment to stay during the challenging next five years or until the company failed."
Persson said that startups also need to use the help of contractors and small agencies which specialize in certain industries and types of marketing, as well as deploying apps and marketing operations to automate nearly every part of the process and track the results from different campaigns.
"We needed to partner with a content marketing leader to develop value-based content and messaging that would address the top challenges faced by the targeted personas," she wrote. "We often identified key individuals to educate them with offers via social media. It might require up to 15 touchpoints to engage them and eventually hand the lead over to the sales team…You need a company-wide editorial process from the beginning, otherwise your customers and prospects will get the same brand experience they get from most startups and large companies-mediocre and conflicting content and disjointed messaging from multiple fiefdoms operating independent of one another."
Persson and her team relied on storytelling to grab readers' attention and keep it without initially pushing products or services at the top of the sales funnel. This could be in the form of a video or audio, an email, print, website, ebook, or any other form, and it stimulated curiosity about what Snowflake did and whether they might be a potential partner. Marketing met with the sales reps each week to find out what their prospects were asking about.
"For content, we attracted interest because of our journalistic style of writing and our newsroom style of envisioning and producing content, which is unusual in the marketing world," she wrote.
Because Snowflake had enthusiastic customers right from the start, it was able to rely on their advocacy in everything from videos to speaking at live events for a wide variety of industries. This could involve a trade show presentation or reps bringing prospects to a microbrewery.
Account-Based Marketing and Public Relations
Account-based marketing enables alignment between sales and marketing as Snowflake grew from having hundreds to thousands of customers. It was scaled by a multi-level strategy that started with its ABM team working with a named sales rep and later with their sales development reps (SDRs), who advance leads to the point the reps can approach those prospects.
"Both ABM and demand generation focus on understanding the needs of different industries and sub-industries, and the pain points of prospective buyers, by delivering personalized marketing messages," Persson wrote.
Snowflake faced challenges many startups face when dealing with the media, with competitors wrongly claiming what its products did and how theirs was superior. Even journalists specializing in data warehouses and software would get the facts wrong, and the confusion became more complex as the company spread across the globe with translation issues.
Five Pillars of Marketing
Persson had taken three companies public before joining Snowflake, and she prepared the organization for the same trajectory by developing five “pillars” in 2016—four years before its IPO.
1. Define Your Market Position
Communicate how your company differs from the competition as succinctly as possible. Too many startups focus on categories that take too long to explain, she said. Make sure your current products and services don't simply appeal to early adopters, but to the much larger potential market. Be consistent in describing your company in the same way because that builds trust.
2. Be the Most Customer-Centric Marketing Team in Your Industry
To do this, you need to look at your company from the outside every day. As you develop new products and services, create detailed personas for each type of influencer so they get these customized messages. Also develop ways to get constant customer feedback.
3. Build for Automation and Scale Early
It's easy to reach $20 million in revenues quickly relying on people to do what software should handle, your own or a vendor's, she noted. Install customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation program (MAP) platforms, the latter especially for generating leads. Phase out software that requires manually entering and extracting data (like spreadsheets and word processing programs). Third, subscribe to SAAS products that are needed, but cleared by an oversight board to avoid application sprawl.
4. Be Bold
You have to be bold to get noticed, but it does come from risks. Snowflake decided to put up billboards along the 101 Bayshore Freeway that traverses Silicon Valley from San Jose to San Francisco. The cost for one can be $20,000 a month and this didn't seem to make sense for a startup at first. But messages were memorable and changed about once a month (The Data Is In: Love Wins, Celebrating Pride; Snowflake/HERSHEY: S'mores Insights in the Data Cloud, Happy Halloween). Snowflake was astounded when photos of the boards were spread across social media, were much talked about, and even won awards.
5. Alignment With Sales
"This pillar is the most important," Persson wrote. "You succeed when your marketing programs align 100% with your sales strategy, starting with sharing the same objectives. The reason Chris and I wrote this book was the rarity of these two organizations ever being aligned in most companies, a demarcation that permeates corporate America. That means marketing and sales have to constantly fight this norm."
Persson and Degnan have much more to say about everything from hiring to going global, but you will have to read the book and put its ideas into practice to generate your startup's own snowstorm.