The Exchanges

Q You know, talking about kind of putting the work in, I listened to all of your shows before this, that you've done with other people, or where you've spoken publicly, talks you've given, and you said that you gave air to Databricks by delaying certain product moves. Can you talk to me on how you reflect on that?

A Yeah, I'm still, like, pissed about it. So there's two things that we screwed up on. Number one, I'm very much like a technical product seller. Like, I love a technical product. I learn how to sell technical products. What was happening, Soflake was super fat and happy being the cloud data warehouse, and I was going to the engineering team, founders, and everyone saying, look, I'm diagnosing where the patient, our customer, is getting sick with, with Databricks. What was happening is, Every company needed a data science notebook and they need a world-class data science experience. Our best customers would tell us that. And our engineering team just said, no, like, no, we're not doing that. And that's stupid. Well, guess what? It wasn't that stupid because look at frigging Databricks now. And so number one, that's, that's one thing that we screwed up on the go to market side. We also screwed up because what happened was we optimized to go public. And when you optimize to go public, you stop hiring. And guess what's really hard to do at Snowflake, you know, or any company, is open up a new logo. New logos are way harder than upselling, and Snowflake had this ridiculous net retention rate of 177% when we were going public. Yeah, that was our net retention rate. So, guess what the sales reps would do? When we stopped hiring, or slowed hiring on the go-to-market side, to optimize fo…

AI assessment note: “So there's two things that we screwed up on. Number one,”

Q Does this AI PLG wave that we see where everyone tries first, grassroots adoption, and then it scales into an enterprise sale. Does that remove the importance of seller relationships?

A I don't think so, because I think if you follow a sales methodology like Medic, and you qualify those deals, and you teach your sales team how to sell in that sales methodology, that will end up differentiating you as an organization. So PLG is great, but if you want to sell to the enterprise, the enterprise is hyper-political, and you have to have a sales process to do that. And at some point, The PLG motion will fail you, or it won't get you to that, that large enterprise. And if you aspire to sell the large enterprise, you need a sales mode. I don't care who you are. If you're open AI, if you're anthropic, if you're Google, you need an enterprise motion and you need a good qualification process to do that and good sales teams to do that.

AI assessment note: “I don't think so, because I think if you follow a sales methodology like Medic”

Q Not at all, but I would love to start. I think sales is this kind of thing that you fall in love with, and I want to start with your entry into sales. So how did you make your way into the world of sales, and when did you first realize that you loved it?

A Yeah, I moved out to California in, in the late nineties, 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 in increments. And so my first rotation was in HR. So I, 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. Um, 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, the, 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 love sales.

AI assessment note: “my next rotation was in sales and it was like, click, I love this.”

Q Not at all, but I would love to start. I think sales is this kind of thing that you fall in love with, and I want to start with your entry into sales. So how did you make your way into the world of sales, and when did you first realize that you loved it?

A Yeah, I moved out to California in, in the late nineties, 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 in increments. And so my first rotation was in HR. So I, 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. Um, 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, the, 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 love sales.

AI assessment note: “then my next rotation was in sales and it was like, click, I love this.”

Q I definitely do. You can go back to that first day at Snowflake and you can give yourself a piece of advice. Knowing all that you do now, what would you go back and tell a slightly younger Chris?

A Yeah. 10 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 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 Spicer 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.

AI assessment note: “what I would say to myself is, Just do what you did, but don't worry.”

Q You mentioned there about hitting matrix, hitting matrix. Carl said I had to ask this one. How did you hold yourself accountable?

A 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 the Vexa. This is where we really came up with real metrics of eight, eight sales calls a week. And I figured when I, 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, my sales manager DMC had 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 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.

AI assessment note: “how I held myself accountable was I'd go on eight sales calls a week”

Q building an internal champion. The thing is, as we both know, you need to have multiple champions. You need to multi-thread it. Chris, how on earth do you do this authentically? I'm selling to you, Chris, today. Chris, hi. Yeah. I just want to meet the rest of your team because I don't know if you're going to be here in six months time. How do you do that authentically?

A Well, I think now in the, in the size of Stroke Lake 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 buyer? And they may not bring you Harry. 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? But if Chris Dagnan, 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 reps movie. They're the director. They can use me however they want. If they make me the director, good luck, and you're probably going to fail. But if you're the director and you're, you're putting me in the right position to say the right things, that's a good director.

AI assessment note: “if Chris Dagnan, the chief revenue officer... is in town... they use us”

Q You mentioned pipeline generation there. Dude, is old school outbound dead? Can we get on those phones or get on those emails and dial for dollars?

A So this week I met with some of our, our SDR leaders. Um, 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, 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, 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.

AI assessment note: “Anyone who says that's dead is crazy.”

Q Would you always hire in two? Because then you know for sure whether you've got a head or not a head and you actually have reliability there.

A A hundred percent. 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 is 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 paid.

AI assessment note: “A hundred percent. Like that's a, that's a good lesson”

Q Any advice to founders, because I hate it too, on, on how to do it well from what you found?

A With this senior person, I, I, I said, listen, like, Hey man, it's not working out and I feel really bad, but this is not going to work out. He goes, and his response to me was like, I can change. And I'm like, I've done enough research. You cannot change. It's not going to make any difference. Uh, we are not going to change our opinion. I am super sorry. You and I are good. We're good people. I'm not going to go talk smack about you out in the world, but this employment engagement is over and here's my HR and that's it. You have to do say as little as possible, get out. Out, in and out quick, um, but be kind. You don't have to be an asshole about it.

AI assessment note: “say as little as possible, get out. Out, in and out quick, um, but be kind.”

Q One-on-ones was one of the first ways that you said, oh, you know, we weren't having them. What do you advise sales leaders on how to do one-on-ones correctly? How often they should do them? How the best do them?

A Every week. And, and I think like, it's actually a good way to use AI. I mean, because now you can have your, you know, you could get into Claude or whatever it is you're going to do and have, you know, tell me about their calendar. Tell me about their forecast. So then you as the manager coming super prepared and saying, okay, well how, tell me about these sales calls. Tell me about these, these deals and, and you're, you're way more informed, but dude, it's not like, Hey bro, how are things like, that's not a good one-on-one. A one-on-one is the manager asking really hard questions about how their, their, their business is going. And it's really to hold the individual contributor to the frontline manager, the second line manager accountable. And that's like, that's what was not happening when you're not doing those one-on-ones, those one-on-ones need to happen every single week. Um, Consistently. Consistency matters. If showing up, like, every month, they're gonna be like, yeah, they don't really ask me tough questions.

AI assessment note: “Every week. And, and I think like, it's actually a good way to use AI.”

Q Any advice to founders, because I hate it too, on, on how to do it well from what you found?

A With this senior person, I, I, I said, listen, like, Hey man, it's not working out and I feel really bad, but this is not going to work out. He goes, and his response to me was like, I can change. And I'm like, I've done enough research. You cannot change. It's not going to make any difference. Uh, we are not going to change our opinion. I am super sorry. You and I are good. We're good people. I'm not going to go talk smack about you out in the world, but this employment engagement is over and here's my HR and that's it. You have to do say as little as possible, get out. Out, in and out quick, um, but be kind. You don't have to be an asshole about it.

AI assessment note: “You have to do say as little as possible, get out. Out, in and out quick”

Q I love that. Does the requirement for medic implementation change in this world?

A I don't think so. I mean, I think, I think metrics matter. Like again, like, you know, someone said like, I won't name names, but I'm here in Europe. I did a dinner with a very successful company and the, the, the head of Europe said, I don't think, uh, medic matters anymore. And I'm like, well, dude, like no pain, no deal, no pain, no deal, no champion, no deal. And, and the way that you develop a champion is you look at the metrics. You show them how to use those metrics to get the deal done. So, like, I, medic doesn't change, and people want it, want to say AI makes it different. I don't believe that at all.

AI assessment note: “I don't think so... medic doesn't change, and people want it, want to say AI makes it different.”

Q That is very, very kind. I just wanted to start with the book. If you were to summarize, what do you most want people to get from doing the book?

A So I, I co-wrote it with, uh, Snowflake's Chief Marketing Officer, Denise Pearson, and Really the, the reason that three years ago that we decided to write the book was that in most organizations, especially I'm seeing it from the outside now looking in is as I become an advisor to many companies, a lot of founding CEOs feel like it's great to have friction between sales and marketing. And Denise and I never had friction. And if we had friction, we dealt with it ourselves. We didn't go to, you know, mom or dad with going to our CEO, you know, we dealt with it internally. And I think it's really important. To have this really close relationship between sales and marketing and for marketing to treat sales as their customer. And that's what Denise and I really focused on in the book. And that's why we do it is that people ask me advice all the time around how to build their companies, how to build go-to-market. Well, I hate patting myself on the back, but Denise and I did a very good job of building a world-class go-to-market organization at Snowflake. And that's what we talk about in the book.

AI assessment note: “really important. To have this really close relationship between sales and marketing”

Q about accountability. You said like pipeline generation master, dude, I can fill your pipe, but I can do it with not great leads. And so I find like actually accountability then really hard on pipeline generation because I can gamify all of the metrics if I wanted to. How do you think about creating that? Like what is success framework for pipeline generation given that so much can be gamed?

A When we hired our CMO almost seven years ago, Denise, I was arguing with the previous marketing team over what a, you know, an MQL was when 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, 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, that was initially under me. And then 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, 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 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.

AI assessment note: “We're just going to talk about qualifying meetings. That's, that's all you should hold me accountable to.”

Q I definitely do. You can go back to that first day at Snowflake and you can give yourself a piece of advice. Knowing all that you do now, what would you go back and tell a slightly younger Chris?

A Yeah. 10 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 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 Spicer 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.

AI assessment note: “what I would say to myself is, Just do what you did, but don't worry.”

Q Can I ask you, I think this is really important, but we mentioned earlier the metrics element. How do you think about as a leader's day sales forecasting? I know it's a bit of a pivot, but it's just one that I get so many sales leaders ask me about. How do you think about effective forecasting? What have been some of your biggest lessons?

A 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, is about the compelling events. Like, is there a compelling event? The biggest hole that you can poke in a forecast Is what is the compelling reason or compelling event that the customer is going to do something, especially in a, in a weird economy, people are not going to do anyone any favors. Like salespeople are like, oh, I have a good relationship with this customer. No, you don't. They're, they're going to care about themselves and their job and their family, not you, Mr. Sales rep, Mrs. Sales rep. What is the compelling event? Do you have a ROI, some reason that the customer is going to 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 number one thing that I, that I look at from a forecast perspective.

AI assessment note: “What is the compelling event? Do you have a ROI, some reason that the customer”

Q Would you always hire in two? Because then you know for sure whether you've got a head or not a head and you actually have reliability there.

A A hundred percent. 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 is 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 paid.

AI assessment note: “A hundred percent. Like that's a, that's a good lesson”

Q Can I ask you, I think this is really important, but we mentioned earlier the metrics element. How do you think about as a leader's day sales forecasting? I know it's a bit of a pivot, but it's just one that I get so many sales leaders ask me about. How do you think about effective forecasting? What have been some of your biggest lessons?

A 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, is about the compelling events. Like, is there a compelling event? The biggest hole that you can poke in a forecast Is what is the compelling reason or compelling event that the customer is going to do something, especially in a, in a weird economy, people are not going to do anyone any favors. Like salespeople are like, oh, I have a good relationship with this customer. No, you don't. They're, they're going to care about themselves and their job and their family, not you, Mr. Sales rep, Mrs. Sales rep. What is the compelling event? Do you have a ROI, some reason that the customer is going to 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 number one thing that I, that I look at from a forecast perspective.

AI assessment note: “That's really the number one thing that I, that I look at from a forecast perspective.”

Q How fast do you know if someone's going to fail? Is it very obvious or does it take more time?

A 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 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, because you have empathy, you want to help people along because, and you want them to succeed. But at some point, they hit ceilings, And you either have to say, Hey, you're, 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? Cause it's not, it's gut-wrenching.

AI assessment note: “I think you see it pretty quickly. It's just, do you have the guts”

Q One-on-ones was one of the first ways that you said, oh, you know, we weren't having them. What do you advise sales leaders on how to do one-on-ones correctly? How often they should do them? How the best do them?

A Every week. And, and I think like, it's actually a good way to use AI. I mean, because now you can have your, you know, you could get into Claude or whatever it is you're going to do and have, you know, tell me about their calendar. Tell me about their forecast. So then you as the manager coming super prepared and saying, okay, well how, tell me about these sales calls. Tell me about these, these deals and, and you're, you're way more informed, but dude, it's not like, Hey bro, how are things like, that's not a good one-on-one. A one-on-one is the manager asking really hard questions about how their, their, their business is going. And it's really to hold the individual contributor to the frontline manager, the second line manager accountable. And that's like, that's what was not happening when you're not doing those one-on-ones, those one-on-ones need to happen every single week. Um, Consistently. Consistency matters. If showing up, like, every month, they're gonna be like, yeah, they don't really ask me tough questions.

AI assessment note: “Every week. And, and I think like, it's actually a good way to use AI.”

Q We spoke before on Message about 20 X quotas for 11 reps, and I got so much inbound from that, and I think quota setting is so hard for founders today. When we're told that we need to grow faster than ever, we see five hundred million ARR bandied around so commonly. How do we think about setting quotas in this very new world?

A If you have a company and the, the founder says, oh, I should give them two million dollars, you know, in a quota. My question, first question is, do you have any evidence to show that you should be able to, they should be able to hit that quota? I'm like, no, but we're an AI company. Well, who gives a fuck that you're an AI company? Like show me the data. So from my perspective, if you're building a great organization and And you have a fast growing sales org you, and you have north of a million and a half dollars of productivity of them, of, of a rep that can, you know, onboard and within six months to over a million and a half dollars, keep hiring faster and faster and faster. If they're doing three, four million dollars, don't pat yourself on the back because that means you're missing opportunities. You're missing a opportunity in the market because they're just sitting there and they're fat and happy. Like, they're just like, yeah, it's easy to make my, my number. So I, I, I think it's like, look, make it hard for them to get to a million and a half, um, and, and find those, those hunters, and that's the kind of organization that will, will make you a very differentiated organization.

AI assessment note: “do you have any evidence to show that you should be able to”

Q You mentioned there about hitting matrix, hitting matrix. Carl said I had to ask this one. How did you hold yourself accountable?

A 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 the Vexa. This is where we really came up with real metrics of eight, eight sales calls a week. And I figured when I, 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, my sales manager DMC had 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 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.

AI assessment note: “how I held myself accountable was I'd go on eight sales calls a week”

Q You mentioned pipeline generation there. Dude, is old school outbound dead? Can we get on those phones or get on those emails and dial for dollars?

A So this week I met with some of our, our SDR leaders. Um, 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, 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, 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.

AI assessment note: “Anyone who says that's dead is crazy.”

Q about accountability. You said like pipeline generation master, dude, I can fill your pipe, but I can do it with not great leads. And so I find like actually accountability then really hard on pipeline generation because I can gamify all of the metrics if I wanted to. How do you think about creating that? Like what is success framework for pipeline generation given that so much can be gamed?

A When we hired our CMO almost seven years ago, Denise, I was arguing with the previous marketing team over what a, you know, an MQL was when 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, 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, that was initially under me. And then 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, 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 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.

AI assessment note: “We're just going to talk about qualifying meetings. That's, that's all you should hold me accountable to.”

Q This is like too good. So I have to just dive in here. So when we actually think about these kind of reports, Being we have 300,000 salespeople that listen to every show, which is worrying given I've never been a sales rep. But my question is, how do we structure these sales emails for them listening, thinking, okay, I want to do it. How do I do it?

A 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. Do the company so that the founders, the engineers hear that. And a lot of features, like I remember we went early days. I brought Terry, or there was this technical feature called windowing that we needed, that we didn't have. 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 Selflake's windowing Functionality today. That's the beauty of the relationship between sales and product is I bring them to water and they have…

AI assessment note: “Here's who I met with. And here's the conversation I had and the next steps.”

Q building an internal champion. The thing is, as we both know, you need to have multiple champions. You need to multi-thread it. Chris, how on earth do you do this authentically? I'm selling to you, Chris, today. Chris, hi. Yeah. I just want to meet the rest of your team because I don't know if you're going to be here in six months time. How do you do that authentically?

A Well, I think now in the, in the size of Stroke Lake 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 buyer? And they may not bring you Harry. 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? But if Chris Dagnan, 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 reps movie. They're the director. They can use me however they want. If they make me the director, good luck, and you're probably going to fail. But if you're the director and you're, you're putting me in the right position to say the right things, that's a good director.

AI assessment note: “a good way to test that champion... is will they actually bring you to the economic buyer”

Q In 10 years time, you look at each other and go, that was a success. What is that body of work?

A I think it's making companies like factory be like the next great sales organization. Um, I think together, if we can walk away saying like, we helped, like we had a hand in building world-class salespeople along with world-class product, like multiple times over, that's what I want to do. That's what I find joy in. And that's what like, someone asked me to be on the board of a, of a publicly traded company and Frank Soutman Quickly helped me put that to bed. And it's like, why would you do that? And he's right. He's like, where I find joy is helping companies build. And that's what we're doing is we're helping these companies build from sometimes nothing into these world-class organizations. So if we can spike the football and say, we've helped a bunch of companies go public. That's what I want to help them do.

AI assessment note: “making companies like factory be like the next great sales organization.”

Q In 10 years time, you look at each other and go, that was a success. What is that body of work?

A I think it's making companies like factory be like the next great sales organization. Um, I think together, if we can walk away saying like, we helped, like we had a hand in building world-class salespeople along with world-class product, like multiple times over, that's what I want to do. That's what I find joy in. And that's what like, someone asked me to be on the board of a, of a publicly traded company and Frank Soutman Quickly helped me put that to bed. And it's like, why would you do that? And he's right. He's like, where I find joy is helping companies build. And that's what we're doing is we're helping these companies build from sometimes nothing into these world-class organizations. So if we can spike the football and say, we've helped a bunch of companies go public. That's what I want to help them do.

AI assessment note: “if we can walk away saying like, we helped, like we had a hand”

Q If you didn't find joy, why did you keep doing it?

A I felt an obligation to the people in the company. It's like, uh, Sridhar came in, and I felt very much that I wanted him to be successful. He is the right guy to run the company, and I felt obligated to make sure that I didn't just bail on him, and so I wanted him to be successful, and, and I stayed in that role to help him become the CEO and let him, you know, find his own, my replacement, but I really felt obligated to the people of Snowflake and the company that we, I I care so deeply. Still to this day, I care deeply. Like, founders ask me, who should I hire from Snowflake? And I'm like, I'm not nobody. I'm not recommending you take anyone. I love the company.

AI assessment note: “I felt an obligation to the people in the company.”