10 Takeaways From How Snowflake Scaled GTM

Hey y’all! Some updates on the VibeScaling front:

Alright - onto our regularly scheduled programming 🙂.

I spent last weekend reading the new book on Snowflake’s GTM - Make It Snow. (yes, I am a huge nerd for this GTM stuff 🤓)

It was incredible. It’s also pretty dense (in a good way).

I was particularly excited to read this one and get into the guts of how they built the GTM team, as we outlined them as a mafia/diaspora/talent hub of the mid-2010s in tech.

Here are 11 of my takeaways from the book (the first 30 pages, which focus on sales) and how I see this playing out in sales.

This was the quote the now CMO of Snowflake, Denise Persson, gave to Chris Degnan in her interview, when he was heading up sales.

I love this - it’s how it should be.

Marketing needs to be in service of sales - helping create demand so they can be successful.

Both work in tandem - but when I’ve seen sales need to be the tip of the spear too much without marketing support, or when the marketing <> sales relationship is bad, it’s usually a disaster (with sales being the scapegoat and usually the one who leaves or gets fired).

Marketing creates demand, and sales convert demand into revenue.

7 years into his career, Chris Degnan’s resume was a mess.

5 jobs in 7 years - in recruiting, when we see this, a lot of times it’s suicide.

However, the head of NA sales @ EMC saw something in him and took a shot on him.

Sometimes it only takes one person taking a chance on you to change your life.

I see this as “keep grinding till you get your shot.” A lot of this game is luck, but the most successful persevere through until someone takes a bet on you. A deeper post on that here, about how I failed to get into OpenAI.

Chris mentions that he wanted to go somewhere smaller and that he was pioneering the cloud data warehouse rather than on-prem, as he knew this was the future and that EMC was too late to this.

He also says a consistent quote with others who make a career change or know they need to get out:

Look up - if you don’t want your boss’s sales leadership job, GTFO. This is how I felt with consulting, and I no longer feel this way (which is why I feel I’m finally on the right path).

First off, I was surprised that they hired sales before marketing and became SO successful as a company. This is definitely an outlier.

He was the 12th employee, pounding the phones to see where they were off in the market.

Probably not ideal in the early stages to have sales doing this - but it gives you incredible, real-time feedback when you are asking people to buy your product and they say no (and instead explain why/giving feedback).

Still works like a charm in 2025 - if you want people to buy your product, ask them for feedback; the best-fit customers will rise to the top (assuming you have a semblance of PMF).

On the flipside, asking for money is the quickest way to get feedback (because most people will probably say no, and you’ll find out why).

Have heard this exact line, especially from my recent interview with Liam Mulcahy @ KP (2nd episode on the VS Pod, launching in the next few weeks).

I see this all the time in early-stage startups, especially with super technical first-time founders.

They either don’t respect sales by thinking things like “this product sells itself!” or think salespeople are dumb.

However, second-time founders know that sales are the lifeblood of their company and how important it is.

Make sure to find the founders who value their sales team with 1) respect and 2) pay (they actually want their reps crushing it from a W2 standpoint).

Chris made sure to bring John McMahon on the board as a GTM/sales specialist, so he could gut-check someone on the board who was setting wild expectations for revenue growth.

Chris had John uplevel his game - this is so important in a sales career.

Love the analogy Chris uses, “even if it’s a pitch right over the plate, I may not have seen the pitch at that speed yet.”

This is why, sometimes, when you’re a director of sales and you get “topped,” it’s not the worst thing in the world - you can learn from others who have been there before, seen the motion you can’t see yet, and speed up your learning curve.

Don’t listen to ppl who regurgitate platitudes - or generalist board members, as he says it

You need specialists who can advise based on their 10,000 hours.

Goes back to why I didn’t go into VC after business school - I needed to operate longer in my career before I felt comfortable advising founders.

For real - how can you genuinely advise if you’ve never done it before?

(or backchannel insanely well)

You hear legends like Brendon Cassidy talk about this all the time, that you need to derisk this role as much as you can.

And salespeople are great at selling themselves.

So, as a head of sales bringing on your first 2-3 hires, the only way you know the initial hires will do the job well is to validate their skill/work ethic from working with them previously.

They brought in the intense Chad Peets to scale Snowflake’s GTM team from 2 —> 100

A legendary episode (and 20VC/20Sales is inspiration for our own podcast) - give this a listen

Honestly, this was the one thing that I didn’t agree with - this questionnaire they used in the process.

They asked a series of unique questions in their hiring process, such as “Do you work well with others?” (They wanted the answer to be no, but you to still be a good person). Or questions around “do you consider yourself an objective thinker?” (they wanted you to say no to this and be someone who went with their gut).

I feel like this way is such an outlier to best practices, but hey, it worked.

We hear this all the time from folks like Mike Maples - the best founders are often super disagreeable. It seems like Snowflake wanted some of these skills.

But did it work because of the hiring process, or because Snowflake was a 1 in a million story?

I thoroughly enjoyed Make It Snow, and highly recommend it for all the GTM nerds out there like myself.

Thanks for being a reader/subscriber of GTMBA.

For those who are new, my name is Chris Balestras, and I’m a partner @ VibeScaling - we work with seed through series C AI-natives to help with GTM advisory, recruiting their early teams, media, and investing.

See you next time 🫡,

Chris