Hiring Gritty, Self-Motivated Salespeople

Chris Degnan is the former Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake, where he helped scale the company from pre-product to over $4B in ARR and more than $100B in market cap. Over his 11-year tenure, Chris built Snowflake’s go-to-market engine from the ground up, from personally running the first outbound campaigns to leading a global sales organization through four CEOs and one of the largest software IPOs in history.

Today, he advises founders and revenue leaders on how to build high-velocity GTM teams, hire with grit, and scale with discipline. Chris is also the co-author of Make It Snow, the definitive playbook on Snowflake’s go-to-market journey, co-written with CMO Denise Persson.

Discussed in this episode

• The early days of Snowflake: selling a stealth startup with no product
• How to hire and identify truly self-motivated, gritty sales talent
• The lessons from John McMahon that shaped Snowflake’s leadership DNA
• How to build sales-marketing alignment that actually scales
• The near-death experiences that almost killed Snowflake
• What great CEOs do differently, from Muglia to Slootman
• The power of focusing on new logo acquisition
• The evolution of sales methodologies: MEDDPICC, culture, and curiosity
• The truth about AI’s “bubble”, and what’s real beneath the hype

Episode highlights

00:02:21 — Why join Snowflake pre-product and in stealth.

00:05:36 — The original outreach script and what resonated with prospects.

00:06:49 — Scaling from lists to SDRs; Degnan’s “8 meetings per week” rule.

00:09:11 — Hiring for self-starters; the interview opener: “Tell me your life story.”

00:12:49 — The feedback loop that kept a CRO in seat for 11 years.

00:24:46 — The outage that almost killed Snowflake, and how leadership showed up.

00:28:34 — New logo gates every quarter and why it mattered more than anything.

00:34:05 — “Customer success is everyone’s job”: removing CS, monetizing PS, driving adoption.

00:36:40 — Databricks: where Snowflake ceded ground and what they’d do differently.

00:39:19 — Why going public was the right move for enterprise trust.

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Follow Chris Degnan

• LinkedIn:
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-degnan-524470Make It Snow (book):https://makeitsnowbook.com

The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.