#327 Building a Sales and Marketing Capability for Data Applications with Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake, and Chris Degnan, former CRO at Snowflake

38 snips

Oct 20, 2025

Guest

Chris Degnan

Guest

Denise Persson

Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake, has two decades of tech marketing experience, while Chris Degnan, former CRO, scaled Snowflake's revenue significantly. They discuss the critical alignment between sales and marketing for growth, sharing insights on identifying ideal customer profiles and leveraging data signals. Denise highlights the importance of a unified data platform for AI, while Chris emphasizes hiring traits that foster scalability. They also explore using predictive forecasting and AI to enhance marketing strategies and resource allocation.

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INSIGHT

AI Needs Data First

You cannot have an AI strategy without a data strategy; clean governed data is prerequisite for AI use.
Companies with disordered data will struggle to realize AI benefits and must prioritize data readiness now.

ADVICE

Treat Sales As Marketing's Customer

Treat sales as a customer of marketing and align around the quality of qualified meetings.
Measure marketing by pipeline impact, not just raw MQL counts.

INSIGHT

Early Customers Shape Product

Early customer conversations shaped Snowflake's product direction before broad availability.
Finding early believers who will 'beat up' the product helped turn it into something customers couldn't live without.

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The journey from startup to billion-dollar enterprise requires more than just a great product—it demands strategic alignment between sales and marketing. How do you identify your ideal customer profile when you're just starting out? What data signals help you find the twins of your successful early adopters? With AI now automating everything from competitive analysis to content creation, the traditional boundaries between departments are blurring. But what personality traits should you look for when building teams that can scale with your growth? And how do you ensure your data strategy supports rather than hinders your AI ambitions in this rapidly evolving landscape?

Denise Persson is CMO at Snowflake and has 20 years of technology marketing experience at high-growth companies. Prior to joining Snowflake, she served as CMO for Apigee, an API platform company that went public in 2015 and Google acquired in 2016. She began her career at collaboration software company Genesys, where she built and led a global marketing organization. Denise also helped lead Genesys through its expansion to become a successful IPO and acquired company. Denise holds a BA in Business Administration and Economics from Stockholm University, and holds an MBA from Georgetown University.

Chris Degnan is the former CRO at Snowflake and has over 15 years of enterprise technology sales experience. Before working at Snowflake, Chris served as the AVP of the West at EMC, and prior to that as VP Western Region at Aveksa, where he helped grow the business 250% year-over-year. Before Aveksa, Chris spent eight years at EMC and managed a team responsible for 175 select accounts. Prior to EMC, Chris worked in enterprise sales at Informatica and Covalent Technologies (acquired by VMware). He holds a BA from the University of Delaware.

In the episode, Richie, Denise, and Chris explore the journey to a billion-dollar ARR, the importance of customer obsession, aligning sales and marketing, leveraging data for decision-making, and the role of AI in scaling operations, and much more.

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