Tech Brew Ride Home (BNS) How Snowflake Wrote The GTM Playbook
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Oct 4, 2025 
Denise Persson, CMO at Snowflake, and Chris Degnan, former CRO and the company's first sales rep, share insights from their book, Make It Snow. They emphasize that sales and marketing must function as 'one brain in two bodies.' Key topics include embedding sales with engineering early to address product gaps, balancing customer feedback while maintaining product focus, and the importance of culture as go-to-market infrastructure. They also discuss strategies for managing partnerships and applying Snowflake's lessons to the evolving AI landscape.
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First Sales Hire Joined In Stealth
- Chris joined Snowflake as the first sales rep in 2013 when there was no website and no customers.
- He called it his midlife-crisis decision and stayed to help build the company from zero.
Data Warehouse To Data Cloud
- Snowflake began as an enterprise data warehouse and evolved into a data cloud platform.
- The company focused on analytics across structured and semi/unstructured data as its North Star.
Cloud-Only Was A Strategic Bet
- Founders chose a cloud-only, as-a-service model even when customers asked for private cloud options.
- That decision was painful early but later became a strategic advantage via data sharing and the data cloud network.
