GTM 170: 0 Customers → $4B: Inside Snowflake’s GTM Machine with Chris Degnan

30 snips

Nov 11, 2025

Chris Degnan, former Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake, shares an incredible journey of scaling the company from zero customers to over $4 billion in ARR. He delves into the early days of selling a stealth startup, teaching listeners how to identify gritty sales talent with unique interview techniques. Degnan discusses the importance of sales-marketing alignment, pivotal moments like a near-fatal outage, and the strategy of relentless new logo acquisition. He also explores insights on AI's role in business and shares key lessons for early-stage founders from his new book, Make It Snow.

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ANECDOTE

Selling A Stealth Product

Chris joined Snowflake pre-product and spent months cold-calling prospects to gather feedback and refine the pitch.
He used those early conversations to identify differentiators like separating storage from compute and ingesting semi-structured data.

ADVICE

Maintain A Meeting Quota

Set a weekly goal for customer-facing meetings; Chris targeted eight meetings per week to maintain pipeline momentum.
Hire SDRs to keep outreach consistent while field sellers travel and close deals.

ADVICE

Hire Grit Over Big-Company Experience

Hire self-starters, not people used to large-company infrastructure like SDRs and Salesforce being handed to them.
Ask behavioral questions like “Tell me your life story” and probe past challenges to surface grit.

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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.