12/4/23- SNOW Sales🌨️, MS🏦CEO, GOOG Sundar, & More Tech
"If you ain’t selling, you ain’t Sh*t."
Welcome back. In a busy world we can be distracted with the trivial many things or we can focus on The Vital Few.
Something that I am thinking about
Sales Lessons Scaling 🌨️Snowflake🎧 (Link)
“You must go on eight sales calls a week and you must be a student of what you sell.”
Chris Degnan serves as Snowflake’s Chief Revenue Officer and has been with the company since 2013. Starting as employee #13 and Sales employee #1, Chris built a Go To Market strategy from the ground up, driving sustained high growth and global reach. Under his sales leadership, Snowflake SNOW 0.00%↑ , has grown its annual product revenue from $0 to over $2.5 billion.☝🏽↗️
Chris was recently interviewed on the 20VC Podcast. (55 Minutes) Chris has over 20 years of technology sales experience. Prior to Snowflake, Chris served in sales leadership roles at EMC and Aveksa, and worked in enterprise sales at Informatica and Covalent Technologies (acquired by VMware).
How did Chris end up at Snowflake in 2013-
I had been selling at EMC and through my storage connections got introduced to Mike because he had started a company called Pure Storage. He was like Hey I'm building this company called Snowflake. I was interviewing with a lot of other companies, some of them went public like AppDynamics got bought by Cisco and what got me excited about Snowflake was the the concept of the cloud. People were going to move analytic workloads to the cloud. The data warehousing market was a huge market at the time. It was a $10-12 billion market. I liked the founders. They were just good humans, as opposed to me going to work for another sales dude. I was going to go work for some cool Founders. That's how I came on as the director of sales, not even the VP of sales. I started and Mike Speiser was our theoretical CEO at the time he showed up one day a week. So it was me and a bunch of Engineers.
Chris wasn’t sure who the ideal customer was, and he wasn’t even sure what the product was. Although Chris knew how to sell, he needed to stop and go back to basics-
You must be a student of what you sell. So for me I wasn't 100% certain on what I was selling so I interviewed the founders to better understand the value proposition.
Chris spent a lot of time NOT selling. He was gathering market data, talking to customers about their pain points. And, Chris describes bringing customer feedback back to the engineering team. When the stage was set, Chris begins to sell.
I go on eight sales calls a week. You do that, you have a good product, you'll be successful. If you have a crap product you won’t. It is about time management.
Weekly sales calls, prospecting and follow up. Week after week, after month, etc. Over time, Chris builds a sales team.
Early on I actually wouldn't let the sales team put an opportunity in Salesforce to forecast it unless the customer had tried the product. Now the forecasting is about the compelling events. Is there a compelling event? The biggest hole that you can poke in a forecast is what is the compelling reason or compelling event causing the customer to do something. Especially in a weird economy, people are not going to do anyone any favors. Sales people are like “oh I have a good relationship with this customer”, no you don't. They're going to care about themselves and their job and their family, not you. Mr sales rep, Mrs sales rep what is the compelling event? Do you have an ROI, some reason that the customer is going to buy? Otherwise that's the easiest thing to poke a hole in and by the way there are a lot of sales leaders that don't ask that (customer) question- “why are you going to do this deal? Why?” That's really the number one thing that I look at from a forecast perspective.
One of Chris’s Snowflake sales reps asked him to come on a sales call recently-
I was in New York last week going on a sales call on a net New Prospect and I'm in the building and this customer is like just talking in circles.😵💫 I'm like hey dude do you want to do something or not? That basically summed it up. He was like “well I don't know that I'm the guy.” Okay great I figured that out really quickly. He wasn't the right guy. Who is the right guy? You have to be very direct. Don't waste my time, I'm not going to waste yours. There are a lot of people that will take meetings but do nothing. You shouldn't waste your time, you should ask the hard questions.
Like most medium to large companies, Snowflake has a sales training program. Chris talks about the metrics, the process and the progression. 👍🏽The 20VC Podcast host asks Chris about expectations for sales reps-
Q- How fast do you know if someone's going to fail (as a sales rep), is it very obvious or does it take more time?
A- If you go out on a sales call and the person doesn't know what the hell they're talking about and they've been on the job for six months.. yeah👎🏽 you're going to be in a world of hurt. You should just cut bait.🙋🏽♀️
To quote Frank Slootman- “when there's doubt, there's no doubt!”
The entire interview is excellent, and I only scratched the surface here. Link 🙏🏽
(If you want a little more on sales… Read about the time- A COO Lectured Me on the Importance of Sales😬. Story at the bottom.👇🏽)
Investing, Companies, Market Past/Future
(I invest in Companies, not in stocks.)
Interesting companies that hosted earnings results or information sessions since my last edition that I reviewed-
Technology- ADI 0.00%↑ , NVDA 0.00%↑ , OKTA 0.00%↑ , ZS 0.00%↑ , CRWD 0.00%↑ , SNOW 0.00%↑ , HPE 0.00%↑ , DELL 0.00%↑ , CRM 0.00%↑
Housing & Banking - LOW 0.00%↑
Others- KR 0.00%↑
(With data and charts it is not what you look at, it is what you see that matters.)
7 Powers⚡by Hamilton Helmer applied to NVDA 0.00%↑ -
YES- Scale, Network, Switching, Brand, Cornered, Process NO- Counter
Conclusion= 💪🏾💪🏿💪💪🏼
📘7 Powers⚡by Hamilton Helmer applied to CRWD 0.00%↑ -
YES- Scale, Network, Switching, Brand, Process MAYBE- Counter NO- Cornered
📘7 Powers⚡by Hamilton Helmer applied to SNOW 0.00%↑ -
YES- Scale, Network, Switching, Brand, Process MAYBE- Counter, Cornered
Podcasts
I wasn’t sure how much I would get out of this podcast. Another boring bank CEO. Boy was I wrong 😳. I discovered James is an interesting person and it was an excellent interview.
In the exchange below, the hose Nicolai pushes James on one of Morgan Stanley’s stated values of “Do the right thing”-
Q- "Do the right thing." Um no offense but isn't that a bit obvious?
A- You're exactly right and I debated this with the group and with myself when we laid out these. I decided in the end it's obvious but the sad history of the financial sector suggests people don't do the right thing so often that it needed to be put on the front wall of every building we have. 😳
Q- Why do you need to do that in the financial sector cuz there are a lot of other sectors where you don't need to do it?
A- Because the scale of what you're dealing with in terms of Financial Risk, what an individual can do to damage themselves, the market, their company, is way disproportionate than if you're a Coca-Cola distributor or you're manufacturing car parts to provide to Mercedes-Benz or Volvo.
Q- You're kind of handling hand grenades 💣💥💣?
A- Yeah and you know Nick Leeson at Barings, Jerome Kerviel at Société Générale, our own people. We had 11 traders who ran a fixed income prop desk that lost $10 billion of capital. A third of our Capital that we'd spent 85 years building. 11 people! Now, why did they do it? Because they were greedy, they thought they could make more money, they'd get paid more, Etc. So that I said, okay we know and we've got now 83,000 people who work for us now. I can't control human behavior. If you've got members of Congress in the United States some of them end up in jail. Members of the police force end up in jail. Members of religious orders end up in jail. Right? Human beings are human beings doesn't matter what cloak they're wearing, some of them are just evil. And some of them are greedy, and some are stupid, and some are Reckless. Our job is to let people know in no uncertain terms that you're obligated to do the right thing HERE!
If we find you doing things like talking to the media when you're not authorized, your biased against an employee because of their background or some form of diversity, anything that suggests you're not doing the right thing.. you're done... you're out of here. 💨🚪
Q- Your talking about all the bad guys, how do you make sure you hire the good guys?
A- Good Guys respect that kind of culture. Good guys are drawn to a place where they know it's values driven.
(The above has been lightly edited by me for clarity.)
Videos
46 Minute- Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google & Alphabet GOOG 0.00%↑ has an emotional intelligence that is unmatched with the rest of the Magnificent Seven. He is brilliant, thoughtful, and comes across as caring and humble.
"You have to encourage innovation. Companies become more conservative in decision making as you grow...be okay with failure and reward effort, not outcomes."
Sundar’s summarization below is simple and beautiful-
"I think the essential struggle of humanity with every technology is harnessing it so that it benefits society." 🙏🏼
(If you would like to read more about Sundar, I wrote about his youth in my post on 4/11/23. Link)
Books and Articles since my last edition
(Books are like loading software on your brain. If I get bored of a book I quit and move on.)
100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-To-1 and How to Find Them by Christopher W. Mayer Business, Nonfiction, Investing. Thoughtful, interesting read.
Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky Science Fiction Original and thought provoking. A bio-engineered dog fights for its life and its right to life.
Here is a link to many of the books I have read and my 1-5 star rating- Goodreads Books Read
Wild Card🃏
Speaking of Sales, Here Are Two Of My Own Observations
Even though I was a CFO for a bunch of years, I have experience as a sales rep previously. In the top section, Chris from Snowflake was talking about time management, and it resonates with me💯. I will explain why below, but before I do, here is how I think about the funnel of people for your product/service:
Imagine a large population of people or companies, from that you have-
Nothing, no awareness>
Stranger, awareness created but you don’t know each other>
Suspect/Lead, could this maybe be a customer>
Prospect, you have qualified them to sell to and are developing a relationship>
Customer, a sale has created the exchange of money🪙>
Fan 💃🏽🕺🏽🥳, repeat or expanding customer 🥳
Here is a way I like to visualize it:
One of the easiest and most frustrating things to do in sales is waste your time chasing your tail for no compensation. We get excited when someone/anyone shows interest in our product. Why do we get so excited? Humans think that they have to be doing something, and that Action equals productivity. But, It does not. Better to work on new quality lead generation than to waste time with an unqualified lead (AKA- a time waster🙋🏻♂️.) Your product is valuable. Your time is scarce, don’t waste it on strangers (Window shoppers.) You should be proud of your product/solution. Then sell it with pride and guard your time.
A COO Lectured Me on the Importance of Sales😬-
As an accounting manager or controller, I once had a battle hardened COO say to me-
“Nick you come to meetings with reports and metrics and opinions. You want to charge customers higher prices and expect them to pay their bills quickly. But, legal, finance, HR are all cost centers. The people who sell to our customers and the people who deliver the product that was promised are what comes first! We need to get out of their way and support THEM.”
It was sharp feedback, and with more experience and more gray hair, I 80% agree with him. Back office functions are irrelevant without a steady pipeline from sales and successful product delivery. If you ain’t selling, you ain’t Sh*t.🫡
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Disclaimer: All of my posts are for informational purposes only. I might own some of the companies discussed in these posts. This is NOT a recommendation to buy or sell securities discussed. Please do your own work before investing your money.
While Morgan Stanley's value of "Do the right thing." seems basic, they emphasized that multiple times when I visited their HQ through a school trip. I find it entertaining that their CEO agrees with it being such a big problem that they have to put it on the front walls of their buildings.