POV

Companies that reach and exceed a billion dollars in annual revenue also reach an inflection point, and executives know they have to continue growing the business but doing so in unison and coordination. Consider the race every tech company wants to win or least remain in: AI.

At Snowflake, there’s five or so product technologies we really focus on and AI is one of them. The key to this alignment is product, sales and marketing agreeing on what matters. What does alignment look like on a day-­to-­day basis, and what does it mean to have marketing, sales, and product wholly dedicated to that alignment at any level of growth or size of your business? How do each of those organizations mirror each other so that they’re stronger? In marketing, we still have our original GTM groups that include a person from demand generation, product marketing, content marketing, ABM, and PR. The product marketer remains the conduit between product management and the cross-­functional marketing teams.

Now, across Snowflake there is a working group for each of our new product areas. For example, we have an AI group that has a product manager, sales leader and a product marketer. We have additional folks who join these teams as needed —­ partner marketers to plug in our partner ecosystem; someone from finance to help forecast, report, and track revenue; and someone from sales strategy for enablement, compensation plans, and other functions from sales operations.

Those are the company-­level product working groups for each product area. The product marketing manager is the person in those meetings, who is also a member of the cross-­functional marketing team. Once again, they are the conduit. For example, the product marketer who helps develop our AI strategy within that company-level working group turns to the marketing, cross-­functional group and directs that AI execution strategy.

Constant Feedback Loop

It’s a powerful and never-ending feedback loop between product strategy teams and their corresponding cross-­functional marketing teams. The goal is to avoid the traditional relationship where a marketer just hears things in one-­on-­one meetings with a product manager or a salesperson. It’s a corporate-­wide working group with each of the core functions in charge of the go-­to-­market strategy and reports to our executive leadership team. And then the product marketer in the room is able to direct and orchestrate across the marketing organization’s working group in the same fashion to develop a go-­to-­market strategy.

On the sales side, the same motion is happening. The sales leaders, who are members of each company-­level product working group, transfer the knowledge from these strategy teams back to the sales organization. The sales leader is also the leader of each cross-­functional group. That’s very intentional, ensuring we’re aligned to what will make sales successful and focus on what customers want. That’s a shift from a very product-­run business. Product builds it, marketing launches it, sales is selling it and then there’s a feedback loop.

Ultimately, that product group of three are responsible for revenue of their area. There are leading indicators and KPIs they should be measuring. For example, how many new opportunities are being opened. They’re looking at what is the sales pipeline for their area. And they’re responsible for specialists to sell it and bring in new business.

For the marketers, in relation to AI for example, it’s about creating awareness. Revenue is important but making sure we are part of every AI conversation is just as important. So, the marketing outputs are about how we can build campaigns that are going to shift that perception in the market. The role of the marketing organization is still the same—­ to make sales successful by driving pipeline. The difference is that there’s no air between sales and product and marketing as far as the strategy behind that. The marketers are working on what their campaigns will be for the first six months of the year.

Product is that constant feedback loop: How can we improve the product and how can we launch these products more effectively into the market? Sales takes everything from product and marketing to build its strategy of selling to new and existing customer opportunities.

What’s Next?

We worked together, day after day, for more than nine years. Individually, we have remained focused on our customer-­centric vision, while always asking “What’s next?” Our pursuit of alignment between both of our organizations never ended. No amount of success impeded that goal. We always looked for new ways to align within and between our organizations, and with other Snowflake teams to serve our customers and our business. If any connection was out of alignment, we found it and fixed it.

When something went wrong, we owned it as individuals or together as a team. We went direct and required that everyone in each of our organizations did too. We praised success but spent much more time revealing and remedying what was broken. We floored the accelerator more often than we pumped the brakes. We each knew our place at Snowflake and that of our teams: marketing serves sales so sales can serve our customers.

We focused on our strengths when our CEO had the same or different strengths. We found the value in their leadership and management styles, but we may have also scrutinized based on evidence. We knew why they were in the top job when they were in the top job. We were each on a rolling, three-­month work contract, in our own minds. We were always interviewing for the job we already had, and we were good with that.

We always had brilliant executive leadership and ingenious engineering, product and finance teams. Snowflake’s success rests on everyone in the company. Over the years, the two of us have been asked consistently, “How do you do it?” How does Snowflake sales and marketing continue to attract customers and drive revenue in ways that many other companies can’t? “Absolute alignment,” is often our answer. It’s not just something we wrote on a wall, thinking that will affect change. We commit to it, strategize for it, and then deliver on it.