20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake

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4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 has grown its annual product revenue from $0 to over $1 billion. 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).

In Today's Episode with Chris Degnen We Discuss:

1. From SDR To World Leading CRO:

How did Chris first make his way into the world of sales?
What does he know now that he wishes he had known when he started in sales?
What are the single biggest mistakes young sales people make today scaling their careers?

2. The Secret to Hitting Quota in Sales:

Why does Chris believe all reps need to do 8 customer calls per week?
How do the best sales reps approach sales prospecting today?
Is cold outbound dead? How does Chris advise his teams on cold calls and emails?
What are the best reasons reps should say no to customers?
Should reps be discounting today? What is an acceptable level?

3. Sales and Product: The Most Important Relationship:

Why does Chris believe sales and product is the most important relationship?
What can leaders do to ensure sales and product communicate effectively?
How does Chris use sales calls today both with his sales team and with product?
What are the single biggest reasons comms between sales and product breaks?

4. Mastering Sales Leadership:

How does Chris approach sales forecasting? What works? What does not work?
Does Chris celebrate when quota is hit? How do you find the balance between pushing further and harder but also celebrating the wins?
How do the best sales leaders train and develop their talent? What do the worst do?

5. Customer Success is BS: Professional Services for the Win:

Why does Chris believe that customer succeed is BS and you should get rid of it?
Why are professional services so much better?
How should the org be structured then when removing CS and adding professional services?
Who is then responsible for upsell?

Transcript

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0:00.0	You must go on eight sales calls a week and you must be a student of what you sell. I send
0:06.0	emails on LinkedIn. So prospecting should never die. Cold calling should never die. The marketing team
0:12.4	needs to generate pipeline. They need to generate leads, meetings. No one's really a friend. You have a job
0:18.5	to do and you have an obligation to shareholders. This is 20 sales with me, Harry Stebbings. Now 20 Sales is the monthly show where we sit down with the best sales leaders in the world to reveal their tips, tactics and strategies when it comes to scaling the best sales teams.
0:31.6	And today, we're joined by a true unicorn. We are often told people are destined for certain stages of company building
0:38.9	and growth.
0:39.8	Well, our guest today is the exception.
0:41.8	He joined Snowflake as the first sales hire and employee number 13, since he scaled the company
0:47.6	from no customers at all to annual product revenues of over a billion dollars.
0:52.1	He's the CRO at Snowflake.
0:53.7	I'm thrilled to welcome,
0:55.3	Chris Degnan, one of the greats, and this episode is beyond. So get out the notebooks and get
1:00.0	ready. But before we dive into the show today, static financial models with manually updated
1:05.1	numbers, they just won't cut it anymore. Meet LiveFlow. Liveflow is the leader in financial
1:10.4	analysis according to G2.
1:12.6	LiveFlow helps finance teams at Y Combinator, Open Phone landing AI, and thousands more forward-thinking companies to turn their spreadsheets into a real-time FP&A platform.
1:22.6	You might be wondering how does it work? You're likely using Google Sheets or Excel for your financing modeling, right?
1:29.4	And when it comes the time to update that model, are you stuck exporting your P&L and balance sheet from your accounting software over and over again?
1:37.4	It's just inefficient.
1:39.0	Enter LiveFlow.
1:40.2	It seamlessly integrates with over 50 financial reports from your accounting system,
1:44.9	enabling you to say goodbye to manually updating your budget versus Actual's report,
	...

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