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The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4637 Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2024

⏱️ 64 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Chad Peets is one of the greatest sales leaders and recruiters of the last 25 years. From 2018 to 2023, Chad was a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. Chad has worked with the world's best CEOs and CROs to build world-class go-to-market organizations. Chad is currently a member of the Board of Directors for Lacework and Luminary Cloud and on the boards of Clumio and Sigma Computing. He previously served as a board member for Astronomer, Transposit, and others. He was an early-stage investor at Snowflake, Sigma, Observe, Lacework, and Clumio.

In Today's Discussion with Chad Peet's We Discuss:

1. You Need a CRO Pre-Product:

  • Why does Chad believe that SaaS companies need a CRO pre-product?
  • Should the founder not be the right person to create the sales playbook?
  • What should the founder look for in their first CRO hire?
  • Does any great CRO really want to go back to an early startup and do it again?

2. What Everyone Gets Wrong in Building Sales Teams:

  • Why are most sales reps not performing?
  • How long does it take for sales teams to ramp? How does this change with PLG and enterprise?
  • What are the benchmarks of good vs great for average sales reps?
  • How do founders and VCs most often hurt their sales teams and performance?

3. How to Build a Hiring Machine:

  • What are the single biggest mistakes people make when hiring sales reps and teams?
  • Are sales people money motivated? How to create comp plans that incentivise and align?
  • Why does Chad believe that any sales rep that does not want to be in the office, is not putting their career and development first?
  • Why is it harder than ever to recruit great sales leaders today?

4. Lessons from Scaling Sales at Snowflake:

  • What are the single biggest lessons of what worked from scaling Snowflake's sales team?
  • What did not work? What would he do differently with the team again?
  • What did Snowflake teach Chad about success and culture and how they interplay together?

 

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

We bring in a CRO pre-product. You need a salesperson to create the sales playbook. What does a VP of

0:05.4

engineering know about creating a sales playbook? Any inside salesperson should recognize that by being

0:10.1

in the office, they are going to get better, faster. If a sales inside salesperson is not willing to make

0:15.9

the sacrifice of a 30-minute commute every day to further his own career. I don't want that person. You have to

0:23.1

care and be willing to sacrifice to do exceptional things to be exceptional. And what I find today is

0:28.1

people are not willing to do that. This is 20 sales with me, Harry Stebbings, the show where we sit down

0:32.6

with the best sales leaders in the world and unveil their tips and tactics. Today, this is the best 20 sales I have ever done.

0:40.0

The guest is an absolute OG and one of the greatest sales leaders and recruiters of the last 25 years.

0:46.2

Chad Piz, Chad is the man who was instrumental in the hiring process of Snowflake Sales Team for the first five years alongside Chris Degnan. He was then a managing

0:55.6

director at Sutter Hill, one of the great firms of the last two decades. This is one of the best,

1:01.1

as I said. It's time to get the notebooks out. There's a lot in this one. But before we dive in,

1:06.1

we need to talk about our sponsor for the day, Clary. Clary is an industry-leading AI-powered revenue platform

1:12.4

that is purpose-built to help companies optimize their end-to-end revenue process. With over

1:17.4

$4 trillion in revenue under management, Clary's customers have a material advantage to optimize

1:22.8

their enterprise revenue process across all teams, from rep to the boardroom, by leveraging the

1:28.3

world's largest and fastest growing AI reservoir of enterprise revenue expertise.

1:33.3

More than 1,500 organizations, including Octa, Adobe, Workday, Zoom and Finastra, run revenue

1:39.3

on Clary to improve win rates, prevent slip deals, forecasts with accuracy, and boost the productivity

1:45.4

of all revenue-critical employees. To learn more about how you can create, convert and close

1:50.8

revenue with Clary, visit Clary.com. You have now arrived at your destination. Chad, I don't

1:56.8

think I've ever been quite so excited about doing a show following a discussion pre-us-starting recording.

2:03.2

So this is going to be a lot of fun.

...

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