Snowflake CMO: How to Position for Your First $100M and Beyond
Over 20+ years of ZOOMing in Silicon Valley, we’ve worked with the best and brightest positioning leaders. One of our rockstars: Denise Persson, CMO of Snowflake has grown four startups beyond $100M, working with us to position the last two for IPO. Her current success is with Snowflake who recently made history as the largest-ever software IPO of $70B.
How did she do it? Denise shared her 5 pillars to success in her SaaStr Build session, “Breaking Through: A step-by-step guide to building a marketing strategy to take you to the first $100M.” Her first step to success is data-driven positioning. Hey, we couldn’t agree more! Here’s how she makes the case.
Snowflake CMO Denise Persson’s 5 pillars to a successful marketing strategy:
Build a foundation that won’t crack
Positioning is where marketing begins. Denise says it’s like building a house, “if the foundation isn't strong enough, the walls will crack.” When you have a strong foundation, you avoid cracks and inefficiencies in your marketing.
So how do you do that and get buy-in across your organization?
Define your hill
It all starts with defining your category, or hill, that you can own. How you discover your hill is with data from extensive market testing, including with real prospects.
Back in 2016, we worked with Snowflake to define their first hill: “The Data Warehouse Built for the Cloud.” This positioned Snowflake to take on the massive data warehouse market, dominated by players clearly built pre-cloud. We tested this phrase against 10 or so other ideas, and this one won by a landslide. It’s simple, easy to understand, and sets them apart.
Denise explains that startups don’t have any time to waste when trying to convince prospects who you are. For startups especially, “you only have a few seconds to explain what you do, so you can't really over-complicate your positioning.”
Position to where you’re selling next
In Denise’s experience, surveys or a few interviews with current prospects or customers aren’t really enough. The category you’re creating needs to be relevant to those who you are selling to next. She loved the fact that our process leverages extensive feedback and A/B testing with real prospects who don’t know your company yet.
Qualitative research with prospects delivers insights that allow you to dig deep into the feedback and data, unlike quantitative surveys where respondents just click a box. Denise compares ZOOM’s data-driven approach to the B2C leaders like Proctor and Gamble. You’re able to test ideas with real people, a very eye-opening approach.
Drive alignment and consistency
According to Denise, a data-driven process makes it so much easier to get buy-in from everyone internally. She thinks this buy-in is vital to success because the most successful brands in the world are the most consistent brands.
Getting employees, partners, and customers to describe you the same way is key to scaling. If anyone described Snowflake differently, the marketing team was on it. Denise knows that the more consistent you are, the more impactful your marketing will be.
Denise explains, “you can't win the battle for your prospects' minds if you are changing who you are every six months.” It’s the reason why their original startup hill lasted nearly three years, bringing them to a $1.5B valuation, before moving to Cloud Data Platform valued at $12.4B, then The Data Cloud as a $70B IPO.