Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions

8The Five Pillars of Marketing

“If the foundation is not strong, the walls will creak.”

—Denise Persson

AS A STARTUP’S head of marketing, you have to put a stake in the ground. You’re hustling all day every day to deliver immediate impact, while trying to hire people and assess the marketers who have arrived before you. You’re also creating strong relationships with sales, engineering, and other teams, while addressing the requests these teams have stockpiled in anticipation of your arrival. With all that swirling around, you also must create a fundamental context that determines every marketing decision. Without alignment within marketing, alignment with other teams will never happen.

Market positioning is the foundation of everything you do. You need to get that right from the beginning. If you start doing marketing without first establishing your position in the market you risk constantly changing your messaging and nothing will stick. As you help build a company, you’re building mindshare. With mindshare, you need extreme consistency. If I’ve learned anything from previous companies, the wind changes direction every day and companies feel they need to change their position and messaging too. By doing so, you accomplish nothing. People don’t know what you stand for.

One of the first things I did when I arrived at Snowflake was to create our five pillars of marketing. This came from my experience prior to Snowflake, helping take three companies public. Snowflake had about ...