Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions

10Absolute Alignment Between Marketing and Sales

“You can’t compete with each other if you want to compete with the rest of the world.”

—Chris Degnan & Denise Persson

THE NUMBER ONE problem we see in enterprise technology companies is the friction between sales and marketing. There is a lot of finger-pointing when things aren’t going well, and it starts at the top. Both of us serve on a number of company boards and tell them what we do when we discover a problem. We identify it and agree on it, together. There’s no finger-pointing. Of course, we’ve had our challenges but we fix them, one way or another, because we had a great working relationship. It’s incredibly important that the relationship remains positive. Every single sales leader told us, “I can’t believe how good our marketing department is.” In a lot of companies, you don’t often hear that.

It’s vital for leaders and managers to figure out who you can trust. Sales can’t do everything they need to be successful. Marketing has to own demand generation and the sales pipeline. On the flip side, marketing’s success will be constrained if they’re not serving the sales team. Snowflake offers an enterprise solution. Marketing’s job is to help drive every transaction between a salesperson and a customer. We have to ask ourselves, “How can we make that process easier?” Marketing is primarily about creating customer awareness, increasing demand, moving prospects down the sales funnel, and helping close customer deals. We strive ...