Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions

15Scaling a Data-Driven Marketing Organization

“Surround yourself with people who know what you don’t.”

—Denise Persson

MARKETING HAS ALWAYS evolved in tandem with our sales organization. When Frank came onboard, we created industry-specific go-to-market motions. It was about aligning very much with the business needs and outcomes of customers. It’s not just about your technology. You need to understand how technology relates to and solves the business problems your customers have. We developed these industry-specific offerings and marketing campaigns but we didn’t do this on our own. We developed them with our business partners, who specialize in industry solutions. We expanded from marketing to just the technologist to the senior level personas on the business side of organizations.

Like our sales team, the marketing team had to grow and deliver on Snowflake’s early revenue mantra of “triple, triple, triple, double, double.” Your organizational paradigm has to shift often because you’re absorbing resources so quickly. Snowflake’s marketing team started with just eight people. Now we have more than several hundred in the organization. It’s more challenging when you have to build such a structure while scaling so aggressively. As you hire more people, you create more functional teams. All the while, you have to scale efficiently to triple your lead flow each year, and then double it in later years. We faced the practical problem of hiring people, putting them into a structure ...