Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions

Foreword

“It’s like one brain in two bodies.”

—Mike Speiser on Chris Degnan and Denise Persson

IF YOU’RE SELLING to eight billion people, like Apple, marketing is the lead and sales follows marketing. If you’re selling enterprise software, and you have tens of thousands of customers, sales is the driver and marketing serves sales. In either case, there has to be absolute alignment between these two organizations in order to be successful. Every great marketer I’ve met understands they must have a great relationship with sales. But a lot of marketers don’t. The standout sales professionals I’ve met believe the same, but a lot of them don’t work in lockstep with marketing.

Chris Degnan and Denise Persson worked side by side at Snowflake for nearly nine years. Theirs is one of the longest working relationships between a company’s chief revenue officer and its chief marketing officer. It all began when Chris arrived in 2013—one year after Snowflake’s inception. Denise arrived in 2016, when the company had just over 100 employees and annual revenues of about $3 million. Over the years, Snowflake would surge to more than 9,000 employees and $3 billion in annual sales. Along the way, it has delivered the largest software IPO in history, among many other industry milestones. Chris and Denise, and their growing organizations, have been there, in perfect alignment, delivering one sonic boom after another.

Hundreds of books exist about how to sell. The same amount exists on how to market. ...