#88: ABM, Bringing Sales & Marketing Together To Win More Customers, Busting Silos with Hillary Carpio & Travis Henry from Snowflake

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All right, I got Travis here, I got Hillary here. And you may have listened to a previous episode with Hillary that was called abm. I just did that because anytime we talk about abm, it's. It's very popular. Which. Why. Why do you think that is, by the way? Why do you think this is such a popular topic, like, to anyone that's been in marketing for a while and sales? It's. It's not a new topic. Just curious to why does this topic still stand out in a sea of all the stuff we could be talking about from sales and marketing?

Yeah, I think it's still a mystery to a lot of people because it's an overinflated acronym that can mean so many different things. So the mystery of it and this magic bullet promise, people are still trying to figure out and understand what it is and how to use it. And so I think that's why it continues to be a popular topic.

What about from your side of the house, Travis?

Yeah, I think to add on to that, it's going from this brilliant, beautiful, makes all the sense in the world idea to cold, hard execution. And I think that is really the toughest piece about it. And I think nothing against what's been written about ABM or published. There's been tons of good stuff that Hillary and I have both learned from, but I think there's a lack out there of people sharing tactically what's worked for them. How are they actually executing, bringing teams together and making ABM happen. That's a big piece of why we wrote the book as well.

All right, so for context for who you're listening to, the first voice you heard was Hillary. Hillary runs ABM at Snowflake, and Travis is responsible for global ops for Snowflake's SDR function and previously worked at Sales Source. Did I anything else that's worth of context in your bio so people can get a broader sense of who you are before we jump in?

Yeah, I think just on my side for Travis, you know, I've been working with revenue teams and specifically focused on the sales development function for over a decade now. I think top of the funnel is the most common pain point, at least in my limited career, of what I've seen revenue teams struggle with. And it's constantly changing, constantly evolving. So that's kind of where I've kept my focus, but spent a lot of times with small companies. So Series A, just getting the revenue operation started in a consulting and advising capacity all the way up to doing some rebuilds in public companies. So I've seen a lot of different operations in my career as well.

I'd add that when you say top of the funnel, what is your definition of that? Because in my experience working with a lot of sales leaders, the issue is actually not top of the funnel, as in how maybe marketers define it, which is like lots of content downloads. I'm guessing that you have a different definition or how you're thinking of what top of the funnel means to an SDR leader.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think about it very simply. It's everything from engagement through to qualified pipeline creation. I think that is a very complex operational and data driven piece of, you know, ultimately growing your business and getting more bookings, getting expansion, all of the above. But I think about it really simply engagement down to creating qualified pipeline. That's. That's my definition of top of the funnel.

All right, so the book is called Busting Silos. And anybody that's listening, like, as much as I would love to go through how many pages are in this book? 275 pages of this book on the podcast today, we're obviously not going to do that, but I would Recommend going to bussingsilows.com or going to Amazon and getting a copy of the book. I think it's great because a lot of times I see people asking for a playbook for something in sales and marketing today, and there is not outside of podcasts, which are great, and communities, which are great, and blog posts, there's not a lot of like, real playbooks out there. And so, like, what I think is cool is, and I recommend like the book the Next CMO as another example for like marketing operational stuff is this to me is a book that if I was still in the marketing leadership function, I would have like, you know, dog eared and bookmarked. And like, my team would hate me because I'd be sending, you know, pictures of every page of like, plays to go and run. And so it's definitely a tactical playbook out there for those who are interested in aligning sales and marketing and driving revenue. But I have some questions that I want to ask about how this book came to be. But first let's just talk about the audience for this book. Like, who is this book specifically for? Does it have to be, Is it for enterprise level companies? Is it for companies that you might sell to at Snowflake? It's probably not for the small business owner down the street, but I do know a lot of people that listen to this podcast are more in the earlier stage side of things. Like who can get something from this book.

Yeah, we wrote it for people who have a bias toward action. So that can be a marketing leader at a startup. It can be a more individual contributor at a large enterprise. Every chapter we end it with something we're really proud of, which is this little summary that talks about what's the minimum viable to get this off the ground and then what's the scaled version? What tech do you need? You know, how can you run it at different levels? And that's the spirit of what we're trying to communicate from COVID to cover is that it's flexible. Right? You can run it how you need to for your organization. There is no one right way of doing things.

Does the go to market motion of the company matter? Like, I think you can take a bunch of different things from this book, but obviously your focus and the strategy you've taken at Snowflake has been account based marketing. Are there lessons like do you have to be selling a certain contract size? You know, does it have to be like we sell B2B SaaS over 100k? Or you know, what if I have a freemium funnel or a more like higher volume SMB type of funnel? What about that end of the spectrum?

Yeah, I would say definitely the most value for those enterprise class sales motions where you're going out. And I would say a minimum average selling price of maybe 20k, something like that. But enough where you can justify the complexity involved in having a marketing function, a sales development function, a quota carrying account executive function, and you're looking for busting the silos between those groups, getting them to work better together. And typically what I've seen, that becomes way more of an issue, way more of a pain to be solved when you're selling something that's complex with a longer sales cycle to a more sophisticated buyer. If you're doing 100% freemium credit card swipe, maybe no touch sales, you can definitely learn some strategic pieces from this book. But all the tactics are really geared towards the enterprise class sale.

Well, and Hillary and I talked about this on our first podcast, but I actually think it's much easier to align sales and marketing on that first side of things, which is like, if it's, if it's high volume, swipe your credit card, all of the work from marketing is so much easier to measure. Right? Well, we're trying to get people to our website and buy stuff. And so much of the disconnect happens as you get into this 20, 30, 40, 50, 100k, whatever the contract is. You know, marketing is not this, like, linear type of thing where, like, we sent an email and people bought, or we did this webinar and people bought, or we went to this event and people bought. And so I like this concept of busting silos. And we talked about this on our podcast. It's like so much of the stuff that we see people either in the Exit 5 community asking questions about or on LinkedIn. We can talk about channels and tactics and plays until we're blue in the face, but, like, none of that matters unless these two teams are aligned and where, like, sales and marketing are together working to achieve the revenue number. Hillary, I see you nodding along. What's your reaction to that?

Yeah, it's just, I mean, we go back and forth in this book on you need the teams aligned, you need executive sponsorship and leadership, but you also just need two individuals who want to work together. Right? And so it can be as simple as starting with, you know, I say find your Travis to your Hillary or Hillary to your Travis. Find that other person who sees the vision you see and get started. And eventually, yeah, you're going to have to tackle the leadership side. They can really come from any part of the organizations. We don't want people to feel handcuffed or, you know, hitting a wall if they don't have the, you know, CMO buy in from the very beginning.

But it's not just about, like, your personal relationship. Right? And I think this is where this gets mixed up a lot, which is like, it's not just that, like, Hillary and Travis, like, like to work together and, like, know how to make each other laugh or, like, can be friendly. Right? Like, because all of that breaks down to me inside of a company when Travis and Hillary have different comp plans and have different goals and are aligned on different things. And Travis is trying to do one thing with the sales team, Hillary's trying to do another thing on the marketing team, and those things are fundamentally misaligned. And so, like, not to oversimplify this B2B marketing thing, but driving revenue in a B2B context, like, it Just comes so far back to like, what are the company's goals? How do we see sales and marketing helping us achieve those goals? Let's come out with a unified plan and then we can go and run these plays and create a strategy to go and execute on this thing. Like, I took a CMO job once at a company and after coming in, we quickly realized that sales and marketing were so far misaligned to the point where sales didn't like the marketing team because if a deal came in and was not touched by sales and closed, marketing would get credit. It was literally like a who got credit thing. It was like one point for marketing, one point for sales, one point for marketing, one point for sales. And which what happens inside of a company when that happens is no kidding. Sales is never going to want to work with marketing. Marketing is never going to walk want to work with sales. But when you're aligned at this level, this is where it all comes back to. So I'm only saying that it sounds obvious to you too. I'm just saying that for those that are listening where like, this is not an easy, this is not going to be an easy fix. You're not going to get one idea from this podcast or from this book that you're just going to go and implement like, it's got to be like, this is the time to press pause and let's like re evaluate our whole sales and marketing function together.

At Snowflake, we were really fortunate to walk into a well aligned sales and market marketing organization that we've been able to build on. And Travis and I really partnered on the SDR ABM side. But at other organizations, right. When it's a startup, it can be as small as two people interacting. When it's a large company, it might be a specific business unit or a specific department within a larger company. So I think one of the things is we want to make sure people realize too, there's an entire team at Snowflake responsible for the incredible success of the company. And it's not just the two of us behind it.

Yeah. And Dave, I was going to challenge you a little bit in the sense that I think there is some kind of internal selling or internal discovery you need to do with your colleagues and your peers. Yes, we have comp plans. There's, you know, visions and values at the corporate level. All of these things that really guide us as employees. But what Hillary and I have found really effective is just going up to someone and starting on that human level. Right. Like a salesperson doing Discovery, you know, what are your pains? What matters to you? Hey, Mr. Mrs. Ae, how well is your pipeline coverage looking this quarter and where are their soft spots and what accounts are of highest interest to you? If you're a marketer and you approach, maybe it's the first sales hire at your startup or you know, a manager at a bigger company and you start to speak the language of that individual, you'll find that they'll be receptive to that. And then the partnership will begin to blossom. And then I think there's a bottoms up effect where, okay, now we can start to more clearly articulate aligned corporate goals. But I think what we found really effective is that interpersonal piece, like get to understand what that person's trying to accomplish in their role.

Yeah, no, that's a good point. That's a good point. My point was not to be meant as like, don't build personal relationships. But I think you're, you're totally right in that if I look back on the best relationships I've had with sales, it has been almost like in a servant role first, which is like, hey, you're trying to close deals, like, how can I help you close deals? And doing those like kind of one off things that might not help, that might not scale, like helping two sales reps write better emails that are going to go out or like improving a deck or like handling some feedback and making some improvements to some pieces of marketing collateral that don't fit in the bigger plan. But like now we feel like, oh yeah, I feel like Dave is helping us and then we close this deal and then like high five together. And that, that wasn't some like beautifully orchestrated campaign, but like, whoa, that was awesome. Like we just worked together and like we closed that deal, like, what else can we do together? And I think that part is contagious. And for me it started more like at an early stage company when I was at Drift as an example, I was the first real marketing person there and we brought in a VP of sales and he immediately hired like three sales reps. And the best alignment I've ever had in my career with sales was during that time because we were in an office and we were literally sitting at the same table. And so I had to listen to them go on calls and have like an awful call and like pitch the deck that I made and be like, oh man, okay, we got to tweak that or make a one to one intro. And so there's so much value into those things. You're completely right. All Right, let's just change gears for a second. How did this book come to be? Like, how did two people who work at a billion dollar plus company decide to write a book? And this is more just for the marketing people that are listening on this podcast, like, how did this book come to be? I'm even curious as to, like, what happens to, like, books that you sell. Like, do you all get a cut from this? Does it go back to Snowflake? I would love to just peel back and just like, not talk about busting these silos for a minute, but just take me into the, the book creation process and how it happened.

Yeah. So Travis and I have been focused, I think, from the very beginning on building our functions, collaboration together. So I was hired with the lens of, hey, we really want somebody to come in and, and integrate ABM with SDRs. And I had started down that path about six months before Travis and his boss, Lars Nielsen, joined the company. And so with our focus on that, it has always been to just build the most collaborative, most impactful organizations we could. And in our QBRs, our leadership was beginning to notice that we were doing something that nobody else was on the market. And so the leadership team at Snowflake actually approached us and gave us the opportunity to share what we're doing with the rest of the industry and with the rest of the world. And, you know, when there is a door, you have the opportunity to walk through it. And we walked through it excitedly and continue to pursue the next steps to bring it to life.

And in terms of the actual book writing process, I mean, we had a ton of support. Our publisher, Skyhorse Publishing, was fantastic. They brought us a lot of resources, but it's like, you know, working out, and I'm not very good at working out, doing it consistently, but it's one of those things where you got to just set the alarm, set the workout, close out, and do that three times a week in your off hours. Because it's not like Snowflake was, hey, you two are working real hard. Let's cut your hours down to 20 per week at your day job. And you need to go write this book. It was, you need to do just as good as you've always been doing, but you have the opportunity to write this book. So it was a lot of Hillary and I jumping on, interviewing, writing down our thoughts, our bullet points, and then getting penned down to paper and really taking it one chapter at a time. But for anyone thinking about writing a book out there, the most important step in the process is that table of contents piece. Build the skeleton. Start with the fundamentals. Why are you writing this book? Who are you writing it for? Build your skeleton. And then from there, it's plugging and chugging, and it's that daily workout routine of just getting words on paper.

The exciting part is the outline when it comes together, because you're like, this. This book's going to be awesome. And then you're like, but now we have to go and write it.

Yeah, it takes work.

When I did my. I wrote a book a year. A year and a half ago, and it was truly, like, working out, where, like, some days I loved it, and some days I'm like, man, this is, like, literally the last thing on the world in the world I want to do. And I've read this chapter a hundred times, and, like, I hate this book. No one's going to think this is interesting. And you just, you know, you got to. Man, managing those ups and downs is tough. This is a personal question. I'm just curious about this. You sell this book, what happens to the revenue from the book? Not that. And as somebody who's wrote a book, don't write a. You should. The best way to make money is not writing a book for. For what it's worth. But I'm just curious what happens. Somebody goes to Amazon and buys this for 20 bucks. Where does the 20 bucks go?

Yeah. So the profits go to Snowflake, and we have the benefit of the opportunity, the experience here talking to people like you, and the ability to continue building our career. And I think for that, we're. We're super grateful.

Cool. And was that, like, something that came up internally? I'm sure that had to have come up. Like, there had to be some guardrail set around this. Was this, like, an internal discussion that you all had?

Yeah. Yeah. So this has all been discussed with legal and other folks, and, you know, I want to go too much into detail, but Travis and I left feeling well recognized for the effort that we put into this book and. And are happy with. With the outcome.

Yeah. And for what it's worth, whatever comes from doing the book is going to be much more beneficial than the couple thousand bucks or whatever it is it would have been from selling books anyway. All right, that was just. Since it's my podcast and I can ask whatever questions I want. That was. That was a question that I wanted to ask there. All right, let's get into the. Let's get in the book. First of all, signed this. I'm going to sell this one on eBay for double.

I want a 10 commission if you do.

No, you're not allowed. We just talked about this. You know, actually, maybe if it's off market, maybe if it's like on ebay or something. Okay, so you have the book split out into four parts. Part one is why, part two is who and what, part three is how, and part four is scale. I feel like we've kind of in our beginning of this podcast. Do you feel like we've covered the why a little bit?

Yeah.

Okay, so let's go to my favorite section in the why, which is Attribution and measurement. And you have this great title of chapter three, which is Forget Attribution and focus on metrics that matter. So tell me about that. Attribution is everything. How are we going to know this is working? And how do you measure this? Does this mean that you don't measure this? Hillary and Travis, like, how does this work?

Yeah, I love that you picked that chapter out because personally, it's one of my favorites. I've come in my career to call attribution, you know, a four letter word and it's pretty much a quagmire for any leadership team that tries to fully solve it. You've got first touch attribution. You know who is the first person to ever interact from our company and this company. Last touch W shaped multi touch. There's a million different ways to slice the attribution question, and every single time I've seen it fall down. Ultimately.

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And so what we mean when we say forget attribution is focus on a single unifying outcome, a strategic outcome for your go to market teams. And I say go to market very intentionally. A term that we talk about and define in the book is this idea of one team go to market. So it's building on top of an account based strategy, but it's bringing all of your functions together to go and actually execute that strategy at scale. And one of the examples and one of the north Stars that we recommend, so to speak, is pipeline coverage. So our North Star at Snowflake and what we recommend for a lot of companies we talk with is how is your pipeline coverage looking? Do you need forex coverage? Meaning if you're going into a fiscal quarter, you need to close $10 million of closed one business, you know, do you need $40 million in pipeline covering that quarter? One of the most illuminating moments for me at Snowflake was as in a quarterly business review and our head of marketing in EMEA was Presenting her section of look back, look forward strategies. And she pulled up a pipeline coverage slide. Only a slide that you would ever see a sales leader presenting on and articulating. Here's what our forecast looks like currently. Here's what our closed 1 target is, here's our gap to goal and just walking through essentially a pipeline review and analysis. And that's the type of kind of power and common language you can get when you say this is the one thing that matters for our business. And that by the way flows all the way up to our board of directors decks that we put together every quarter. Right. We're a public company, a lot of scrutiny, but this has become the unifying metric. And then maybe Hillary can touch on the metrics that matter. We do track things, we do quantify a lot of things. And maybe Hillary can touch on that.

Yeah, let's go there in one second. Just want to add something. So you have, you have a quote from John Miller on the, on the back of this, but I think maybe it was on LinkedIn. He One analogy that he used is like if you are playing soccer and you eventually score a goal, there's going to be, you know, it might take 20 minutes and there might be 15 different passes and this play and that play. You don't then try to quantify. Well like well Hillary pass it to Travis. But then Bob touched it and then like Sam also did this thing. But that is totally how we go and measure marketing. And then I also love what you have in this book, if I can just read it for a second. Attribution is a huge part of modern work culture, but it can also be a zero sum game, especially when you work in marketing where everything you do contributes to multimedia multi front campaigns where measuring individual contributor impact is virtually impossible. The person who created the pitch deck may have influenced a sale closer to the bottom of the funnel, but billboards and online ads could have done some subtle warmups work long before that. I could add in, you know, maybe the company has a podcast and the they're sharing stuff on LinkedIn or you did a webinar or a trade show or a random event. I totally agree with that. And this is the bridge to Hillary. However, how do we make that like I think everybody would be nodding along be like, yes, that is how my company does marketing. But it is hard because it's hard to then go to Sarah who manages the blog and say like hey, you, you influence or you were responsible for this much pipeline when also we know that that's not how marketing works. Right. Just because you sent an email or wrote an article or put out a new video doesn't mean someone's going to then just go to your website and buy. So completely agree with the concept, but maybe Hillary can take us into like inside of a company. How do we actually track and measure those activities and then how do those things roll up into this overall metric, which is pipeline coverage.

Yeah. And when you mentioned measure what matters, that's referring to these indicators that we talk about in the book that pipeline is the end goal. But there's all these other flags along the way, both green and red, that you pay attention to. So it's measure what you're actually trying to accomplish. If the blog is trying to create engagement, that later leads to pipeline, measure the engagement. Don't try to measure Pipeline off of a single blog view. Right. If an SDR is trying to book a meeting, measure the success of getting that meeting and then worry about Pipeline as a follow on conversion metric down the funnel. So it's really looking at as a chain of events of different teams working together and understanding how they all play together. And then I also think you have to look at what is when the whole team is working together, saying the same thing to the same people at the same time. I talked about this in our other podcast, Dave. What is the multiplier effect? Right. So when all of those indicators come together, we see a 3x4x increase in meetings booked, we see a blank lift in pipeline, we see a higher acv, whatever it might be. You can see the sum of those parts as an effect at the end. And you can use that comparison as your metric to the leadership team.

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Who's.

Who's working with the SDR teams on like making sure we're working the right accounts? I just, I love how you've shrunk that into those six simple steps. I think a lot of them are straightforward. As for how you would measure them, like working accounts, you know, booking meetings, opportunities. Close 1. Let's talk about this big topic of, I think the big gray area, at least for me in the discussions that I see is engaged accounts. Can you take us, can you explain how you all see the world? Like, how do you measure engagement? Marketing's doing all these, creating all this content and talking about all this stuff and all these channels, like what? Break. Break down engaged accounts, please?

Yeah, I love that question and I love that Engaged metric. And it's something I talk to the companies I advise regularly about because it's Flexible and it's. You can start with anything. Right. So if you have a minimal amount of metrics and data available to you, it can be website visits from an account using a de anonymization tool. It can be leads if you want. How many people have filled out forms and we call those known engagers instead of anonymous engagers. But Snowflake, we have a couple different definitions and it's kind of a this or that could be ABM 20 visits from to an ABM page or more. It can be a campaign responder. We kind of have a methodology set up somewhat similar to how Engagio used to work, but before it was brought into demand based where you could just tweak it. So that's how it is on our, what we call our field performance dash. And then we have an ABM Engaged which is based off of page visits when we're looking at just an account based funnel.

Got it. So that's something that I think a lot of people, somebody's on a run right now and they're like, ah, that's okay. So page widgets, you still, even with all of the field touch points, you're still focused on that digital property which is your website. And so you're measuring how often and what they've done on the website. And can you tell us what tool, if you, if it's legal to share that or how you would do that or something that you might recommend for people to start with?

Yeah, we use a combination of tools just to get a broader coverage of our account visiting. So we use Demandbase, we use Bombora, and we also use roleworks for the deanonymization side. The thing I'll share too on engagement is there is a difference between targeting and engaged. Right. And so I would define engaged as them showing interest in you, whereas targeting is you showing interest in them. So however you want to define that, we think at the highest part of the funnel and what we're doing them engaging with our advertising and coming to the pages that we're guiding them to that are custom created for them on the ABM side that indicates interest in us. So just another way to think about it is how do you know they're interested?

Love that. Travis, do you have anything to add to that?

I do. I think it's kind of covered in a different chapter, but it feeds into making that funnel work. You'll notice each stage in that funnel has accounts as part of the name of that stage. Right. And that's something that's fundamental to abm. A lot of people are aware of. You move from this language of leads or individuals into this language of accounts. And that can't be overstated, in my opinion. And specifically, the exercise I would recommend all listeners to do is sit down with your sales leader, your marketing leader, maybe even finance, as well as an operation sales operations leader, if you have one, and go out and define the classic ideal customer profile. But do the hard work of then applying that ideal customer profile to the universe of companies and organizations that you want to go and put effort behind selling to out in the world. And I think that's one of the toughest parts of aligning. And the way I think about it is it's way harder to say no to certain things, right? By focusing, that implies that you're saying no and you're putting less effort behind other things. So at Snowflake, any given day of the week, Hillary's team is targeting a universe that we all agree on that has 9,000 companies in it. And we all care about those 9,000 companies. We care about other companies as well. But that is what feeds that funnel that you're referring to in the book. And it makes things really, really clear. Then we set up pathways for other companies or individuals to self qualify down our nurture paths, right? To raise their hand and say, hey, I've been educated on your solution. You didn't know about me, but I have pain that you can solve and I have budget to solve it. All those good things. But do the hard work of defining that target account universe, put that into your systems and then track against it again. That's those leading indicators that really drive alignment across your teams.

Is your cat yelling at you, Hillary?

I don't have a cat. I thought that was your cat.

No, that was my cat. I was perfectly time with Hillary, like looking over there and I'm only, I'm only at. Sorry for the, the side tangent, but I was never a cat guy my whole life. When my wife and I started dating, she had a cat. I made, I made her send the cat away to her parents. My two little kids got obsessed with kittens as a like torture for me. And now I'm the one that's home all day. And so I have two cats and they're always. And a dog and they're always yelling at each other.

And so my dog was asleep and he was doing this weird thing with his face that I don't know if he was chasing a squirrel. And it was, but I was making sure he was okay.

I love that I Also love when you catch the dog in a dream. And like, yeah, I love that you're like, what was the dog?

I will say, it's so interesting to go back to what Travis was saying because David was just reading your newsletter this morning that was literally talking about exactly. What he just said is like, sometimes it's not about optimizations. It's going back to understanding. Are you even looking at the right ICD fee?

Love that.

Funny to make that connection.

Okay, well, let's, let's, let's talk about that.

Sorry, but I brought that up organically, so I need to know we're on the same page.

All right. If you want to get on that newsletter, it's exit5.com you will become an engaged account in our funnel and we're going to sell to you at some point. We don't have the right ACV for that, but we're working on it. Okay, so the target accounts you at Snowflake Massive company, one of the, you know, breakout successes in SaaS that everybody knows. If you're listening to this, the people who are doing this at Snowflake have a universe of 9,000 accounts. Right. I know startups that are doing like 7 million in revenue and they will tell you that their target account list is like 50,000 companies. Right. You both are vigorously nodding along to that. Like, let's talk about the actual account identification process, because I feel like there is a disconnect between, yeah, hey, we want to sell to this whole world of things, but, like, who can we sell to now? How do we target them? Can you actually, like, unpack the actual account identification process? And then Travis had the ultimate kicker line in there, which is like, it's a universe of accounts that we both agree on. Right? We have to agree on these things. So where do you start? With the account identification process?

Yeah, I'd say first, going back to that reluctance I was alluding to, it's the same reluctance that, you know, marketers have with the age old concept of a lead funnel. Right? Like, we got so many leads. Like, what are you doing with all the leads? We have all these leads from the webinar, the events, and there's a massive difference between leads and qualified leads that are relevant and ready to move forward. And then the pushback or the gut instinct is always, but what if, but there might be, but let's go search, and there could be someone we're missing over here. And it's that same reluctance that your leadership is going to have when you start these conversations around Defining your target addressable market or your target account universe. It's what if we're missing other accounts out there that we could sell to? Maybe if we hope and pray for it. And you just need to get comfortable with the fact that you're going to be most effective when you focus. And so for early stage companies, right, when I talk to startups, it's not go out and try to sell and see what sticks to four, five, six different industries. Hey, you think you have a play in healthcare or life sciences? Focus on that and build your target addressable market there first. I think the issue that companies run into, they think this is stagnant and fixed and concrete in place, when the fact is they should be revisiting this quarterly or twice a year and redefining that market and looking at some of those long tail outcomes of the companies they thought they should sell to. Number one metric for doing that net retention rate, right? That combines how well are you renewing these customers with how much are they expanding, using your product more, buying more from you. If that is not at a healthy level from a benchmark perspective, then your hypothesis is wrong. You need to go back and tweak it. But those are just some guiding principles I think, when you go into this conversation. But Hillary, how else would you unpack account identification?

Yeah, I mean at Snowflake, it's layers, right? So there's an account propensity score that we use that our sales enablement team creates. And that's just a basic ICP fit, right? Does it look like another customer that we have had? Does it make sense for us to sell to? And that accounts for the main allocation of accounts to sales reps. That's our named account list. So that's at the broader company level. There's far more than 9,000 accounts that Snowflake is targeting from that perspective. But then you take that named account list and we're narrowing that down into timing. So those are a good fit. But is now the right time to be having a conversation with them? That's the list that Travis and my team, sales, our global teams are all aligning on to say what is in this pocket that we both agree is ripe to go after. And a lot of that, most of that is data driven. What do we know about them? That's public data, private data, conversational data, etc, in order to prioritize those. And that's where we get those metrics of having a higher conversion rate, higher ability to get into the account. It's because we're working together with intelligence to get to the right accounts and.

What'S the actual data tools or tech that you're using to figure out who these 9,000 accounts should be? I think there's probably like a MVP v1 version that people could do like by hand. But once you get past 100, 200, 300 companies, even this can be hard to do. So where would you recommend people look to to go and build their account list? Chat GPT. Just go ask Chad GPT.

Right, just go ask ChatGPT. That's coming down the pipe. But I think today data providers have gotten really, really good and there's some, you know, best in class versions. So Zoom Info I think still is a market leader in this space of TAM identification. You can plug in all of the characteristics you're looking for for these accounts, you can sync them into your system. I would also say an account based marketing platform is really helpful here in terms of measuring that intent that Hillary was talking about. So sixth sense demand base, your different players in that market and then third party intent data providers are also really, really helpful here. Hillary mentioned them before, but we go to Bombora primarily for third party intent data. Hilary, any others you'd add there?

I mean we have so many different sources of data and inputs that help us understand what to go after and when. But I really think that the most valuable input of data is conversation with the sales team. Who have they called, who hasn't answered, who have they called, who have said now's not the right time. What conversations have they had with a colleague who's friends with the cio? Right. That information helps us then make sense of the numerical data that we're getting from these other providers and turn it into an actual narrative that means something to the person receiving it.

Just a tactical thing on that. Where would you start? Like if you were giving advice to an earlier stage company here that doesn't have the maybe either brand recognition of Snowflake or world class customers to reference in their outreach. I see a lot of companies struggle with the question of like all right, I got my list but like what the heck do I, what do I call them and say? Or I don't have anybody's phone number or like what do I reach out? Do I just email them? I don't understand and I think this will be a transition for us into plays. But like what advice would you give to an earlier stage company with where does this outreach begin and what are the tactics here?

You have to treat your customers and your or your future customers and your prospects as humans. Right. Just, just how you're trying to sell something to them. Other people are trying to sell stuff to you and think about what do you respond to, what do you care about when it lands in your inbox? And a lot of that's knowing them as humans. Do a little bit of research about them before you send a cold email. Know what they care about, know what their challenges are. That's going to make you stick out from the crowd and help resonate with what they need and what they want. Psychologically, we're all trying to succeed and you know, better our careers. And so if you can be somebody that identifies with how you're going to help them get a promotion, how you're going to help them get recognition, how you're going to help them succeed in a board meeting, those are things that people will naturally be more inclined to respond to, regardless of the notoriety of your company.

Yeah, I think there's a natural building that your company will do. And it's the way we laid out the book, like why we laid it out that way, which is you have the target accounts, right. And you've picked those accounts because you've connected that there are use cases or distinct pains that your product or solution or service can solve. Right. If you don't have that, you're not ready to buy this book, you're not ready to listen to this podcast. You need to go figure out product market fit. But once you have a strong hypothesis, maybe you've sold to 10 customers as a founder, you're starting out with the sales team. You build this set of accounts. Then if you want to be really good, we've got some ways to start out just scrappy with intent or timing type, data sources, basic stuff. Okay, you're selling to financial services. Is there a new regulatory law that just came out that governs the way that they need to manage data? If you're selling something like a snowflake or in media, are you responding to the wave of cookieless future in advertising? Right. What is that something that compelling event that why now goes back to the old school basho technique of why you're going to sell to these people and then bring that down to a company level. Right. Can you connect that. That trend. Right. That why now moment to what this particular company cares about. And then ideally and for the top tier of your accounts, personalized to that individual. But if someone opens an email or looks at an Advertisement In B2B, I think today as a buyer myself, I gloss over it. If I read the first two lines and I'm like, no one took time to think about writing this thing for me or building this optic for me or at least for my company. I think that is the ground level for relevance today and success today. Again, if you're selling a highly valuable considered product, you can make much easier purchasing decisions for something that costs less, something that costs more. You need to have that at least that level. And I'd say the reason we split minimum viable and scaled up at the end of every chapter is because we actually don't want you to try to scale things early. We don't want you to try to hey, how do we send that good of an email to a thousand people a week? No, start with a hundred people a week, set up AB testing, control your variables and start to learn and get in a room and say what's working here between our teams and what should we stop doing? What should we start doing? And then we have a whole bunch of for you with how do I scale that up to like you said, a many billions of dollar business.

That's great. This is great advice from you both because this to me is the missing piece of the chatter about abm. Like it always comes back to like, well, people just associate ABM with just like we're just going to go run ads to these people and it's like, no, no, no, no. Think about what Travis just said. Like it all start. There's so much that has to do with the company fundamentals. Like who are we selling to and what's the pitch? Like that to me is what's going to make this whole thing work, not whether you're doing, you know, running display ads to your accounts. And so like have you even emailed like come up with that first pay? Okay, so we, we ran the whole actors exercise. We think we're a really good fit to sell to these accounts right now. And here's why. And here's the why you why now before we do anything scaled, let's test this with a hundred accounts. Okay, we just did it. We got no responses. Let's go back. Maybe it's the wrong pitch was. And it could be the subject line and the copy of the email. It could be the who you emailed. It could be the actual pitch. It could be what was in the note. It could be like we just. The first email was an offer straight to a call. No one's going to do that. There's so many variables in there that you have to nail. Then you can say, okay, wow, we did this with a hundred. Because it can also be as hard as we make this. It can also be very easy in that if you have the right product at the right time, sometimes it is as easy as email those people and tell them about your great, the great product that you have. Right. But we want to just default to like the crazy, you know, retargeting digital, all the tactics that. It's not always about that. It's so much more about the targeting. Who are you selling and why? And, and I like what you said, Travis, about that example of like, you know, something changed. And the fine, I forget the exact example was like, we're selling to finance and this big regulatory thing change. It takes a company level effort from the CEO and the founders and the head of product and sales and marketing to articulate that point of view. That is the whole work. That's the effort. It's not like that to me. That's why in my career at least, I've cared so much about the positioning and messaging and storytelling and brand stuff. Because if we can do that, then not to take away from any of the things that you all are doing, like, I don't want to say it's easy, but like, it's easier if you have that type of offer. Then we can go and try all the back to the email, the optimizations and tweaks and stuff, right?

Yeah.

All right, let's. Let's wrap up. We could talk for three hours on this topic, but then there'd be no point anybody going and getting the book. So hopefully you got a bunch of things out of this podcast today. I know I did, which is awesome. And you can go and get the book busting silos. But let's just talk about some of your favorite plays. Right? So obviously my favorite play clearly is having a good pitch and sending, sending the right emails. But people always ask. So I'm curious to hear from both of you one or two examples of, you know, most creative, most effective, interesting plays you've run. What's worked the best in your time at Snowflake? Some examples for people would be great.

Yeah, I think I can kick off one that has worked and it's pretty tactical. It's. We've called it the end of quarter flurry. And basically where this came from was our sales development team was looking at, you know, the midpoint of a quarter and things weren't looking great for how we're going to round out the quarter in terms of number of meetings we needed to hit pipeline generated etc. And Hillary and her team had the brilliant idea of, you know, what's the quickest path to result that we can spin up and then make an impact this quarter, not next quarter, not this year. And what they decided to do was to target active prospects who were in sequence for the sales development team but had not responded yet to our outreach. We had not booked a meeting yet with them and to serve those individuals very specific ads to accelerate that sales cycle and to accelerate the call to action and to get back touch with the sdr. And lo and behold, deploying those tactics worked wonderfully to the point where our SDR director in his wrap up again back to a QBR said we would not have made our quarter, we would not have made our number if it weren't for Hillary's team stepping in and accelerating the efforts that we already had in motion towards the end of the quarter. So that was one of my favorites. And again, really simple, pull the list of prospects that your team's already reaching out to, put a few conditions on there, and then look at the type of sequences that are being used for those individuals and build some quick advertisements on top of them and target specifically those individuals. So that I think that's one of my favorites. Hillary.

Yeah, I think I'm going to end this podcast and be like, oh, I forgot this favorite thing. But because it's top of mind. We just had our annual customer customer event in Vegas a few weeks ago and this is the second year my team has done this spin to win wheel and it's one of my favorites because we literally last year got a wheel off of Amazon that you like. Oh, you know, you spin and go around in a circle and you land on one of the pie slices, got it for $300 on Amazon and collected all of the leftover swag around the company of things that people had over ordered, had extras of, whatever and used those as prizes and generated an insane number of meetings for a sales development team coming back from the event using a meeting booking tool right there. And the reason I love it and the reason it's my favorite is because it's so simple. You have all of these insane activations at events that are digital and creative and cost, you know, several hundred thousand dollars. And it was a humble, refreshing reminder that it can be as simple as a $300 wheel off of Amazon if you have the strategy right and you, you have the data right. So it's something that is just, it's a good reminder.

But what were the prizes we Had.

A myriad of things last year and this year we did. We bought a few nice, nicer items. It's kind of the jackpot prize. And then we had leftover T shirts, we had books that we were giving away. We had fidget spinners, we had desk pad, mouse pad things. Very wide range of items. And when we'd run out of one, we would switch out the card and put in another card of things they could win. And we actually learned this year that people are more interested in spinning the wheel than winning anything. So I don't even know what's on the wheel. I just want to spin it because it looks fun. So we probably.

It was, it was in Las Vegas. That was the context.

Next year, next year you just. That should be the whole thing. Like the. We like you just, it's called free wheel and you just spin it and then you book a meeting.

Like there's probably some human psychology principle behind that.

But I also think again, to me, this still comes back to like what you're selling and who you're selling to and being in the right place. Because your average startup that also goes to the show, who nobody's ever heard of, who kind of like people aren't sure what they do and what they offer and who they sell to could have the same exact wheel and they could have spent a ton of money and they're giving away iPads and golf clubs and this, all this other stuff. And none of those meetings actually convert. Right. And so sometimes when you have the right offer, the tactics are easiest. I think I forget where I read this in a book, but it's like, if you have this amazing new restaurant in town that has a very clear offer and a very clear need, you don't necessarily need the people jumping up and down on the streets and the craziest marketing. Sometimes you just need to have that big ass sign out front that says like, we're now open. And that just speaks to like, you know, all the stuff we talked about. But we're going to wrap. Travis, Hillary, thank you so much. If you're listening, go and get the book. Busting silos. This episode was a great little teaser for that, but I think I'm not even in the game right now. And I got this thing dog eared and marked up and highlighted. I'm gonna go spin off my own ABM consulting practice. Just kind of ripping off your book. I think that would be wildly successful. You two are awesome. It's clear that you're passionate and have deep knowledge about this stuff. And so the fact that you took the time and put this into a book for people is going to be super helpful. I hope people go and check it out and I wish you both a bunch of continued success. The measure for me would be if you go to LinkedIn and connect with Travis and connect with Hillary and send them a note and say, hey, I heard you on the Exit 5 podcast. That was awesome. I sent this to my boss or my friend. That's the best feedback I get. So thank you both and I'm sure we'll see you again soon. Okay.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Thanks, Dave.

All right.

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