Snowflake's CMO explains how relentlessly repeating one message—"the data warehouse built for the cloud"—built their category. At LinkedIn, a similar approach created "Deep Sales" and energized 2,000 salespeople, but the same strategy failed at a Series B startup without the platform reach or budget to sustain it.
I have never done well before with previous companies is the extreme consistency. Because when you saw Snowflake, it was always the data warehouse built for the cloud, anything, whatever it was. So we just hammered that. It was the consistency, it was the frequency, right? That's what made it work. It's almost more important to be consistent than being 100% right, I would say.
Yeah, just when we get bored of it in marketing, that market has only just started to hear us, right? And you had the same experience. So you tried to name something at an earlier stage startup and you just didn't have the money or the traction to get it, but then you've seen success in other experiences, right?
So this is one of my favorite topics. I've actually been to like the mothership of category creation. If you follow me on LinkedIn, I have an 8-series newsletter about creating a category. So I'll tell you what worked and what didn't. So my second time working with category design advisors and creating a category, was at LinkedIn and it was successful. It was actually pretty transformational for our business. We created a category called Deep Sales. It resonated with the market. It got our sales team so excited to have a North Star to talk about. And it also differentiated us. It was well chosen because it differentiated us from shallow selling, which was a subtle dig at our competitors, but not an overt dig. So we just kind of found that sweet spot. But because we were LinkedIn, because we're large enough, we have a platform that we can speak to on a daily basis as well as get our sort of our enthusiasts speaking about it. We had the leverage to make deep sales a thing that mattered, and I could roll it out to a sales team of 2,000 people. We could flood the feed with it. So I had that sort of the share of voice to create something that was really meaningful. And it was a game changer for my career at LinkedIn. Conversely, the first time I did it, I was at a— I was CMO at an AI startup and it was Series B. And as you were saying, we didn't have the leverage. We didn't have— we didn't have the budget. We didn't have the platform. We didn't have the scaled sales team. And so it's very hard to strike in the market when no one knows who you are, you don't really have strong representation, and create something new. So although we really believed in the positioning, we just didn't have the resources to make it stick. And so I think there's lots of great things about it, but you have to know the sort of the boundary conditions of when it works and when it doesn't. And I've learned from both
