A Step by Step Guide to Build a Marketing Strategy to Take You to the First $100M with Snowflake CMO

And welcome to this session where we're going to talk about how to break through the noise to get to 100 million. And this has always been my number one challenge at every company I work for. I've led marketing at four SaaS startups in the past 25 years and we took those companies beyond 100 million and two IPOs. I wish there was a magic formula that works for every situation, but no journey is clearly the same and what's most important is really how well you execute. But there are a few things that I've learned that can make a difference to most startups. And for today I've summarized them under five key pillars and when I look back at our journey here at Snowflake, I think they've had tremendous impact and I'm going to talk about how we apply them during our journey to 100 million. And I hope you'll be able to pick up a few things that could be helpful to you. So let's dive into pillar number one, positioning. This is really where marketing begins and it's really important to get this part right in order for all our marketing efforts to be effective. It's really like building a house. If the foundation isn't strong enough, the walls will crack. But with a strong positioning, you can avoid cracks in your marketing and your program investments will be a lot more effective. Also, there are many different definitions out there of what positioning is really all about. Still today I think one of the best books on this topic is Positioning by Alvis. I often get questions about which books I recommend and this is one of my favorites. For sure, it's over 20 years old now, but there's really nothing new with the concepts shared in this one. In essence, Al Riis describes positioning as the battle for your prospect's mind and winning the battle is really all about how well do you differentiate yourself in the mind of the prospect. So what is then the best way to develop your positioning and how do you go about getting buy in for everyone in your organization? The most powerful process I have personally ever seen is the one developed by Zoom Marketing. It's a consulting firm firm specialized in strategic positioning for tech companies and they have a very unique and data driven approach on how to create a breakthrough positioning. I work with them a couple of times and I think the magic really with their process is how data driven it is and they have extensive testing involved that you also do with real prospects at the end. And according to Zoom, positioning is truly about defining your category and they refer to this as your hill and marketing is really the process of owning your hill. So it all starts with defining your hill, the hill that you are set to own on your journey to 100 million. @ Snowflake, the category we determined to own back in 2016 was the data warehouse built for the cloud. Our positioning has evolved since then. Snowflake is today the data cloud company. But for today we're looking at this journey to 100 million. So we decided to take on the massive data warehousing market, which was a category that already was well understood. And when you're a startup, you only have a few seconds to explain what to do. So you can't really over complicate your positioning. Sometimes startups are creating categories that take too much time to explain and time is definitely not your friend. When you're startup, your positioning really needs to help people understand what you do quickly and it needs to be relevant as well. As I mentioned earlier, part of the zoom process, you do extensive focus groups with real prospects to really make sure that your position is actually working with those who already don't know your company yet again. Most often companies make a few interviews with current prospects or customers, but that isn't really enough. You know, the category of creation that you're creating really need to be relevant to those who you are selling to next. And you also get so much data and insights in a back from prospects. And this data driven process really makes it so much easier to get buy in from everyone internally. And this buy in is really vital. Consistency is incredibly important. The most successful brands in the world are also the most consistent brand. Your employees, partners, customers, they all need to describe you the same way. You can't really win the battle for your prospects minds if you are changing who you are every six months. So for over three years, the data warehouse built for the cloud, positioning was really everywhere. And if anyone described us differently, we asked them to go and change it. So again, the more consistent you are, the more impactful will your marketing be as well. So now when you're done with positioning, it's time to start climbing the hill. And this takes us to pillar number two. And I call this one, be the most customer centric marketing team in your industry. And when you look at what the most admired brands in the world have in commons, they all own their categories, they're incredibly consistent, consistent with their brand experience and they have incredible customer loyalty. And our first value at Snowflake is to put the customer first and on the marketing team. We decided from the beginning that we were going to create the most customer centric company and marketing team in our industry. And that really meant that we needed to think outside in all the time. And to do that, you really have to keep the pulse on what your customers needs all the time. Vince Morello, our chief storyteller, is also one of our early members of our marketing team. And in order to make sure that we always kept the pulse on our customers, he ran almost daily meetings with our sales engineers. And those were the ones that were out in the field with our customers. And that really helped us learn exactly the type of questions or concerns that we needed to address with our customers. And in order to scale our content development. In those early days, Vince got almost every employee involved with writing content and creating videos, engineering product, and our leadership team, we were all cranking out content and our marketing was almost 100% evangelism at the time. And we really kept a laser focus on what our customers really wanted to learn. So I think it's so important to really have that direct pulse and really finding a way to get that. And this also helps us create trust and credibility. And this is something you often lack as a startup. At Snowflake, we have a mantra that we can't launch any marketing program that doesn't feature a customer. Whenever possible, we will always put customers at the forefront of all our marketing. And I could argue that the Snowflake brand is almost entirely built through word of mouth marketing. We have thousands of brand ambassadors in our customers today and they're doing marketing for Snowflake every day. Our CEO often reminds us that our job is to inspire people to change. And there is nothing more inspiring to prospects than learning what their peers have accomplished with your product. Esther Sekora ran our customer marketing in our early days and she was very successful building our customer advocacy because she built direct relationships with our customers. You're not going to get customers always do exactly what you want them to do. But she focused on what was really in it for the customer, what was of value to them, and that's how she got them involved with our marketing programs. We never produced any fancy or expensive videos. Instead we did a lot of short videos with our customers out in the field at our events. And this way we could get so many more customers involved. And they also came across a lot more authentic this way as well. So one thing I can also recommend is starting an advisory board as soon as you have enough customers to do so. At our customer advisory boarding meetings, we used to give our customers fake dollar bills which they got to invest in different parts of a roadmap and this really helps us prioritize the things that matters most to our customers. So again, be sure that your marketing is actually helping customers because that's really what marketing should be all about. And find that way to get constant customer feedback. I can also recommend starting an annual customer engagement survey as early as possible that also helps you establish your NPS score. And every year we measure every single component of our customers experience with Snowflake and this survey just provides a lot of valuable insights to us. And again, as soon as you have actual customers do anything you can to put them at the forefront of all your marketing, they are your most effective marketing tool. A challenge that is very common is that you get to 20 million and then growth slows down because you rely on too much manual work. In 2017, the big topic at every oil hands for us was around automation and getting rid of the hamsters. The hamsters were all of those doing any work that should be automated. And someone even dressed up as a hamster in a wheel at one of our Halloween parties that year. The hamster. They were very important in the beginning. You can't scale a company with hamsters and hamsters were setting up accounts for our customers and it wasn't really until we had a fully automated provisioning system that our free trial signups really started taking off. So how does this relate to marketing? One thing to make sure is that your marketing stack can truly scale with you from from the beginning. It's going to slow you down if you have to start replacing things in the midst of all this great momentum you have. And time is again clearly not your friend when you're startup. It's all about landing and expanding fast. This is a map of our marketing stack today and Lars Christensen, who runs demand gen at Snowflake, did a great job really building our marketing stack to scale from the beginning so we never had to stop the engine and start replacing parts, which is something I've had to do at other companies. Another thing we focused on was to scale every component of our demand and process. The one thing all Sassys companies do in the beginning is introducing the live demos in order to cut down on those one to one meetings. But something else that has worked really well for us at Snowflake is our weekly office hours. Every company has to deal with the requests from prospects who want to talk to a reference customer and those are very time consuming to manage. And the customers that you're asking all the time, they get a little bit annoyed after time as well. So today we drive all our prospects to a weekly office hour where they can talk live to customers and really get all their questions answered. And no question is really off limit here. These office hours grew quickly and now we have hundreds of prospects attending them every day. So we've been able to really completely eliminate that one to one reference call request. We also did the same thing with our local workshops that we used to do out in the field and we moved them online even before COVID And the online version is actually performed even much better. So the point I like to make here is that to get to 100 million and doing that fast, you really need to get rid of the hamsters as soon as you can. You really have to look at every component of your buyer's journey and replace everything you can. That is time consuming. So to break through, you have to get noticed. And the challenge is that building brand awareness really takes time, especially for us startups. We don't have the millions we can pour into traditional advertising and at the same time, we're often competing with the largest and most well known brands in the world. So what do you do then? What are your options? I think that being bold is really the best chance you have of beating the system and getting noticed. Being bold is clearly not without risk and every management team isn't willing to take that risk. But at Snowflake, we were willing to do that and we had a big vision and we created a bold brand that really also fits well with our values and culture at Snowflake. In the beginning, a lot of people recognized us for our billboard on 101 here in Silicon Valley. And in the early days they were really critical for hiring. As a small startup, you are fighting for talent and you have to stand out. And at every new hire onboarding session we had in the beginning, at least half of the room said that they first learned about Snowflake from our billboards. Often got questions about how we measuring this billboard, but just that metric alone, that again, more than half of all our employees got to know about Snowflake through this billboard. That made it worth it just in itself. Our message on this billboards were often reflections of current events. We were always made sure to come back to data and always reinforce our positioning as the data warehouse built for the cloud. Most people really enjoyed them, some didn't. But we did something different. They were bold, they were different and we definitely got the attention that we needed in the beginning. And the inspiration behind the Snowflake brand comes from Virgin America. They disrupted the airline industry where they're highly customer centric brand and we were set to do something similar in the data management analytics industry. We have been working with SCONA Advertising for the past few years, four years. And they've done a great work for us helping us develop that tone of voice that we have. And positioning and brand experience are two things that really go hand in hand. And consistency is so important and you have to stay the course and you also have to be the guardian of your brand all the times. So we are at my last pillar here for this session and I think I really saved the most important one to the end. Having sales and marketing working as one team is really essential both to marketing efficiency and to revenue growth. And I think a big reason for our fast growth at Snowflake is the strong alignment we have across our entire company and that we've had from the beginning. And if your marketing programs don't align 100% with your sales strategy and goals, much of your marketing efforts will go to waste. And aligning really starts with sharing the same objectives. And here at Snowflake, marketing owns the pipeline. And that way it's also much easier to get alignment with sales. Our alignment point is around pipeline. Sometimes I hear people say that it's good to have healthy tension between sales and marketing, but I completely disagree with that statement. It's very easy that that healthy tension quickly leads to misunderstandings and creates negative tensions. So if we have any CEOs here on the call, I can highly recommend to make sure that you have outstanding alignments between your head of marketing and your head of sales. Again, my job every day is really to make sure that our marketing is 100% aligned with sales and that we execute at the same pace all the time. The big fear I have at night is really that marketing would ever miss a B tier. The last thing I will ever do is to let our sales organization down. In the early days, I spent every Monday morning with our hstrs at that time to align our marketing programs with their efforts every week. Today, you know, we're almost 300 people in marketing and or sales organization so but we still have the same alignment. I can't meet with all of them, you know, every Monday morning, but I do meet with them often. So to succeed as a marketer you have to have a deep understanding and respect for the craft of sales. Noting is more important than the other. The only thing that is important is really to fly as close as the blue angels as we can at every step of your journey. So in summary, if I look back at the things we did really well at Snowflake in that 0 to 100 million phase, the execution of these five pillars really had tremendous impact on our speed and our growth and I think they're really relevant to any company. So make sure that you really invest in your positioning early on and that you're super consistent with your positioning. Also put customers at the forefront of all your marketing and really find a way to keep that close pulse on your customers needs all the time. This week, Monday, Tuesday, we had our annual customer advisory board and there's just nothing more inspiring as well to hear from your customers. And again, don't really think about scale from the beginning. Things like when you're building out your marketing stack, make sure that that can send scale with you so you don't have to stop during the journey because then you're going to waste time. And again, be bold. Be as bold as you dare to be. And again, getting to 100 million, it really takes a lot of focused execution clearly. But most importantly, it really takes outstanding teamwork and trust and alignment across all your functions in your company. So thank you for joining me today. I would now like to open up for any questions.

Yeah Denise, we already have several coming in. Thanks and perfect. We will just get things kicked off. I'm seeing a bunch of comments of people really loving the customers. Interesting focused Denise that's resonating with a lot of people, the loyalty of customers. First question that's come in, how much of your budget is put into customer marketing and marketing to existing customers? Snowflake has an incredible 160% net retention rate.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Actually in terms of net retention rates, our focus on the marketing is really, it's all about what we call capacity one, it's basically a landing new customer. If you look at the attribution and where we can measure our impact most is really on new business. And then when we land those customers, there are a lot of other resources that are kicking in a snowflake in our professional services team. They're doing an amazing job here. Also our partners as well. Our partners are a big component of that group growth and that retention rate. We clearly do a lot of upsell programs and of course marketing new workloads and use cases to our customers. But it's just harder to measure exactly our impact here. In the past in the early days we were basically only marketing to the practitioners. So those people on the data team on it bi in the last year we've really expanded our Presence across enterprise. So we're marketing out to the line of business, we're marketing to C level. So that's the type of programs we're now doing within existing accounts is expanding right on the. To the business side. It's about talking more about the business outcomes of using Snowflake. So that's where a lot of investment goes. But most of those programs are exactly relevant to our prospects as well. So we basically blend a lot of our prospects and customer program. We have a big user conference coming up in June and there's this back and forth. Is this a prospect event, is it a customer event? But it's really both. I can't give an exact dollar amount of that. Clearly things like a conference would of course be a customer event, but again, I would say 80% of our marketing budget goes into building new business. It goes into landing new accounts. Building the pipeline. When I talk about the pipeline, I talk about what we call on our capacity. One pipeline. That's what we're staring at every day.

Awesome. A few questions coming in from one from Ray and Max about how you incentivize customers or if you do incentivize customers for helping with advocacy pieces so to getting them to be involved in office hours just being advocates for you. Can you share a little bit more about that and if you do offer any incentives.

Yeah, great question. Yeah, we do actually have incentives. We don't have it. I think in the past we actually didn't have it on. On our website we're calling it the customer voice, you know, the voice of the customer program. Something. I don't remember the exact name now, but there is an incentive and, but we're not using any automation platform for that. We felt that was something that is just too much of a big effort to implement. But we give them things like it's mostly, you know, either snowflake swag or it's, you know, it's the Bose headsets and the app and the iPads and you know, all the things that you're probably, you know, giving. Giving as well. We have a lot of incentive for what we call our Data Heroes program, which is for our practitioners in our community. That's more sort of an automated program where they're getting points and they're getting different incentives for participating in our, in our community. But what we've seen as well is that these people, they become famous right when they start doing all these testimonies as well. So a lot of people are building their personal brands just like we see in the Whole marketing industry. Right. There are a lot of different marketers that are participating in all this in our webinars for all the different marketing platforms. Right. They're building their brands through this. That's kind of more what we're focused on. We're focused more on what's really in it for the customer. Either they might have a new program that they want to announce to the world or again, often it's really personal reasons. Right. They are so proud of what they're doing. A lot of these people get promotions. Right. You know, after they've implemented Snowflake because everything is going so much better. And that's that you're going to see that of course, with your customers as well. Right. That the impact they're having is something they want to make a big deal out of us.

Now you're getting a little army of Snowflake influencers.

Yeah. But I say that Office hour program is something I have never done before. And that one has just been, has had a huge impact. Right. And those one to one reference calls, they're just so time consuming and you annoy customers. You have to ask sales reps and all those sort of things. So now every time someone wants to talk to reference, we say, hey, we have the office hour with so and so next week at town. You can ask any question. It's like it's non scripted, full, completely authentic conversation. Cool.

Next question from Ben. Should sales and marketing be run by the same person in order to get the alignment?

I don't think really that's necessary, to be honest. You know, I was, I almost see myself working for Chris Dingenan. Right. I mean our serial. I work for him in a way. So I don't think that necessary. I think it's very much of a mindset. And when I grew up in the marketing in the 90s, at that time sales was king. Right. It was very hard to measure the impact, direct measure of marketing on your pipeline and those, you know, things. So everything it did right was really all about for sales. It was very perception based at that time. Right. It was all about their perception of marketing. I think I grew up at the time when sales was king and I still kind of have that hat with me. I think that has actually served me well in my career in marketing because if you can't deliver what the sales organization need, you're just not going to succeed. And sometimes, you know, meet folks who think that, oh, even marketing is a thing now, especially in SaaS. Right. Of course we are, we're having so much more impact on the whole journey. But for Snowflake, it's still a salesperson who runs the deal. Right. And we're just as important. Right. Both of us. So I don't think that's necessary. But you don't want to work for a leader who wants to create that kind of tension. Right? Because I see that out there too. Some leaders want to have tension between folks. Right. They want to have some sort of, you know, you know, fight internally. Right. That that doesn't work. And we have never, ever had that at Snowflake. It's all about how are we as aligned on a core set of goals, you know, as possible, and just run as fast as we can towards those together. So, yeah, I would. I was super happy, you know, working for CRO too, and again, I see myself working for him. But today, both our CRO and I, we reporting to our CEO.

Got it. We have so many questions coming in, Denise, but we have a lot of people that are in this room too. So if you do have a question for Denise and want to jump in and ask her directly, feel free to unmute yourself. You can raise your hand. Amelia is in here with me too, and we can help manage that with everyone. So feel free to jump in. Or we can continue on with questions that people are chatting through.

Good morning. Denise Skpander with Lumen Digital Ventures. Fantastic presentation. Thank you. One thing that you talked about when you talked about the pillars was around positioning. That's your first one. And the consistency piece is where most startups probably have the difficult task of maintaining it. What's your suggestion to a startup that's. That's joining a crowded field? Because I think the consistency is easier if you are unique. But what would be some key nuggets that you could give us that helps somebody define a little bit of differentiation in a crowded field?

Yeah. One thing for sure, what I really liked, and I need to give a shout out to the Zoom folks at Zoom Marketing. It's not a Zoom video company, but they're called Zoom Marketing was. Again, they just have a very unique process that I think everyone should take a look at. When I came into Snowflake, right. My first goal, or task, if you will, that I was asked to do was to define what the positioning of the company is. And there were so many different views on that. Right. Everyone have a question opinion on these things. And that's really hard when you come in as a cmo. Right. Because again, what do I know? You know, I'm not necessarily the expert in this, you know, industry as well. And in most cases, right, the loudest voice wins when it comes to positioning, right. Either it's a CEO or a founder or someone else, right, who has the loudest, you know, voice. And that might not necessarily be the right, you know, decision. So I think the most important thing is here, of course you have all those discussions, right? You will have a set of maybe four or five great options. You need to talk to your customers, get input from those. But again, the thing is with customers, they already know you, right? They already know you. And it's all about who are the thousands and thousands of organizations that you are going to sell to next, right? How are you relevant to them? And that's what I really like about this testing with focus groups. And what we did, we were sitting behind glass. Four different focus groups, two different cities, different type of audiences that we were targeting as a company. And we were testing all these different positioning statements with them and a lot of other things as well, more than just, you know, positioning. But at the end, you know, we, we got the winner and it was really through a data driven approach. And when you hear the data warehouse built for the cloud sounds really, really in a simple. Right. But that's not, that's not, that wasn't kind of on, on, on, on the whiteboard, you know, at the beginning. And words matters, the words you use in a matters and prospects really like the fact that we were so straightforward, you know, built for the cloud. They got that language, data warehousing, they could understand that, you know, category. I think that that's the key thing, right? You can't, don't invent a category that is going to take a too long time to explain. If your salespeople are going to have to get spent 30 minutes just trying to explain this new category you're creating. They won't even get to talking about what you, what you, what you're actually going to, doing, right? So you need, you need to develop position positioning that where people can really frame you into something. But then of course you need to have a unique hill, right, that is relevant within that, within that category as well. I hope that helps. But consistency, very young consistency, right? I can't, I can't stop talking about that because I think I've done those mistakes right? Where you know, I think everyone here is maybe being the same situation where the CEO or someone comes in three months later, you know, I heard this for this customer yesterday, you know, we should do this right? And then you change and you just got going and in the end no one understands who you are. And consistency also creates trust. Right? And trust is something you really need. So I could almost argue that it's more important than execute on consistency, than being 100% right.

Thanks, Sk. Anyone else have questions they want to dive in with? This is Carrie Liu.

Hi, Denise, how are you? Hey, how are you?

Good.

I have a question for you because.

One of the things I admire about you is your, like, endurance and stick to it. Iveness, like right now, Snowflake has been so successful and everything is like unicorns and roses. But like, you've been through hard times in startups as well. Can you tell us a little bit more about, like, sticking with it or what? Like, how you came through the hard.

Points to get to the success?

Like, not just at Snowflake, but, you know, there's been lots of downs since the 90s.

Yeah, there have been downs, but you know what? If I look back, I embrace the downs. The downs have been the absolute best thing of my entire career. Right. You only learn through the downs. And I could say that, I can say it's. Maybe I shouldn't be so honest about it, but Snowflake has definitely been the easiest, you know, marketing job I've ever had because we clearly had, we have, we have an amazing, you know, product too. Right. And all companies I work for have had amazing, you know, products, but they've been, you know, always a curveball, you know, sent your way. And we're all going to be, you know, Santos, you know, you know, curveballs, right? You know, through, through the journey that is going to, that is going to put you off, but it's all about how you're handling those, you know, curveballs and getting back on track again and getting back on the journey and start, you know, climbing that hill. So I think anytime something is hard, again, you know, say thank you for, for that, you know, experience was. That's really where you, where you learn through your career as well. Say that to my team members sometimes when something happened to them that they didn't kind of maybe enjoy. So much to say, but congratulations, right? You know, finally, finally you are going through something, you know, hard. So again, again, I just have to look at the embrace, embrace those situations and that's, that's when you learn again, right? When the going gets tough, right? The tough gets tough, gets going. Right. That's the only, only option. I guess it's also how you're. As a personality, you have to, you never want to lose Right. That's the type of mentality you need to have.

Denise, I'll jump in with one from Anders that's in here with us. They're asking with regard to positioning, are you adjusting anything over time, or would you say it's all about getting it right from the get go?

No, I think, again, it could come to a point where you actually have grown out of the category in the way we did at Snowflake. Right. I mean, the Snowflake platform have, of course, grown so much through the years. So we came to a point where data warehousing was just one workload of our platform and we had to expand because the scope of what we do is so, so much bigger. But I think it's dangerous to have a too big scope from the beginning was. First of all, you're not really going to come across as. As credible. What if Snowflake back in 2016 went out and talked about, you know, we're the data cloud company and the people would just, you know, laugh at that. Right. You know, at that time, and it wouldn't even be some category they would understand. You know, now we have a much, much bigger, you know, marketing machine and we have so much more attention, so we can really get people to understand, you know, what the data cloud is really, you know, all about. Right. You know, people want to listen to your narrative, but when you're a startup, right, no one has really time to listen to your narrative. So you need to kind of, again, create a category that people understand. But again, you will evolve. You will definitely evolve over your time in terms of your category. Again, when you conquer that hill, then you're going to see the next hill, right? I mean, that's what it is. The first definition is the first hill, and then you climb that. And again, then you climb up through the rest of the mountain.

Yeah, always another one.

And then another one and another one. Yeah.

Anyone else want to jump in with a question? Okay, we have plenty more coming through the chat. This is an in. Oh, go ahead.

Can I take one more? Denise, Execution by the operations and the delivery team is another crucial aspect of maintaining that customer satisfaction in your pillars. You don't talk about it, but you do mention a little bit about scaling and being built to scale, which I'm assuming takes. But you're taking the delivery and execution into that category. Possibly. But as a marketing leader, did you have influence in how the execution was getting done and the feedback from the customers back into sales and marketing?

Yeah, absolutely. I should say that, you know, when I joined Snowflake. We were eight people on the marketing team. Right. So. So I was, of course, you know, talking to. To customer all the time, you know, myself, you know, I was the one out there at the registration, you know, desk, you know, at all our events, you know, in the. In the early days and, you know, printing the name tags and all those sort of things. Right. I mean, that's what you got to do in the early days. And you need to be able to kind of see scale from that clearly as well. But it's just, I mean, it's also so ingrained in our values, and our values really guides us through our execution. And our number one value is putting the customer first. And I think a lot of companies say that, yeah, of course we're putting the customer first. But then somehow you lose it right. After a while and you become inwards focused and focusing on all things going on internally. People always come around to that. Right. And question things all the time. Is this the right thing to do for the customer? And there's been situation where we've had to make decisions that haven't been good for us. You know, short term, it could be something where we had to, you know, take a hit in revenue and those sort of things because it was the right thing to do for the customer. And we've always, again, lived by that mantra. And I think that's also why we're seeing the success we have today. We track our NPS score constantly. We have an NPS score of 71. I can highly recommend everyone to get that customer engagement survey activated early on, so you can really measure your growth in all those scores. So we look at every single component of the journey our customers have with Snowflake, and we track every single thing. And if anything, you know, would kind of, you know, fall. Right. It's really all hands on deck to kind of investigate what is going on and address that. So we just never, ever satisfied, you know, we are a culture or where complacency kind of can't happen. It's sort of constantly really about what's the next thing and what is the next most important thing for our customers. Hope that answered the question.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah.

And I think Anders had a similar question, so that was good to talk about the feedback stuff. Okay, I have another one for you, Denise. What marketing activity would have the most impact if you stopped it right now?

Yeah, definitely. Customers, if we took away, come back. I think again, for. I think, as I said, I could argue that I think our whole brand Awareness has really been built through the word of mouth of our customers. Right. And I often talk to customers and they say like, hey, I have done 100 backdoor references for you this year. That's a one person who talked to 100 people in a year. And this was a very senior person at a very big bank as an example. So if you can really again get those customers really activated and passionate and inspired to talk about you, that's great. And find all those values to do that, everything. Again, every marketing program we put out there always need to include a customer at any time. So if we took away customer advocacy, that will have a big, big impact. We would lose thousands and thousands of marketers essentially, you know, on a marketing team. And that thing around customer advocacy, you know, we've all heard about it, you know, we, there's nothing new new about it, right. What's whatsoever, but it's really about how you execute, you know, on that. And I think it was just instrumental in the beginning to like it's never, ever, ever give up on that. Right. And we had, you know, a dedicated who just constantly were trying to find ways what work she knows exactly. Okay, this customer is okay doing this, but this one is sometimes really finding in those early days what's going to work. And often I meet startups and they have great customers and they are willing to talk, but I don't see them anywhere. They don't do anything with that. So that's focus on that as quick as you can. As soon as you have customers, right. Get those in a front and center.

Awesome. Yeah, a lot of people were having had questions for you about early stage stuff. So I think those tips are super helpful. A specific one for early stage. Any tips for building the budget spent on building your brand at an early stage?

Yeah, and I can say we spend less than a percent of our budget on any traditional advertising still today. And I can show share the numbers directly, you know, with you, but those billboards we did in the early days, we had really maximum two at any, any time. But we use them sort of as a platform to just kind of amplify, you know, that, that the message. It probably looked like we had more. You know, I often bought like remnant billboards, right. So you know, you need to have your connections with, you know, outfront and Clear Channel and those guys. Right. And then I got some, you know, remnant deals suddenly, you know, the biggest boards in San Francisco for, you know, much, much less. And that kind of made us look, you know, bigger.

Right.

Because one thing you want to do as well is to really, what, try to look much bigger than you, than you are. Right. So when I got in and we had done 3 million in ARR when I joined and the goal, that was, okay, we need to act like $100 million company. Right. Because we were asking companies to put their most valuable assets right in Snowflake. Their data, it's really their baby. You know, we're asking them, us to take care of. So credibility and trust was very important. So we focused a lot on just, again, looking kind of, you know, maybe bigger than we are. And the way we did that was really through having those customers at the front and center and then doing some of this, you know, more splashier things like the billboards. But again, from a body standpoint, that was maybe about maximum 70, 80,000amonth, you know, back in those days, but well worth it even just from a hiring standpoint. Content creation, we all know that as well, right. I mean, it's really about trying to. And I think those companies do content creation really well. That's even when kind of the CEO kind of mandates everyone to, you need to participate in the content engine. Right. But there's no way one content person is going to really create all that content that you need. In the early days. So we of course got to know our CEO was involved with content creation. Engineers, product people, you know, everyone. Right. So my previous company was Apigee. They were amazing at that. Right. I mean, it was also the CEO who kind of really drove everyone. Right. You all need to produce X number of content pieces, you know, per month. Right. So that, that's if you have any, if they're any CEOs here as well, really, you know, go in and support those content creation efforts. For sure.

Got it. The question on the billboards that we have from Grace, how did you measure attribution or how do you measure attribution for offline marketing tactics like the billboards that you showed?

Yeah. And as mentioned before, they're actually very. They are very hard to measure. And I got that question, you know, all the time. And the answer to that question was really on that hiring side. Right. Everyone, let's say if we sat with 20 people in our weekly onboarding sessions back in Those days there, 2016, 2017, more than half said that they learned about Snowflake from those billboards. So again, just from a hiring standpoint, they were just so important to us. And then we more looked at, of course, you know, what's the engagement around this? I mean, you know, Those billboards were shared on all different social media networks. And we just measured kind of the engagement and looking at kind of how, how people engaged with that. But there's no. And I've been looking at that if there are any kind of effective survey tools or anything like that, but I haven't been able to find anything. We do measure our share of voice continuously, but share voice, right, is really a matter of looking at all the mentions of you right online and compared and we compare that to our closest competing products, but that's again, there's no direct kind of link from those billboards.

We have a few more minutes with Denise and a few more final questions, but does anyone have one that they want to ask her? Live here, Feel free to unmute yourself. Make sure we give everyone a chance for that. Denise, a follow up question on your customer evangelist from Michael. Should the office hours be run exclusively by evangelists or do you also want staff present?

There is a staff present just in the beginning to kind of just welcome, right? I mean, the way you did it today, Taylor, right? I know you with the welcome. Right. So there's someone there, of course, to make sure that everything is kind of, you know, working, but it's more someone just making an introduction and then this. For those of the office hours, these customers start a little bit talking about kind of their background. No slides, nothing like that really. Just how long they've been using Snowflake, how they implemented, you know, Snowflake, you know, what they're using Snowflake for, just like that. And then they just jump into questions. And it's also the fact when everyone who attends those calls, when they see like, wow, there are so many other people in here as well. Right. You know, I've got to look into this, right? You know, I'm not the only one, you know, you know, buying Snowflake at this time. Right. So that also kind of helps a bit as well. So. And also the questions that most prospects have on those calls are the same questions as, you know, most of the others have on the call as well.

Someone has a question regarding early stage again. So this is from Linda and another question from Derek. Looking back on Snowflake starting up when you were pre revenue, how did you secure your first 10 customers?

Yeah, I came after the first 10 customers and I think this experience. Great podcast. It's called the Great Podcast. And they did an interview with Chris Dangan, our CRO recently. I can highly recommend you to listen to that one if you want to hear about that whole Story because he was our CRO. He was the first sales rep, you know, of. Of our company. And that was, I mean a grind, right? He was, I mean do. He makes. He made the phone calls.

He.

He talks about spamming, right. He was, he was selling emails everywhere. He did his own marketing. He didn't have a website. It was really him and a bunch of engineers in the company and some people refer to him as the fourth founder as well in over company because he was so instrumental because he was also that voice. Right. Of the customer. Every week he summarized the report on. I've Talked, I've made 10 meetings this week. This is a feedback and I'm getting from all these, all these customers. So it was just for him it was one guy with a phone and a laptop, right. Sending emails on his own. No website, making tons of calls. It was just activity, activity. And our first customer, their accordance media. They are of course so grateful in a form for them. And again, that's what it is. It was just a lot of hard work from Chris Dana. And today, you know, he runs an organization with, you know, over a thousand people and he's done, he's been, he's been done an incredible job just scaling from a one person with a phone and a laptop spamming folks to again running, you know, one of the fastest growing companies in the world. And grief and passion. Right. He had so much passion for what he was doing as well. Yeah.

You have to at that point, right. When you're.

Yeah.

When you're just reaching out to anyone and everyone. Denise, want to thank you so much for your time. I have one final question for you. This one's from Tyler asking did Snowflake use quant marketing tools like cluster analysis and conjoint to choose. Choose its positioning? If yes, how did they complement more qualitative types of research?

That's a great question. I think. I think again, some, you know, companies do like surveys and things like that, right. To, to, to test positioning. But the way, you know, we did it together with Zoom Marketing is really in focus groups and that's what the B2C. Right. That's what, you know, the, you know, the Procter and Gambles are doing. Right. That's what they do. Right. That's how they test things in real, you know, with, with real people. Right. So in these focus groups they were about 15. 15 people. Right. In each, you know, group and with a survey. Right. I think it's so easy for people cannot completely maybe, you know, understand what you're trying to Achieve and they just, you know, click a box. But in this case, you get it. You just get so much more feedback, you know, back from this, you know, prospects and doing it in the kind of B2C style in focus groups. And, and we got, we got, we got so much more than just the positioning. We got feedback on everything from, you know, our core differentiation to, to, to our tagline to. Yeah, it was very eye opening to me as a marketer, the type of feedback we got through that. And yeah, so I would recommend more doing it the. More in a more way in like in a focus group format than sending out surveys.

We have a follow up question that I lied to Denise. So follow up question to that were how big were your. How big were you when you did those focus groups? So how big were you revenue wise?

No revenue. I mean, yeah, there was, there were some ARR. There was, there was some ARR coming in. I don't think they were hardly any revenue at that point. Again, we were at that. I think we were at 3. 3. We don't like 3 million in ARR or something like that. So it was, it was, it was early. We still had, we had customers. We maybe had, you know, 40 customers or so at that time, but it was still in the early days.

So another great tip for all those early stage questions that we got earlier as well. Well, Denise, thank you so much for your time and everyone, thank you so much for your incredible questions. I know we couldn't get to quite all of them. Denise, we'll just have to have you back at something else to do all these questions. But thank you again so much for all your time. We have a full schedule of sessions the rest of the day, so everyone please check out the agenda and join us for some other great content and we'll see you then. Thanks again, Denise.

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. Bye bye. Bye.