The Dashboard Is Dead: What Snowflake's CMO Does Instead
Snowflake's CMO replaced dashboards with AI agents that answer marketing questions in natural language, cutting cost per opportunity by 30%. The shift required clean data, a new hiring focus on GTM engineers, and cultural changes like weekly AI challenges across a 700-person team.
Chapters
You don't really log into a dashboard when you wake up in the morning.
I mean, of course I did that, um, in the past. The thing is, when you look at the dashboard, it just creates more questions, right? You look at the dashboard, you wanna understand, okay, why, why did the pipeline go up in this, you know, territory? And most times, right, I would have to ping someone. I have to Slack someone, hey, can you look into this? I'm just really curious to understand what happened here. Or I would call someone, or you would have meetings about the dashboards where you sit with the sales team having meetings, interpreting the dashboards. They're just talking Just talking about the time spent discussing the data, really what's behind the data. So today, I mean, we of course use a lot of our own technology at Snowflake, but now I can interrogate the data, right? I can understand again, you know, okay, why did the pipeline go up in US West, you know, for instance, and what are the projections, you know, for the next, you know, quarter, those things. So I can, nobody gets any Slack messages from me anymore, right? It's quiet because I can get, you know, I can get all the answers to my questions now that I couldn't get before. That's why I'm saying that the dashboard is dead. I don't think it's fully dead yet, but again, that ability to really understand the why and get, you know, recommendations in real time. I mean, it's—
Right. Because you can just talk to your data now in a native language.
Yeah.
You can just talk to your data.
Yeah.
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Welcome back, Denise. I'm so excited you're back at Saastr. I know last year we had Sreethar and that was really fun on our closing day, but I'm glad to have you back at Saastr. So welcome back.
So excited to be here. Great to meet you again.
Yes.
Love hanging out with the faster community.
Yeah, I wanted to have sort of like a difference in marketing here kind of with these sessions back to back, right? We were just talking about Vibe Coding and marketing and how they deploy literally on, you know, anybody at the company can help deploy features at Lovable. And Snowflake is at such an incredible scale that I wanted to give people like a sense of what it's like to deploy agents at a company that has more like compliance and data and security, but you're still finding a way to push through and get it done. Yeah, yeah. So one of the things, it's just funny, we were just saying backstage, like, you don't even know the number of agents that you have anymore. Can you give folks a little bit of context of what you do have going on in marketing that's agent tech, just from a high level?
Yeah, I mean, again, it differs across, you know, all the different, you know, functions, obviously. And we have this vision, of course, it's a very bold vision, and everyone might have the same vision, but it's that we wanna become the most AI-assisted marketing team in B2B, essentially. So that's kind of what everyone is inspired, you know, by. And it's very much about also kind of getting everyone on board, you know, with you, right? As a team.
I mean— You have way more people to get on board.
Yeah, I think a year ago there were more people maybe resisting, maybe even a little bit scared, right? We saw some data around that, certain functions, right? A lot of people were concerned about their jobs. I think this year is completely different. We're seeing everyone really leaning in. Everyone is kind of motivated about being part of the transformation, you know, journey. And we just invest a lot in learning and development and a lot of peer learning, you know, across the team as well. So, again, examples, I mean, I just got some recent, you know, data. Of course, one of our big spends is around media, you know, buy and—
Yeah.
And digital display ads, you know, all of that, right? And, in the past, it's been very quite fragmented. You have all these different channels with its own analytics.
Yeah.
And what we've been able to do now, bringing all this together, is really looking at, again, not just what happened.
Yeah.
But really what, what, what, why is it happening?
Yeah.
Giving, you know, real-time recommendations we can optimize in our spend. And that's where we're seeing now 30%.
Wow.
So far, I mean, we hope to open, you know, you just optimization, you know, happens on a daily basis.
It's very discouraging.
Yeah, but just looking back in the last, you know, 6 months, we've been able to lower our costs per opportunity with 30%. So, that's where we're seeing real return on investments.
That is a real return.
Yeah.
The other thing I wanted to ask you, 'cause it's such a contrast too from like, okay, I just showed folks like our AIVP marketing dashboard, but I know you've said like on our prep call and stuff, you don't really log into a dashboard when you wake up in the morning.
No, I mean, I'm like, that's so scary. Yeah, I mean, Of course I did that in the past. The thing is, when you look at the dashboard, it just creates more questions, right? You look at the dashboard, you wanna understand, okay, why, why did the pipeline go up in this, you know, territory? And most times, right, I would have to ping someone. I have to Slack someone, hey, can you look into this? I'm just really curious to understand what happened here. Or I would call someone, or you would have meetings about the dashboards where you sit with the sales team having meetings, interpreting the dashboard.
They're just talking about it.
Just talking about the time spent to discuss using the data really, what's behind the data. So today, I mean, we of course use a lot of our own technology at Snowflake, but now, right, I can able have, I can interrogate the data, right? I can understand again, you know, okay, why did the pipeline go up in US West, you know, for instance? And what are the projections, you know, for the next, you know, quarter, those things. Yeah. So I can, nobody gets any Slack messages from me anymore, right? It's quiet because I can get, you know, I can get all the answers to my questions now that I couldn't get before. That's why I'm saying that the dashboard is dead. I don't think it's fully dead yet, but again, that ability to really understand the why and get, you know, recommendations in real time. I mean, it's—
Right.
Because you can just talk to your data now in a native language.
Yeah.
You can just talk to your data.
Yeah.
And it's, again, I mean, this time is just the best time in history to be in marketing. I mean, marketing has always been about, okay, the one who's the most relevant wins, right? Was relevant to the customer. And it's also about the timing, right? Of that, for that customer. And now you have all the tools to be—
100%.
Relevant at an individual, you know, level at the right time. So it's magic.
Yeah, it is pretty magical. What are, what are some of the things on your Non dashboard that you see now that you maybe would've had to wait weeks for beforehand?
Yeah, I mean, even things beyond just, I mean, pipeline metrics, of course, is super important. At Snowflake, marketing owns the new business pipeline, right? So that's what I would be, that's what I'm accountable for.
Yeah.
But everything else around, you know, our business, everything going on, I mean, the marketing organization, we have about 700 people in marketing. We also have our whole customer training, partner enablement, sales enablement team in marketing as well. Just understanding for me in the morning, what's the health of our organization? Has someone, how many—
You're asking it for internal.
Yes, exactly. Who joined Snowflake Marketing in the past week? Or I mean, who has left? Why did they leave, right? Do we have an attrition issue, you know, or not?
Wow.
Even things like, I mean, traveling expenses. I can see if someone has, I hate looking at those things, that feels more professional, but I can even see in the morning, right? I get my morning brief, my morning warning skill coming in and I can say, well, these 5 people, they had booked too expensive flight tickets. It's actually quite expensive travel right now. But things like that, I get intelligence not just around kind of the business, but the health of our organization and et cetera.
So I wanna ask you two parts to that question 'cause it's a little funny you mention expenses, but it's actually so important when you have a bigger org like Snowflake is, right? Of like, okay, being able to access, like that's something that maybe only your finance team previously had.
Yeah.
But now you can see almost, probably almost anything across Snowflake and you can just ask your data the question of, hey, what's going on with XYZ person or new person? And it's kind of crazy to see that unlock. And then related to that, a bunch folks have been asking our presenters this week is how good does your data have to be to get the agents deployed?
Yeah, I mean, absolute essential, right? I mean, you know how it is, if you have bad data, you're gonna make bad decisions. If you have bad data and AI, you're gonna make bad decisions faster and at scale, right? So the consequences of bad data when it comes to AI is even— 100%.
Is even worse.
'Cause it just compounds.
Exactly. I mean, again, I mean, AI runs, you know, on data. There's nothing more important to have your data estate, you know, in order. And also having that collaboration with your own data team or your, maybe it's your, you know, IT organization, whoever runs data in the organization. But that partnership is so important 'cause again, in the past, right, we did very sort of isolated look at marketing data. The opportunity now is to be able to combine that data with the rest of all data in your organization, all knowledge, all intelligence in your organization. That's really where the, um, the impact comes from.
And how much has now accessing this data impacted how you work with like marketing or not marketing with like sales and then product?
Yeah, I mean, in the past there was so much, I think, I don't know how many marketers and how many people in sales we have here, right? But think about the time you spend, right, agreeing to the data. Hey, this is what my data tells me.
But mine says something else.
Yes, the alignment, right? Sales would say, well, this is my dashboard and my data. This is how I interpreted this.
Yeah.
That's important that there's one source, you know, of truth for your organization. That also saves you so much time.
100%. Yeah, I don't tell you the amount of times I'd be like, well, you know, I think this campaign, it says it's working. The sales team would be like, well, we didn't get enough, you know, close one revenue from it, or it doesn't count, or I brought in that deal. And like the data will just tell you now, like, where the deal was sourced from, who touched it, what happened, what are the actions they took on the website. Like, not only do the data, does the data know, but the agents know too. Like, everything ties all back together. And I mean, I haven't seen my agents duke it out yet amongst each other with the data because they, they're always falling back to what they know to be true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And also, right, you look at, of course, I mean, we all have some sort of funnel view, right? We have, of course, our top of the funnel engagement targets, we have conversions, we have, you know, meetings, we have opportunities. And today also in real time, just seeing exactly right, what, what, what is happening across the funnel and, uh, being able to address things in real time, right? Everyone in marketing have been that last couple weeks in the quarter where you're like, we don't have enough pipeline, right?
Right.
It's too late. It is way too late for marketing to do anything that quarter. So that ability to really project, knowing, okay, you know, how is our, you know, Q3 pipeline look like? How is Q4, right? Those are the things we wanna be able to impact, not trying to fix something broken in, in the core.
Right. Because now you can get a lot more ahead of it.
Yes.
That you can make better decisions. And now that you have so many agents in marketing, like how, how you guys are a big org, like now how quickly do you guys move now when you see that something bad is on the horizon?
Yeah, in terms of—
In terms of like if you see the data.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, very much, very much real time every day. I mean, everyone have their core metrics, especially when it comes to our pipeline, we have very clear targets for every single, you know, stage.
Exactly.
And yeah, we can see in real time and it's also that ability to reallocate investments, right? Because in the past you only knew in, at the end of a campaign, right?
Right, yeah, typically.
Yes, you wanna be able to just adjust in real time.
Wow, that's crazy. Yeah, and then one thing I wanna, I know you guys have been big on like, like you said, like investing in brand and like data and then your team, like how much has that changed now with the amount of data that you have and with all the agents and AI that you guys are running?
Yeah, I mean, again, I mean, budgets are not growing exactly, right? I mean, it's all about, I think we are, have, you know, 40, 50% growth we need to deliver on this year, but it's not like we, we, we're not getting more resources.
Right.
You know, to, to do that.
You might be getting less.
Yeah.
And I know, exactly. I think also, I mean, I think for next year, I don't think anyone is gonna come back and say, I'm gonna need more headcount for this. They're just gonna look at you and like, you, you, you don't understand.
Sounds crazy.
Where we are today, right? So I think everyone realized what's, what's coming and that, Yeah, that's what drives people to—
Yeah.
To optimize more.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I know you have, so you've got a lot of agents deployed across the marketing org. Is there one that you find is like the most valuable maybe for you? Or then maybe if you have a different answer for your team that you feel like has really identified your process at such a large scale?
Yeah. I mean, for me it's more like, and I can get it today, tonight, right? Today I get, you know, the brief, you know, for tomorrow. I can see everything going on. I can get recommendations for how to prep for things. Just things like, again, going into a customer meeting, that used to take a lot of time for sales organizations, others prepare for that, right? Okay, Denise is gonna meet the customer, right? It's gonna take, they could spend, you know, hours on, on prep.
Yeah, 'cause you gotta talk to all the different parties. You gotta, you know, listen to all the call recordings and now you're like, well, the AI just summarized everything that happened and everything that we should be doing.
Yeah, just getting that full, full brief.
Yeah.
For those, you know, customer, you know, conversations, you're clearly more intelligent when you go into those Conversations, things like preparing all the presentations, right, for a customer meeting, the time that used to take to custom that, now you can create complete, you know, custom presentation depending exactly on that customer's, what they care about. That's pretty, pretty huge time saver. It is, yeah.
Yeah.
One thing I wanna get your like kind of unique perspective on is you guys have a, obviously you have a big go-to-market team at Scale. They're creating a lot of data because you are Snowflake. Like, how do you manage that now with all the humans entering data, but then all their also agents and their workflows, like compounding amounts of data that's just going back all into Snowflake?
No, exactly, exactly. I mean, it's a loop, right?
It's a loop, yeah.
Yeah, exactly. But also for us, I mean, we also have a centralized sort of AI engineering team, which is also very important to understand, okay, what are, again, how, what are these agents doing that we are, we, we have developed, right? I mean, are we compliant? Is our data safe? Are these agents having access, you know, to the right, you know, right information? So there's a lot of, for us, right, there's a lot at stake if something goes wrong, if we send out—
Yeah.
Wrong communication to customers or something like that. So we of course have to invest more in what we call like the control plane, right? Yes. In terms of what these agents are doing. And I think, If you're a bigger company now, well, maybe you can make, of course, bigger investments. If you're a smaller company, you can clearly move faster.
You can take a little more risk.
Exactly, you can take more risks. And also in a larger B2B organization, there's so many channels that you have, right? I mean, just the number of channels you have from a digital media buy standpoint to events. And in terms of events, we're just seeing the demand for events, all those in-person experiences, it's going off the roof right now. So I think 10 years ago, right, we all said, well, events are dying and think about this marketing team spending any time on events, that's bad, it's all digital.
Right, it's a waste of money.
That's exactly, we're seeing now again that people really craving those in-person experiences, really coming out, really learning from others at the moment.
Yeah, you brought up something interesting, which is that, you know, when, 'cause your data compounds so much, right? You have humans building with agents and all the data flowing back together, like, because you guys need to be so compliant, like, is there, how do you, how do you manage that now? It's like, do you have, do you still have like a human that presses go at the end of the day, or how are your agents able to govern that?
Yeah, and exactly right. I mean, we are first, I mean, look at last year, you know, everyone did experiments. We, you know, we got some efficiencies. Today, again, most of us have been able to automate, quite complex, you know, workflows. Another example for us is that most of our revenue comes from expansion within our existing accounts, and we're really then increasing consumption by activating a new use case.
Yep.
So just looking at an account and like, okay, where do we start? What use case should we promote or market or sell to which account? That workflow, which it was very time-consuming.
Yeah.
That's the workflow we've been able to fully automate. But what we haven't done yet is of course the full activation part, right? The kind of, can again, the campaign activate by itself? Yeah, can do it itself. Certain parts within our digital media investments, not there. So I think that's why we're seeing, we're seeing more that, you know, GTM engineer function, you know, coming in. And that's, that's kind of a function that we are expanding to really help with that component.
Yeah. And you mentioned GTM engineer is something you're hiring for now. Yeah. How much has your hiring changed from like the last time Snowflake was here at Saastr?
Yeah, I know that is again, like I think the GTM engineer function has clearly is, that's the one we're hiring for. Business analysts, not so much anymore. So there's certain kind of functions like, let's say our content marketing team, they're able to do of course so significantly more than they did in the past. On their own. Yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah. So, it won't be a function that we will sort of invest more in, in terms of, you know, headcounts.
Yeah.
We're seeing functions like product marketing, right? We have always wanted product marketing to spend more time with customers. They haven't had time, right? The product marketers have a wealth of information.
Yep.
They're amazing in front of customers. They just haven't had time for that.
Yep.
And now they're getting that time, you know, freed up. Bringing it back. Really spend time with more real high-value customer interactions that they couldn't do before.
Which leads me to a related question that I think a lot of folks are struggling with now, which is you've mentioned, so now product marketing has spent a lot more time with customers. How do you think about this whole debate of like FDE versus SE versus product marketer? Like how are you guys tackling that when folks are like, hey, I need a lot of help to get, you know, myself set up on Snowflake to get Agentic and be able to talk to my data?
Yeah, well, for us again, like we have FDE, you know, capabilities for our customers as well. So some customers really, We really want that. And of course, I think we're seeing now the world moving very much towards, we're looking for specific, you know, business outcomes. Yeah. And that's of course where the, this FD, uh, function comes in, right? They go in on like, hey, we're gonna help you accomplish this specific outcome versus like, here is the technology, go and figure out yourself. We of course have a very large partner ecosystem with the, with the GSIs and the SIs. That do a lot of that for Snowflake, you know, as well. Yeah.
Yeah. And have you seen more demand from customers? 'Cause I know you guys are obviously responsible for new business.
Yes.
Do you see the new business customers asking more and more for, for something like an SDE?
Definitely.
Definitely. Because also when you talk to customers, right, they all, many of them now have like, they, they have a vision, right? They know where they need to go and they also understand that the technology is here for it, but they don't really have the confidence yet in their, in their teams to make it happen and at the timeline that they want. So customers are clearly looking for more of that help to get to, you know, that gap in between kind of their vision and execution, essentially.
So customers are asking for a lot more now than they ever used to ask for.
Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
And how does that impact like everything else in marketing for you?
Yeah, again, I think, you know, we talked about business outcomes. I mean, we have made such a big shift this year, getting the entire sales organization to really just talk about business outcomes.
Yeah.
And of course we're fully aligned with that. Mm-hmm. And, um, last week, um, we have something we call the AI Challenge on the marketing team. So every week someone creates a video about an agent or a skill that they developed.
Yeah.
And one of our product market leaders, he's developed this, uh, business outcome skill.
Oh.
So essentially then you can ask put your, your content, let's say you've created content, right? For, it could be for a customer, it could be for an industry or a persona. You put it into the agent. The agents will basically look at, okay, how business outcomes focused is this really?
Yeah.
What are you missing here? Right? Yeah. What, what, how do you need to adjust this messaging? To get that. Or this, this content. So, um, just an incredible example again, right?
Yeah.
Of someone building something like that.
And since you have a bigger team, for folks that are, you know, scaling in the room or maybe thinking about, you know, future-facing of when they get to this scale, how are they gonna roll out agents to like the entire marketing team? Can you share a little bit about how you've built like AI fluency without, with the entire marketing team?
Yeah, and I think that's probably been the biggest investment we made over the last, you know, year to also really get everyone, you know, on board. There's a lot of like, you look at people of course are self, wanna self-learn, right? Who wanna look for, for education and have that curiosity by themselves. This is not a time, right, where that traditional kind of, uh, weekly training sessions, right, is, is working anymore. And also, also when you deliver training today, right, you might have 80% sitting there saying, I already know all this, and 20%, wow, this is way too advanced for me.
Yeah.
So that's also the power of AI now and learning is that you can learn at at the—
Same pace.
At the pace or the phase you're at. But again, this, again, overall investments in that, again, we do have, of course, our weekly, you know, AI skills training sessions for the team. As I mentioned, we have the kind of the weekly AI challenge where someone is sharing what they built, you know, challenging, you know, someone else to show what they built. We do AI hackathons at the function level.
Yeah.
Because let's say what the communications team needs to do, you know, versus our digital marketing needs to do quite soon a difference. So we have done a number of folks are really experts in helping kind of the team leaders setting up this, you know, hackathons, you know, et cetera. We have our AI council, you know, on the team.
Yeah.
So every quarter we have an AI day across the entire team that everyone around the world, you know, participates in. So, And I think that it's so important to not have a kind of like, I don't believe kind of in having the stick, right? You know, forcing people like, you, you have to do this. It's about really inspiring people and, uh, fuel that curiosity from, from within.
Right.
And I think looking across the marketing team at Snowflake, right? Some of the greatest innovation from an AI perspective, it happened among people that I could never have expected. People that, um, I, they, they would be the last people that I would think. That you would have thought of. Yeah, that I would think. If we look, let's say our leaderboard, we actually do have a leaderboard as well in terms of, it is actually sort of a usage-based leaderboard. And, um, and also with that, I also tell the team, right, hey, this leaderboard's, I mean, good, but it's not, it's not about how many tokens you're using, right? That matters either. But looking at our leaderboard. How you're, yeah, exactly. How are you using it? And also realizing that everyone is at a different, uh, phase of the journey, right? Yeah. And, um, but again, the, the leaders on the board are, are people from our brand team.
Right.
I, I didn't expect them to be there.
Yeah.
But the top 3, they're actually on that team and they're just, um, innovating a lot of things in terms of what we're doing with our website, um, and their brand and those things.
So, um, yeah. And do you incentivize them to get on the top of the leader board?
I mean, I think they're excited. Yeah, they, they, we have some, you know, prizes and things like that. They just, I mean, um, they, I don't think they're like, okay, I'm gonna do this to get on the leader board. And I think it's super important that, again, not to have a behavior like you're just having people do busy work, right? Just use it to just to show that you're using it. That's not the, the, um, the, um, important part. Also, we have, we have a, we call our, uh, quarterly what matters. Essentially, it's like our OKRs on the team.
Yep.
And everyone across the team, they need to have a what matters for AI. And it could be that I'm gonna learn something. It doesn't matter if it's something basic, right? But you need to have something that brings you further, right? In terms of AI fluency. So some are way out here, some are a little bit behind, and I'm also saying it's okay, right? We just want it to kind of move.
Yes.
So we all have a sort of an AI skill we need to learn on our quarterly, which matters, and also something that we're gonna build. And it doesn't matter if it's something small. It's more about really getting in, starting using it, and then, yeah.
Yeah.
How has that impacted hiring for you specifically in marketing? 'Cause I feel like right now everyone's just kind of in like a, almost a holding pattern when it comes to marketing of like, you know, maybe we can't find, I, everyone's been saying like, we just can't find enough go-to-market engineers 'cause you post the job and people apply, but no one's been a go-to-market engineer yet.
No, exactly. But I'm seeing some people, converting into that.
Yeah.
It could be someone former marketing operations.
Yeah.
We're seeing a lot.
I've seen a lot of marketing ops.
Yeah.
I mean, think about, I was, uh, in marketing when marketing ops came 20 years ago, right? Where did we find those people? Now we couldn't find, it was the same, same thing. It would, these were people that saw, wow, there's a new career opportunity. I really wanna lean in here.
Yeah.
So we're seeing the same thing that a lot of, uh, marketing operations, also those we said that we don't need the business analyst so much more. But the business analysts are so used to also working, you know, with data. So many of them are leaning in into this kind of GTM engineer function. I would say in the past you would look at, okay, you need to have this skill, you need to have—
Yep.
Marketo skill, you need to have Salesforce skill. There were a lot of the skills you needed to have. Now more and more the soft skills are becoming more important. Are you— things are changing so fast, so are you someone who can really adapt with this speed? Do you have that kind of sense of fire within from a curiosity standpoint? Adaptability, you know, self-leadership, change management, collaborative skills, those are becoming even more important to get things down.
And like certifications.
Yeah, to get things down though.
Yeah.
And is, have you found a good way to test for that when you're hiring?
Uh, I mean, we are asking people to, again, uh, solve problems.
Okay.
Right. I mean, we're giving them more more sort of homework to, okay, here's a problem. Here you can use, you know, Snowflake, IntelliGels, or you can use, you know, these AI tools. How do you approach this, you know, problem? And they can get, you know, a few days and can, if they don't wanna participate in the exercise, they don't need to, but then they kind of sort of self-select out.
Yeah.
But if they're curious and wanna join the team, right, they get to do one of these exercises and then we'll see what they, what they came back with. Yeah, how they handle, guess, how again, their thought process around it.
And are you still, are you still doing most of that remote or now have you kind of flipped back to doing some of that in-person?
No, more I would say, again, we are doing interviews need to be very much in, in person. There could be parts of the process that might be virtual.
Yeah.
I think that's also what we learned that we have as a, as a full mandate, right? That we cannot hire anyone.
Yeah.
Before we have met this person.
Something, yeah.
Because you can only really, again, judge those maybe kind of the personal skills, soft skills, if you're meeting someone in person.
100%.
Yeah. Versus sitting with someone over Zoom, right? And they're kind of, you know, using ChatGPT for every, for every answer, right?
Yeah, you can, how would you know?
Yeah, you can't do that, right? When you're in, in, uh, in person. Yeah. It's not about kind of, um, that you need to know it all, but it's that willingness to kind of really, really learn and want to be part of this transformation we're in right now.
And have you seen certain profiles when you're hiring now be more maybe successful than others?
Again, it's not about, again, kind of, again, before it was also very much like the long experience you have about something. You need to be able to kind of look at problems in a different way, right? So, that's also something we're looking for. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, hey, you know, hiring, there's always going to be mistakes happening, you know, someone Also from both sides, right? Someone maybe thought that they would be a good fit.
Yeah.
They're not. There's always, always, that's always gonna be the issue. For sure.
But yeah.
Yeah.
So now that, and then now that you have so many agents that between yourself and the rest of the marketing org are using on a daily basis, I just wanna get your perspective on something that I feel like people talk about a lot on social media, which is like, okay, how much of marketing should still be humans and how much of it should be agentic? Like how much, where do you draw that line of like what your team should do versus what you let the agents or the data do for itself?
Yeah.
I mean, we're seeing more and more that there's this skepticism around what's fake and what's real.
Right.
There's certain things which, you know, are fine with, you know, a dancing dog or something. We're fine, it's fun, it's okay that that's sort of fake. But there's certain things where we don't know, right? Is this real or not? Or not, yeah. Authenticity is becoming, I think, high value, you know, in that. And that's also what we can spend more time on, right? That's, that is the human strength and, and value we can bring to marketing to make sure that, okay, what is the uniqueness of our, our brand, our company, that authenticity, right? That's where we can spend more time than we could before.
Yep. In marketing.
Yeah.
Another thing I want to ask was because like you have such a large at-scale marketing org, right? And like, I know people are at like different scales when they're here at SaaStr. Like, is there— are there certain pieces within marketing you feel like for driving new business they should— like if they're maybe just starting out, maybe they only have one agent or two before they have, you know, multiple. You don't even know how many agents you have.
Yeah.
Endless, right? Endless agents, endless data.
Yeah.
What are the ones you think they can maybe focus on that'd be the most impactful?
Yeah. I mean, I do think you, you need to start with the data. Yep.
Right? 100%.
If you don't make that investment, it's gonna come back and bite you big time.
Of course.
A year, you know, from now.
Yeah.
So, um, it was the same thing. Remember, like, you know, Salesforce hygiene, right?
Yeah.
If you didn't get that right in the beginning when you spent time on that, when you implemented Salesforce back in the day, we're, we're at that stage now. If you don't really look at your data estate, making sure that you have all the data you will need to do what you wanna do.
Yeah.
That's, again, you're gonna get very, very sort of shallow value from AI if you don't get that right.
And how do you enforce, I mean, you work at a data company, so maybe it's just part of how you hire and like your DNA, but do you ever find that you still have to enforce people to like, you know, across marketing and sales to like actually put, you know, marketing attributed revenue or what campaigns are working. Like, do you feel like you still have to like push a boulder uphill to get people to do that?
But that's also why that has been so much easier with AVZY, right? Things like, again, on the sales side, I mean, uh, just, you know, updating sales forms or whatever that is. So that, that is of course a very important system of record.
Yeah.
That you can just do that directly from your, from your agent, right? I mean, you're doing directly, I mean, it's, it's automated, right? Automated. Yeah. Taking on a you know, you, you just take the email conversation you just have with the customer, then you get updates, Salesforce automatically. So, so I think all that data hygiene is becoming easier than it was before. Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think having a good found— obviously having a good foundation.
People skipped steps before, right? People skipped, people really skipped a lot of stuff. I don't wanna skip, you skipped a lot of steps and therefore you didn't have, had an incomplete picture what's going on.
Yeah.
But, um, yeah, that, that's, we're making that easier as well.
Yeah, yeah, that's one of the supreme things I think about agents is I was saying earlier, like we, you know, when we started building out these Agentic workflows, we kind of took like a day or two to like clean all of our data because what you put in for the context is definitely affects what you get out. And when it comes to your data, like if it's building on a foundation that's wrong, it's just gonna duplicate that.
And I mean, it's getting so much more amplified and visible now. I think we're all getting, you know, emails or, ads that are completely wrong, right? Where there's a completely different name, right? I'm getting that, you know, you're getting the text messages, emails, and ads every day with the information—
Wrong data.
Incorrect, right? You're gonna be pretty kind of with that brand or that company, you're gonna have a pretty, you know, first impression last for quite some time.
It really does.
It might take a while before you wanna give that company a chance again. So, and again, that all comes back to the data that is feeding these agents. If they don't, if that data isn't right, the agent is gonna amplify that issue.
Yeah, we're gonna, just for folks too, if you have a question for Denise, I'm gonna open up for questions in a little bit. So, if you wanna hit the microphones, she'll answer some audience Q&A, but I'll ask one more question too, which is, is there an agent now that you either you feel like is your most important or one that you're like, I couldn't imagine living without this one like a year ago?
Yeah, I mean, for me, we have our own agent, Snowflake in intelligence, essentially that gives me, it's essentially like, a ChatGPT interface to all our data, all our information, all our knowledge, but also external, I mean, you know, knowledge as well, that I wouldn't be able to live without today. Yeah. Yeah.
Go ahead, do you have a question?
With a company at Snowflake scale, how do you determine the percentage of your marketing budget that gets allocated to AI? Then how do you manage and control that in a highly variable cost environment?
Yeah.
Actually for us, so the AI cost for any, again, all, all, all that is actually at an, at a company level.
Yeah.
At the moment, it will probably change, you know, next year. But the, the, the, the stood from a company perspective and from the leadership and our CEO, right? He doesn't want someone's budget to hold them back in terms of leaning in and experimenting at the moment. So essentially for us on the market side, essentially is unlimited access to all AI tools, essentially without getting, you know, anything allocated to marketing. Again, could change next year, but I think that was a wise—
That's a wise decision.
Because what's happening as well, right? That usage is going off the roof. It is of course, you know, costing a lot of money, but you cannot be like, okay, limits people, right? You know, you cannot use this anymore now, you need to slow down, right? Because then we slow down innovation. So I do think there's a, there's a quite big bucket allocated at the company level.
Mm-hmm.
And I think that was a wise decision. It might, again, might change next year where we know a little bit more, okay, what should the spend from the marketing organization, you know, be and the sales organization as well. We of course need to optimize our AI usage as well. There's clearly, of course, AI we're investing in or agents that are doing the same thing, right, across our company. So we're gonna have to kind of look at that, um, um, from a full—
Do you have certain agents or like, uh, tools that are company-wide that are, oh, I mean, obviously you have your own too, but—
Yeah, especially, yeah, especially on the JT, we have our own kind of GTM agent called Raven. That's really what our entire sales organization is using as well as, as, as the marketing organization. And that is very, again, that one is then also centrally managed. All the kind of skills within the Raven is certified, because again, it comes back to, right, we don't have, we are very low risk, you know, tolerance. So our centralized data net and they certify the skills within our own GTM agent, if you will.
Yeah.
And also making sure again that we're not replicating Right. But we have the opportunity, everyone can essentially go out and build almost anything they want at the moment, right? So of course you're gonna have duplications, efforts happening through that. So we need to, can also rein things in. Cut down on the duplication. Yes, exactly, yeah.
Yeah, you wanna go to your question?
Yeah, okay. So I am building a GTM engineering function at a security company. It's been going pretty well, I think, but I know you have one at Snowflake. And so I was curious, first of all, how big is that team building the central services and automations and things like that? And then also, you know, because you have a lot of compliance things to worry about, obviously you can't just give everyone access to everything. If you could just elaborate a little more on how it's set up, how many people are kind of building those things, and just a little more information.
Yeah.
So we also have, again, a central AI data organization at Snowflake, and they have people on that team that are dedicated to, to sales and marketing. I think that might be around 20 people or so that are dedicated to sales and marketing. I mean, we have a quite large sales organization. Again, the demand on that team, right? It's, they can't handle the demand that is coming in at the moment. We also now again have about 2 people on the marketing team that again, sit a little bit closer to us. Today. But again, I said the demand that you're going to find the same thing, probably, right? The demand for this person's time is going to be very, very, very high. So someone is going to just more again have to prioritize, okay, what are then the agents or the different skills that we want to prioritize, you know, essentially, right? So again, it's that, that is, I think that is a, that's a challenge. I think everyone is going to be faced with, you're going to have to to really prioritize hard for what that person is gonna focus on.
Thank you.
Yeah.
So one thing that stood out, by the way, I love Snowflake, so thank, and thanks for being here, but the token leaderboard kind of stood out and it might be not the most central thing to all the different things you're doing, but it's an interesting, use it as an anecdote, this tension with that and the idea of tracking outcomes. And there might be a correlation with more usage and more outcomes, but then there's also the business impact of, more costs. So, I wonder if you've considered how you could build leaderboards more oriented towards marketing outcomes, if it's more content, more leads, rather than your current total.
Oh, exactly. As I said, right, when I, when I bring up the leaderboard, it's more about highlighting those individuals who kind of just, you know, leaning in, experimenting, and most of those people on the leaderboards, they are helping the rest of the team, right? So, they're very much, they're becoming, that was never the intention. Right, but there are probably 7, 8 people that have become true power users. Those are the ones who are now going in and helping, let's say, the communications team with their AI hackathon, for instance. So they're very much like, they're not staying siloed in their function and they're really just out helping the rest of the team. So they're true sort of power users at that standpoint. And also, I always bring that up, right, when I show those, you know, top 3 people, right, every month is like, you know what, it's not about, again, the number of tokens you're using, right? It's really about the business outcomes. It doesn't matter if you only have 100 tokens, right? Again, the most important thing is that you, you, we're all leaning in here. We're leaning in, you know, we're learning, we're being curious, and we're always thinking about a hard problem. And it's like, is there a way for me to do this with AI in a more effective, in a way? Yeah. So, so important to not like, you know, reward token usage. Yeah, only. Yeah.
How do you decide who owns what? And what I mean by that is, for example, we just gave a bunch of people a Claude license at our company. Now there's a million agents getting built, but so much of it's cross-functional dependent as well. And so one area I'm trying to figure out is who should own what and how do you decide? Is it just who built the agent owns it, or is it, uh, is it a VP or is it a C-level person? Like, how do you decide who gets to drive the direction of the growth?
Yeah, for us right now, we're basically just encouraging everyone at every level of the company to kind of to, to build, you know, agents to build, you know, apps, you know, on their own. It's gonna come to a point where we're gonna have to kind of rein this in a little bit. And, um, again, as I mentioned before, we do have also a centralized team who goes in if there is a skill, I mean, that we have developed, right? That is gonna be used by more people. It's gonna have to be, you know, certified, you know, by them to really make sure, again, is this skill, this agent actually delivering the, the correct, you know, uh, correcting a behavior. So we have, I mean, we have those resources or people who go in and help us, you know, with that. But again, there's also, we, again, we said we are very much encouraging a lot of experimenting, usage, building at every level of the company right now. But I think we might find ourselves like, let's say 10, 15 years ago, right? With SaaS applications, right? Yeah. It was the same, you know, when marketing started buying technology, right? Then we probably had, at least 100 different SaaS applications and then sort of the IT department finally coming in and like, okay, we need to actually have order here. We need to understand what is being used across our company. What is really the usage of this, of this applications? I think we're gonna see probably similar thing happening in, from an agent standpoint, right? Where there's gonna have to be, you know, a control layer around this. Yeah.
So I run a marketing organization as well, and as we get better and stronger and faster all the time, particularly at content and at launches, one of the challenges that we're running into is that we are running the risk of overwhelming sales on the enablement side. So how are you handling having your sales team feel confident and enabled at the same pace.
Yeah, yeah. And actually just a few months ago we moved our whole sales enablement, partner enablement, customer training over to marketing. And the reason for that is also because a lot, we build a lot of the content, right? Content started to be duplicated. There were duplicate efforts in terms of content building across our company. And the key thing now with AI and content, right? Build content once and you can create all these derivative assets, right, for different target segments, including sales and, and, um, and partners. So the journey we're in right now is still, we have our, again, we have something called Snow Search. That's essentially our, you know, biweekly sales training programs that we still have that in parallel, but at the same time, we're building this complete sort of self-service. Yeah. Enablement agent for our sales organization. So they basically can get the answers and training at the time where they need it. Because again, so much time is wasted, right, by attending training sessions where it's either too advanced or it's too kind of too easy for you, right? So we're very much focused on building this individualized journeys for our sellers. Things like also now you can do, there's a platform called Jodly. I dunno if you know that one, but you can do, I mean, even role-playing, right? You have an agent.
Yeah.
That you're role-playing with. Think about the time before you had to spend doing that with your manager or others, right? It was kind of pretty horrific to do that. Now you can do that, train yourself, you know, with an agent who has all the intelligence in your company, can really help you, you know, perfect your pitch or perfect your, the presentation you have to your customer, you know, tomorrow. So I think that whole world of enablement training is gonna be up for massive, you know, disruption, you know, next.
Yeah.
And, um, we're just, just gonna be able to again meet people where they are, right?
Yeah.
Give them the right intelligence at the, uh, at the phase they're in essentially. So we, yeah, we have a lot of work happening on that at the moment.
All right, we'll do, we'll do yours as the last question. Yep.
Thanks Denise, for being an inspiration to many of us in the CMO community as well. So, let me lead with that. I know that Snowflake has led the discussion around one team GTM. I'm curious to understand how you see that evolving in the AI world and what do you tell the marketers? I'm actually struggling to tell the young marketers on my team what the future of this function looks like? Yeah, I think, I mean, we, we, I don't think anyone can paint a clear picture of what it looks like, but we can be a part of, of shaping it and building it, right? That's kind of really how I try to inspire motivating the team, right? You know, you can be a part of this transformation or you can sort of opt out essentially. So, um, but the second part in terms of, you know, one team you talk about, but the alignment with the sales organization or, Right. Yeah. I don't think there's anything more important. It remains how we operate on a day-to-day basis. I mean, again, we had a CRO that I worked with for almost 10 years. I mean, we were like, I mean, so, so aligned. We have a new CRO now, been with the company for a long time, so I'm building the same relationship, you know, with him. And it's also important to, it's not about just about me and the CRO. It starts, of course, with us having the same exact objectives, but you also need to make sure that you have that alignment, right, across the entire market organization, the sales organization, right? So if I look at the sales leadership team, right, I'll make sure we have the VPs under CRO. I have account depart, right, on the marketing side that is fully aligned with that, um, individual. So it's so important to have those kind of relationships built at every kind of level, you know, of the, um, of the organization. And again, hey, so, so fun to hang out with all of you and the, and the SaaStr community. So thank you for having me.
It's always nice to have you.
Thank you for coming back.
Thank you guys.
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