How to foster a feedback-friendly company culture

Welcome and Introduction

Danny Wasserman: This is Reveal: The Revenue Intelligence Podcast, here to help go-to-market leaders, do one thing—stop guessing. If you’re ready to unlock reality and reach your full potential, then this show is for you. I’m Danny Wasserman, coming to you from the Gong Studios. Howdy, howdy, howdy. Danny, the Rev Wasserman back again. Guess who’s back? Back again. Danny’s back. Tell a friend.

Yes, this is an absolutely earth-shattering week for Reveal as we have the chance to explore, unpack, uncover the secrets that are the underpinnings to someone incredibly special who has defied all statistics as far as remaining at the helm of one of the hottest, most recognized global brands in the tech space today, with a decade as the CRO, when typically, CROs average a tenure of about 18 months. Here’s someone who, even before assuming the reins of this monolithic powerhouse, had unbelievable stints at other recognizable tech players that subsequently went on to influence how he leads large global organizations today.

Who are we talking about? We’re talking about the CRO of Snowflake, Chris Degnan, who is in the house and could not have been a cooler, more humble, but real dude. He talks about in this episode the importance of preserving basic humanity, and within humanity, he talks about vulnerability, honesty, as well as curiosity with people who are your peers when you’re the CRO, but also people up and down the stack, inside and out, who are bound to want to give you feedback.

When he talks about in the pursuit of trying to find truth inside and outside the organization, that conflict in the workplace, when you’re having hard discussions, it can be constructive. So, reversing the stigma that conflict is destructive. In fact, he talks about this idea of positive conflict, where you’re not urging someone to shut up when you disagree with them. In fact, you’re more curiously unpacking the position that they’re presenting to you.

Along the way, Chris talks a lot about how, through his own personal experience, he’s cultivated a sense of skepticism. I wouldn’t say paranoia, but certainly enough doubt that makes him an incredibly discerning leader when he examines every fact with a fine-tooth comb. You don’t want to hear from me, you want to hear from Chris. So it’s time for me to put a cork in it and tell that DJ to spin that.

With just shy of a decade working at EMC, cutting his teeth in sales, working his way up with a quick stopover at Avexa before becoming employee 16 at none other than this rinky-dink startup that no one’s ever heard of. Of course, you know I’m joking—it has gone on to make history, absolutely making a dent in the technology universe. We’re talking to the guy who has defied statistical odds and probabilities when the average tenure I just looked up for a CRO is 18 months. He has crossed the threshold of a decade at the helm of the revenue organizations at Snowflake. Of course, you’ve connected the dots by this point. We are talking to Chris Degnan. Chris, welcome to Reveal.

Chris Degnan: Danny, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Defining a Leader: Love Winning or Hate Losing?

Danny Wasserman: Alright, so there’s no shortage of content online with your name tied to it, Chris, whether it’s interviews or publications about your philosophy. Where I want to go, and I owe a big thanks to Joubin over at Kleiner Perkins in the Grit podcast because he and you, in a very candid moment, surfaced a lot about your feelings of anxiety and paranoia. I want to start the conversation because in a world where we have to boil down defining yourself in a binary outcome between being someone who loves to win or hates to lose, how would you describe yourself?

Chris Degnan: I hate to lose. Celebrating wins is fine, but what gets me is losing. And so I think one of the earliest hires that I made at Snowflake, or one of my early hires at Snowflake, it was his first job out of college, he said to me, “Sales is like a hamster wheel in that there’s never an end.” And I think I don’t like missing a quarter. I don’t like missing a forecast. I don’t like losing a deal. And I think those are the things that drive me, not necessarily, “Hey, slam dunk, we had a great year.” Who cares? No one cares. They’re like, onto the next. So that’s how I operate. But I do remind myself that celebrating the people that work for me and the wins and the hard work they’ve done is super important. So I make sure we do that.

Danny Wasserman: And thinking about your insatiable appetite for what’s next, there’s an absence inherently, dare I say, of satisfaction. And I wonder, when you think about, I’m reading this book called The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Anchor, and he talks about societally, we push the goalpost further and further back, so that after we reach—I mean, in your interview, you even talked about, “Hey, we closed a legacy, a historic crowning achievement, $100 million deal,” and the next day we’re like, “Well, what’s next? Can we do 110?” If we keep pushing the goalposts further and further back, are we ever allowed to exist in the present with satisfaction, or is that dangerous?

Chris Degnan: For me, it’s dangerous. And I love the quote, and I love the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In that movie, Ferris says, “If you don’t stop,”—life moves pretty fast, so you gotta stop and take a look around. That’s, in essence, what he says, and I try to remind myself to do that. Because a lot of the fun that I’m building a company is, you’re in the moment, you’re building it. You want to get to that next thing, whatever that next thing is—you want to buy that next car, you want to get that next house, you want to do whatever. But so much of the fun of building a company is being in the middle of it. And you go back and look at it in time, and I think about this all the time. I just pulled up my first QBR deck, the very first one I had at Snowflake, and it’s really awesome to go back and think about just that—on how desperate we were. So, the desperation matters. Having a little bit of desperation matters. But those are things that you get nostalgic about, for sure.

Balancing Skepticism and Paranoia

Danny Wasserman: When we think about Ferris Bueller’s philosophy and your boss’s unapologetically, dare I even say, skeptical outlook on life, what are the ways that you balance what is maybe a healthy dose of skepticism to keep you hungry, to keep you humble? And when do you also have someone or something internally and intrinsically that says, “I have over-indexed into a degree of paranoia where it is either unhealthy for me, or even it is causing an unhealthy degree of friction and pushback because it manifests itself in distrust towards the people that work for me?”

Chris Degnan: I think trying to be as honest as you can with everyone around you. I think if there’s one constant that has been in my tenure at Snowflake, it has been change.

Danny Wasserman: Okay.

Chris Degnan: So 10 years in, and I’m still grinding, and I’m still changing, and I’m still doing reorganizations constantly. And it’s not because I want to be mean and make people’s lives difficult—because change is hard on everybody—but as Frank Slootman likes to say, “If you’re intellectually honest with yourself about what’s the right thing to do for the customer, what’s the right thing to do for the company, then the rest will fall into place.” And that’s one of the learning moments for me. I do what’s right for our customers, I do what’s right for the company and, of course, our employees, but making Snowflake successful is going to be what’s good for our employees and our investors.

The Importance of Scrutinizing Numbers

Danny Wasserman: You’ve talked a lot about examining numbers. There was this anecdote that you shared in Grit, where at one point, perhaps you got a little too comfortable with the momentum that you had cultivated and built at Snowflake, and weren’t scrutinizing the numbers enough. And numbers can tell whatever story you want, but you went back in hindsight and thought, “Oh man, I really should have double-clicked into those numbers.” So, I’d love for you to explain your determination of when am I bringing a healthy dose of skepticism to anything I see versus when does that actually become, dare I even say, pessimism? And are those one and the same, or is pessimism just an over-rotation into that healthy dose of skepticism amidst your success?

Chris Degnan: Well, I think that the crazy part of a successful company like Snowflake is… the first thing is to remind yourself that Snowflake’s not successful because of you. And I think there’s a lot of people who are part of a successful company and think the company is successful because of them. You’re part of that rocket ship, but you’re not the rocket ship. And I think it’s important for you to remind yourself of that. And I think if you go into that and evaluate, “How are we growing? What am I doing and what can I do better?” So yeah, there’s pessimism because there are people who have been at Snowflake on the sales side, have hit their numbers, and we’ve had to let them go because their egos have gotten too big or they’re just not doing the job as they need to. And I think you always have to evaluate, is it because of the person, is it because of the product, is it because of the market, whatever it is? And again, going back to the intellectually honest conversation, if you really evaluate that on a regular basis and say… Frank always likes to say there are a lot of people who have put on their LinkedIn profiles, “ex-Snowflake” to get the next job. Because they were here, maybe they were part of a good thing, maybe they weren’t. And I think the way I view it is, I’m very intellectually honest with myself around, “Am I doing the right things? Where have I screwed up?” And there are a lot of things that I have screwed up on my journey and continuing to try to learn and figure out where I can improve.

Fostering a Culture of Truth Tellers

Danny Wasserman: You’re talking a lot about this notion of honesty. Honesty with introspection, examining, “Am I, Chris, still doing what I need to do?” And then having those same honest conversations with the people on your teams. I really want to double-click into this idea of truth-tellers, because you talk about it a lot in previous interviews—surrounding yourself with people who, in spite of reporting up to you, may feel some reticence to be truth-tellers because out of fear of backlash or political repercussions, they don’t summon the courage to tell you maybe what you need to hear—what you want to hear—which is the truth. So talk to us a little bit about how you, as a leader, engender and break that degree of safety and honesty with people. And also, if you could, speak to the people who have yet to achieve your level of authority. How can they determine what is that litmus test—when they can be really honest with you versus when it’s a time to disagree but commit to what someone like Chris is going to decide to do?

Chris Degnan: Yeah, look, I think if you tell everyone their ideas are stupid, then you’re definitely not going to elicit feedback. So, first of all, I think you have to be very open to getting feedback from anyone in the company, whether it’s a new hire, “How was your new hire process?” Just asking that to a customer—”What was it like becoming a customer? What was the sales cycle like? What did you like? What didn’t you like?” I think if you come with the approach that you don’t know all, and you’re open to feedback, and you take notes and you act upon those things, those are things that are invaluable.

I think when I talk to people, it’s hard—I get it—that Snowflake is a big company, and they don’t want to screw up their job, they want to do their job, get paid, and have a happy life. My job is really to find out where there are holes. And sometimes, when you open something up, like you say, “Oh, there’s an issue here,” then you dive three layers deep, and you think, “Oh my gosh, this has been going on for a while.” So inevitably, you have to have trusting relationships with people that don’t work directly for you, that aren’t in your organization, that will tell you the truth. So you have to make the effort to have one-on-ones with people that, again, either A) aren’t working for you at all, or B) are not direct reports to you, and figure out who’s willing to tell you the truth—who has the guts. And then, when they tell you something, you also have to then validate it. I always say there are three sides to every story. There’s the person who’s telling the story, there’s someone else’s side, and there’s the truth. And sometimes it’s in the middle.

Positive Conflict and Friction in the Workplace

Danny Wasserman: And in a previous interview, you talked about how you and Frank had whittled down the number of people that were in attendance in those staff meetings to the folks that would have the courage to be truthful. And at times, those discussions got contentious, not disrespectful, but that there was conflict because people strongly and passionately feel their side is better or worse than the other. Help us understand what are ways that you maintain that degree of candor and honesty, and even at times when conflict arises, how you still leave that meeting and can hug it out, can slap high-fives and not harbor any grudges.

Chris Degnan: The way I look at it is, my brother and I, he’s four years younger, and we can say nasty things to each other in the moment, but at the end of the day, we get it all out, and then we’re brothers, and we’re still together. And I think that’s the way you hope that people operate. And when someone comes in, and they bring an alternative view on things that you may not agree with, don’t tell them to shut up. Listen to them. And it’s okay to debate them and say, “I don’t agree.” You can get into a disagreement.

My daughters always tell me a funny story. So our first real CEO was Bob Muglia, and Bob’s this very high-intensity, emotional, Italian dude. And I wear my emotions on my sleeve. Bob and I were fighting, and they’re like, “Dad, are you going to get fired?” And I’m like, “Nope.” Because Bob and I would hug it out after coming to an agreement. That’s how we got along—friction was okay. And I think in any company, friction is actually good because it makes you really evaluate what’s going on that’s good and what’s going on that’s not good. And I think if you just say, “I know all and you cannot question me,” then your company’s never going to get better. And that’s the thing—you have to let your ego down and say, “I don’t know all.” And by the way, I encourage people to tell me stuff, but again, it’s hard to get those people to tell you the truth all the time.

Building a Feedback-Friendly Company Culture

Speaker 3: Any successful organization needs an open, feedback-friendly culture. Chris Degnan firmly believes that leaders should value and act on all feedback, regardless of where it originates. And in a healthy business environment, openness to intellectual disagreement and good debate is what drives improvement. He’s really onto something because, in fact, Harvard Business Review found that 85% of employees say that they respect and trust humble leaders more than non-humble alternatives. When we talk about humble leaders, it’s those employees who really appreciate being valued regardless of the position that they hold, but also when they are heard and listened to. It’s that kind of two-way street exchange that builds loyalty within an organization.

Additionally, HBR found that 50% of workplace conflicts can be resolved effectively through respectful and curious dialogue. So, don’t shy away from asking those hard questions, so long as they don’t mutate into an indictment or a cross-examination. It’s a great discussion when it’s created with passion and openness to feedback. Let’s get back to Chris and hear a little bit more about how he’s created this exact type of rapport at Snowflake.

The Craving for Competition and Intellectual Conflict

Danny Wasserman: You had said in an interview that you “love when people come at you.” That was the exact quote I wrote down. And I’m wondering, in that thirst, that craving for competition, would you say, again speaking to what you divulged in your interviews about your upbringing, your childhood on Grit, is that symptomatic of the strife, the trauma, the pain that came out of those surprises that now, almost to feel a certain degree of intensity, that’s what it takes to switch you on?

Chris Degnan: Inevitably, when you bring passion to a conversation and conviction, but you’re open to feedback at the same time, that fosters a really great conversation. So, I think it’s really important to understand what you’re talking about—so be a student of what you sell, then bring that passion and conviction to it, and then be open to the fact that they might come and bring passion and conviction back to you. But inevitably, what it does is it brings this honesty. I love conflict—not conflict in an actual physical altercation, but really intellectual conflict where you can have honest conversations with people.

Ruling Through Fear vs. Leading Through Empathy

Danny Wasserman: And this is a great segue, because when we talk about the presence of intellectual conflict being a catalyst for growth and optimization, I want to go back to a different binary discussion. We started this episode talking about, “Hey, do you love to win, or do you hate to lose?” I now want us to think about, in the history of monolithic tech companies—I’ll use Larry Ellison and Oracle as the quintessential example of someone who had no qualms whatsoever in running a highly successful organization, but was generally understood to be one run out of a culture of fear. And understanding that fear, this notion of intensity or “come at me and let’s engage and escalate,” that produces stratospheric success.

And I’m wondering, perhaps we societally conflate the presence of empathy with that bend or that angle, but I’m wondering, if we compare what is the Larry model versus certain things that you find incredibly motivating—that hatred of losing, and even drawing some parallels between what Frank has gone on record saying—would you say that in ruling with a culture of fear versus managing with a culture of love, there’s really now at this point a track record that ruling out of that degree of intensity trumps all? Or could we make a counterpoint that says, “Love conquers all?” Or maybe they’re not mutually exclusive?

Chris Degnan: Yeah, so look, when was Oracle founded—in the ’80s? So kudos to Larry. He built an amazing company, and he did it his way. But you certainly can’t decide to manage a company by fear, but that’s not the modern way. I don’t think that’s… if you were raised in that environment, if your parents raised you in an authoritarian environment, and they were hardcore on you and whatever, you might decide to raise your children that way. Or you might say, “There were some good things, there were some rules that actually worked really well, but I’m not going to be that authoritarian to my children.”

A classic example of really what an awesome learning moment for me was when Bob Muglia came in, and he took our contract, our customer contract, and he made it from basically two pages to eight pages. And I said, “Bob, you’re killing us.” And I said, “You cannot change the contract to eight pages.” And I said, “You’re going to screw us. The sales team’s going to quit,” blah blah blah. And Bob let me rant, and I ranted for like five minutes. He said, “Are you done?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “Okay, let me ask you one question: Have you read the contract?” And I said, “No, I have not read the contract.” He goes—so in a really wonderful teaching moment, he said, “Do me a favor: read the contract, redline the contract, tell me where you’re going to have concerns, and then I’ll review it with you, and then I may make some changes after that.” And I’m like, “Man, that was a really good self-reflective moment for me.” I’m like, I didn’t have to come at Bob and yell at him and try to bully my way through—which is a culture that I learned. I had to come and say, “Here’s what I found to not really work in the contract,” and have an intellectual conversation to the best of my ability with a really smart human.

But to Bob’s credit, he used that as a development moment for me. And I think that’s a really good way to think about things. Look, however Oracle was made, however EMC was made, they were made a long time ago. I’m not going to raise a sales team at Snowflake the same way that I was raised at EMC, or the same way I was raised anywhere else growing up. There are things that I learned that were wonderful from my upbringing in enterprise sales at EMC that I have applied here at Snowflake, but I haven’t taken everything. And I think that’s the thing—you learn along the way that you’re going to say, “I’ll take some of the good, and I’m going to throw out the bad.” And that’s my perspective on how I think about raising the organization, if you will.

Knowing When to Stand Firm: The Goldman Deal Story

Danny Wasserman: When you use the example of two versus eight pages with Bob, trying to decide what are the hills I’m going to die on, and what am I going to learn to maybe flex and bend on? There’s an amazing story you tell when you and Benoit are selling early on—probably 2014 or 2015—into Goldman, and well before the acceptance of the public cloud. And everyone is still saying, “You guys are crazy, you’re not going to pander to the private cloud.” And here you have the darling of Wall Street saying, “Guys, we love you, but what’s up with the private cloud?” And Benoit’s conviction to essentially walk from Goldman is borderline—I want to say with all due respect—it’s courageous, but almost irreverent given where Snowflake was at in its maturity then.

I use that as an example because as a co-founder, to have that degree of persistence, I think, has led to historic success for so many other people. And I think about that Benoit story, and I draw a parallel between the stories that Michael Lewis writes—the story of Billy Beane, and being the laughing stock of baseball, but nonetheless, Moneyball being his total, like, “I’m going to go down with this ship.” And now we think of that as table stakes in the world of sports, or even Sam Bateman-Fried. Yes, again, we know the fate of FTX, but nonetheless, in spite of everyone’s critique, the persistence, the absolute unwavering commitment—they’re going to die on that hill. And I’m wondering, when are those moments when you do die on the hill with Bob or with Frank, and what are the other times where you’re like, “Nothing is actually worth dying on the hill”?

Chris Degnan: It’s important for founders of companies to have pillars of their vision. Benoit came from Oracle and Thierry, and one of the things they really didn’t like about the legacy software market was that they got into this moment where they stopped really innovating on their product, and they were just doing all these bug fixes for versions of Oracle that were four or five years old. And so one of the pillars of Snowflake when they were building it was that they only wanted to have one version of Snowflake.

So Snowflake’s an as-a-service offering that we manage all the upgrades online, so the customer doesn’t have dot-dot-dot versions of Snowflake that they’re managing on their own. We manage that. There’s all sorts of challenges with that when we were growing up, but I think that was a fundamental pillar of the company that they were just like, “We’re not doing it.” And so when Goldman said to us, “Look, we want to run your software in our data center,” he’s like, “We’re not a software company. We’re a Software as a Service, and we’re not going to let you do that.” And so, even though there were companies that a lot of times you negotiate in a contract that if the company goes out of business, you can get the source code and escrow, we wouldn’t even do that because they were like, “There’s no way that you could actually do anything with our software.”

I think the reality is that a lot of companies don’t have that conviction, and you can let a large enterprise hurt you if you let them. I think that’s the beauty of having mature founders—they had this vision, they knew what was good for the company, they followed that vision, and there were deviations we made, but they weren’t deviations off of the core pillars of the company they built. And that’s really important, to have conviction around that, because salespeople can be pretty convincing. But I went into that meeting already talking to Benoit, knowing that whatever they were going to ask for, we probably weren’t going to do because we didn’t want them to kill Snowflake. We wanted to build this awesome data cloud as a service, and that’s really what we wanted to do—or they wanted to do—and I believed in their vision, and I trusted them. So I was just there to support them.

Launching Snowflake in Japan

Danny Wasserman: You came in as employee 16, eventually made your way up to being the CRO, and along the way, well, Bob then joined after you had been there, and then we know that Frank came in after Bob. Have there been moments where, with your tribal knowledge and your conviction, that you have died on certain hills with Bob or with Frank? Anything that comes to mind?

Chris Degnan: With Frank, he looks for what he says are the “nonverbals,” like, how is your body reacting? I’m not a good liar. So he tries to look in the depths of my soul and figure out if I have conviction around it. I think one of the things that was really scary for me—I had conviction around going to Japan, launching Snowflake in Japan. For a software company to launch in Japan, it’s expensive. You have to have all your documentation—something like 90% of the country does not speak English, they don’t use LinkedIn. So, there are all sorts of things that you have to think about on launching that market. I was really pushing.

So he looked at me and said, I had a consultant and he didn’t want the consultant talking—he wanted me, and he wanted me to have conviction. So I would say that is an example of having a conviction. And four years later, we’ve launched Japan, and it’s worked out quite well for us. It’s a wonderful performing country for us. But it took a little guts, and I was scared because, look, I was still within six months of Frank joining, going into my one-on-ones with him, not sure if I was going to have a job after each and every one-on-one. You’re on pins and needles when you go and you put yourself out there saying, “We’re going to go do this.” And I’m super glad we did. Super proud of the team we have over there.

But yeah, there’s all sorts of things like that that I’ve had throughout the times. And I think there have been pivotal moments. We have large customers who have asked us to do things, even with Bob, where Bob was initially resistant to that, eventually he agreed that these were the right things to do. So there’s a history of yes. And I think a lot of times what leaders look for is, do you have passion and conviction, or are you just asking, “Should we do this?” Do you have ownership, or are you trying to manage up? And what I’ve learned is, if I don’t have passion and conviction, or the people below me don’t have passion and conviction, I’m not doing that. But if you have passion and conviction, bring it. Bring the passion, bring the conviction, bring the data, and yeah, sure, I can get behind it if you have it. And that’s something I’ve really learned in working for Frank. I can’t own everything, but if people bring it and say, “This is going to be meaningful to us,” then I can get behind it.

Working with Frank Slootman: Anxiety and Trust

Danny Wasserman: You’ve described, even in this recording but also previously, talking about those first six months under Frank Slootman—perhaps the most anxiety-provoking written chapter in your whole career. In contrast, Bob had cried in front of you; you described him as a father. So when you have nothing left to prove, and here you are subjecting yourself to anxiety, was there ever any temptation when Bob left to be like, “Well, if he goes, I go.” Was it ever a package deal? Did you feel any inclination to just say, “Well, if he’s not here—”

Chris Degnan: You have to understand—I love Snowflake, and I feel this passion behind the company. And I still, to this day, care about Snowflake. And the way I view it is, even when Bob left, I cared for the people. I cared for the company. I knew we had something special.

Snowflake’s Revolutionary Consumption-Based Pricing Model

Danny Wasserman: As we think back historically on Snowflake, I don’t believe it’s hyperbole to talk about what you did early on as revolutionary. Revolutionary in terms of the technology, also revolutionary in terms of the licensing model and pivoting away from per seat or perpetual licensing to consumption and charging as a utility. We had seen the public cloud starting to do this, but it had not taken such hold as we now presumably just take it for granted. Walk us through those early stages. I mean, you even talked in an interview about, “Man, I really boggled the initial pricing and licensing,” but how did you, even early on, evangelize that? Did you run into headwinds? Were people skeptical of it? Tell us a little bit more about that.

Chris Degnan: I’d say that people still try to get us to change the pricing model 10 years in. I think, to his credit, this is Bob Muglia—he invented our pricing. And it’s still… there are tweaks we’ve made along the way, but it’s a good lesson in general, if you’re building a company: if your underlying cost of goods is a variable cost of goods—aka the cloud providers—you cannot have a fixed model. As much as you want to have a fixed model, if you have a fixed model, your largest customers will be your worst margin-performing. You’ll probably be underwater with your largest customers. There are SaaS companies that have done that. Their CEOs do not have the guts or the brains, or both, to go out and create a consumption model because their underlying cost is variable.

So, if you have—and that’s what I learned from Bob—it’s very difficult to do that. And especially as you get into a large enterprise, they come and say, “Well, what if we give you an all-you-can-eat?” They just want as much as they can. Bob would be like, “No way, because you’ll kill us.” But the thing that was hard is, we were replacing things like competitors that had on-premise systems with a fixed amount of CPUs. Those fixed amount of CPUs and storage cost a certain amount of money. If they needed to get more, they would just go out and do a capital purchase and buy more. And with Snowflake, the beauty is, when you’re not using it, you’re not paying for it. When you are using it, you are.

So, you have to get used to it. The hardest part for us, especially early on, was going into a customer who had a fixed resource and saying, “Hey, you’re going to be buying a variable resource, and how do we size it?” And early on, we had to require a proof of concept 100% of the time to basically extrapolate, “Okay, this is how you’re going to use it.” The easiest analogy I always give is, if you’re going to sell your grandma a cell phone, and say, “Grandma, hey, I’m going to give you this phone, try the phone, we’ll see how many minutes you talk every month. If you’re talking 100 minutes a month, you can pay $2 a minute if you pay on demand. Or if I pre-sell you a year’s worth of minutes, which is 1,200 minutes, I’ll sell you that at a discount.” And that’s the model, and that’s how we’ve done it.

But I think the proof of concept, especially early on, was critical for us to showcase how we were using it. Then people started to realize, “Oh gosh, I’m saving 60% on the on-premise systems that I had before.”

The Future Beyond Snowflake: Staying Hungry or Consulting?

Danny Wasserman: Thinking about what, again, I’ll use the word one more time—revolutionary. At a time when that was not commonplace for you to even think about what you would do beyond Snowflake. Not that, again, I have a crystal ball or I’m projecting onto the world that you’re leaving, but would it have to be something as, I don’t know, just boundary-pushing to get you to stay as switched on? Or at this point, from everything you’ve gleaned, the scars you’ve accumulated, is there an appeal to want to do consulting, which is a nice way to coast into the twilight of an otherwise just unquestionably illustrious career? Or do you, if you’re going to be in the saddle, it’s got to be 8,500 RPMs bordering on redlining?

Chris Degnan: It’s a good question. Look, 100% of my mental game is associated with Snowflake right now. And people call me about all sorts of jobs that you would think are the coolest companies out there, whatever. And I’m uninterested. Again, my love for Snowflake is real, and it’s like I didn’t make the product, but I helped the company grow up. And I have a lot of passion and conviction behind that. It’s hard to go out and build relationships in organizations that—I can only imagine having to go and build relationships with a whole other set of founders or a CEO or whomever. That’s tiring.

On the flip side, I’ve done advisory work, I’ve done board work, and the challenge I have with that, which I’m currently not doing either, is when you tell someone to do something in the role I have now, they actually do it. When you tell someone to do that, and they don’t do it, and they’re paying you a lot of money to be a consultant, an advisor, a board member, and they don’t do it, you’re like, “Why the hell am I here?”

So, I think it’s an interesting thing to think about. I’m 49 years old. I still enjoy the work I do. I find Snowflake, where we’re going as a company, extremely exciting. I think we have the opportunity to be the next great tech company—not just a great IPO, but there’s a long life ahead of Snowflake. So my mental capacity is really focused on making sure Snowflake’s set up for success in the future. And then, when the time comes, and they don’t want me anymore, maybe I’ll take some time off and evaluate it. And it’s hard to say whether I’d go back to operating or not. Right now, I’d say no. But you never say no, is what I’ve learned.

Final Thoughts: Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson

Danny Wasserman: Two more questions and then we’ll wrap. Well, you’re a Boston boy. Sports were huge growing up. Larry Bird or Magic Johnson? Different style players, totally different personalities and affect. Can we put to rest the debate—who was better? And then B, would you say that in evolving into the leader you’ve become, are there elements that you find are more representative or reflective of Larry’s style? Or are you finding opportunities to start putting on a little showmanship and the people’s champ and Magic? You are unquestionably, irrefutably a celebrity now in the world of tech execs. I’m wondering both in terms of athleticism and leadership principles—tell us a little bit about where you take inspiration.

Chris Degnan: Well, yeah, I wouldn’t say I’m the best salesperson out there. I’ve met a lot of much better salespeople, and I think Magic Johnson was a better athlete for sure. I’d say that I respect the heck out of the Lakers team, and Magic Johnson was awesome, awesome, awesome to watch. Obviously, Larry Bird was my idol growing up. And I would say that I wasn’t a poor kid from French Lick, Indiana, but I think I respect the work ethic that Larry brought. I also respected the smack-talking that he brought, and they say he’s one of the best smack-talkers out there.

So look, I admire both of them. I’m a passionate Celtics fan to this day. I will always, from a competitive standpoint, hate the Lakers but respect them. And I think what I’ll say about competition is I think competition is great. I think it’s great for customers. I think it makes you better. It puts you in… it centers you. And I like having people that are wanting to kill Snowflake. I think where I draw the line is around ethics. When people aren’t ethical in their competitive ways, I don’t like that. So bring it at me all day. I’m going to grind. I’m going to be the Larry Bird, if you will, of enterprise software. I wish I had the natural ability of Magic Johnson, but I do not. So yeah, that’s what I’d say.

One Word to Describe Sales

Danny Wasserman: Alrighty. Well, we’ll wrap with the last question, Chris, that we ask every single one of our guests that come through the Gong Studios, and it’s this. If you could describe sales in just one word, what would it be?

Chris Degnan: Grind. The thing that I tell people when they come to Snowflake—I was talking to one of our sales leaders over in Switzerland, and he’s worked at hardcore sales organizations before, and he’s worked at good technology companies before. And I think he took a perspective of, from the outside looking in, Snowflake looked like this—I’m just going to show up, and it was going to be easy. But you have to understand that we’re competing in a space where these are 10- or 15-year workloads that we’re winning at Snowflake. And it’s hard. If you don’t go on a certain number of sales calls a week, if you don’t know the product and you don’t know how to compete, you’ll lose. And you’re not going to make money, and you’ll get fired. That’s here at Snowflake.

So, I think the thing that I tell people in new hire class, when I get in front of new hires, “Some of you will be successful, and some of you won’t—that are in this class today. And it’s on you. If you take the time and effort to learn the product… if you take the time and effort to go on a large number of sales calls every week… Do you think I like traveling to Europe five times this year, going to Asia a whole bunch? No, I do not. I do it because that is required for me to be successful in this job.” And I think that’s the thing that I’d say—it’s an element of grind. You don’t have to be… I don’t consider myself the smartest salesperson. I don’t consider myself, like I said, the Magic Johnson of sales. No, man. It’s like you have to get out there, and you have to go and show and prove and do all those things that basically show that you know what you’re talking about, and get your at-bats or get in front of as many customers as possible because we do have a good product. So if you do all those things, you’ll be successful. If you don’t, that’s on you.

Danny Wasserman: I just so appreciate you taking a step back because from the outside looking in at Snowflake, you’ve made it to the Promised Land, Chris. Oh my God, you’re in the Garden of Eden. And yet, from the time you arrived, you’re setting quotas, there needed to be 2,000 prospecting emails per week—not sexy stuff—all the way to a decade later, the CRO of the software company with the largest IPO in software history. And there are still things that are not glamorous, but come with the job, and there are no shortcuts.

So, from end to end, from start to where you stand today, your consistency in vigilantly committing to the discipline of putting your head down and grinding with that grit is commendable, to say the least. So, Chris, thanks for all your humility, your honesty, and your counsel and wisdom that you’ve shared with the nearly 33,000 unique monthly listeners of Reveal. I know I’m taking a lot away. I can speak for our entire audience as well that they’ll relish the chance to hear what you have to say.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chris Degnan, the Chief Revenue Officer of Snowflake. Chris, thanks so much for being here.

Chris Degnan: Danny, thanks for having me. Pleasure talking.

Danny Wasserman: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Reveal. If you want more resources on how Revenue Intelligence can help you create high-performing sales teams, then head on over to gong.io and along the way, like what you heard, come on, give us that five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen.