20Sales: Scaling Snowflake from $0-$3BN in ARR | Snowflake vs Databricks: My Biggest Lessons | Why Customer Success is BS and What Replaces It with Chris Chris Degnan

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
This is 20Sales with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited to welcome a great back to the hot seat, Chris Degnan. Chris is the former CRO at Snowflake, where he was instrumental in scaling the company from less than a million in revenue to over three billion in annual revenue. He joined as first sales hire, and he built Snowflake's go-to-market engine from scratch, growing the team to more than 6,000 globally. And under his leadership, Snowflake became one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in history. I cannot emphasize enough how few people are able to scale with the company growth, like Chris did with Snowflake. This was an incredible discussion. But before we dive into the show today, is your finance team a cost center tied up in enforcing policies, bogged down by cumbersome processes and drowning in operational busy work? Well, what if you could unlock seamless, strategic finance that actually fuels your business growth? This is why leading global growth companies use Payhawk, the finance orchestration platform that unifies global spend management with conversational AI to deliver best user experience for everybody dealing with company spending. Finance teams using Payhawk report a major shift from operational to strategic work. New AI agents for each finance role handle the busy work, acting with the same governance as your finance team, like having a small team of expert assistants that work 24-7, but also providing an exceptional user experience to your employees. Payhawk is built for growth and enterprise businesses that operate globally. No six-month implementations, no consultant dependencies, just immediate finance transformation that scales with your business. Leading growth companies like Vinted, Wallbox and hundreds more across 32 countries use Payhawk to move finance forward, not just keep up. Ready to turn your finance processes into a competitive advantage? Payhawk is offering a staggering 30% discount to everybody switching from a qualifying expense management or company card provider who mentioned the 20VC podcast. Visit payhawk.com/switch to learn more and make the intelligent switch today. And speaking of game-changing products like Payhawk there, no sales team can be the best without attention. Attention creates AI agents that learn from your best sales conversations. So they record your sales touchpoints across a ton of different areas like meetings, emails, calls, CRMs and more. They then use these AI agents and learn from that data to automate busy work like follow-ups, next steps, CRM updates, coaching scorecards, bluntly all the manual shit that your sales team has to do but takes away from their creativity and closing deals. So stop losing winnable deals to process and start automating.
Take the grunt away from your sales team. Use attention.com. The best sales teams all are. While Attention is helping your sales team focus on closing more deals, let's look at how you can bring that same edge to your website. Are you still jumping between tools just to update your website? Don't do this. Framer unifies design, CMS and publishing all on one canvas. There's no handoff, no hassle. Everything you need to design and publish in one place. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production-ready websites and it's now redefining how we design for the web. With the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas-based design tool, Framer is more than a site builder. It's a true all-in-one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals, to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site, Framer is where ideas go to live, start and finish. No Figma imports, no messy HTML, just design, iterate and ship all in one place. And it's completely free to start. Ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool? Start creating for free at framer.com/design and use the code sales for a free month of Framer Pro. That's framer.com/design and use the promo code sales. framer.com/design, use the promo code sales.
Rules and restrictions may apply. You have now arrived at your destination. Chris, dude, I am so excited for this. I think you are one of the great leaders of our time. You have built the Snowflake Sales Walk into an absolute machine. Thank you so much for joining me today. First, dude.

**Chris Degnan** (4:24)
Harry, as always, it's great to see you and thanks for having me and congrats on all your success, Harry.

**Harry Stebbings** (4:30)
That is very, very kind. I just wanted to start with the book. If you were to summarize, what do you most want people to get from doing the book?

**Chris Degnan** (4:39)
I co-wrote it with Snowflake's Chief Marketing Officer, Denise Pearson. Really, the reason that three years ago that we decided to write the book was that in most organizations, especially I'm seeing it from the outside, now looking in is as I become an advisor to many companies, a lot of founding CEOs feel like it's great to have friction between sales and marketing. Denise and I never had friction. If we had friction, we dealt with it ourselves. We didn't go to mom or dad with going up to our CEO. We dealt with it internally. I think it's really important to have this really close relationship between sales and marketing, and for marketing to treat sales as their customer. That's what Denise and I really focused on in the book, and that's why we do it is that people ask me advice all the time around how to build their companies, how to build go-to-market. Well, I hate patting myself on the back, but Denise and I did a very good job of building a world-class go-to-market organization at Snowflake, and that's what we talk about in the book.