Qubit: Frank Slootman (Snowflake) on Sales
Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman described what makes a great sales organization on The Knowledge Project podcast:
Sales is the tip of the spear
Sales faces the cold reality of the marketplace
Everybody in the organization works for sales
Startup founders are similar when looking for product-market fit.
It's refreshing to hear what it truly takes to build and scale an organization.
“What is the difference between a good sales organization and a great sales organization?
You get a much better sales organization when you have a full alignment in the entire company.
Everybody works for sales, effectively. We always say that we are all working for sales here because they are the tip of the spear and the rest of us are really the wood behind the arrowhead. That’s sort of the way I characterize the relationships between sales and the rest of the company. I always tell them we are all working for you because, if we are not working for you, I don’t know what we are doing.
Sales needs to feel that wood behind the arrowhead, like everybody is killing themselves to help [sales] succeed. It’s not so much that it’s all about selling stuff and transactions and deals and all of that, it’s just that sales experiences the reality of the marketplace. The first and the most profound way. The rest of [the] organization sits much farther away from the cold winds of competition and some of the ugliness that happens, the uncertainties and the anxieties, all these kinds of things. So, yeah, sales is harder, which is why the rest of the organization needs to be in alignment and in support of them.
The alignment is really important, that we really provision the whole company behind that because they are experiencing reality in the marketplace and we, the rest of us, have to adjust to that, we got to help them, we got to change things. It’s a constant process of basically living their experience, what does it mean and how often are we seeing this and what are we going to do about it.”
Source:
Frank Slootman: Doing Less, Doing Better [The Knowledge Project Ep. #173]
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