E471 | Ryan Lieber, Snowflake: Sales and Scaling Strategies: First SDR and EMEA’s Go-To-Market Leader [Path to Market]

0:03If you're a category creator, you really do have to be a zero to one. Your idea has to be differentiated. It can't just be better. Snowflake, we were truly different from what was on the market. Welcome to Path to Market, the podcast where we unravel the art and science of go-to-market strategies for startups and scale-ups. Brought to you by Natasha Lytton from SeedCamp, the day one partner for Europe's most exceptional entrepreneurs, and Micah Smirthwaite, seasoned investor and sales leader. This series dives deep into the challenges, opportunities, and insights that to find a company's journey to market success.

0:37Together, Natasha and Micah will share their own learnings, uncover practical advice from seasoned go-to-market leaders, and dispel the myths surrounding what it really takes to master go-to-market. So whether you're a founder, operator, or investor, this series will empower you with actionable insights to navigate your path to market success. Let's dive in. We're really excited today. Natasha and I are going to speak with Ryan Lieber. Ryan was early at Snowflake. He joined in 2014 in California as the 40th employee and was the first SDR. He then relocated to London to help build out the EMEA go-to-market team.

1:16And if you're not familiar with Snowflake, today Snowflake has storage and compute resources that businesses use for a variety of workloads from data integration to business intelligence. But what's remarkable is the size and scale of Snowflake. They have over 7 ,000 employees. They closed Q2 with a revenue run rate of$3.5 billion, over 10 ,000 customers, and a market cap of over$40 billion. And that's today. But Ryan joined when it was 2014. Prospects didn't know what Snowflake was, let alone a cloud data warehouse. And he was the first SDR. So Ryan, can you share with us a little bit what it was like in the early days to join a small company and some of the responsibilities you've had along the way?

2:06Yeah, happy to. And I guess, well, first off, thank you very much for having me on, Natasha. I'm really excited to be here and share those early day stories. is maybe before I get there, I'll just talk about how I ended up at Snowflake in the first place, because I think that's probably the most common question I get. So if you go back to 2014, I graduated from University of California, Santa Barbara in California, and I always wanted to work for a startup. So one of the degrees I did was technology and entrepreneurship. I knew I didn't want to work for a big company because you would feel, at least for me personally, I didn't want to feel like a cog in the machine.

2:45So graduated from Santa Barbara and then moved back up to the Bay Area where I'm from and used a recruiter in order to get into startups because first job, didn't even know how to contact a startup really. And she sent me four companies. I won't list the other three, but one of them was Snowflake. And I didn't know what a cloud data warehouse was. As we'll get to, it really wasn't even a true market yet. that they were based in San Mateo, California, which if you're from California and you're young, you want to be up in San Francisco. You don't want to be living down in San Mateo. No offense, San Mateo.

3:18It wasn't the cool place to be at the time for a younger individual. But what did catch my attention was Bob Muglia, who was the CEO at the time. And if you know anything about Bob, he was the third most senior person at Microsoft. It was him, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates. So to know that he ran their SQL server,$16 billion business, and then went to a small startup. That's what ultimately grabbed my attention. And yeah, I went to apply and fortunately got the job. I can share a little more about that interview process later. But yeah, joined 40th employee. And what was really exciting about it is we were a small company, even though 40 employees, it feels like a larger number than it was.

3:57But 40 is not a big number when you get there. And right when I got to that environment. You could tell they know what good looks like. It was a lot of industry veterans, someone with my first job. It was high pressure. Not that anyone was placing the pressure on me, but when you're around great people, you want to be able to execute. And being their first SDR, I was effectively the guinea pig. It's what they called me at the time. And because we didn't have an SDR, we didn't really know any outbound. We didn't know our ICP. We were still in stealth mode, so there's no website. So it was a lot of trial by fire and trying to learn on the go on what is our correct messaging, who's the right personas, what use cases should we even go after.

4:35And we really didn't know any of that at that particular point in time. So I'm sure we'll touch on how that evolved a little bit later. I'm sure in those early days, as you're building a process and playbook, it's a lot of experiments and then you codify what works and turn that into a process. And then can you talk about over the last 10 years, some of the other roles you've had? Yeah. So it went from an SDR. And then I think what's always been fun about Snowflake and to their credit, they've always effectively let me create my next role. And I think that's really important for startups is that you provide career opportunities for individuals at the organization, no matter the seniority level.

5:14Because what do they say? They say you leave your manager, not a company. And if your manager is not helping you create career opportunities, that's pretty stifling and motivating. And that's one of the areas which effectively led me to be at Snowflake for a little over 10 years now. There's always been an opportunity for career growth. Moved from SDR to senior SDR, which I just got a pay raise. There wasn't any more responsibility. And effectively at that time, then we said, hey, we need to create an inside sales team. We had a few people from account executive perspective who were in the field, but we really didn't have anyone just to go after those more midsize accounts who didn't have any experience.

5:49So I became our inside sales of Director East. They didn't really care what our title was. It was, you know, seem bigger than you are. And that was our motto at the time. In late 2016, our CRO, Chris Dugnan, effectively said, hey, we're going to open operations in Europe. If someone wants to go, there's going to be opportunities. So I created my business case. I asked Chris for a meeting. Chris was my initial manager at the time. And I said, hey, I want to go to London. And he said, you can go. and that was pretty much the conversation and then I asked him if I could you know still I put a lot of effort into this business case can I at least share it with you moved to London in March 2017 we had four of us there on the ground on that day and I think it was like March 13th or or 14th and that's what I call my x-factor year because I did sales worked events ordered catering I was our IT person in Europe it's the only job that I wanted to get fired from I was the worst IT person and people would join and not know that I was actually in sales.

6:49And they'd be like, wow, this IT guy is actually not very good. And he doesn't know a lot about Apple laptops. And people would have to politely inform him saying, Ryan doesn't actually do IT. He's just the only person in Europe who actually knows how to set up this laptop. And late 27, early 2018 was when I'd say life changed a little bit, which is when we got our first inbound lead from Israel. And they said, Ryan, why don't you cover it? And that was the beginning of a really fun, but challenging career journey opening Israel for Snowflake. So I did that for three years until we had about a$14 million business and 2021 passed it off to a local team because it got big enough at that point in time.

7:28But just for anyone who's joining a startup, I did partnerships in Europe at some point in time, as I mentioned, IT, catering, they still say my greatest legacy will be getting us a free delivery for the office. So I'm not sure I'll ever beat that, but it was just, I guess, It's a lot around just staying flexible. And if you're going to grow with an organization, you have to be willing to wear multiple hats. That really is the beauty of working at a startup. There is more work to do than there is people to do it. Then there's always that tension point, isn't there, where you're used to running kind of all these different areas.

8:00But then there's a maturity level that kind of comes in and actually you start having to put people in place. It was really interesting hearing you speak because there's always we want to be so intentional, right, with how we scale up the business, with how we launch international. But your story is a perfect example of actually a lot of the time it's opportunistic and inbound things come in and not necessarily what you're anticipating. And you have to jump on opportunities as and when they arise. And I'd say, yeah, one other learning there, especially if you're an early employee in sales, your territory only gets smaller.

8:32And you have to, I think, really be selfless and recognize that, yes, your territory is getting smaller, but ultimately adding more people to your territory is going to help from a brand awareness standpoint. More people are going to actually know about your business because you've got a double the amount of people trying to educate the market. And you do see salespeople who get territorial who don't want additional people added. Or yes, there's a moment of saturation, but I think when you're that small, you want more salespeople because ultimately they're going to help with the greater message of the company.

9:00So I used to have the whole world for sales and so I've always just gotten smaller from there. It can only get smaller when you have the whole world. system. Yeah, exactly. I want to sort of rewind a little bit and go back to some of the early days. And you alluded to it a little bit, which was really interesting that when you joined 40 people, there wasn't actually any understanding yet of ICP, but they were still making a decision to hire an SDR and someone they wanted to figure it out. So where was the responsibility of when you think about the responsibility of finding customers for a new company category?

9:33And with category creation there's such a large amount of education and skepticism can you talk about how you guys at Snowflake approached that as you said you didn't know what a cloud data warehouse was when you started out so for any startup founder or teams who are trying to build in a new category do you have any guidance that would help them yeah when I initially heard about Snowflake I was doing that research you couldn't google cloud data warehouse because nothing even popped up on google and if you looked up data warehousing, it was very boring. And I was like, I can't believe this is the company I'm going to apply for.

10:09And it just shows almost how immature the market was back then and how much actually needed to be created in order for Snowflake to really be possible and exist. If you look at the category creation side, yeah, when you don't have a working website, I think all it said, it was faster than Teradata, more flexible than Hadoop. And there was one other line I can't remember, but you couldn't click on anything. Why would anyone know what Snowflake is? So in those early days when you're a category creator, a lot of rejection, which ultimately means there's a lot of evangelizing, a lot of learning reinforcement.

10:39And the most difficult part about being a category creator is overcoming misperceptions and fear, particularly if someone's worried about their job. Since we were a cloud data warehouse, naturally our kind of enemy at that time, which we had to discover, we didn't know who our enemies would be, but it was individuals who were managing on-premise data environments like Teradata and Natiza, SQL Server. When they have a cloud data warehouse, they immediately get scared. It's like our day in AI. Some people worried about their jobs. For us, these on-premise DBAs, they were worried about their jobs.

11:11And a big part of our rule was to share with them, this is the future. These are the benefits. But also people didn't trust the cloud in 2014. They didn't know where the cloud was. I didn't even know it was in what US West is in Oregon. I was actually a little bit disheartened when I I figured out that the cloud was a physical data center somewhere. So educating people around actually the cloud is a lot more secure than you managing it yourself. And what we had going for us is if you're a category creator, it kind of goes back to that Peter Thiel, where you really do have to be a zero to one. Your idea has to be differentiated.

11:47It can't just be better. And Snowflake, we were truly different from what was on the market. You can tell something's different by the questions customers ultimately have to ask. And fortunately, we were also very innovative with our separation of storage and compute. And that was the messaging we, through our education, that we were going to lead with. Back to your question around ICP. We did, shame to say it now, a lot of spamming at the time, sending up thousands and thousands of emails to go out before I went home. And poor people who are in our CRM because we didn't have a Salesforce administrator.

12:18So poor Joe Johnson was in our CRM four times. We get four emails from me and I would not get very nice messaging back from him. So there was a lot of inefficiency with our outreach. But ultimately, after sending these thousands of emails, we were getting responses from ad tech companies, media, and gaming. And what we figured out was, one, these companies were more innovative. They didn't have as much technical debt. And two, they were getting a lot of semi-structured data. So JSON, Avril, XML, Parquet, Clickstream, which no other platform at the time could really ingest. And this is how we found our ICP.

12:53we really took signals from the market and who was actually responding to us. And that's how we got our first customers. It was White Ops, which is now human, still a customer today. And oh gosh, and one other ad tech company. That's what we then honed our messaging on. Because at that time, we didn't care about the deal size. We just needed happy, referenceable customers. And especially when you're a category creator, it's really an education sale to begin with. And we knew if we could just get them to the demo, they were going to see the promised land and we were going to be golden. It was truly differentiated.

13:25So we got to the demo. They were like, wow, I think I heard them call it black magic about three times, which I was told by more senior people, Ryan, this doesn't happen. Data engineers who believe in science don't call technology black magic. That's when you've got a really exciting feeling like we are on to something here. I know this is probably a long-winded answer, but I'd say there's one more famous line which one of the early sales guys told me and he said, Ryan, it's not our job to sell the religion and the Bible. And what he meant by that was, it's not our job to sell the religion in the cloud.

13:54If a company doesn't believe in the cloud, they're definitely not going to move their data to a cloud data platform. So we need to go after companies who already believe what we believe, and they're already open to the cloud. They already trust it. If you don't believe in religion, period, you're probably not going to go after Buddhism, Christianity, you're probably not going to be open to it. And that always stuck with me. And that's always what I tell founders is you have to go after people who already believe what you believe from the technology perspective. I think that's great that you ran all these experiments and you were able to find these people who had the religion of the cloud in these few verticals.

14:26And as you ran all these experiments with your thousands of outbound emails and started to get sales opportunities, that's how a sales process gets codified is you just take those experiments and you start to run them and that becomes the playbook. In the early stages of a company and when founders, before they have a salesperson, they often are doing a lot of the sales themselves. And one framework that I know you use at Snowflake is MedPick. Many founders, technical founders may have never heard of MedPick. So can you talk a little bit about what that is in terms of the sales process and how MedPick is used at Snowflake?

15:05Yeah. So we got, I'd say lucky there, where John McMahon, who was the head of our board, was I think the founder of MedPick or one of the kind of key pillars of it. So we really got it ingrained in our business from day one. And if you're not familiar with MedPick, it's a sales methodology that helps qualify deals and help move deals through the sales cycle. And it stands for metrics, economic buyer, decision process, decision criteria, pain, paper process, identify pain, competition champion. And I think I mentioned it twice in there, but you got the gist of it. And when I meet with founders, I'd say that's probably the number one piece of advice I actually give them is I ask them if they know MedPick, particularly if they're doing founder-led sales.

15:44More often than not, they don't. And I advise them, look it up because it's really going to help them qualify their early engagements and close them at a much quicker rate. And the big aspect of MedPick is you want to help increase your chance of closing while decreasing the risks associated with deals. And if you don't know the letter of MedPick, then that's a big red flag in actually being able to successfully get that deal done. And from a founder perspective, if they're hiring a salesperson and they plan on being involved in pipeline review, QBRs, and they're asking questions, the sales team is going to have a lot more respect for them if they know MedPick.

16:18There's nothing worse than having a founder who doesn't know sales who wants to be involved in sales, but hasn't taken the time to learn it. Yeah, that's been involved since Snowflake at day one in our QBRs. In MedPick, it's the methodology. I think anyone can learn it. It's not rocket science. But if you do see it get it commonly messed up all the time, but you make every mistake once and then you learn from it. Yeah, it's funny. Sales is art and science and MedPic put some of the science behind it. And it's as simple as when a founder will tell you, hey, we're talking to X company. And you say, okay, well, is that person the champion or do they have budget and economic buyer?

16:55And just the simple questions of framing who are all the stakeholders in a buying process can really help close a sale and advance it along. One question about selling as a team, and you're not just the salesperson, but having technical buyers wanting to buy from technical counterparts. And so as a salesperson, you may engage with engineering product, your marketing counterparts, even some of the founding team. Can you talk about how to include these cross-functional teams into a sales process? Yeah, I think especially in the beginning, selling those early deals, it was very much a team effort.

17:32And before we were trying to acquire first customers in stealth, it's, yes, they have to believe in our technology, but they also have to believe in the vision of the company and where we want to go, which is why it was important to not just have the salesperson and our sales engineer, but we would get our CEO involved, who could really provide the credibility of what Snowflake was then and where we're going to be in the future, but also because people didn't trust the cloud, we would actually get individuals on the call who created Snowflake's security systems. So they could really walk them through and make them as comfortable as possible what we've implemented from a security perspective.

18:08With those early customers, obviously we want to make them happy reference customers. So we bring in the individuals responsible for marketing. So we could share them, hey, if you adopt Snowflake and you leverage it XYZ way, here's actually how we want to develop a more strategic partnership with you. So it was really important to get all these different individuals involved. And I think at any stage, it takes a village to close a deal, especially when you're a small startup and you're willing to show the faces of these really valuable people at your company to a prospect. It definitely means a lot to them, especially as you climb up that ladder, because typically we weren't engaged with the decision makers in these early deals.

18:45It was the technical people, someone who was maybe a coach who we wish would become a champion, And if you put it in MedPIC terms, and once we started getting up the ladder to the decision makers, that's when we really like to engage our CEO who could bring that gravitas of coming from Microsoft, having real experience in the space. So he could have that kind of leader to leader conversation. Was it at different parts of the sales funnel that you'd kind of interspersed those people? Because that's a lot of different people, right? I totally get and can see the value in having all of those different counterparts, whether it's marketing, security, CEO, et cetera, coming in.

19:19But how did you break down like almost when best to play that person in the various stages of your sales process? Yeah, I think it really would come in as we would put the proof of concept or MVP together, because obviously you don't want them involved too early because then they've got their day jobs as well. So you really want to bring them in when the deal is qualified, I would say, and the customers bought in to actually trialing out Snowflake. And as you go through and put that evaluation together, say security is going to be one piece of it. okay, well, if security is going to be a piece of it, let's get your SOC or security team or your CISO on a call and we'll arrange a call with security person.

19:56And as you mature through the deal process and it gets more, you start taking off the required capabilities and you really think it's going to go more towards a deal. Then maybe that's when you bring in marketing and say, hey, this isn't just about the technical aspects. We're really looking at this from a partnership perspective. So it really depends on, I'd say, yeah, the maturity of how that deal is progressing. and as you get more towards the decision maker level, more towards a contract, maybe that's when we bring in our CEO at the time. That helps answer the question. Definitely does. Thank you very much.

20:27I guess on that, it'd be really good to delve deeper into all things hiring because, you know, not everybody is fortunate enough to find a you. And obviously you joined Snowflake relatively early in your career and you've been able to build an amazing career there. For founders looking now to hire somebody and start making go-to-market hires, when should they be looking to bring on an SDR? At what stage does it make sense? And also what's the job spec? What realistically do you want this person to be doing and how do founders go about finding these holy grail people? Yeah, I think you probably hire an SDR earlier rather than later because one, they're not that expensive to begin with depending on, I guess, the amount of funding you have.

21:12But also they take so much workload off of that founder's plate. Because one of the hardest parts of a founder, I think, is particularly if they're technical, is they're trying to build a product. And if you're building a product, you want to be in that flow state from a coding perspective. And you have to get out of that and also then think about cold outreach. That's a really hard balancing act to do as a founder, given the other million tasks that you have at hand. So I would say actually bringing on that SDR earlier rather than later. It's funny when I got that job spec for Snowflake, you know, cloud data warehousing, I didn't know what a data warehouse was.

21:43So I messaged my friend who did computer science and I said, Hey, I'm looking to apply for this cloud data warehousing. And he just responds back saying, you have no business applying for a cloud data warehousing company. You don't even know what it is. And I thought that was really funny. So I told the recruiter, yes, I want to apply. And then I started my research on what was the data warehouse to begin with. So I went into that interview. And I started to waffle about what I thought a data warehouse was. And Chris just stopped me. He's like, it doesn't matter. Stop trying to tell us what a data warehouse is.

22:15You can learn it. What they were really curious about more was my character. Who was I as a 22-year-old coming out of school? Really digging into what sort of challenges or obstacles did I have to overcome in life to that date? And not really what were the obstacles, but also how did I put myself in the best position possible to overcome those. Because that's what really sales is, is you get a target and then it looks very daunting. It happens at the beginning of every quarter when I'm sure Micah remembers it from his sales days, you get a number and you say, how the heck am I going to hit that?

22:45And you've got about 10 minutes of sulking. And then you say, okay, well, I have to put myself in the best position possible to achieve it. And that's really what an SDR has to do on a daily basis. So I'd say being able to put yourself in the best position possible, but then looking at different personality traits, I'd say, yes, you see a lot of athletes in sales. But I don't think it's just athletes. It's just individuals who are hyper-competitive and hate to lose. And that can come in many different aspects. And that's a really key component of an SDR, someone who's not content with not hitting your quota meeting for the week.

23:18But the other part of that is having that growth mindset saying, well, if I need to get six meetings a week, I'm going to shoot for eight, bringing that positive energy because you're just getting kicked to the floor every single day. You're lucky if you can make 100 calls and you set say one meeting that would be most people one to two meetings that's a happy day and you really need to be able to create that positive mindset and at that age you need to be coachable because you don't know anything so you need to have i'd say positive managers people willing to dedicate the time but you also have to soak in what they're telling you and be able to apply it quickly and the last part i say being curious because really being an sdr is just about asking questions and making the customer feel like you want to understand their business better and then be able to put it in a format where your technology can actually solve their business pains.