Overview
At an astounding 50% year-over-year growth, Snowflake regularly forms new sales teams, launches new products, and adjusts their methods of funneling demand. With this rapid growth, Snowflake’s revenue teams need an adaptable, yet robust tool that will both support and scale their account-based marketing (ABM) plays. Capitalizing on the power and flexibility of LeanData’s Revenue Orchestration platform, Snowflake is able to execute plays and “tactical strikes” to support more than 20 ABM marketers and 250 SDRs, providing rich context and achieving each outcome by automating every go-to-market (GTM) motion to the fullest extent.
- Industry
- Information Technology
- Location
- Bozeman, Montana
- Interview With
- Travis Henry, Director, SDR Operations and Enablement and Hillary Carpio, Senior Director, Account Based Marketing
Solutions
LeanData Matching
LeanData Routing
Results
1-3 hours saved per day per SDR
on researching inbound leads
99% reduction in Ops time spent
updating routing rules (from weeks to hours)
Less than 5 minute response time
to demo and contact requests (due to accurately routed leads)
Founded in 2012, Snowflake’s cloud-native platform, which powers the Data Cloud, allows businesses to store, manage, and analyze vast amounts of data in a scalable and efficient manner. Snowflake has experienced tremendous success, as evidenced by its 2020 IPO, the largest ever for a software company at that time. Snowflake continues to expand its customer base, offering a reliable and secure single data experience that spans multiple clouds and geographies.
When Travis Henry, an experienced LeanData user, joined Snowflake in 2020, he pinpointed challenges related to their lead scoring and inbound processes. Travis led a project team to implement a proprietary lead scoring model, triggering automation within Salesforce to manage inbound leads. This came with an expansion of LeanData lead routing, a massive shift in Marketo, and a full overhaul of Salesforce automation that would not only keep up with growth, but more importantly, scale. In recognition of Travis’s innovative leadership and direction, he was awarded 2022 OpsStar of the Year.
Travis said, “I realized early in my career, if I can get LeanData, make sure that leads make it to the right person, and look at my market in an account-based way, that gives me hours back every week. LeanData allows me to focus on being a leader for my team.”
To further Snowflake’s internal goal of ‘insane alignment between Sales and Marketing’, Travis worked closely with Hillary Carpio, Snowflake’s Senior Director of Account Based Marketing, to bring together integrated, account-based, cross-functional teams that successfully target and close business at phenomenal rates.
Travis and Hillary have coined their approach “One-Team GTM,” and share plays and strategies in their book, Busting Silos. Through a combination of account prioritization, digital advertising and highly targeted SDR prospecting, Snowflake experiences 2X to 4X increases in SDR efficiency through their One-Team GTM approach.
And, to execute this one-two sales and marketing punch, the Snowflake team relies on the power and flexibility of LeanData Revenue Orchestration to mobilize a full menu of go-to-market plays.
Automating Targeted Account-Based Motions
One goal of Snowflake’s ABM program is to provide warm, targeted leads to their SDR teams. In the beginning phases, pilot plays involved simple follow-up sequences on LinkedIn ads. Today, however, they are taking a much more data-driven, automated and orchestrated approach.
Using data provided by Snowflake’s own proprietary platform, the Snowflake team has developed a catalog of plays which can be put into motion at any time, depending on the needs of Sales reps, a particular region, or set of accounts.
For example, using LeanData’s lead-to-account matching capabilities, Snowflake is able to get a sense of which people work at which companies. Through account matching, Snowflake can determine just how penetrated they are into the accounts they want as customers. And, if account penetration is minimal, they can then look for awareness, propensity, and buyer signals, and run a corresponding play to advance the deal forward.
Travis said, “We wouldn’t be able to have those insights without LeanData in place.”
Preventing GTM Bottlenecks
When Snowflake launched an SDR team in Korea, that particular team needed to know essential information about their territories and accounts. However, Snowflake SalesOps also wanted to feed the SDRs relevant buyer signals at the right time — signals which formerly had been sent to a different team, a continent away in Singapore.
Using LeanData routing, Snowflake SalesOps was able to set up an entirely new GTM motion and launch, from a demand generation perspective, in a new country in just a few clicks. Travis said, “Without LeanData, it would have been a bottleneck to launch that market and that team.”
Supporting PLG Land & Expand Plays
The Snowflake team also uses LeanData to execute land-and-expand plays associated with their self-service funnel.
When someone signs up for a new monthly subscription via the website, Snowflake reflects those customers as “self-service” Accounts in Salesforce, and LeanData routes those Accounts to the right Sales rep. This motion is the basis for a product-led-growth (PLG) expansion play.
Using Snowflake for product usage data, the team can identify accounts at risk or those with upside potential. Automation then connects usage data with sales data to initiate customer expansion playbooks, prompting sales reps to sell annual contracts or expanding product offerings.
Actioning Buyer Signal Data at the Right Time
With an increasingly digital-first buying experience producing a flood of buyer signal data, Travis has noticed that overall demand signals have increased in volume. Snowflake’s Marketing and Operations teams are not just dealing with first-party campaign responses or lists of webinar attendees, they collect an entire world of intent data, propensity data, and usage data that provides insight into buyer interest.
The Snowflake team uses LeanData to trigger automation based on a Lead’s response to a campaign, matching leads with accounts and auto-converting them into contacts. Then, these contacts are enrolled into a corresponding Outreach sequence. This automation allows the SDR teams to immediately follow up with the contact with the buyer signal as context, creating a “warming up” motion that is 3X more likely to result in a meeting.
Solving Cumbersome Sales Team Pool Management
In the past, Round Robin pool management was a cumbersome mess due to Sales teams being in a continuous state of flux: new hires, resignations, vacations, and other absences. Keeping pools up-to-date was tedious: manually checking onboarding lists and updating personnel changes.
However, through LeanData routing automation, Snowflake is able to simplify this process by either auto-assigning employees to groups or auto-removing them from groups based on updates made in Salesforce, with no limits on changes as teams scale.
Saving Time by Eliminating Non-Sales Activities
By implementing LeanData, Snowflake’s sales reps don’t waste time digging through their CRM to determine whether they should pay attention to a buyer signal or work a lead. Rather, signals are prioritized through the LeanData graph, placing contacts into context-based sequences at the right time, and allowing reps to spend more time on deal-closing activities.
In fact, Travis estimates that 20% of an SDR’s bandwidth is put back into their day in time saved. Plus, with LeanData matching in place, this prevents sales reps from mistakenly reaching out to a seemingly “cold lead” which in actuality is a customer account, thus preserving the professional Snowflake brand.
About Snowflake
Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) enables every organization to mobilize their data with Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Customers use the Data Cloud to unite siloed data, discover and securely share data, power data applications, and execute diverse AI/ML and analytic workloads. Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a single data experience that spans multiple clouds and geographies. Thousands of customers across many industries, including 639 of the 2023 Forbes Global 2000 (G2K) as of July 31, 2023, use Snowflake Data Cloud to power their businesses. Learn more at snowflake.com.
