HOW TO GET YOUR COMPANY TO TURN R1-BILLION+ EDITORIAL
These pillars were the cornerstones of our marketing success at Snowflake during our journey to US$100-million.
Our marketing team ran almost daily
survey as early as possible. This also
In addition, we scaled every component
were out in the field with our customers.
Score (NPS) score. Every year, we
we introduced live product demos to
meetings with our sales engineers who That helped us learn which questions and concerns we needed to address. To scale our content development in
those early days, we got almost every
helps you establish your Net Promoter measure every single component
of our customers’ experience with
Snowflake, and the survey provides us with invaluable insights. BUILD FOR SCALE
focused on what our customers wanted
experience a slowdown in growth. This
to learn. This helped us create trust and credibility, which startups often lack. Whenever possible, we put actual customers at the forefront of our
Many startups get to US$20-million and
building direct relationships with them and made sure there was value for
them to participate. We also started customer advisory board meetings, where we gave our customers fake
dollar bills and asked them to invest
them in different parts of our roadmap.
This helped us prioritise the things that mattered most to them.
Finally, I recommend companies start an annual customer engagement
one-to-one reference call request and helps us respect our customers’ time.
hamsters as soon as you can, make
and processes to scale.
around automating more work so
marketing efforts, we worked on
a reference customer and get all their
build their marketing technology stack
manual work, and because they don’t
among our customers today, and they
To get customers involved in our
session where prospects can talk live to
For startups looking to scale to
In 2017, the big topic at every all-
are our most effective marketing.
We instituted a weekly Office Hours
often happens because they rely on
marketing programs. We have
thousands of brand ambassadors
cut down on one-to-one meetings.
questions answered. This eliminates the
employee involved with writing content and creating videos that were laser-
of our demand process. For example,
hands meeting at Snowflake was
US$100 million quickly, get rid of the sure your technology can grow with
you, and find ways to improve every component of your buyers’ journey that is time-consuming.
we could get rid of the “hamsters.” The hamsters were all of the
resources doing work that should be automated. In the beginning,
they were very important in doing
things such as setting up accounts for our customers. But it wasn’t
really until we had a fully automated
provisioning system that our free-trial sign-ups took off.
We also built our marketing technology stack to scale with our growth from the beginning. If you don’t, you’ll have to slow down and start replacing parts, hindering your momentum.
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