Introduction

Wide Nets and Wasted Resources

Although it only operated for a little more than eighteen months between 1860 and 1861, the Pony Express transformed how Americans communicated. This now-legendary system drastically cut the time it took to send mail between the east and west coasts of the United States, sometimes by a factor of six. Instead of loading envelopes onto hulking ships or lumbering stagecoaches, messages were carried by individual couriers moving swiftly on horseback through a series of checkpoints between Missouri to California. Riders hot-swapped from fatigued horses to fresh ones to maximize speed, stopping only for their own rest and caloric intake.

The Pony Express achieved a stepwise advance in communications velocity and reliability by stitching together a coordinated set of motions that worked continuously under very specific circumstances. If one of the waypoints wasn’t ready to supply the rider with a fresh horse, or if the waypoints were spread out beyond a day’s ride, the entire system would break down. The riders themselves even had to stay under a weight limit of 125 pounds. The horses they chose were specialized for stamina and distance. Before being supplanted by the telegraph, this system worked to reduce the average mail delivery time from coast to coast from multiple months to a ten-day sprint, from sender to recipient.

Cultivating new business isn’t all that different. To achieve real efficacy in today’s B2B sales and marketing landscape, you must orchestrate a symphony of content, digital experiences, peer validation, physical mail, in-person events, and the all-important human touch points of live conversations and asynchronous messages. And you need to do that at the scale of thousands of unique businesses and tens of thousands of unique humans in those businesses, with each permutation demanding a resonant value proposition that compels action.

Generating new business takes follow-through, vigilance, and skill, and it’s not something that can ever stop. As individuals who have dedicated our careers to growing B2B revenue as leaders, operators, advisers, and consultants for dozens of companies, we’ve learned the prospecting motion must be continuous and unbroken. Inbound leads must be triaged in a timely manner; outbound motions need room to build on themselves over weeks and months; and signals from target accounts can present themselves at any time and vanish just as quickly. Sales teams can’t focus exclusively at closing business in the immediate quarter; if they do, they wake up on day one of the next quarter inside a forecasting hole.

The hardest part of closing a deal is finding it. So we must always be looking.

At Snowflake, one of our mantras is target the right accounts at the right time with the right message to the right people. Doing this involves complex orchestration and organizational alignment that no single team can create alone. But any team or individual can start the work of alignment at a small scale and build a solid case. Lessons from our past roles and the framework we’ve constructed at Snowflake have helped us amplify that effort. We’ve built systems that enable us to address accounts, timing, messaging, and people simultaneously, as have many other corporations. What sets us apart is our ability to do these things in a highly targeted, one-to-one way as well as a digitally enabled at-scale approach, all while working as one big unified team.

Everyone wants to target the right accounts at the right time and deliver the right message to the right people. In this book, we’ll talk about how to actually do it, from ideation to execution, at startup speed and enterprise scale.

We know how because we’ve done it. We’ve created new systems and augmented existing ones to keep the Snowflake sales pipeline full at all times. We’ve either been in your shoes ourselves or worked with incredible people in your shoes. We know what it’s like to stare down a broken strategy and know it can be made better.

We also understand the temptation to solve go-to-market (GTM) problems by paying an expert consultant to come in and make those problems go away. We’ve even been those consultants. So we know the truth: Real change can and should be driven by tackling the tough work of internal alignment across your GTM teams. What we are proposing in this book is an evolution that builds on the concept of account-based, the strategy where marketing focuses on a specific set of accounts with tailored messaging and content. We will walk you through how to bring your revenue teams together to amplify your impact and ramp up your growth curve. We call this coming together of marketing, sales, and sales development one-team go-to-market (GTM).

All this to say that we’re speaking from experience. (Including dealing with our fair share of failures.) Both of us have driven change in pipeline-generation philosophies and processes for many years. And in the case of our work at Snowflake, we’ve had the opportunity to build an orchestrated one-team GTM machine that effectively engages the largest organizations in the world and maximizes the odds of landing them as customers. Undoubtedly, we have benefited from the work of predecessors, colleagues, market timing, and an unbelievable product. But we have also worked through the challenges of alignment and pushed the boundaries of what is possible in today’s data-driven, technology-enabled world of sales and marketing.

Here’s how it all got started.

A meeting of aligned minds

Hillary was working as a marketing manager at a network security company. Her job was to take a suite of solutions across the organization and develop GTM campaigns that included touch points from all marketing teams including corporate communications, product marketing, digital marketing, content marketing, and the web team. The company was close to mastering the bill of materials for the one-to-many approach, with well-aligned content, messaging, and delivery. The problem was that despite how well-oiled the machine seemed to be, it wasn’t netting the highest-profile, highest-spending customers. Hillary’s team needed to narrow their focus and make an impact on a list of key accounts selected by leadership. Doing this would help the company hit their overall revenue targets.

Because she’s constantly hunting for process improvements and ways to connect cross-functional teams, Hillary attended a conference, learned how Snowflake did account-based marketing (ABM), and brought those ideas back to her employer … with a twist. She had developed a reputation for stitching together free and existing technology to expand her impact beyond single-human limitations, and that’s what she did here. She took what she’d learned from Snowflake—which had a five-person team—and applied it as a one-person team by using tech to scale. Since the learnings were designed for a resourced team of multiple people, Hillary modified them and tweaked them to use as a foundation for what she wanted to do, and built her own ideas on top of them. (A practice we’ll strongly encourage you to do throughout this book.) This included pitching to the sales development (SDR) team to ask for volunteers to participate, and hiring developers out of Romania for $2K to help her connect a few key pieces in her tech stack.

She built up her ABM practice and refined it. Now able to target thousands of accounts with relevant messaging and content—with a subset of those messages teed up for SDR outreach as a team—she had results within a few weeks showing a 122 percent increase in SDR open rates, fifteen times the industry standard meeting conversion rate, and a sevenfold increase in reply rates. At this point she and her manager, the VP of corporate marketing, brand and demand at her company, knew they were onto something. By joining forces with the SDR function, they had cracked the code for taking their existing campaign infrastructure, tailoring it to top accounts, and scaling it. She proved that an account-based approach could be launched successfully, regardless of resources. It just required an innovative mindset and bias toward action.

Snowflake’s ABM experts heard about her innovations and got in touch with her. Inspired by the opportunities available at Snowflake, she later made the leap to lead its ABM function into the next era of the company’s scale, to IPO and beyond. In her new role, her first priority was to fortify and maximize the relationships between ABM folks and SDRs within the company. Although Snowflake was a big, well-funded organization with existing ABM, sales, and SDR departments and enthusiastic support from leadership, Hillary saw an opportunity to truly unify these teams.

She approached the SDR team with a grand plan of how they could collaborate to prioritize their accounts using intent data, then roll out an end-to-end program. But together they recognized that her grand plan was too grand, and she needed to scale back and look for one small way they could work together to get the ball rolling.

Instead of using intent data to orchestrate outreach to thousands of accounts, they took one person on Hillary’s ABM team and equipped them with the right data to partner with an SDR on a list of about ten accounts. This right-sized partnership worked spectacularly, and Hillary began making plans to scale her efforts slowly and methodically. Even with leadership buy-in and a solid vision, change takes time and requires winning the hearts and minds of cross-functional teams.

Meanwhile, Travis had been working in marketing and sales development roles for his whole career, and saw a repeating pattern of go-to-market inefficiency at the companies he worked at and consulted for. Marketing generated huge demand at great cost, but had little insight into and direction regarding what was happening with that demand. Often conversations with marketing leaders would circle back to the same script. There was lots of focus on what the company could do to optimize its campaigns, increase engagement, and drive more leads from the marketing dollars being spent, but Travis saw that these were the wrong issues to focus on, akin to Henry Ford focusing on smithing better horseshoes. Meanwhile, sales teams would regularly pursue the long, difficult road of cold outbound prospecting to individuals who had never been exposed to the company’s value proposition. Nobody was dedicated to and bought into converting the demand that marketing was producing into the things that mattered to the business: meetings, opportunities, and revenue.

This led him to recognize the power of the sales development representative (SDR) role. But that also wasn’t enough. SDRs themselves were not effective without the direction and guidance of the sales team, who held ultimate responsibility for the accounts that we were all trying to get in front of. He knew that inviting prospects to show up at an event, mingle with their peers, nosh on a scone, and learn about the company’s value proposition was necessary, but not sufficient in creating customers. These marketing campaigns had to be paired with a formalized sales follow-up mechanism to get prospects to a real buying cycle.

Finding and understanding the SDR function—a specialized role that sits between the scone and the sale—was a breakthrough for him. But his real aha moment came when he saw the power of a well-engineered tech stack in the hands of these purpose-built prospectors. He realized that the output of a single SDR could be multiplied by five to ten times if that person had clean data, the ability to automate the mundane, and a tight interlock with buying signals that they could home in on. So Travis pioneered the function of dedicated Sales Development Operations and Enablement, bringing the strategy and process rigor usually reserved for quota-carrying sales teams to the demand creating SDR teams at the top of the funnel. SDRs are one of the most data-driven, process-oriented, and tool-enabled functions in a go-to-market team, yet most companies do not dedicate an operations professional (or team) to support them. Travis was brought into Snowflake as an operations leader to shepherd the function’s growth from a group of 85 to more than 250 individuals.

Once the two of us started talking, we knew we were on the same page. And we were able to hit the ground running because the basic foundation was in place. Snowflake already had sales reps assigned to a list of accounts, ABM was already being used (though not in the way we were envisioning), and leadership had already put an SDR team in place. All of these factors helped us, as did identifying each other as like minds. Hillary had already been getting her team in place and pitching her ideas, but when Travis joined Snowflake it was like a door had opened for us both, and we could walk through it together.

At first, it was just the two of us putting our minds together, brainstorming how we could initiate change at a small scale within the larger company. Both of us had done similar work outside Snowflake with fewer resources and at smaller companies, so we were well positioned to build on our experiences. Now we have the same grassroots mentality but with stellar teams to support us and massive scale to push us. By creating some early wins together, gathering momentum among open-minded team members, landing some big clients using our strategies, and eventually making the case to leadership that our one-team GTM operation merited ongoing investment, we’ve built one of the largest teams in the industry.

If we can get started with just two people—two believers in the ABM way and the importance of aligning sales with marketing—so can you.

And honestly? If you find the right coconspirators, you can get a lean little ABM, sales, and SDR machine up and running in about three months, with whichever mix of resources you have. Most of the strategies we’re about to explain can be enacted with a few eager people and a creative plan to connect existing tech in a smarter way.

How This Book Works

Our job is to help you find your collaborators, experiment with some plays, and decide if this way of working works for you. We know you’re perusing these pages now so you can learn Snowflake’s one-team GTM secrets and apply them inside your own company. And we’re genuinely excited to share those secrets with you! One-team GTM is a journey, and not always a linear one. We wrote this book expecting that some of you will be intimately familiar with some of the concepts we explore and will thumb through them to dive into the nitty-gritty of execution; others will appreciate a full-spectrum guide from ideation to measurement. We hope you’ll bookmark, highlight, and use this book as a field guide through your journey. The fact that you picked up a copy in the first place proves that you believe there’s a better, more efficient way to pilot a twenty-first-century sales and marketing operation. You’re our kind of people, and we know you can succeed.

We wrote this book because we’ve been where you may be now, discovered (through real trial and error) how powerful an account-based strategy can be, and figured out how to move from loose idea to cold, hard execution.

We also wrote this book because we really, truly want to help you go to market more efficiently and effectively. We want to help you build your own Pony Express for your pipeline, and fundamentally transform your GTM processes. We are both process-savvy, operationally minded doers who make the most of whatever resources we’ve got, and it kills us to know that most sales and marketing departments still spend their time working against each other rather than cooperating. We might not be able to change that dynamic everywhere all at once but, with your help, we can start a ground-swell. We can start convincing people that there’s a better, more engaging, more profitable way to do business. And that way is together.

That said, this book is not an HR manual. We won’t be teaching you how to pitch an organizational change to your board or navigate the most toxic personalities in your company. You’ll have to manage those interpersonal politics on your own. We also won’t be offering solutions for lack of product fit, or ways to save a sinking ship. Uniting sales and marketing through a one-team approach is a long play, not a last-ditch effort.

This book is for you if you’re a doer, an ambitious tactician, a person who wants to make a positive impact regardless of your position in the org chart. The learnings and guidance we’ve compiled in these pages span from strategic plans down to gritty tactical details. We’ve also structured the book in such a way that you can learn how to build a world-class GTM machine from scratch or skip past topics you’ve already mastered to level up your operation. In short, we wrote this book for B2B go-to-market leaders of all levels who are looking for a better way to grow revenue.

In part 1, we’ll help you build a custom on-ramp to merging sales and marketing and creating your own pipeline-generating machinery at startup speed. While we heartily agree with Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman that execution beats strategy every day of the week, the truth is that you’ll set up your account-based program to fail without a solid understanding of what you’re trying to achieve. The chapters in this part of the book will challenge your thinking about why your business should change and who should be involved in the conversation.

Then in part 2 we show you how to get the structures, knowledge, and content in place to fuel that machine. These chapters will help you get a clear picture of which customers you want to bring into the fold and get you building the mechanisms you need to grab their attention.

Part 3 dives straight into defining and running your first big plays. We will cover the necessity of great timing and how to solve for it, stitching your content together, and drawing clear swim lanes for your GTM teams to bring everything to life for your target customers.

And finally in part 4, we walk you through the path to enterprise scale. We will explain how you can ramp up your marketing offers and seamlessly present them to thousands of companies instead of dozens. You will also get a sneak peek at how we see data powering the future of revenue.

Nearly every chapter wraps up with a table highlighting what you’ll need to do to create a minimum viable or scaled version of the processes we’ve explained. It also summarizes some mistakes to avoid as you dive into execution.

As you make your way through these pages, we’ll give you a bit of advice, plenty of strategies, and a handful of perspectives besides ours so you can see how this marketing magic works inside Snowflake itself. We’ll also share insights from our work with other B2B startups and scale-ups. Our hope is that you’ll highlight your favorite passages and dog-ear a few pages so you can refer back to ideas you’re eager to implement.

We’re not promising to change your business overnight, but we believe with these tools and ideas you could get to your first one-team GTM win in as little as a few weeks, changing the trajectory of your go-to-market machine over the next eight to twelve months.

It’s gonna be a wild ride. Are you ready? Let’s go.

PART 1

WHY

1

Do the Unthinkable: Marry Sales and Marketing

When a big, sophisticated buyer considers making a purchase, many teams need to work together to enable the sale. We know this because we’ve been involved in closing deals with some of the biggest logos in the business world, including multinational corporations on the Global 2000 list. We’re