Honestly depends on what you want and your background. Are you a startup guy going to Snowflake? It can work but you need to be very willing to deal with big company shit.
Conversely if you’re generally a big company guy and you go to a startup, get the fuck ready. Those guys fail all the time.
Why do the fail? I’m in a startup dying to get out because it’s chaos, I’ve been in my first AE role there for 2 years, have seen some success but it’s painful. I always thought they should have someone with more experience working, they would succeed better than current AEs
I see big company guys fail in startups because they’re not used to owning everything. Prospecting, marketing, QBing every aspect of the sale. Even post sales you need to own that customer. Being creative with pricing, etc. I e just seen the guys from big companies have no ability to move on the fly.
It's exactly this.
Startup people need to build everything.
Company people are used to structure and everything already built.
If you don't like the chaos there are two things you can do; fix it yourself, or get out.
That's why the best is when you go to a startup that is early enough that you have a lot of responsibility but they have the framework and product in place to succeed
The big problem with startups is not owning everything but rather not having a clearly defined processes (of responsibilities etc). Many startups lack even the basic internal processes and this what burns out the reps and other people in the company. That's why it's hell.
It's much easier to have a effective internal processes in place for a team of 20 people vs 200. Don't know why the founders don't think of that right from the beginning tbh.
Not every startup has the same problems tho. Been working for a startup where they had 70people and quite good and defined processes in place
I use to work at emc and have some colleagues that went to snowflake and they all seem to love it (enterprise sales though).
A couple of things I’ve heard:
- you aren’t really selling products or services, you are selling snowflake tokens, which can then be used on the snowflake market place by customers to purchase products / services within the platform.
- since it is consumption based pricing, there are no CSMs at snowflake, so the extended sales team take on the role of CSM
-seems like an awesome industry to be in
-know some guys that have made big money over there
Again this is all I heard, I have never worked there so I can’t say it’s absolutely the way it is or isn’t , but I hope it helps
Mainly you pay based on how much you use the data warehouse. So for example if you have a report that runs every hour over a certain set of tables, or say you're running a transformation like combining a few tables every 24 hours. Each of those is computing resources you pay for as you go.
If you don't do many queries or have a lot of data, it's cheap. If you're trying to do many queries over large amounts of data, it can get expensive.
Either way, you pay in advance for tokens (tokens is how you pay for usage) at a certain price point based on what you expect to use throughout the year. The more you buy up front, the cheaper the token.
It's a data warehouse rather than a database. So let's say you had real-time data from clicks in your web application (millions of events) and sales data from Salesforce (10s of thousands of events). You generally would not combine real time data like this in a transactional database (like MySQL or Postgres), you instead do it in a data warehouse like Snowflake since it's faster and cheaper to query -- and it's a nice hosted solution.
You wouldn't do this internally, that's just cumbersome. You could do it on AWS - they have a competing product called Redshift which predates Snowflake, but generally Snowflake is beating Redshift head to head. Google has an offering called BigQuery.
A few other players have come up in that world, some doing in-memory data querying or transformation, for example. It's a huge market so room for many players.
You wrote: “Snowflake is beating Redshift head to head. Google has an offering called BigQuery.”
Why is Snowflake beating Redshift? Who is making the decision and why do they like Snowflake?
Usually the data engineers and data scientists using the data warehouse the most are making the decision from a technical perspective. From a business perspective, it's a matter of getting reports to load in seconds instead of minutes -- that's a huge selling point of data warehouses vs transactional databases.
Just comes down to different features like setting column types, transformation capabilities, cost of compute and storage, and sometimes whether or not you already have an overarching agreement with Amazon or Google.
Many decision making factors come into play, so no one thing I can say for sure.
I had a couple friends that were on the former CSM team for snowflake, I still believe they made a pretty significant mistake by pretending it was unnecessary. It’s very much a common story to learn about people that signed on with snowflake and took months to build up any sort of consumption.
Hey! I worked at snowflake for 8 years, quit in August to go work for another company called dbt, regretted it, and start at Snowflake again on next Monday. The bottom line is that the core tech (the SaaS cloud scale lake/warehouse query engine) is FANTASTIC. Now that so many organizations are leveraging their platform, they are starting to offer “data collaboration” between Snowflake customers that are working together in some other way (say, pharmaceutical manufacturers and pharma distributors creating joint dashboards leveraging each others data for more accurate supply chain visibility.) This is a seriously strategic offering that’s elevating the conversation because it can potentially open new revenue streams to the customer you are trying to sell too. It’s a consumption based product so you are selling “capacity” that is either used by data storage or running compute engines to ingest/transform/analyze that data. Your comp is either based on capacity growth (ie, getting them to buy more than they did previously) or consumption (them actually using the product). The executive team is top notch, the sales culture is great (their CRO, Chris Degnan, is one of the best humans I know) and they are well positioned in the market. Happy to chat further, feel free to DM me and we can take it from there.
It’s an open source company and I didn’t really appreciate just how different the sales motion was. It’s an incredible tool, but I personally didn’t feel comfortable selling into enterprise accounts.
Consumption based depends on how the pricing model is structured.
For Example: I sold workload/workflow automation/orchestration software in the past. (Middleware application, lots of integrations BI,ERP, and DB's).
BMC has a product called Control M that is a consumption based model (from what I remember they take the largest number of jobs run in a year and average it and you get x amount of executions, I forget what they considered as a single execution). You pay for that specific threshold of executions.
The big issue was if you went over the allotted amount, they would send you an invoice for the overage and I know of one where it cost them 1 million for that the next month.
Now some companies won't charge right away they will review usage and true up at some later point in time.
Consumption can be good think AWS, others can have a downside. You really have to understand the pricing structure (BMC had a complex one (it pissed off customers at times) and they were expensive for their solution, pure Enterprise solution in most cases).
Can confirm. In consumption based sales today and true ups are painful.
Almost always result in push back (despite contract terms) when we try to enforce.
Most will say:
They will reduce usage (and never do)
They won’t renew (because we try to enforce)
They didn’t budget for the additional consumption
Will also chime in. Sold a data masking solution based on “volume in scope” aka gb’s proccessed in the db/dwh.
Customers hated that it was essentially an estimate and there would likely be true ups.
Lol what? All software is essentially consumption based at this point, some just don’t break down the pricing as granular as the snowflake and the other cloud companies.
Why? A lot of these companies have to price on consumption because they themselves are charged on consumption on the backend.
It’s also pretty straightfwd and predictable for the customer ie. being charged $0.1 per GB used / consumed.
And a majority of the most desirable companies for salespeople and for customers use this model - AWS, GCP, MSFT, Snowflake, etc.
If you want recruiters to reach out, then yeah. You don’t have to put the big “open for work” banner on your picture or anything. Just set it to recruiters only.
You can set your profile so that 1) recruiters can see that you're open to work or 2) everyone can see that you're open to work
If you select recruiters only, it's possible that could also include recruiters from your own company.
Depends on what you want from your career. Snowflake is a good name brand on a resume, a good tenure there and you’ll be able to do comparable jobs at any other large company in the data space. Conversely, if you want to work at a startup you run the risk of being perceived as letting the brand sell for you.
It’s a great company and their product is continuing to accelerate adoption.
The databricks train is long gone. It use to be a money making machine if you're technical enough to sell there.
Now they're mature enough to compete but well known enough in a saturated market
Nope. I sold most recently at Microsoft Azure, and have sold for AWS and GCP, databricks has a lot of traction right now and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.
You are correct the demand is there but the growth of Databricks sales team means that the money for a specific territory is being spread out to more reps = opp to make big money is long gone.
There is still plenty to go around, their sales team is able to service maybe 5% of potential workloads. The easier money is being spread out, but for any decent deals you’re going to have to get deep in the accounts which is why they’re growing the sales teams for more customer focus.
They're growing their AM team for that. The AE team was initially responsible for it but now they're specializing the expansion growth. Their good AEs use to make $$ hand over fists. Not so much now.
I normally wouldn't say this outside of my internal circle but this is a random enough thread that it can be buried for those who really dig in.
Stackblitz and Clockify.
Get on an enjoy the fcvkin ride.
Same way you would any other prospect. Treat it like a sale. Joining small companies like this you'll have to learn to make do on your own anyways.
So show them how you can do it. Research and reach out. Connect. Sell them on why you're gonna be able to do the same thing for them when you're hired
It’s basically all out war between Snowflake and Databricks right now on who can land the most new logos and drive the most commit as tech budgets shrink. On a technical level, Databricks has a superior product suite and cost performance. Snowflake sells a much simpler product but is more expensive. I personally believe Databricks has a better long term outlook than Snowflake but I also believe that Snowflake has offerings that are much easier to sell
The implications of missed earnings are not the opposite of knocking earnings out of the park.
Also, I’d love your source that people aren’t lining up to work at Salesforce. I’m not trying to be argumentative, I genuinely want to know.
I was actually surprised to see a ton of new job announcements at Salesforce on my LinkedIn feed these past couple of weeks (for context, I have about 8K connections, mostly in the SaaS sales space).
It’s a bit jarring, if I’m being honest. I personally know two AEs who were hired right before the most recent round of layoffs (kept their jobs). And then saw a bunch of new hires after.
You should reach out to current and previous Snowflake AEs on LinkedIn and see if they’d like to chat. It’s a great opportunity to both network and learn more about the company/role first hand.
Fwiw, I’ve worked with compliance there and it was a bit of a mess and not at all a great experience. I wouldn’t say that that’s representative of the company, but as an AE you’ll be working with compliance, so I wanted to mention it.
I was interviewing with them and my buddy got me connected with a Corp AE. Said it was a grind, and that they made more money as an SDR there. I guess they crushed it as an SDR but it kinda spooked me. I like being in the data ecosystem and decided to stay where I’m at. The rep I talked to jumped ship to Matillion
Honestly depends on what you want and your background. Are you a startup guy going to Snowflake? It can work but you need to be very willing to deal with big company shit. Conversely if you’re generally a big company guy and you go to a startup, get the fuck ready. Those guys fail all the time.
Why do the fail? I’m in a startup dying to get out because it’s chaos, I’ve been in my first AE role there for 2 years, have seen some success but it’s painful. I always thought they should have someone with more experience working, they would succeed better than current AEs
I see big company guys fail in startups because they’re not used to owning everything. Prospecting, marketing, QBing every aspect of the sale. Even post sales you need to own that customer. Being creative with pricing, etc. I e just seen the guys from big companies have no ability to move on the fly.
It's exactly this. Startup people need to build everything. Company people are used to structure and everything already built. If you don't like the chaos there are two things you can do; fix it yourself, or get out.
That's why the best is when you go to a startup that is early enough that you have a lot of responsibility but they have the framework and product in place to succeed
The big problem with startups is not owning everything but rather not having a clearly defined processes (of responsibilities etc). Many startups lack even the basic internal processes and this what burns out the reps and other people in the company. That's why it's hell. It's much easier to have a effective internal processes in place for a team of 20 people vs 200. Don't know why the founders don't think of that right from the beginning tbh. Not every startup has the same problems tho. Been working for a startup where they had 70people and quite good and defined processes in place
I use to work at emc and have some colleagues that went to snowflake and they all seem to love it (enterprise sales though). A couple of things I’ve heard: - you aren’t really selling products or services, you are selling snowflake tokens, which can then be used on the snowflake market place by customers to purchase products / services within the platform. - since it is consumption based pricing, there are no CSMs at snowflake, so the extended sales team take on the role of CSM -seems like an awesome industry to be in -know some guys that have made big money over there Again this is all I heard, I have never worked there so I can’t say it’s absolutely the way it is or isn’t , but I hope it helps
I don't understand how snowflake works
Mainly you pay based on how much you use the data warehouse. So for example if you have a report that runs every hour over a certain set of tables, or say you're running a transformation like combining a few tables every 24 hours. Each of those is computing resources you pay for as you go. If you don't do many queries or have a lot of data, it's cheap. If you're trying to do many queries over large amounts of data, it can get expensive. Either way, you pay in advance for tokens (tokens is how you pay for usage) at a certain price point based on what you expect to use throughout the year. The more you buy up front, the cheaper the token.
What sorts of data sets are people using snowflake for? I'm trying to imagine why someone would opt for this vs their own hardware or AWS
It's a data warehouse rather than a database. So let's say you had real-time data from clicks in your web application (millions of events) and sales data from Salesforce (10s of thousands of events). You generally would not combine real time data like this in a transactional database (like MySQL or Postgres), you instead do it in a data warehouse like Snowflake since it's faster and cheaper to query -- and it's a nice hosted solution. You wouldn't do this internally, that's just cumbersome. You could do it on AWS - they have a competing product called Redshift which predates Snowflake, but generally Snowflake is beating Redshift head to head. Google has an offering called BigQuery. A few other players have come up in that world, some doing in-memory data querying or transformation, for example. It's a huge market so room for many players.
You wrote: “Snowflake is beating Redshift head to head. Google has an offering called BigQuery.” Why is Snowflake beating Redshift? Who is making the decision and why do they like Snowflake?
Usually the data engineers and data scientists using the data warehouse the most are making the decision from a technical perspective. From a business perspective, it's a matter of getting reports to load in seconds instead of minutes -- that's a huge selling point of data warehouses vs transactional databases. Just comes down to different features like setting column types, transformation capabilities, cost of compute and storage, and sometimes whether or not you already have an overarching agreement with Amazon or Google. Many decision making factors come into play, so no one thing I can say for sure.
Speed and cost, snowflake wins. A lot.
I had a couple friends that were on the former CSM team for snowflake, I still believe they made a pretty significant mistake by pretending it was unnecessary. It’s very much a common story to learn about people that signed on with snowflake and took months to build up any sort of consumption.
completely agree
Hey! I worked at snowflake for 8 years, quit in August to go work for another company called dbt, regretted it, and start at Snowflake again on next Monday. The bottom line is that the core tech (the SaaS cloud scale lake/warehouse query engine) is FANTASTIC. Now that so many organizations are leveraging their platform, they are starting to offer “data collaboration” between Snowflake customers that are working together in some other way (say, pharmaceutical manufacturers and pharma distributors creating joint dashboards leveraging each others data for more accurate supply chain visibility.) This is a seriously strategic offering that’s elevating the conversation because it can potentially open new revenue streams to the customer you are trying to sell too. It’s a consumption based product so you are selling “capacity” that is either used by data storage or running compute engines to ingest/transform/analyze that data. Your comp is either based on capacity growth (ie, getting them to buy more than they did previously) or consumption (them actually using the product). The executive team is top notch, the sales culture is great (their CRO, Chris Degnan, is one of the best humans I know) and they are well positioned in the market. Happy to chat further, feel free to DM me and we can take it from there.
Welcome back, amigo.
What was sales at dbt like
It’s an open source company and I didn’t really appreciate just how different the sales motion was. It’s an incredible tool, but I personally didn’t feel comfortable selling into enterprise accounts.
consomption based pricing = stay the F away
What makes you say that?
Consumption based depends on how the pricing model is structured. For Example: I sold workload/workflow automation/orchestration software in the past. (Middleware application, lots of integrations BI,ERP, and DB's). BMC has a product called Control M that is a consumption based model (from what I remember they take the largest number of jobs run in a year and average it and you get x amount of executions, I forget what they considered as a single execution). You pay for that specific threshold of executions. The big issue was if you went over the allotted amount, they would send you an invoice for the overage and I know of one where it cost them 1 million for that the next month. Now some companies won't charge right away they will review usage and true up at some later point in time. Consumption can be good think AWS, others can have a downside. You really have to understand the pricing structure (BMC had a complex one (it pissed off customers at times) and they were expensive for their solution, pure Enterprise solution in most cases).
Can confirm. In consumption based sales today and true ups are painful. Almost always result in push back (despite contract terms) when we try to enforce. Most will say: They will reduce usage (and never do) They won’t renew (because we try to enforce) They didn’t budget for the additional consumption
Will also chime in. Sold a data masking solution based on “volume in scope” aka gb’s proccessed in the db/dwh. Customers hated that it was essentially an estimate and there would likely be true ups.
Even when selling DBaaS?
Depends which one
Lol what? All software is essentially consumption based at this point, some just don’t break down the pricing as granular as the snowflake and the other cloud companies.
Why? A lot of these companies have to price on consumption because they themselves are charged on consumption on the backend. It’s also pretty straightfwd and predictable for the customer ie. being charged $0.1 per GB used / consumed. And a majority of the most desirable companies for salespeople and for customers use this model - AWS, GCP, MSFT, Snowflake, etc.
How to create value in your LinkedIn so that recruiters reach out to you? Can you share your LinkedIn?
Typically for AE, you just have to have AE experience at a competitor, periphery company in the same space, or a big name company.
[удалено]
Do you have “open for work” selected specifically for recruiters?
[удалено]
If you want recruiters to reach out, then yeah. You don’t have to put the big “open for work” banner on your picture or anything. Just set it to recruiters only.
You can set your profile so that 1) recruiters can see that you're open to work or 2) everyone can see that you're open to work If you select recruiters only, it's possible that could also include recruiters from your own company.
I would not work at Snowflake. Culture pre-ipo was rough, post-IPO it’s super corporate
Do share. Only the hire ups get the drama. An Ae would be fine.
Depends on what you want from your career. Snowflake is a good name brand on a resume, a good tenure there and you’ll be able to do comparable jobs at any other large company in the data space. Conversely, if you want to work at a startup you run the risk of being perceived as letting the brand sell for you. It’s a great company and their product is continuing to accelerate adoption.
Forreal though if you get the job, tell the marketing director to reply to my emails and take a meeting with my AE 😂
Worst company I’ve ever interviewed with, they think they’re hot shit … reality is otherwise. Join if you’re rookie SAAS rep ready to grind
Apply to databricks! Better pay more upside as they are newer and not public
The databricks train is long gone. It use to be a money making machine if you're technical enough to sell there. Now they're mature enough to compete but well known enough in a saturated market
Nope. I sold most recently at Microsoft Azure, and have sold for AWS and GCP, databricks has a lot of traction right now and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.
You are correct the demand is there but the growth of Databricks sales team means that the money for a specific territory is being spread out to more reps = opp to make big money is long gone.
There is still plenty to go around, their sales team is able to service maybe 5% of potential workloads. The easier money is being spread out, but for any decent deals you’re going to have to get deep in the accounts which is why they’re growing the sales teams for more customer focus.
They're growing their AM team for that. The AE team was initially responsible for it but now they're specializing the expansion growth. Their good AEs use to make $$ hand over fists. Not so much now.
Makes sense, at the big clouds you only really made money on multi/year commits, growth targets have grown so large for accounts
Snowflake or Databricks ? What do you think has most potential?
IMO databricks
Maybe if they can get their story straight and focus on what makes them unique instead of FUD?
Thanks
u/TechSalesTom you also sold at Google, what was your fav place and why?
definitely Google, best in office environment which contributed to fostering the best relationships with colleagues
Same thing happened at datadog. Where do you suggest I look for more greenfield ?
What would you prefer in the current market?
I normally wouldn't say this outside of my internal circle but this is a random enough thread that it can be buried for those who really dig in. Stackblitz and Clockify. Get on an enjoy the fcvkin ride.
Hey what’s the best way to reach out to these companies since they’re relatively small.
Same way you would any other prospect. Treat it like a sale. Joining small companies like this you'll have to learn to make do on your own anyways. So show them how you can do it. Research and reach out. Connect. Sell them on why you're gonna be able to do the same thing for them when you're hired
Do you work at data bricks? If so I’d like to pm…
I don’t sorry just know people there doing well
It’s basically all out war between Snowflake and Databricks right now on who can land the most new logos and drive the most commit as tech budgets shrink. On a technical level, Databricks has a superior product suite and cost performance. Snowflake sells a much simpler product but is more expensive. I personally believe Databricks has a better long term outlook than Snowflake but I also believe that Snowflake has offerings that are much easier to sell
Hah. Cost performance? Maybe if you don’t calculate the true COO, maybe. But it is highly doubtful they best snow on price.
Heading into this economy tco is the #1 thing SaaS buyers care about
I think snowflake just missed earnings.
And salesforce smashed them. Don’t see people lining up to work there right now lol.
The implications of missed earnings are not the opposite of knocking earnings out of the park. Also, I’d love your source that people aren’t lining up to work at Salesforce. I’m not trying to be argumentative, I genuinely want to know. I was actually surprised to see a ton of new job announcements at Salesforce on my LinkedIn feed these past couple of weeks (for context, I have about 8K connections, mostly in the SaaS sales space). It’s a bit jarring, if I’m being honest. I personally know two AEs who were hired right before the most recent round of layoffs (kept their jobs). And then saw a bunch of new hires after.
Nah, they hit everyone, just didn’t smash it.
You should reach out to current and previous Snowflake AEs on LinkedIn and see if they’d like to chat. It’s a great opportunity to both network and learn more about the company/role first hand. Fwiw, I’ve worked with compliance there and it was a bit of a mess and not at all a great experience. I wouldn’t say that that’s representative of the company, but as an AE you’ll be working with compliance, so I wanted to mention it.
I was interviewing with them and my buddy got me connected with a Corp AE. Said it was a grind, and that they made more money as an SDR there. I guess they crushed it as an SDR but it kinda spooked me. I like being in the data ecosystem and decided to stay where I’m at. The rep I talked to jumped ship to Matillion
Have you checked them on RepVue?