Editorial
The Gist
- Hire hustlers first. Your earliest hires set the tone—choose doers who can scale into leaders and keep teams focused on the “huge rocks.”
- Position or perish. Clear, consistent positioning beats cleverness—own a simple message and stick with it until the market outgrows it.
- Automate before you stall. Manual “hamster wheel” growth collapses at scale—automation creates efficiency and protects customer goodwill.
- Sales is your first customer. Marketing only wins when sales trusts it. Shared OKRs, trust-building, and alignment turn tension into fuel for growth.
- Data is the foundation. One source of truth enables real-time optimization and ensures every touchpoint delivers measurable impact.
"Make it Snow," publishing Oct. 7, is a practical guide for B2B CMOs seeking measurable marketing impact and stronger alignment with sales. Written by Snowflake’s Denise Persson and Chris Degnan, it distills proven strategies for scaling marketing and offers actionable guidance for both current and aspiring CMOs to sharpen strategy, strengthen partnerships and accelerate growth.
While its seven lessons apply broadly across B2B marketing, they are especially relevant to software marketing leaders needing to navigate today’s increasingly competitive landscape.
In this article, I’ll focus on the most valuable takeaways for CMOs.
Table of Contents
- Lesson 1: Make the Right First Hires
- Lesson 2: Define Your Market Position
- Lesson 3: Be the Most Customer Centric Marketing Organization
- Lesson 4: Build for Automation Scale Early on
- Lesson 5: Be Bold
- Lesson 6: Alignment With Sales
- Lesson 7: Create a Data-Driven Marketing Organization
- Parting Words
Lesson 1: Make the Right First Hires
When building an early-stage team, hire fast and prioritize people with deep experience who can wear many hats. CMOs should look for individuals who don’t hesitate to roll up their sleeves, act as strong individual contributors and eventually grow into leaders who can build and manage their own teams.
Who You Hire Defines How You Scale
To keep execution sharp, each new hire should work with their manager to define a short list of the most critical projects for every quarter—what Persson calls the “huge rocks.” This keeps the focus on what truly matters, ensure accountability and drive visible progress even as the organization scales.
Related Article: Preparing CMOs for the Next Decade of Marketing Leadership
Lesson 2: Define Your Market Position
Persson points to one of marketing’s most enduring classics—Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout—which defined positioning as “an organized system for finding a window into the mind.” In her view, marketers still have only seconds to explain what their company does, which makes clarity and relevance non-negotiable. Overcomplicating your story is a fast track to being ignored. How many marketing leaders need to hear this message!
Persson argues that discipline is key: CMOs should revisit their company’s positioning every two to three years to ensure it still fits where the business is headed, but resist the temptation to change it prematurely. Clarity, consistency and timing are what make positioning stick.
Lesson 3: Be the Most Customer Centric Marketing Organization
The most admired brands, says Persson, share three traits: they own their categories, deliver a relentlessly consistent brand experience and inspire deep customer loyalty.
Customer Centricity Means Acting, Not Just Listening
To make that real, Snowflake built systematic ways to gather feedback, including an NPS program. But, as Persson emphasizes, the goal wasn’t simply to measure how Snowflake was doing. Instead, the purpose was to identify customers who weren’t fully satisfied and take action. That shift in mindset—from scorekeeping to problem-solving—is what turns feedback into loyalty and loyalty into enduring brand strength.
Related Article: 10 Guaranteed Ways to Improve Customer Satisfaction
Lesson 4: Build for Automation Scale Early on
Persson believes startups often sprint to $20 million in revenue, but their growth stalls when they rely too heavily on manual work. She says scaling isn’t possible if your company is powered by “hamsters”—endless human effort running on wheels.
The real path to scale is automation, which streamlines processes, eliminates duplicative tools and frees teams to focus on impact instead of inefficiency. This mindset extends to customer references, a critical need for every B2B company.
Lesson 5: Be Bold
Persson cites Virgin America as her inspiration for being bold—a company that disrupted a stale industry with a bold, customer-centric brand. Her core belief is that positioning and brand experience are inseparable. It’s not enough to define who you are; you must deliver it consistently at every touchpoint. That requires patience, discipline and the willingness to stay the course even when it’s tempting to chase every new trend.
Persson emphasizes to be smart about where you compete. Don't try to outspend giants with deeper pockets. Instead choose bold, strategic bets that amplify your brand while staying within your means—a lesson in both creativity and discipline.
Lesson 6: Alignment With Sales
Persson argues lack of alignment is the number one problem for tech companies. Marketing only succeeds when its programs are 100% aligned with the sales strategy; otherwise, most of that effort is wasted, and worse, sales lose faith in marketing. Effective marketing isn’t about flashy campaigns—it’s about building strategies and execution plans that stuff the pipeline with qualified opportunities that actually convert into deals.
Tension Is Healthy—Mistrust Isn’t
Persson emphasizes that alignment doesn’t mean tension disappears. In fact, some tension is healthy. What’s critical is ensuring it doesn’t spiral into finger-pointing, negativity or mistrust. That’s why she worked early on to build trust by meeting every sales rep. Her belief is simple: CMOs must do whatever it takes to make alignment real, because alignment is ultimately built on relationships and trust.
Treat Sales as Your First Customer
She also reframes the marketer’s role: “Sales is our number one customer.” At HP Software, I learned the same lesson firsthand—nothing happened without sales buy-in. If sales don’t believe in a new product, they won’t invest their time to sell it. Persson recognized this and took smart steps, such as creating shared OKRs between sales and marketing, so both teams worked toward the same outcomes.
Automation also plays a role—but only if it makes the lives of salespeople easier. The goal is not just to generate leads but to help 90% of reps make their number, not just a lucky few. This focus on shared success turns alignment from an abstract value into a competitive weapon, powering both growth and trust across the company.
Lesson 7: Create a Data-Driven Marketing Organization
Persson discussed eliminating “data hamsters”—the manual, repetitive tasks that slow growth and consume time. Every part of the customer journey needs to be reexamined, and wherever effort is high but impact is low, replace it with replicable processes. The only way to scale effectively, she argues, is through automation that drives true efficiency.
One Source of Truth or One Source of Delay
This challenge is magnified by the explosion of marketing technology. Today there are more than 15,000 potential solutions spanning analytics, enrichment, identity, onboarding, engagement, programmatic execution, measurement and optimization. All of it rests on the backbone of data integration and modeling.
For Persson, however, the problem wasn’t a lack of tools—it was timing. Early on, their data was good, but it arrived too late. It sometimes took IT three weeks to deliver insights, a gap that made it impossible to be a truly customer-centric business. Sound familiar?
Related Article: 6 Marketing Technologt Trends to Watch in 2025
Data Discipline Turns Optimization Into Habit
Continuous optimization isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about ensuring every touchpoint contributes to a better customer experience. For Persson, that’s the ultimate measure of success: using data and automation to make customers not just satisfied, but genuinely happy.
Seven Lessons for B2B CMOs
Key takeaways for chief marketing officers:
| Lesson | Core Idea | Action for CMOs |
|---|---|---|
| Make the Right First Hires | Early hires set the cultural and executional tone. | Recruit versatile doers who can scale into leaders and focus on quarterly “huge rocks.” |
| Define Your Market Position | Clarity beats cleverness in positioning. | Anchor your brand in a simple, memorable message and revisit every 2–3 years. |
| Be the Most Customer Centric | Loyalty comes from solving, not scorekeeping. | Turn NPS and feedback programs into real-time actions that strengthen trust. |
| Build for Automation Scale Early | Manual “hamster wheels” stall growth. | Automate processes and reimagine references with scalable, repeatable systems. |
| Be Bold | Strategic risks amplify brand impact. | Invest in bold, high-visibility moves that inspire pride and differentiate without overspending. |
| Align With Sales | Marketing only succeeds with sales trust. | Create shared OKRs, build personal relationships, and treat sales as your top customer. |
| Create a Data Driven Organization | Real-time insights power customer centricity. | Eliminate “data hamsters” by building a single source of truth and optimizing continuously. |
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Parting Words
Our Take: Discipline Scales, Shiny Objects Don’t
From making the right first hires to building automation into the core of operations, from bold positioning to relentless customer centricity, the lessons are consistent: simplicity scales, trust builds alignment, and data drives impact.
For CMOs, the takeaway is clear—growth comes not from chasing shiny objects, but from building organizations where strategy, execution and customer outcomes are inseparably linked.
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