How Chris Degnan Built Snowflake's Sales Org From Scratch
EP 147 of The Logan Bartlett Show: For people building companies - from the people who’ve done it.
Chris Degnan joined Snowflake as employee #13 (and the 1st sales hire). He scaled the sales org from 0 to over $3B in ARR, spanned four CEOs, and retired as CRO after 11 years.
In his first podcast post-retirement, Chris opened his CRO playbook, from early enablement to hiring rigor and fending off threats from competitors. If you’re a founder or running sales at a startup, this one is for you…
Read the transcript here
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✉️ Episode Memo
➡️ Degnan’s non-negotiable rituals for building a world-class sales org
#1: Always – Obsess over enablement. It isn’t a nice-to-have—it should be a top priority. Pick a methodology (like MEDDIC) and hold a weekly enablement session with every rep.
#2: Weekly – Every single person in your sales org needs to have a forecast call every week. There should also be a direct team meeting.
#3: For milestones – Run sales kickoffs & quarterly business reviews.
Chris was shocked by how many startups skip these fundamentals. If you don’t invest in enablement and real coaching systems, he says you’re just asking for failure. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel here.
➡️ Should you hire sales reps in less than 2 weeks?
If you’re trying to interview dozens of people for one role, the process is set up to fail. What if you were limited to two people and had to decide if either is your person? Much simpler.
At Snowflake, the sales team would limit hiring processes to two weeks. Both sides needed to commit to a decision by the end of that window. If a candidate just “wanted to get to know people” and wouldn’t be ready to sign by day 14, they weren’t in the process. This requires a good pitch to candidates and keeps everything efficient.
➡️ The one thing that makes a great sales leader
The best measure of a leader is the performance of their individual contributors. Chris believes great sales leaders do three things: they hire great people, they train those people well, and they drive individual productivity. At Snowflake, his ultimate success metric was whether reps could consistently generate $250K in new ARR per quarter by month seven (after they were fully ramped).
⭐ Trailer
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