Amp It Up

Raise your standards, pick up the pace, sharpen your focus, and align your people. You don't need to bring in reams of consultants to examine everything that is going on. What you need on day one is to ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity.

Try applying “insanely great” as a standard on a daily basis and see how far you get.

Most people have a relatively easy time coming up with their top three priorities. Just ask them. As an exercise I often ask: if you can only do one thing for the rest of the year, and nothing else, what would it be and why?

This mentality of living up to your potential has kept up with me ever since. I am not so much focused day‐to‐day on outcomes; I am focused on maximizing the input side of the equation. Doing everything we can to the best of our abilities. It's like marathons or triathlons, which are 99% training and 1% racing

We all need to be careful what “elevator” we get into early in our careers. Some go up, some go down, some don't move. It's largely beyond our control, so choose wisely

We coped in ways I have used ever since: hire people ahead of their own curve. Hire more for aptitude than experience and give people the career opportunity of a lifetime. They will be motivated and driven, with a cannot‐fail attitude. The good ones would grab the opportunity to accelerate their careers with us.

the infamous start‐up “chasm,” as popularized by management author Geoffrey Moore, had scarcely been a speed bump

When you take over a company with a wide range of issues, you have to start solving the more straightforward problems as fast as possible so you can narrow the focus on the harder ones. Bringing in some proven performers was a no‐brainer

A Great Mission Is Big (but Not Impossible!)
Snowflake's current

Continually narrowing the mission aperture is key because companies have a natural tendency to lose focus over time

Once you have your mission in place, how do you get everyone to embrace it and make it real? The four keys are applying focus, urgency, execution, and strategy.

I love a win‐win deal as much as anyone else, but it's much more common that business is close to a zero‐sum game.

Chapter: The War Against Incrementalism

Why didn't tape automation companies invent Data Domain? Why didn't Ford invent Tesla? The answer in all those examples, and many more, is incrementalism.

Chapter: Great Execution Is Rarer than Great Strategy

As one of my former bosses observed: “No strategy is better than its execution.”

Chapter: Treat Execution like a Teachable Competency

Talented reps can then graduate to full‐fledged enterprise sales. These are elite sales roles, highly compensated when done well. The final upward step is to our so‐called Majors team, where dedicated account managers take care of our largest 200 accounts.

Chapter: Getting Strategy Right

Scott McNealy famously said, “fail fast”—the sooner the better. We sometimes use the expression “that dog won't hunt”—not in reference to a person but to a strategic approach that just isn't working, no matter what we do.

Chapter: Strategy Problems versus Execution Problems

In my experience, most sales shortfalls reflect either an inadequate product or a disconnect between the product and the target market.

Chapter: You Don't Need to Hire Consultants or Strategists

Consultants are people who borrow your watch, tell you what time it is, and then keep the watch

Chapter: Drivers Wanted

we adopted a goal for recruiting that we only wanted drivers, not passengers

Chapter: Drivers Wanted

On the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers. Drivers wanted.”

Chapter: Maintain an Active Recruiting Posture

Perform what we call active “calibration” sessions on critical positions in a group format. In these sessions, executives and managers present evaluations of their direct reports and seek feedback from the peer group outside their chain of command

Chapter: The Dangers of Silos

The answer I was hoping for, however, was his leadership peer group, meaning his counterparts in engineering, marketing, finance, services, and so on, because that's the team that really runs any company. The

Chapter: The Dangers of Silos

Many companies are plagued by good execution within individual silos but terrible execution across silos

Chapter: A Better Option: Going Direct

We have a saying we often repeat at our companies: Go direct

Chapter: How to Focus on Analysis

==My preferred tactic is to start with so‐called first principles. Break problems down into their most basic elements. ==

Chapter: Sales Growth Is About Timing

“There comes a time when the venture must pivot from conserving resources to applying them rapidly, as fast as you know how to do effectively—when that cross‐over time comes is not always obvious.”

Geoff Moore's book Crossing the Chasm.

Chapter: Snowflake: Making Sense of Your Gunslingers and Flatliners

A busy sales funnel boosts productivity and energy within a sales team, while allowing management to study the biggest sales challenges and see how the top performers are overcoming them. Conversely, if you skimp on resources for lead generation, your sales reps will end up having only a couple of meetings a week.

Chapter: Snowflake: Making Sense of Your Gunslingers and Flatliners

And we taught them a predictable, systematic process for making a compelling case to potential customers that would yield the envisioned sales productivity.

Chapter: Snowflake: Making Sense of Your Gunslingers and Flatliners

As we started to drill down on this dynamic, it became clear that we had lots of “flatliners” on our global sales team—people who simply weren't closing deals or even building up their pipeline of prospects. Most of the company's growth was generated by a small group of “gunslingers” who delivered consistently strong sales productivity

Chapter: ServiceNow: Seizing the Right Moment to Ramp Up

==It's quite common in early‐stage companies for a small group of reps to be driving most of the revenue, while a larger group of flatliners are failing to contribute. The problem in these cases is usually a bad habit of hiring indiscriminately, and a lack of standardized, effective sales enablement. ==

Chapter: ServiceNow: Seizing the Right Moment to Ramp Up

Nothing is more indicative and predictive of sales results than quota deployed on the street. Quota is the level of sales dollars assigned to deployed sales representatives. Once they have a quota and they need to hit it to make a living, it becomes a steamroller of channeled human effort.

Chapter: ServiceNow: Seizing the Right Moment to Ramp Up

Here's a paradox of the ServiceNow example. In a static, low growth company, increasing sales productivity is viewed as a positive development. But in high‐growth scenarios it's a negative metric because it means you aren't hiring fast enough

Chapter: ServiceNow: Seizing the Right Moment to Ramp Up

If you have a sales force that's stuck in the mud, don't just complain about the staff's failure to hit your targets and timeline. Ask lots of questions to figure out what's wrong. Then take bold steps to mitigate the problem as soon as you understand it. You can't simply take a “wait and see” posture while hoping the metrics will improve. You have to aggressively manage nonperformance, cut headcount if appropriate, or add headcount wherever you have the highest probability of converting sales potential to sales yield.

Chapter: Two Problems: Uncertainty and Fear

“Grow Fast or Die Slow” is the title of a 2014 study by McKinsey & Co that examined thousands of software and services companies between 1980 and 2012. It concluded that growth trumps everything else as a driver and predictor of long‐term success. “Super grower” companies, which McKinsey defined as 60% or more annual growth, had five times higher returns than medium growth companies (which had less than 20% annual growth). Super growers also had an eight times greater likelihood of reaching $1 billion in annual revenue

Chapter: Bringing Down the Costs of Growth

A higher‐probability path to growth at scale is to leverage your proven strengths to adapt your original offering for adjacent markets.

Chapter: Hang On to Your Early‐Stage Dynamism

If you could do just one thing for the remainder of the year, what would that be and why?

Chapter: Takeaway 4: Early adopters buy differently than later adopters.

That's what drives the distinction between early adopters and late adopters, explained so brilliantly in Geoffrey Moore's landmark book, Crossing the Chasm. If you try to sell to both groups the same way, you are very likely to fail.

Chapter: Takeaway 5: Stay close to home in the early going.

If you offer a partial solution that requires your customers to seek the rest of the solution elsewhere, you are making it easy for a competitor to drive through the gap you left open. Try to deliver a complete solution so you won't be so vulnerable to displacement.

I've found that slides work best as visual aids for the audience, never as a crutch for the presenter. One way to do that is eliminate text bullets altogether, and amp up the visuals.