Narrow the Focus, Increase the Quality with Frank Slootman

Key Learnings from: Narrow the Focus, Increase the Quality.

Frank Slootman is the Chairman and CEO of Snowflake. Snowflake’s vision is a world with unlimited access to governed data, so every organization can tackle the challenges and opportunities of today and reveal the possibilities of tomorrow. Snowflake enables every organization to mobilize their data with Snowflake’s Data Cloud. Customers use the Data Cloud to unite siloed data, discover and securely share data, and execute diverse analytic workloads.?Prior to Snowflake, Frank was the Chairman and CEO of the legendary software business, ServiceNow.

[Learning 1] Building with the Right Talent:

When thinking about people and if you have the right talent, you don't inspect a person as much as you inspect their work. Frank looks at the outputs of specific teams against targets and uses this as the barometer to see if the people currently in roles are the right people to continue the on the journey and take the next step up. Once this output has been understood and analyzed, he is going to move quick on any changes that need to be made --- "ripping the bandaid off" rather than moving slowly and waiting to see if things change. Frank calls out that most people wait too long and avoid the inevitable because it's an uncomfortable situation, but by doing this, you are risking your leadership mojo and trust of your A players as they watch folks who are not a fit for the role be kept around. At Snowflake Frank aligned to this "fast course corrector," by getting buy in from the board on people decisions before even joining the company and once he came onboard, the changes were made right away.

Once you have identified where change needs to be made, you start looking to hire the right executives by talking to everyone you possibly can that knows this person so that you get the real answers that are not always going to come about during the normal interview process. What is the person like? What was great about them? What was not so great? Does this person fill a skill gap that your current leaders lack? He likes the approach of speaking with references, but also making your own roads to references by stalking LinkedIn for mutual connections that worked with or currently work with this person.

Frank's opinions on hiring and firing might be perceived as harsh, but Frank believes that suffering from and tolerating mediocrity is the worst thing you can do as a leader. You need to confront mediocrity right away and always be focusing on how you can raise the bar: "we are closing $100,000 deals, but how can we get to $250,000 - $500,000 deals."

Another interesting perspective is that "hiring is like M&A." When you buy a company you are often buying the talent of the organization, and this is the same as hiring a very talented individual who is going to level up your current people and attract talented people in the future (a snowball affect).

[Learning 2] Importance of Product:

Products needs to be outstanding to make enterprises adjust their current tooling (more true the larger the enterprise and the larger the impact of the tooling on your business -- higher risk of change). The idea here is that if the product is not "blow your face off impressive", then why are we even considering a change. You need to "dazzle" people to have them put their neck on the line with their executives and to have them add work to their already packed plate of things to do. Because of this need to orders of magnitudes better product and avoiding the idea of incrementalism for product improvement. This is a mind numbing way to go about your day, in his opinion.

Another way that Frank frames his thoughts on product strategy is asking the question: "if you could only do one thing this year, what would it be and why?" Don't be afraid of going in on one idea and it being wrong. Most people get uncomfortable going all in on their high conviction idea and want to de-risk their efforts by working on 5+ ideas at once and in his opinion you've already lost by spreading focus and energy this wide.

A good idea is to be asking product questions like: what are we doing? why are we doing it? are the reasons still valid? If you have clear answers to these questions, you have a clear path forward and are able to "narrow your focus." Try to complete tasks in more of a sequential way than a parallel fashion (when people know what they need to do they feel energized).

[Learning 3] Founder Led Sales:

Early in a companies life, the founder(s) of the company are the sales team, and unlike traditional "sales reps," the founders can often skate around poor/lacking product by being very skilled, knowledgeable about the space, and finding the sliver of early adopters where the fit is strong enough to justify a purchase even with the product lacking in most ways that your scale customer will need it to be sufficient. This is the stage of a company's go-to-market that is before the chasm (Crossing the Chasm), and more so a business development effort than a sales effort. Business development in the sense that each customer and each opportunity is more likely to be a "one-off situation," than a rinse and repeat sales playbook you ask account executives to follow once you have clearly crossed the chasm.

For this early stage of revenue (let's call it <$1M of ARR for B2B Enterprise SaaS), is the founding team's opportunity to listen and learn to what is going to drive interest in your product, while at the same time keeping an eye on what can become repeatable in terms of product you build, marketing messaging and sales plays. Because the founders are also building the product, they need this quick and iterative feedback loop right from the horses mouth and because business development is more challenging than sales at scale, you don't want to hire/scale a sales organization before you truly cross the chasm.

Another revenue focused concept is the "need to always be a student of your distribution." With distribution being defined as sales, demand generation and post sales/growth. Frank has seen other companies try to dive too deep into the channel sales motion too early and then lost control of their distribution as well as the boots on the ground feedback loop an early stage company so desperately needs. And as you do build this in-house sales team, you don't just put bodies in territory and expect to see great results, you need the right enablement, structure and sales leadership.

When talking about "sales leadership," Frank dislikes the sales leader who comes in and says,"I have a sales playbook we can put in place," because for him this means, "I've done this before and we are going to do boom, boom, boom and it will work here as well." While a framework is good, you want people who are a bit more open-minded to realizing this time is likely never like last time and the better approach might be closer to a 1st principles or lean back approach to thinking through the uniqueness of your current opportunity set. By rushing into something without critical thinking, you are more likely than not going to burn through capital that could have otherwise been used to fuel a different areas of your business.

[Learning 4] Raising the Bar:

A ideology that Frank has become associated with is the concept of always raising the bar. At a point when he was with ServiceNow, they were growing 100% YoY, and rather than be happy with unbelievable growth, he was asking his colleagues, why are we not growing at 200% and what would we need to do in order to grow at 200%?

This idea of raising the bar comes up again for Frank with his comment that "everyone shows up every quarter." He does not want to hear that prospects are taking vacation in July or Q2 is always a slow quarter. It's his opinion that we all need to be performing each and every quarter, so you plan around this vacation and perceived slowness and create mutual action plans with your customers, knowing that you might lose their focus for a couple weeks during the quarter. It's a rigor mindset that you build with your company and this is how you will get to higher growth rates that you previously thought possible.