The Guy Who Builds Sales Machines at Rocketships

Good Morning. OpenAI says one of its models escaped a secure testing environment, got onto the internet, and hacked an AI platform called Hugging Face to cheat on an evaluation. So, yeah… we’re basically living in a sci-fi movie at this point. My only complaint is that the robots are focusing on the wrong crimes. Next time one breaks loose, could it send my cold emails and update my CRM? Use your powers for good. Now, let’s get into today’s Follow Up. (:

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Frank Slootman has scaled 3 massive companies with the same sales playbook.

Data Domain, ServiceNow, and Snowflake.

Between them, multi-billion dollar acquisitions and the biggest software IPO in history at the time. (Snowflake in 2020.)

Every time he took over, the company already had a great product. But it didn't have a sales machine to scale to billions in revenue.

So each time he arrived, he built a sales machine, using mostly the same playbook.

He gave away most of the playbook in his book, Amp It Up. And nearly all of it comes down to how he runs sales teams.

Here's what he does differently, and the stuff you should steal for your own sales team…

Sales leaders love a resume with household names on it.

They think “this sales rep sold at AWS, so they must be good.” Which is often true.

But Slootman doesn't care.

He hires for what he calls "slope." How much is this person growing, and how hungry are they to prove something?

He'd rather have a scrappy rep from a no-name startup who's on fire vs an Oracle vet coasting on 15 years of accolades.

When he took over Snowflake in 2019, the company had generated just under $100 million in revenue the previous fiscal year. Five years later, annual product revenue was approaching $3 billion.

There’s no way to pull that off without incredible talent. And specifically, sales talent.

When Slootman got to Snowflake, he raised the bar on what the company looked for when hiring new reps, and got rid of the ones who didn’t meet the new standards.

Slootman names his enemy.

It’s not enough to just grow and hit targets. If you want to create a burning desire to win in your reps, you need to find a common enemy to compete against.

At ServiceNow, the enemy was BMC. Every deal, meeting, and internal review focused on beating them.

Then at Snowflake, it was Amazon Redshift. Reps studied their weaknesses and memorized their counter points.

This is one you should implement asap. Pick your enemy this quarter, and make sure every rep can name them.

Slootman kills bad deals and makes his teams focus small.

He calls this "narrowing the aperture." Fewer segments, fewer product bets, and fewer priorities dumped on the sales team all at once.

When reps are asked to sell three products across five verticals with two competing campaigns, they end up selling none of them well.

His actual line on this. "Priority should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none."

Once you’re clear on your product and ICP priority, focus on who you can actually win, and not on who might buy.

Look at your pipeline right now. There's a deal you've been dragging for six months, hoping they’ll magically reach out one day and say they’re ready to close. You and I both know it’s unlikely.

Kill it today and focus that energy on deals that will actually close.

You don’t need me (or Slootman) to tell you that speed is everything in sales.

The longer you wait to follow up with an inbound lead, the less likely you are to close them. That’s sales 101. Yet sales reps still move like a sloth all the time.

Slootman doesn’t tolerate it in his sales orgs.

He runs weekly forecast calls. So deal reviews happen faster than most companies do quarterly business reviews.

When a rep says "the prospect is thinking it over," Slootman wants to know how they're planning to force a decision this week.

As he puts it in his book: "Time is not our friend. Time introduces risks, such as new entrants."

A lot of problems in sales (& business) get solved when you ask the question: “How can we get this done sooner?”

Check out The Follow Up Guy on LinkedIn.