Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity

by Frank Slootman

People lower their standards in an effort to move things along and get things off their desks. Don't do it. Fight that impulse every step of the way. It doesn't take much more mental energy to raise standards. Don't let malaise set in. Bust it up. Raising the bar is energizing by itself.

Instead of telling people what I think of a proposal, a product, a feature, whatever, I ask them instead what they think. Were they thrilled with it? Absolutely love it? Most of the time I would hear, “It's okay,” or “It's not bad.” They would surmise from my facial expression that this wasn't the answer I was looking for. Come back when you are bursting with excitement about whatever you are proposing to the rest of us.

First, think about execution more sequentially than in parallel. Work on fewer things at the same time, and prioritize hard. Even if you're not sure about ranking priorities, do it anyway. The process alone will be enlightening. Figure out what matters most, what matters less, and what matters not at all.

Leaders set the pace. People sometimes ask to get back to me in a week, and I ask, why not tomorrow or the next day?

I had an episode in my early teens when my school grades were failing. My dad didn't say I needed to get better grades, merely that I had to work up to my potential. As long as I worked hard, he would accept the results. But he had to be fully convinced that I was in fact putting everything into it. That may appear to be a liberating way to have your parents think about failing grades.

I would sometimes say in all‐hands meetings that I was personally committed to help each of our employees reach a different station in life as a function of the company's fortunes. In exchange, I was asking for the best they had to offer.

The mission also has to be treated with urgency. There is a saying in sales that “time kills all deals.” Time is not our friend. Time introduces risks, such as new entrants.

As a smaller company, we have to fight back with the superiority of our product and the sponsors inside accounts—people who really want our product and do the internal selling on our behalf.

Leaders have to channel the organization's state of mind.

At Snowflake, we offer a clear career path and professional development for sales staff. We assign recent college graduates to follow up on inbound leads; their goal is to qualify and set meetings for our more senior salespeople. It's a hard job being on the phone all day, talking to strangers and trying to set up meetings, but it gives them a bedrock foundation for their sales skills. Next, a business development rep gets promoted to selling to smaller enterprises and institutions. 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.

One of my favorite observations is that “good judgment comes from bad judgment.” Experience may be overrated by some, but it's hard to find a substitute for it. New managers have to learn from and through their management chain. When we promote inexperienced managers to senior roles, chaos ensues. It becomes the blind leading the blind. Organizations cannot scale and mature around inexperienced management staff.

Passengers are people who don't mind simply being carried along by the company's momentum, offering little or no input, seemingly not caring much about the direction chosen by management. They are often pleasant, get along with everyone, attend meetings promptly, and generally do not stand out as troublemakers.

Employees should be able to look at themselves in the mirror and feel strongly that they matter to the organization, that they contribute in significant ways, that their absence would significantly hurt its results.

Everybody, and we mean everybody, has permission to speak to anybody inside the company, for any reason, regardless of role, rank, or function.

Trying to staff a whole sales team prematurely is a very common managerial mistake. So is failing to figure out what distinguishes top sales performers from weak performers before ramping up headcount.

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. So we knew this was an execution problem.

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.