Modern Revenue at 2025 Value Creation Summit

Sales efficiency at Snowflake: Productivity dictates investment

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Snowflake's Investor Day presentation this week was a great showcase of how CRO-CFO alignment is crucial in driving company strategy. The session had plenty of evidence of effective collaboration between the Sales and Finance teams . For example, Snowflake's FY2025 sales compensation redesign is directly tied to the company's strategic objectives to drive logo and consumption growth. This is impossible for a CRO or CFO to achieve alone ; they have to do it together. My favorite piece of evidence of Snowflake's CRO-CFO alignment is the chart on the right (from last year's deck), which shows how sales productivity dictates new sales investment. Sales productivity is defined as (x) net new ACV in $ millions divided by (y) AE headcount at fiscal year-end. The 1.0x threshold metric means the company will only invest in new sales headcount when AEs on average close at least $1 million in net new ACV annually. In other words, as long as Finance sees the productivity , Sales will get more budget to hire more reps. This defines accountabilities and rules of engagement: The CFO proactively supports the CRO's evolving needs, and the CRO has clear expectations about driving efficient growth. This chart is easy to put on a slide, but achieving the level of alignment required for a common CRO-CFO definition of "sales productivity" is very difficult. Few companies succeed at this , but Snowflake shows it can be done.

What makes Snowflake different ? Here's a hint: The previous CEO used to call himself " Frank (Anti-Silo) Slootman " on his LinkedIn profile.

That tells you everything you need to know: CRO-CFO alignment starts with the CEO (not with the tech stack).