20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets

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Chad Peets 0:00
We bring in a CRO pre-product. You need a salesperson to create the sales playbook. What does a VP of engineering know about creating a sales playbook? Any inside salesperson should recognize that by being in the office, they are going to get better faster. If a sales inside salesperson is not willing to make the sacrifice of a 30-minute commute every day to further his own career. I don't want that person. You have to care and be willing to sacrifice to do exceptional things to be exceptional. And what I find today is people are not willing to do that.
Harry Stebbings 0:29
This is 20 Sales with me, Harry Stebbings, the show where we sit down with the best sales leaders in the world and unveil their tips and tactics. Today, this is the best 20 sales I have ever done. The guest is an absolute OG. and one of the greatest sales leaders and recruiters of the last 25 years, Chad Peets. Chad is the man who was instrumental in the hiring process of Snowflake's sales team for the first five years, alongside Chris Degnan. He was then a managing director at Sutter Hill, one of the great firms of the last two decades. This is one of the best, as I said. It's time to get the notebooks out. There's a lot in this one. But before we dive in, we need to talk about our sponsor for the day, Clary. Clary is an industry-leading AI-powered revenue platform that is purpose-built to help companies optimize their end-to-end revenue process.
Harry Stebbings 1:17
With over $4 trillion in revenue under management, Clary's customers have a material advantage to optimize their enterprise revenue process across all teams, from rep to the boardroom, by leveraging the world's largest and fastest-growing AI reservoir of enterprise revenue expertise. More than 1,500 organizations, including Okta, Adobe, Workday, Zoom, and Finastra, run revenue on Clary to improve win rates, prevent slip deals, forecast with accuracy, and boost the productivity of all revenue-critical employees. To learn more about how you can create, convert, and close revenue with Clary, visit clary.com. You have now arrived at your destination. Chad, I don't think I've ever been quite so excited about doing a show following a discussion pre us starting recording. So this is going to be a lot of fun. Thank you for joining me today.
Chad Peets 2:05
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Based on the people that you've interviewed in the past, I find that hard to believe, but I'm humbled that you said it. So thank you.
Harry Stebbings 2:12
Do you know what? Also, I spoke to Chris Dagnon and Mike Spicer before this show. And if you want like hard heavyweights who are incredible at what they do, saying someone is the best in the world at what they do. I'm like, oh, shit. So I'm looking forward to this. So I want to start off with just a little bit, though, in terms of context. How did you make your way into sales first? And let's start there.
Chad Peets 2:35
I'll give you the short version, but I saw the movie Wall Street when I was 12 years old, and I knew I wanted to be a stockbroker. So I went to USC. I studied finance. I graduated from USC. I went to Merrill Lynch to be a stockbroker. And that was 1997 and 1998. And at that time... That industry was changing. It was becoming a fee-based industry, less about trading stocks and more about just fee-based. And that's not what I wanted to do. One, two, I was turned off a bit because it was such product pushing. By that, I mean, hey, go sell this product to your customers. We're going to charge one and a half points. This is the shit we want you to sell this week. I didn't feel at the time like, does it matter if that's the right product for the customer? It was just, we're going to go push that product. The other thing that was clear to me was to be successful in that industry, I was going to have to accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars in assets. I was 22 years old. I looked like I was 16.
Chad Peets 3:30
I would likely have had to call friends and family to raise money, and I was never going to do that. I just simply was not comfortable doing that. At the time, I had a client that came in. I was doing some financial planning for him and his wife said to him, you should hire this kid. And I was all arrogant and shit at the time. I was like 22.

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