Guest
Denise Persson
CMO, Snowflake
Thirty-three years in technology marketing, a believer that data decides what AI can do and that the CMO belongs in the room as a business leader.
About
Denise Persson is Chief Marketing Officer at Snowflake, the data and AI company, where she has led marketing since 2016. She is known as a tech marketer who built the Snowflake brand from, by her account, a 40-customer startup that had not yet done a million dollars in revenue into one of the most recognised names in enterprise data.
Persson grew up in Sweden in the 1980s, captivated by the lifestyle advertising she watched at the cinema, the Levi's and Juicy Fruit commercials of the era, and the weekly advertising magazine Resume she read cover to cover. Her early ambition was to be a product manager at Procter & Gamble. Instead, as she tells it, she fell into technology by accident in 1993, joining Commodore just as personal computing was opening up, the start of a career she dates at 33 years in tech marketing.
In 2016 Persson joined Snowflake when, by her account, it had around 40 customers, had been in market for 10 months and had not done a million dollars in total revenue, the smallest company she had ever worked for. She was drawn by a problem she had lived with as a marketer: data fragmented across digital channels with no way to measure the whole. Since then she has argued consistently that data is the core asset of every function, that AI is only as good as the data behind it, and that the CMO belongs in the leadership conversation as a business leader rather than a defender of a function.
Career30 years
- 2022 to now Patricia Industries Board Member
- 2016 to now Snowflake CMO
- 2020 to 2023 ON24 Board Member
- 2018 to 2023 Neo4j Board Member
Show earlier roles: LightStep, Apigee, ON24, Genesys
- 2019 to 2020 LightStep Board Member
- 2013 to 2016 Apigee CMO
- 2008 to 2013 ON24 CMO
- 2005 to 2008 Genesys EVP Marketing
- 2002 to 2005 Genesys VP Marketing
- 2000 to 2002 Genesys Global Marketing Director
- 1999 to 2000 Genesys Global Product Manager
- 1996 to 1999 Genesys Marketing Manager Nordics
How Denise thinks3 convictions
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Customer outcomes over technology
Persson argues that tech companies fall in love with what the technology can do and lose sight of what customers can achieve with it. She says the only thing a customer cares about is their business outcome, which makes thinking from the outside in the hardest and most important discipline for a tech marketer. It is the habit she has carried through her whole career.
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Stay a constant learner
Persson believes the best careers are discovered rather than planned, and that curiosity has become the core trait for anyone in the field. She points out that there is no external academy for much of what marketers now have to learn, so people learn from the peers sitting around them. For her, hiring people she can learn from and keeping a curious mind is the engine of staying sharp.
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Build for durable growth
Persson warns that tech companies over-index on demand generation because it is easy to measure, at the expense of brand. She frames durable growth as a matter of making your numbers in the future, not only this year, which requires investing in both. Brand, she adds, is where the long-term trust that makes data sharing possible actually gets built.