Snowflake is one of the 20 largest software companies in the world, and Denise Persson, the company’s chief marketing officer, wants to hit the top 10.
“We’re talking about going from great to iconic,” she says.
Persson has the experience to pull this off. This is her fourth CMO job in the last 29 years and she has a track record of taking companies public including Genesys and Apigee, which was acquired by Google in 2016.
To grow Snowflake she is taking a more b-to-c approach to b-to-b marketing. “We aim to create the most customer-obsessed technology company on the planet,” she says.
From a brand standpoint, Persson is focused on having Snowflake customers tell their story. “In B2B technology, people trust their peers more than anything else,” she says. “Telling the story through the customers, it really serves two purposes – inspiration and education – and it shows how much we’re putting the customer at the center of everything we do.”
The company is working with The Olympics for both Milano Cortina 2026 and LA2028 to use data to organize the event from city planning and selling tickets to measuring athlete stats. “For example, we are supporting the USA Bobsled-Skeleton Team, a very data-driven event. It’s like Formula 1 on ice. Every millisecond counts. All that data sits in Snowflake. They’re using Snowflake and our AI offerings to optimize performance,” says Persson. “One of the team members of Team USA is a data engineer. The fact that you have sporting teams now with data engineers on the team to help optimize the sport is quite exciting. That’s the story that people want to listen to as well.”
This storytelling example comes from the company’s approach to marketing that focuses on listening to customers first. “Customers don’t want to hear you talk from the inside out about your product and all that. The best sellers are those who listen more than talk,” she continues. “That’s how you build trust. You need to put yourself in their world and tailor your message to solve their unique business problems.”
Persson also says Snowflake is highly focused on their role in their tech community. “Snowflake is an ecosystem company,” she says. “It’s not just about Snowflake, it’s the ecosystem of technologies and partners around Snowflake and how we’re all coming together to really serve customers.”
Brand Innovators caught up with Persson from Spain where she was attending meetings with her EMEA team. The San Francisco-based marketer talked about supporting marketers in an AI world, how the company is powering The Olympics and her approach to leadership. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How are you supporting marketers to be agents of change in an AI world?
With executive engagement, they want you to facilitate peer-to-peer learning. I don’t want to go to an event just to listen to vendors. I really learn the most from my peers. To be the one who helps facilitate that is really important. It could be bringing in the executive audience, that chief data and AI officer, the CMO, the CFO. How do you create a community there that’s really bringing value to them? I know some vendors, even in the marketing space, where people want to really buy from that company because they want to be part of that community they’re creating.
We’re very focused on that in terms of execution. How can we be the ones championing and facilitating that community within our customer base? It’s about putting yourself in the customer’s world and not trying to have customers move into your world.
How are you telling the story of Snowflake’s involvement in cultural moments such as the LA 2028 Olympics?
It’s just a different storytelling of our product that many people can relate to. If we go in and talk about fraud management at a bank, that doesn’t apply to everyone. But people can relate to how data and AI is used within sports. It’s a story that people want to hear about. LA 2028 is going to be the largest sporting event ever held in history. It’s going to be bigger than Paris and many Superbowls. They’re going to sell more tickets than any sporting event in history.
To talk about that story, how they are using technology and data to organize the biggest and best, most technology-driven Olympics of all time, has a very wide audience. Everyone wants to know how LA is going to manage traffic in the summer of 2028. How are they housing athletes? How are creating a sustainable event? How are they using data and AI to sell merchandise and tickets and really connect the whole ecosystem of partners that are helping build The Olympics? How are they using data to collaborate with the state of California? These are stories people can really relate to and are very curious about.
What is your approach to leadership?
One of our values is to make each other the best. What I love about marketing is, it’s the greatest team sport in business. There’s no way one individual can possess all the skills alone. You need to be a business strategist, a growth architect. You need to be aligned with everyone in the business, a champion of the customer, a brand strategist. The key attribute of a successful CMO is really the ability to really bring all those together. I never did team sports myself. Maybe this is my opportunity.
As a CMO, you need to be dangerous enough in all those types of functions. You need to understand what exceptional looks like and the skills you’re looking for in your team. How do I bring them together? It’s very much a role of aligning people towards a mission, bringing clarity in terms of where we are going as a company.
Leadership is one of the key things you need to possess. There’s so many exceptional marketers and CMOs out there. But if you fail to align the business strategy with your team and with sales, you fail.
What was one career defining moment for you?
My biggest career defining moment was when I was 27. I was offered the VP of marketing role at the French teleconferencing startup where I was working called Genesys. We essentially developed what Zoom is today. We were acquired back in 2008. I was by far not ready for that position. I’d been with the company for three or four years and the CEO just said, “Hey, Our VP of marketing is going to do something else. I’m appointing you VP of marketing next week. By the way, 50 of the top executives around the world are coming in and you’re going to present the marketing plan.”
That was the biggest defining moment in my life. I was scared to death. I never expected to be in that role. But it’s one of the situations where you have to say yes. I have had the opportunity to give other people that opportunity. It’s the greatest part of my job today. When I see potential in people and give them life changing opportunities.
What marketing predictions do you have for 2026?
We’re going to see the true realization and the business outcomes of AI on a broader unit basis. It’s going to be super important that you build a culture of constant learning, the ability to really thrive in change. We learned a lot through COVID in terms of dealing with a curveball coming your way. Those who have the ability to really adapt and thrive in change are the ones who are going to succeed. No one in Silicon Valley has ever experienced the speed of change we are experiencing.
I recently did a panel with another CMO who is hearing a lot of CMOs in the b-to-c space saying, “I’m scared. I actually don’t know what to do.” In this case, you have to jump into the cold water and learn. You’re going to have to start somewhere. Nobody knows what the world of marketing is going to look like in five years. There’s no crystal ball.
You need to identify those who are the change agents on your team, who are very curious and really enable them. On the marketing team at Snowflake, we have an AI Council. We identified the top people from each function who really are super curious about it. That alleviates some of the anxiety. We have this team who are driving this agenda, doing the experimentation. We do a quarterly AI marketing day for the rest of the team to really educate us on what is working, what is not. I learn from this team every day. I feel less anxious because I know we’re making progress.
