In 2018, both Snowflake and Databricks made strategic moves by hiring GTM (Go-to-Market) Systems Leaders. Bringing in a Leadership hire early is the single best way to establish a strong foundation for your internal Salesforce infrastructure.
Fast forward to today and the teams have scaled in drastically different ways.
Let's take a closer look and compare the approach these Enterprise SaaS giants have taken to scaling the Salesforce team.
Databricks: ~1,500 Sales Reps
Comprehensive Breakdown of Databricks' Salesforce Team
Snowflake: ~2,300 Sales Reps
Comprehensive Breakdown of Snowflake's Salesforce Team
While these snapshots of org structures provide only a glimpse, there are potentially areas for improvement on both teams.
The more glaring instance of it certainly comes at Databricks, though. Primarily the lack of Salesforce Administrators and Product Owners, combined with a relatively lean Business Analyst layer given the horsepower they have on the Engineering side.
A Salesforce Team with ~20 Engineers gives you a ton of capacity to ship new features.
And that's a great thing assuming you have the structure and team in place to properly plan the roadmap you intend to build (Product Owners) and clearly document requirements and conduct thorough gap analysis (Business Analysts).
Without maturity in those functions, you fall into the trap of building for today without a broader plan of how that will scale in the future.
For more insights on how we view the importance of Salesforce Product Managers, check out our analysis on the Role of Salesforce PMs at Zillow. and the Diverse Background of Block's Salesforce Product Management team.
In general: