CEO Keynote Template: The Snowflake Summit Example
CEO Keynote Template: The Snowflake Summit Example
A Ten-Part Plan for CEO Success
I’ve collaborated on many CEO keynotes over the years and probably critiqued more than a hundred. Snowflake’s new CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, opened the Snowflake Summit 2024 this week and executed the common “CEO Keynote Template” very well. The session is not yet online for replay, but I’ll add it here when it is. His template template that worked so well?
Open with a Pump Up Video Teasing the Theme
Share Your Company & Personal Credentials
Share the Real Customer Pain Points
Name Your Category and Share a Bold Vision for Your Leadership
Announce a Product That Proves your Commitment to That Vision
*Warning against live demos…Support Your Vision With a List of Three Benefits or Claims
Get Influential Outsiders to Validate your Vision and Leadership + Announce a Meaningful Partnership
Share Customer Stories to Support Your Points
Share Return on Investment Statistics
(6 Months Earlier) Develop a Company Strategy and Execute It
Open with a Pump Up Video Teasing the Theme
Like most CEO keynotes, Snowflake opened up with a quick 2-3 minute video with driving music, quick transitions, and inspirational, visionary words. A well-designed video gives you a chance to kick off the conference with energy, inspiration, and visual stimulation. The music, the vibe - it can all be carefully architected to bring the keynote to life before the CEO even steps on stage.
Share Your Company & Personal Credentials
Almost all CEO keynotes start out with a list of why your company matters in the world. Snowflake’s claim: "Welcome to the largest gathering of AI and data professionals in the world,” and “We have people here from analyst to CEO and from nearly every continent on earth” (did they miss Antarctica? He may have been improvising : )
Many companies share how many customers they have, how much progress they’ve made over the last year, or other big proof points for showing leadership and momentum. Sridhar shared that Snowflake runs 5 billion queries every day, roughly equivalent to all of Google’s daily searches, to show their massive scale and impact.
Some CEOs don’t need to share their own personal credentials if they are well-established in their industry. Sridhar was in a unique position, being three months into his role as CEO of Snowflake. To introduce himself to the audience and earn credibility, he shared his elite background including having run Snowflake’s AI and Innovation teams and having run all ads for Google before that.
Sridhar went further and also dove deep into the credibility of his AI research team, highlighting the depth of top researchers in critical AI focus areas.
Share the Real Customer Pain Points
Every story needs highs and lows - you need to wander through the suffering and challenges to be able to present your solution as the hero. Sridhar went through the challenges of AI:
Name Your Category and Share a Bold Vision for Your Leadership
In Snowflake’s early days, they were selling against data warehouses and named their category “Cloud Data Warehouse” to emphasize their differentiation. Years later, they changed their positioning to be the “Cloud Data Platform,” having expanded far beyond just data warehouses. Today, they re-named their category the AI Data Cloud, incorporating the big future ahead of them within the data world. Their focus: Enterprise AI - putting the power of AI into the hands of everyone while centralizing security, access and governance. Having announced their category as the AI Data Cloud for the Enterprise, Sridahr went on to share his vision of Snowflake being the unified customer platform, making the complex, simple, effective, and cost-efficient.
Announce a Product That Proves your Commitment to That Vision
The first data point to that vision becoming reality: a product that supports it. Cue the clapping, more details, and a quick demo please. (Sidebar - the chance of a live demo going wrong is directly proportional to the number of people watching and pressure of the situation - Sridahr did NOT have a live demo).
Support Your Vision with Lists of Three Benefits or Claims
Two is too few, four is too many, three is just right. Sridahr had several lists of threes throughout his keynote. (If you can get your CEO to repeat the same list of three over and over instead of having different branded threes, you win!)
Get Influential Outsiders to Validate your Vision and Leadership + Announce a Meaningful Partnership
Fully establishing Snowflake’s influence in the future of AI, Sridhar hosted the man of the moment, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, for a long keynote cameo. Jensen not only praised Snowflake, but went on to co-announce a partnership for deeper integration of products and development.
Share Customer Names and Stories to Support Your Points
Throughout the presentation, Sridhar shared big names and quick stories about customers using Snowflake’s products and getting measurable business value. I counted at least ten different customer stories. The little vignettes brought the company’s success and claims to life. Everyone trusts customer experiences more than vendor claims. While Sridhar didn’t bring any customers on stage himself, directly following his session, Snowflake CMO Denise Persson led a customer panel with big-name customers.
Share Return on Investment Statistics
“Show me the money!” It’s hard to get customers to quantify the impact of your products, but real numbers and real customer stories again sell better than any general claims you make. Sridhar claimed that Snowflake has “The Best ROI of any data platform” but then went on to specify the Total Cost of Ownership Pfizer realized ( I think it was a 57% decrease ) (A great follow-on asset for the conference, at the booth or for a nurture stream? The case study!)
(6 Months Earlier) Develop a Strategy and Execute It
There’s nothing worse than trying to write a CEO keynote when there’s no THERE THERE. Speechwriters and marketers aren’t magicians, they work to shape a story but need some real meat on the bone. The # 1 success factor for knocking a CEO keynote out of the ballpark is to start envisioning it at least 6 months ahead of time. Where do we want to take the company? What product work do we need to do between now and then to really EXCITE our customers and prospects? How can we allocate real resources to that instead of scrambling at the last minute? The Snowflake keynote was effective because they have been moving towards their vision with deliberate, meaningful steps - promoting a CEO with deep AI chops, hiring an elite AI team to bring their data expertise into the AI world, developing a deep and significant relationship with NVIDIA, nurturing customer relationships to be able to share their stories publicly.
There are no easy shortcuts to this kind of work, but it is a thing of beauty when you see it all come together. Congrats to the Snowflake team for a job well done.
Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.