Masters of MEDDICC: Thibaut Ceyrolle

00:05 Andy Whyte: Hey, Thibaut. Welcome to Masters of MEDDICC. It is awesome to have you on the show, and I am thrilled to have you here — because not only do you meet the criteria we have of being an expert in revenue with tons of useful experience, but you're also a guest from Europe, from our part of the world. So many of the guests in the past have come from across that great pond between us and the United States. But you're here, and you're based in London — is that right?. 00:24 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah, exactly. 00:24 Andy Whyte: So welcome, welcome to the show. 00:24 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Very happy to join this podcast today. 00:43 Andy Whyte: Thank you very much. Well, for those who don't know you — perhaps you could give us an introduction. I know you've been working in software for 20 years. You don't look old enough to have that much experience, but perhaps you could give us a little background on how you got into this wonderful world of technology sales. 01:02 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah. So I am old enough — maybe it's just the lighting, I don't know. Nobody will notice with my French accent, but apologies for that. I've lived in the UK for six years, and I've been working in the IT and software space for more than 20 years now. I started Snowflake's EMEA business four years ago — I was the first employee on the ground. Before that I worked for different companies. I was at Bazaarvoice for four years — that's when I moved from France to the UK to lead Europe for them. And before that I spent almost seven years at BMC Software, where my last position was Country Manager for France. So yeah — heavily involved in this space, always on the sales side. It's probably the only thing I'm able to do in life. But yeah — 20 years in this space, and then starting the EMEA activity for Snowflake four years ago. 02:11 Andy Whyte: Four years ago. And it's funny you say that — that sales is the only thing you do in life. Because one of the things that fascinates me, and is so much of a success story, is what you started and built for Snowflake in EMEA. And that is so much more than it sounds. Building a team like that — it's a fascinating topic for me. How would you describe that role of being the first person on the ground in a region like EMEA?. 02:30 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah. So it was very, very important for me. I always pay close attention to the choices I make in my career. Before going into software, I worked straight out of school — I never had anything handed to me. I had to pay for everything, including business school. I worked part-time at HP in parallel to fund my business school because my parents didn't have any money to give me for it. But I wanted to go to a very good business school, and I did. Afterwards I was thinking: OK, I need to go out and do this properly. So I started in sales in 2000 — right when the world was collapsing with the internet bubble — and I was exploring different directions. I said, OK, maybe I need to start in services first, to understand the real dynamics of the market. And I learned a lot. It was extremely difficult — nothing like finding a job today. But I did that for seven years. I overachieved in many ways, and was eventually able to sell a project end-to-end to BMC Software. The country manager said, OK, maybe we need to bring this outsider in. So I joined BMC — and initially, not coming from a software background, they told me I needed to go into a specialist role first to prove myself. 03:29 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Which I did. It was tough, but I made it through the first year. After that, I moved into management and became a global manager for the Orange account. I had made the choice to join BMC Software — it was a large company, and honestly I was a little disappointed at first — until BladeLogic was acquired. The arrival of John McMahon and his sales leadership team — and people like Jamie and others who came in with them — really changed my life. It changed my career. We can probably come back to that. After that, BMC was a large company and I wanted to change things up. The digital marketing space was very active at the time, and I wanted to step out of the infrastructure world where I'd already spent 14 years. So I moved into digital marketing and joined Bazaarvoice. When the previous Europe lead left, I took over the whole European operation. That's when I moved to the UK. I had always had this in mind since business school — if you want to achieve significant things in your career, you have two options: you either go into finance, or you sell software. I kept that in mind as I built towards my goals. 04:56 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Bazaarvoice was an established company and I was reviewing a lot of things, but it wasn't a blank page. And then John McMahon introduced me — and I'm forever grateful to him for this — to Snowflake and to Chris Degnan, who is their CRO, and one of the best people I've ever had the privilege of working with. What was missing in my career at that point was really building something from scratch, from zero. And I was young enough in my head, at least, to say: OK, I'm going to do this. You also need to be ready to take a step down in some ways. I had been managing around 200 people in Europe at Bazaarvoice. Everyone was saying I was completely crazy to leave for this unknown company. And I said: yeah, but I think the outcome is going to be enormous. Nobody knew Snowflake at that point. But doing a proper assessment — John was on the board, my initial meetings were excellent — I felt the potential of starting from scratch. That was something I was missing, and I wanted to experience it. Could I build something from zero? Could I hire all the right people and grow this business?. 06:27 Thibaut Ceyrolle: And fundamentally, the solution and the technology were exceptional. That was a major part of my decision at the time. Sorry — long answer — but I just wanted to explain how I came to that decision. 06:27 Andy Whyte: No, I love it. Thank you for that — my mind is racing and there's so much we can dig into. One of the things I was planning to ask you, which you've touched on, is about pivotal moments in your career — a point where someone or something changed the way you think about sales. For me, personally, that was working with John Kaplan and Force Management, where I had that eureka moment — going from thinking I was a hard-working, conscientious salesperson who kept up with the latest trends and books, to suddenly realising I was hitting a glass ceiling because I didn't know what the elite salespeople actually do. It opened up a whole new world. And I was curious — you spent six years at Bazaarvoice and time at BMC — I wonder if that switch happened when the BladeLogic team arrived with John McMahon. I'd love to hear more about that. 07:13 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah, exactly that. Honestly, when you join a company from the outside — as I was when I was in services mode, coming up through business school — I had this dream view of the software world. 08:24 Thibaut Ceyrolle: When I joined BMC, at the beginning I was enthusiastic, but honestly a little disappointed in the sales execution. And I will always remember — we were at the sales kickoff in Nashville, Tennessee, after the BladeLogic acquisition. Honestly, before the acquisition, I was about to leave — I was disappointed with how things were going at BMC. Nashville, Tennessee is not Las Vegas, not New York, not San Francisco. But BMC chose it, and it was a deliberate choice. There was a real energy at that time. And then John came on stage and gave one of the best speeches I have ever heard. The way he framed things, the energy he brought — saying "you need to operate like this in the field" — and showing this whole new framework — a full analysis of the BladeLogic approach. It was mind-blowing for me. Afterwards, during a coffee break, Cédric came up to me — and also Andy Sadler, one of the guys I was working with. They came to me because I was managing the France Telecom and Orange account — one of the most significant potential customers for the new approach. They were quite disappointed by the quality of some of the salespeople arriving from the BladeLogic side, and were asking the right questions about who could work with these accounts. 09:58 Thibaut Ceyrolle: I actually still had a call with Cédric yesterday — which was quite fun. At that point in time, I was asking a lot of questions. He was watching me. By the end, it was clear to both of us there was something there. And the truth is, at that time, I was applying these principles instinctively, but I didn't have the structure to underpin them. And as you say in your book, it's like a compass — you answer the questions that help you make sure you fully master your sales campaigns and your sales motion. It's not something magical. It's just a structure that, if you apply it, gives you a very high success rate. And so I was immediately selected, I think, because this guy saw I had something — that I was able to learn. And I was invited to one of the last BladeLogic bootcamps, with all the BladeLogic guys. I think I was one of the only BMC people there. How cool is that. And I did some training, and that's where I met Andy Sadler, Paul McGrath, and all those guys who are now my friends. And I realised: OK, I'm much closer to the way those guys think and operate than to the BMC approach. 10:59 Thibaut Ceyrolle: It literally changed my life, because it helped me put words to what I felt was right — but in a much more structured way. 12:27 Andy Whyte: Yeah, that's fascinating. And one of the things I consistently hear from salespeople who are new to MEDDIC — whether through content, a book, or anything else — is: "This is how I've always sold. I just didn't know there was a name for it. I didn't know there was a framework." And I think that's probably one of the main reasons MEDDIC has been so successful and has proliferated so much — because it's just natural. It mirrors the way customers actually buy. It applies common sense in a structured way. So it's interesting to hear your story echoing that — that you were doing many of these things naturally, intuitively, but perhaps didn't have the structure behind them. 13:24 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah. And I learned a great deal despite the time pressure. What's very important is that so many people I meet say, "Yeah, of course, I work with MEDDIC." But when you dig into it, the most important piece is experiencing it properly. And that's not easy. I remember the first time I really applied it in earnest was on a major deal with Orange. I think I did something like 64 interviews during the business value assessment we were building for them. One of my colleagues and I did that together — it was tough, but incredibly rewarding. I found that doing proper analysis, asking the right questions, developing multiple options, influencing the decision process, having all the right metrics to build the business case — it was honestly very difficult. But I was being coached by someone with very strong experience in this, and I absorbed everything like a sponge. The problem you sometimes see is people saying "Yeah, I know MEDDIC" — but it's just a checklist for them. It's not embedded. And that's very important — it needs to be part of who you are. 14:29 Andy Whyte: Yeah, I agree. I put it into almost four stages — and it's not even a linear process. The first stage is learning MEDDIC. And a lot of people will stop there — their definition of "learning MEDDIC" will just be knowing the definitions of each letter. And as you mention, that's obviously not enough. The next stage is putting it into practice — you've learned what the elements are and you're trying to apply them. Those two stages almost go hand in hand. And then there's a bigger gap — the stage where the individual or the team truly embraces MEDDIC. That's where they really get it and feel it, the same way both of us did when we had that eureka moment. It clicked. And you start to see results — a meeting goes better because you focused on MEDDIC, or you get some positive signal from it. And then there's this fourth stage, which I think is often overlooked — the peak of it — where it becomes second nature. Where you're not consciously thinking about MEDDIC at all, because it's simply how you operate. It's how your mind works. And if that's a scale, so many people are at one end saying they practise MEDDIC, they know MEDDIC — and they still have a long way to go. 16:13 Andy Whyte: But the beauty of it — and I think this is one of MEDDIC's great strengths — is that unlike so many sales initiatives, programmes, and tools that are very top-down, that serve sales leaders, and then weaken as they come down the ladder — MEDDIC is the other way around. The primary value, the most immediate value, is for the individual contributor. And then it flows upwards from there. So what I love is the idea that if you're listening to this and you think "yeah, that resonates — and I've got a long way to go before this is second nature" — you are the first person who is going to benefit from that journey. Everyone else around you will too. But you'll be the first. And that's cool. 17:18 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah. It's a very important point. In the real world, MEDDIC is for the individual. It's for them — not for management, not for reporting. And when you realise it's for you, and you approach your sales campaigns with an entrepreneurial mindset — you are personally responsible for what you do — that's when it starts to really make a difference. 17:52 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And I love that idea — the entrepreneur mindset. Seeing your territory, your patch, your number as your own business. I used to think of it like a franchise. You and your team have a Snowflake franchise. The difference is — and I love this analogy — unlike a real franchise, you don't forgo paid holidays entirely, you have an SDR keeping your calendar full, you have a sales engineer the franchisor pays for. It's like having a franchise, but even better. And looking at the success you folks had at Snowflake, I'm pretty sure the compensation was better than most franchises too. 18:18 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah. But it's difficult. When I was talking about the choices I was making — the people around me, my parents, my friends — were asking why I was leaving a very good position. And honestly, the first year was extraordinary. I think I spent around fifty thousand euros of my own money in that first year, just to make things work. You need to be ready for that. It doesn't always pay off immediately. And I was also lucky to find the right team members and the right company. But I'm sure it would have worked regardless — because if you apply the right thinking, there is no way to be successful in life without taking risk. I had this conversation with John and others. We were reflecting on what was still missing for me — and it was building from scratch. Because when you're responsible for what you've built, and when you start with an invitation to build a team as you describe — with pre-sales, a marketing team, PR, all of that infrastructure already in place — that's very different. When I started Snowflake EMEA, I literally went to IKEA to buy the furniture for the office and built it myself. 19:54 Thibaut Ceyrolle: I saw a great post recently from a startup founder showing the first chair he'd assembled at the office. I was doing exactly that. But it's a beautiful thing — seeing what you built from those early days. 20:20 Andy Whyte: I love that. So let's talk about building that team — because you were genuinely the first person on the ground. You are person number one. So who was person number two? What role? And did you get those early decisions right?. 20:55 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah. So it took about a year and a half. I had the first call from Chris around June — actually my first call with him was around August 2015. It then took four months of conversations with Chris. The first meeting I had with him — when you speak with someone and immediately speak the same language, there's a moment when it just clicks. That was the case with Chris. So at Christmas time I decided to jump. I resigned from Bazaarvoice. And I was already in the mindset of: I'm going to build this like my own company. Where do I start? And what was great about Chris was that he said: "You're in charge of Europe — you make your own choices." Trust is extremely important in any business like that. And we had immediate trust with Chris from the very beginning. So the first people I needed were salespeople — and pre-sales. I was not an expert in data warehousing, so I needed help from the Snowflake side on the technical front. They seconded someone to us. But very quickly I said to Chris: we don't necessarily need people from the established market. 21:59 Thibaut Ceyrolle: What we need at the beginning are champion builders — highly skilled people who are comfortable in a MEDDIC environment, who are willing to be risk-takers themselves, and who will be able to find customers who will follow them based on who they are. Because what you need to realise is — when I started, this is a true story — people will tell you they thought I was selling ice cream. When you go to London, or the Regent Street area, or Oxford Street, you have a snowflake shop. They sell ice cream. And that was really the beginning — the name didn't resonate with anyone who mattered, except for a few people who knew the technology but not necessarily in the right way. So you need to find a way. The first guy I hired — it came out of a chance breakfast meeting. Completely out of the blue. We talked, we clicked immediately, and we both knew we needed to do this together. He started as a seller but quickly stepped up as the UK lead, because that's where we started. And I said: at the beginning of a company like this, you need people who sell themselves. If you have managers sitting behind their screens managing spreadsheets during a startup phase, it doesn't work. 23:39 Thibaut Ceyrolle: So that was my first hire — let's call him our UK leader. And off the back of that success, we also brought in another outstanding person. Someone who had worked at similar companies to me but who I'd never actually worked with directly. I didn't know him well at all. But I was at Bazaarvoice with someone who had since left — he'd left because he felt the potential wasn't there and had moved to a different company. He'd only been at that new company for about two months. I tracked him down and said, look, I think this is probably the opportunity of your life. He's German originally, and very sensible and measured. He thought about it very quickly and said: OK, let's go. And at the beginning, it was very important for me to have people who trusted me — people I knew would operate the right way, and people I could trust in return. Trust is everything when you're working with two or three salespeople. We also had one person who wasn't my direct choice — he was placed by the company — but he was a fantastic guy from the US, from Snowflake HQ. 24:47 Thibaut Ceyrolle: He was a BDR. And that was how we all started. That was our founding team. 25:08 Andy Whyte: That's great. And after that you extended. But that first core group of people — that was it. And it's funny — I was about to bring up the trust point, and then you did. There is no way someone makes a move to a new company, stays only two months, and then moves again — to where Snowflake was in 2016, wherever you were at that point — nobody makes that kind of leap just by looking at the technology and the background. They make it emotionally, based on exactly what you said: trust. There must have been something between you and him — knowing him even briefly, you could see he was ready. It was probably a bit of a head-versus-heart battle going on inside him. And his heart won, because of trust. And we see that in recruiting. We also see it in sales. And it's a big part of where the champion dynamic comes in — which brings us back to what you said earlier about looking for champion builders rather than industry or product experts. That is a fascinating topic. Is that still your approach?. 26:34 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah, definitely. And right now I'm advising a lot of companies, and I have exactly this kind of discussion. Because when I was looking at who to hire, what I was always looking for — and what you need to understand — was someone who is just listening. Not performing. Just listening. And when I started Snowflake, I didn't mind the move to cloud-based solutions — I saw it very quickly. When ServiceNow arrived and started competing and defining the market, it was clear: this was going to be the de facto standard. And I was thinking: OK, I need to be part of this wave, because if you're not, it's very difficult. I'd been approached by a number of companies who were inventing new things — genuinely innovating — but it's very difficult to protect your market when you're in Europe. First you're unknown. On top of that, your technology is completely unknown. And you're building from nothing, in a market where you first have to create the awareness of where the pain even is. Yeah. So the market was a new market. What we needed was a new narrative. It wasn't immediately obvious, but I felt the potential quickly — first we'd have new use cases, but we'd also have a massive replacement market for legacy data warehousing. 27:51 Thibaut Ceyrolle: And when I was looking at the legacy players — Teradata, IBM, Oracle and others — these were cloud-era competitors. But, no offence to them, they were different people making different bets. Most of those people had been sitting in the same seat for 15 or 20 years. And the truly disruptive people — the ones who change things — are not the ones who stay 25 years in one company. They're the ones who took risks, took time, and are genuinely built to change things. And this is always what I was looking for: people who are here to change the world. Very quickly when I was building the team, I said: yes, we will be the de facto solution in this market at some point. That was a state of mind. You are here to truly be in the market and to become the company that Snowflake is today. But you need specific people for it. 29:12 Andy Whyte: Yeah. That state of mind is fascinating to me, because I think it plays such an important role in a sales organisation's success. And what we talk about a lot — what it comes back to — is this: if I am completely convinced that my technology is the best, that it will bring unbelievable value to the customer, and that is as clear in my mind as anything — then the confidence that comes with that builds a certain profile, a certain attitude, a certain approach in the salesperson. They qualify hard because they have this mindset of: "I'm going to dig into whether there's a real opportunity here, and if there isn't — see you later. I'm on to the next one, because everyone wants to talk to me right now." That builds a real sense of momentum and FOMO. It becomes a catalyst for success. And once that flywheel starts spinning, it's very hard to slow down — because confidence breeds success, and success breeds more success. And then the word you used — "disruptive" — is really interesting to me. That's probably the perfect word to sum up the strategy you were describing and the kind of people you were looking to put on the ground as your first hires. 30:21 Andy Whyte: Did that word just come naturally to you, or is it something you'd consciously defined?. 31:05 Thibaut Ceyrolle: So when I was making the decision about whether to join Snowflake, I was hesitating — Snowflake wasn't well known, but it felt like an obvious opportunity in a way. And if you ask Chris, he knew I was talking to a lot of companies. At one point it came down to the final choice. What made the difference was the person. The team. The best teammates I've ever had in my life, and the inspiration of the CEO. I was still looking for that, and in the other companies I was meeting, they weren't necessarily ready to move as fast or as boldly. But I felt that Snowflake was genuinely changing something. Because what's extremely good and extremely rare — Chris as CEO went through exactly what I did. He was the first sales person on the ground in the US, just as I was going to be for EMEA. I have enormous respect for that. Because this is what I like. When you talk to managers — when you talk to John, to my colleagues, to Andy, to Paul McGrath — all those guys are good managers, excellent managers, sometimes brilliant leaders. But they were also outstanding individual contributors themselves. That's the case with Chris. 32:04 Thibaut Ceyrolle: When I had that interaction with him, I was leaving Snowflake to someone else. I was listening to what they were saying about Snowflake. And the way it was described — I jumped at it. I said: OK, this is the description I've been looking for. 32:53 Andy Whyte: Yeah. I love that. And that disruptive mindset carries forward — as you say, it's interesting that Chris went through the same process. Him coming in as the first sales person for Snowflake, building the teams, then scaling globally — and you repeating his journey in a regional sense — is one thing. But then taking that disruptive mindset to customers is another thing entirely. You mentioned a lot about how Snowflake was unknown. I can remember when I first started hearing about Snowflake — it was because of the noise you were making from the success you were having, and people started talking. But you've got to have that success before people hear about it. So rewinding back to when people thought you were an ice cream company — we had the same thing at Sprinklr once, where someone wanted actual fire-prevention sprinklers. We even had a conversation in Q4 about whether we could sell them and count the revenue towards our target. Unfortunately not. But yeah — going in as a new company with a new proposition in many ways does require that disruptive mindset, which is very close to the Challenger Sale mindset. 34:22 Andy Whyte: And one of the things I always think is an additional challenge for organisations in that position is: not only are you approaching companies that often don't have a budget reserved for what you're selling, but because of that, they've never bought anything like it before. They have no idea what the evaluation criteria should be. So not only do you have that challenge, but the decision criteria is also something you have to build with them. And that, I think, is where the divide between good and elite salespeople becomes a significant one — where your people can truly help craft and influence that decision criteria. 35:05 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah. The decision criteria is key. And you mentioned John Kaplan — what was fantastic about Snowflake is that, because I've met many startups, the foundations matter enormously. John Kaplan and Force Management arrived at Snowflake with a plan and the right training. But because of the influence Chris and I had already established in EMEA, we were already doing many of the right things and had the right foundations in place. It wasn't a revolution when they arrived. But John Kaplan and Force Management helped create a framework where everybody said the same things and everybody worked on the decision criteria to win against the competition. And when you look at the market and realise how well-prepared you are to own your unique differentiators — that's how you argue and win. The most difficult thing when you're starting out is to qualify out. Because your first wins are so important — the first opportunities you get, you know. At the end of the day, you say: yes, we can engage in this sales campaign. But after that, if you look at an RFP and the way it's written, most of the time the decision criteria isn't coming from you. 36:38 Thibaut Ceyrolle: I don't blame customers for that — they have so many companies to meet, it's impossible for them to build a balanced decision framework without the help of a vendor. So if you're not there early enough to influence it, someone else will be. And in that case, sometimes you need to be ready to qualify out. Very quickly, when we started — with John, Marcus, and the rest of the team — we qualified out of some opportunities. And we were questioned hard for it. Because at the beginning, you'll meet a lot of companies who say "OK, let's do a POC." And all of them say yes. But we would see them and sometimes say no — because we were so convinced in the quality of the technology, and we wanted to have the right criteria in place before starting a POC. And that was extremely, extremely important. 37:26 Andy Whyte: Tell me — in some of those instances where you put the brakes on and started that motion of saying "this doesn't quite feel like a fit" — were there instances where the customer turned around and said "actually, tell us why you don't think it's a fit" — and you were able to re-engage off the back of pushing back and then re-influence the criteria?. 37:52 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah. Everything comes back to champions. If you have people who understand your technology quickly — and when you start a business, the two most important things are not necessarily the formal decision makers. When you start, the first opportunity is impossible without proper pain being identified. Because that's where the real interest sits. And a champion is often the one defending your solution. When we started, we were in London and we needed to build European champions. For example — I did an analysis recently for an early-stage startup, and all the reference customers they were citing were American. When you're selling in Europe, and you only have Walt Disney, Netflix, and Bank of America as references, it doesn't fully resonate. It's good, but it's not what you need here. So we had this obsessive focus on adding new European customers — because if you have the right European champions, you can ask them to advocate and influence decisions in their peer networks. And if you have a proper champion, you can have an honest conversation with them — you can say "I don't feel comfortable here" — and I learned that after maybe 14 or 15 years of doing this, qualifying out of some opportunities. 38:37 Thibaut Ceyrolle: It's very important. 39:23 Andy Whyte: Yeah. I have this saying: nobody ever regrets qualifying out. And I still say it a lot — partly because it's true, and partly because I want to provoke someone to try and prove me wrong. I'm genuinely curious whether anyone has ever regretted it. And so far, no one ever has. So for me, it's a super interesting one. And the decision criteria is such a fascinating part of MEDDIC. If we're looking at the difference between elite salespeople and the rest — it's the elite ones who don't just take control of the decision criteria, but who weave it throughout the entire campaign. They influence it, and then they make it almost like the theme of the engagement. Whether it's a sales campaign, a sales process, an RFP — they find their unique differentiators within the decision criteria and they name them. They title their proposal around them. They put a memorable framing on it. That's something I don't see often enough in MEDDIC practice more broadly, and I'd love to see more of it. So — especially with Snowflake, where you were disrupting the market with a genuinely new proposition — were there any particular tactics or strategies you used to shape that decision criteria?. 41:09 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah. I think everything is relative to the point I made about making people realise something they haven't considered yet. I remember the first big campaign with Sainsbury's. I met with the key person there and he said: "Nobody here would be fired for choosing IBM." It was a replacement of their Teradata environment, and the thinking was: nobody gets fired for picking the safe option. But I said to him: "Yes — but nobody gets promoted for it either. With Snowflake, they can." And it's very important. At that time — with the customer and with our internal team — we pushed back and explained: this isn't about us. It's about you. In many companies, you'll see a tendency to want an apples-to-apples comparison. And somebody who was absolutely fantastic and helped us enormously in the early days was Steve — he was managing pre-sales worldwide and we were lucky enough to have him embedded in our team for a period of time. He built this concept — and it was originally Chris's framing — of: it's not apples to apples. It's apples to apple pie. I love that. It's mind-blowing. You need to make people understand that you can't do the same comparison — because the comparison itself is wrong. 42:31 Thibaut Ceyrolle: You need to sell the apple pie. And Steve took that concept and made it brilliantly actionable. We used it everywhere, and it was extremely important. Yeah. And you will face this problem — so many competitors in the market, and customers with their own habits and frames of reference. I remember meeting the stock exchange in France. They were only thinking about what they already had and what the competition looked like against that. But the problem with truly disruptive technology is you can do things with it that the customer hasn't even thought to ask for yet. And you need to help them understand the value of that. 43:31 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And a lot of work. I agree. And I think one of the things people often overlook about the process of influencing decision criteria is that you're not just angling towards your own strengths — you're also being the person who inspires the change. We talk a lot about thought leadership. And if you're the first person to go in and say: "I understand that you do things this way, and I can see why. But here's what we're seeing — organisations like yours that have made this shift have had this kind of outcome" — you start to see the light bulbs go on. Not only are you differentiating yourself and shaping criteria in your favour, but anyone who follows you into that meeting room will now be judged against a new standard. And if they don't bring it up themselves, they're already on the back foot — even if they have the same capability or even a better version of it. And that, for me, is something often overlooked. Going back to what you said earlier about trust — trust comes from someone buying into you first. And it's very important for champion building. So the decision criteria isn't just about the technical evaluation and differentiation. 44:38 Andy Whyte: It's about building a genuine sense of inspiration in the customer, so they see you as someone who brings value not just from a product, but from how they're approaching the project. Super interesting. OK. So one thing I want to dig into before we run out of time is: starting a region as we've talked about, and building it to the success you had — how many interviews must you have done over the last four or five years?. 45:21 Thibaut Ceyrolle: I think around 380. 45:21 Andy Whyte: And what's amazing is that at an organisation like Snowflake, by the time someone gets to you, it's already a pretty filtered process. Those 380 are presumably very well-qualified candidates. Why so many?. 46:08 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah, it's a good topic. So those 380 weren't only salespeople — it was almost everyone I met in the early days. Right now we have 750 people in EMEA, so it's quite a significant organisation. But when we started, I wanted to make sure every person fit within the fabric of the team and was genuinely right for what we were building. So I met everyone — and when you start a startup like that, you do things yourself. At the beginning, you can't hand things off. You have to be directly involved. What we did well is: at the start we were using one exclusive headhunter per country, and after that we extended to three per region. We kept them exclusive — meaning the headhunter working for France only worked for France. And I always gave the analogy of a real estate agency: if your house is listed with ten different agencies, every buyer thinks something must be wrong with it. There must be something wrong with it. Right? That negotiating power disappears. Whereas if you have one exclusive agency — that house has scarcity. It's different. Of course you need a good product, a good house. 47:11 Thibaut Ceyrolle: We had both. And so we worked with this community of headhunters, with the additional support of credits from our VC side. Chad — who works at a venture fund and is probably the best headhunter I've ever met, and a close friend — was part of that. We were doing literally bi-weekly calls to track where things were. At peak, we were onboarding 15 to 17 people a week. It was a hiring machine. And I personally opened 14 different countries — doing all the opening meetings, being present to meet candidates in each location. If you're not organised, it simply doesn't work. And Chad helped give us structure and guidance throughout. With his emails and by working closely with Mike Spicer — who was doing a fantastic job — we had a very strong motion in place. So my strong recommendation: invest in a small number of exclusive headhunters. Spend time with them. If a headhunter doesn't ask you questions about your business or your sales campaigns — that's a red flag. The good ones are almost like students of your business. We were training them. I met them regularly, and they were able to speak intelligently about what we were doing. And that helped attract all the right people. 48:34 Andy Whyte: Yeah, that's absolutely right. So many people evaluate recruiters only on the quality of the candidates they put in front of you. But what you're not seeing is all the A-players who were never approached — because the recruiter didn't understand the proposition well enough to capture that person's attention. And once a candidate has been approached once for a role poorly, you may never get to them again. And your analogy around real estate is exactly right — if a role is being pitched by six different recruiters simultaneously, the best candidates think: something must be wrong here. Whereas you want to project the feeling of: this company is in demand, this is a select process, this is somewhere on the way up. So yeah — fascinating insights, really interesting. And then when someone is in front of you — has there ever been a situation, maybe it happens a lot, where you've met someone and in the first five minutes you feel that thing? Where you're suddenly in a different mode yourself — you're still interviewing them, still qualifying, but part of you has flipped into sales mode because you think: I'm on to something here. Do you find that?. 50:05 Andy Whyte: And if so, what characterises those moments?. 50:46 Thibaut Ceyrolle: So with experience, you develop the ability to understand what good people look like — at least for your company. There are two dimensions to this. On the sales side — when I'm doing an interview with a salesperson — what's very important is: if you've been successful in your career, you don't need to over-prove yourself. What I mean by that is: I never need to over-talk about what I've done, because the results and the choices speak for themselves. This is something very important. And I actually came across something just yesterday — I'm not the biggest guy on social media, but there's one person I follow on Instagram whose content I really admire. He shared a quote that resonated enormously with me: "Speak with honesty. Think with sincerity. Act with integrity." And honestly, that is a summary of everything I was looking for. I'm grateful because I saw it just the night before this conversation, and it crystallised something I'd been trying to articulate. When you speak to someone, you will see if they're honest. You'll see if they're sincere. And you'll feel that immediately. With experience, I'm now able to see through people who aren't being genuine. 51:59 Thibaut Ceyrolle: And when somebody is honest, you can feel it. When somebody isn't overstating their results, you can feel that too. When somebody is doing the right things in their personal and professional life, you know they have the right level of integrity — by the way they treat their friends, their family, their work. And all of that becomes very quickly apparent. And what I was thinking when I first met Chris — the question was very simple. And every time when you have a simple, easy conversation between people, you know you're on the right path — finding someone genuine. But as soon as it becomes complicated, and you don't understand what the person is saying, it's a difficult sign. 53:30 Andy Whyte: Yeah. I like that. And it comes back to that feeling, that trust. It's not so much a conscious thought of "this is getting complicated" — it's more of an internal feeling. Like: I can vibe with this person. I can see myself working with them. Super interesting. So Thibaut — this has been exceptional. Thank you so much. I already know this is going to be a hugely popular episode. There's going to be a real challenge picking which soundbites to pull from it. But thank you so much for your time. And if people want to connect with you, where should they find you?. 54:34 Thibaut Ceyrolle: Yeah, LinkedIn — but please don't just send a blank connection request. I have a backlog of around six hundred. So send a message with some context, and reach out on the usual social networks. Yeah. But thank you, thank you. 54:50 Andy Whyte: And that's what you're about, isn't it. You know, I think you embody what we talk about — you win when you're genuinely learning. You said something very important earlier that I think bears repeating: always be in a learning state of mind, because you can never know everything. 54:50 Thibaut Ceyrolle: I've learned a lot from the books I'd recommend people to read. 54:50 Andy Whyte: Thank you very much, Thibaut. 54:50 Thibaut Ceyrolle: That's very kind of you to say, but thank you most of all for your time today. 54:50 Andy Whyte: I'm sure I speak for everyone listening — incredible stuff. Thanks very much.