4 lessons from the lady who runs ABM for North America at Snowflake
That lady is Casey Patterson and she is responsible for managing 23 marketers at Snowflake with the mission of driving revenue through account based marketing.
I love writing about ABM (and our audience here seems to like it too) because it is the one motion in B2B where marketing and sales actually stop arguing about credit.
It’s not about the credit or the score or proving what marketing did. See, every other approach usually leads to someone somewhere fighting over a touch. Did the ad influence it, did the blog post, did the SDR get there first? ABM cuts through all of that and the scoreboard gets simpler: sales picked a list of accounts, and the only question is whether marketing helped them get in or not.
If you’ve been anywhere near enterprise software in the last few years you know the name. Snowflake is the AI Data Cloud platform that’s become foundational infrastructure for how the world’s biggest companies actually use their data. It frequently ranks on the Fortune Future 50 (which highlights companies with the strongest long-term sustainable growth potential) and took the #1 spot in 2025. Databricks is the closest competitor and the fight between those two is one of the biggest in enterprise tech right now.
So when I wanted to understand how ABM actually works at the enterprise level, I went to Casey Patterson. She’s Director of ABM at Snowflake and runs the program across North America with a team of 23 marketers supporting her. Most marketing teams don’t have 23 people total. Hers is just the ABM slice. She’s a Tier 1 ABM expert (if I had to give you a made up stat to further prove her credibility here).
The thing I appreciated about Casey is that almost nothing she said is locked to having a Snowflake-sized budget (because inevitably someone will respond and say yeah Dave, must be nice. If I had a multi-million dollar marketing budget to take clients golfing!) But if you check out my conversation with Casey it becomes super clear she gets the principles behind this stuff. Put her anywhere, with budget or without, and she’d get the job done.
Here are four things I’m calling out for you:
1. Your sales team is the bottleneck, not your TAM.
The question people ask all the time when it comes to working with sales is “how many accounts should we target?” Casey’s answer is the cleanest I’ve heard, and she pointed me to The Goal by Eli Goldratt, the old manufacturing book about bottlenecks. The principle is that things back up at whichever stage of the process has the least capacity, and in B2B that stage is almost always sales.
So you work backwards from there. How many reps do you have, and how much pipeline can each one actually carry? If one rep is handling Disney as a named account, you might target just that one. If a rep has 100 accounts and you set 100 meetings, you’ve just made expensive garbage that nobody can follow up on. Casey’s team typically targets around ten accounts per rep when they expect to land four meetings. Sales bandwidth defines the list, not your TAM.
This is also an incredibly useful yet simple lesson in marketing planning and forecasting. It’s all about sales capacity, not how many accounts your CEO thinks you should be supporting with marketing.
2. The swarm: run a two-week swarm on one account.
Casey walked me through a play they ran for a single customer account where the goal was to drive adoption of Snowflake’s AI assistant. They ran a hands-on lab onsite at the customer, layered geo-fenced out-of-home ads around the location (using tools like AdQuick and OneScreen.ai), added a gifting follow-up, and ran an SDR email sequence on top of it. The whole thing was compressed into two weeks around the event, and by the end they had doubled the number of Cortex users inside the account.
You don’t need the Snowflake budget to copy the principle. Pick one important account, layer four or five channels at the same time, and timebox the whole thing. ABM doesn’t really work as an always-on motion. It works as a swarm with a clear start and end date, where sales knows exactly when the wave is coming and is ready to follow up.
3. Myth busting: you don’t need a six-figure MarTech stack to do ABM.
When Casey was building ABM from scratch at her last company, the toolkit was pretty simple: 1:1 landing pages built for specific accounts, direct mail with a clear offer and a QR code, small curated dinners organized around a specific pain point, and customer-to-customer conversations where she introduced a prospect to an existing customer who could vouch for the product.
No 6sense, no Demandbase, no fancy data warehouse. Just real alignment with sales on the 20 accounts that mattered most that quarter, and a handful of low-cost plays executed well. If you’re trying to get an ABM program off the ground at a smaller company, that’s your starter pack, and the tools can come later.
If someone tells you you need all this fancy complicated technology to run ABM, they’re probably trying to sell you something 🙂
4. What’s next? The future version of ABM looks more like Netflix than a campaign calendar.
Casey and her boss Hillary (hi Hillary, hope you are well) are building toward what they’re calling agent ABM (dun dun dunnnnnnnn) and the idea is to stop pushing the same campaign at every account on the same schedule, and start meeting buyers in the channel they actually prefer, with the content they actually want, based on what they’ve already engaged with.
Note: I added the dun dun dunnnnn for effect. I hope Marisa doesn’t edit it out. And I don’t actually think it’s a feature in Snowflake. That noise is not real.
When you log into Netflix, it knows what you’ve watched and what you’re halfway through. Most B2B marketing is still operating like cable TV: same ad, same time, same channel, hope someone’s tuned in. None of this is a new idea (Seth Godin was writing about permission marketing back in 1999), but AI finally makes it possible to do at scale, and Casey said the channel layer is the part that’s been too hard to crack until now. That’s where the next 12 months of ABM gets interesting.
What’s the most effective ABM play you’re running right now? Hit reply. We want to feature a few in an upcoming edition. More ABM. More ABM!
– Dave
P.S. On finding a mentor in your career in marketing:
Right at the beginning of this episode, Casey and I talk about how she found a mentor. I thought this was a really useful discussion because I know many people are always asking how to find a mentor.
There’s a lot more in the full conversation, including a great tangent on how Casey cold-LinkedIn-messaged Hillary years before they ever worked together and turned it into a mentorship.
