For anyone leading a demand generation event, it’s a tough — if not uncommon — scenario: The audience is ready, the cameras are rolling … but the technical expert you rely on is absent.
This was the exact situation Erin Troiano, Senior Marketing Manager on the demand gen team at Snowflake, found herself in recently. It was the day of a major public sector webinar — a high-stakes demo for high-level prospects from U.S. federal agencies.
Standard operating procedure for these events is clear. Marketing teams handle the logistics and broad messaging and secure a solutions engineer (SE) to join the webinar. The SE’s job is to be ready and able to field the difficult, in-the-weeds technical questions that inevitably pop up during a demo.
“Long story short, a solutions engineer simply wasn’t available for the date and time of the live webinar,” Troiano recalls. “We had a line on a last-minute resource, but that fell through. I was definitely scrambling for a solution.”
With the webinar underway and technical questions rolling in, Troiano had two choices: Deflect the questions and risk losing engagement, or find a new way to answer them. Then she remembered she has access to a powerful internal resource: Snowflake Intelligence.
To understand the weight of this moment, you have to understand the typical workflow. Securing technical experts for marketing events is a logistical hurdle — akin to “herding cats.” SEs are a valuable resource whose core responsibility is driving revenue, often by meeting with customers and prospects wherever in the United States they may be.
Asking an SE to sit at a computer for an hour just in case technical questions appear in the chat of a webinar they’re not conducting is a big ask. It takes them away from high-value work; yet without them, there is a risk of losing important prospect engagement. “It’s really a favor that they’re doing for us,” Troiano notes.
But on this day, SE involvement wasn’t an option. It was just Troiano and the AI of Snowflake Intelligence.
As the demo progressed, the questions started coming. They weren’t just logistical queries; they were technical questions about Snowflake’s capabilities. Troiano opened a chat window with Snowflake Intelligence and began to copy and paste the attendees’ questions directly into the tool.
The results were immediate.
“I would prompt a technical question; it would quickly respond with an accurate answer,” Troiano says.
Crucially, Snowflake Intelligence didn’t just give Troiano the answer; it gave her the sources. It surfaced links to public documentation that she could pass directly to the attendees. This allowed the prospects to read through the documentation extensively while continuing to listen to the webinar.
By the end of the session, Troiano had successfully fielded seven complex technical questions quickly and efficiently.
The true test of the tool’s effectiveness wasn’t just in surviving the hour — it was in the business outcome. Among the attendees of the webinar was a high-level prospect from a very large federal agency, who later “asked for a follow-up demo for a larger audience in that federal organization,” Troiano shares. “I thought that was the biggest win. … He’s kind of a legend in that space.”
Indeed, instead of satisfaction scores dipping in the absence of an SE, the webinar was a resounding success. The audience got what they needed, and the sales team got a massive pipeline opportunity — all without pulling an SE off the road.
The greater demand generation team has found other valuable uses for Snowflake Intelligence. Like Troiano, JC Quiambao, Senior Demand Generation Manager at Snowflake, has used Snowflake Intelligence during webinars as a “virtual SE” to help him analyze attendee questions and respond with technical answers in real time. But he also leverages survey data, which is a major webinar component to derive direct insights from prospects and customers. With the help of AI, he can centralize all the surveys into one sheet, analyze the data and bucket key answers to help improve and optimize future hands-on labs.
Julie Hoyt, Senior Demand Generation Manager at Snowflake, is leveraging Snowflake Intelligence to make it faster and easier to analyze QBR data, potentially saving each demand generation team member hours every quarter.
Demand Generation Manager Gayatri Kapur uses Snowflake Intelligence to streamline marketable database analysis. Through intuitive natural language queries, her team can now track the growth of line-of-business personas versus technical ones and pinpoint exactly which sources are driving their most valuable leads. The team also relies on Snowflake Intelligence for real-time campaign reporting to ensure continuous optimization.
What these stories highlight is a shift in how nontechnical teams can operate. By leveraging Snowflake Intelligence, marketing professionals can handle technical inquiries with confidence, reducing the “invisible labor” of scheduling and logistics.
More importantly, it optimizes the entire organization’s time. “It takes away that pressure and pain point of trying to secure someone,” Troiano explains. SEs can stay focused on closing deals, and marketing can keep the funnel moving, knowing they have the intelligence they need right at their fingertips.
In the modern enterprise, one of the main hurdles to effective AI and analytics isn’t a lack of data, it’s […]
The energy industry is operating in a period of unprecedented change. Across both the oil and gas and power and […]
For anyone leading a demand generation event, it’s a tough — if not uncommon — scenario: The audience is ready, […]
Our services help both the big and small organisations in the identification of security breaches and provide outclass solutions to prevent any potential harm.