The situation
Elementum went into Snowflake Summit 26 (June 1–4, San Francisco) having just repositioned from "Open Orchestration Platform" to the AI-native replacement for legacy enterprise SaaS. The marketing team was me and the one dedicated marketer I had inherited. Summit was the first real test of whether the new story held in front of an audience nobody had briefed.
The problem was standing. A small company announcing that the enterprise SaaS stack is ending is a vendor making noise. The same claim from a Fortune 500 Chief Digital Officer, on Snowflake's own mainstage, is a market signal. We had the customers. The work was getting them in front of the right rooms.
The idea
Put customers in the frame and keep the company out of it.
Everything we ran that week was built around named executives describing what they had actually deployed — not product narrative, not a booth pitch.
What it took
- Keynote placement. Sanofi's Emmanuel Frenéhard demonstrated "Concierge for Field," an agent built on Elementum running on governed Snowflake data, live in the Opening Keynote. Under Armour's Patrick Duroseau joined Snowflake's Christian Kleinerman in the Platform Keynote to walk through a five-year data and AI journey.
- A nomination-only dinner program, run under one line: The end of legacy SaaS. A dinner conversation. Two nights, two deliberately different rooms — SVP+ transformation operators at Niku Steakhouse on June 1, Fortune 500 CIOs at Quince on June 2 — with Sanofi's Dimitrije Jankovic and Emmanuel Frenéhard and Under Armour's Patrick Duroseau at the tables. Nominations closed two weeks before the show so the guest lists were curated, not filled.
- Partner-hosted reach we did not have to build alone: a happy hour with Snowflake and Hakkoda on June 1, and a retail, CPG, and manufacturing evening with Hakkoda and IBM on June 2.
- SaaSpocalypse, June 3 at Temple SF, co-hosted with Deloitte — the positioning turned into a party, and the line people actually repeated.
- A sunrise run across the Golden Gate Bridge on June 4 to close the week with customers, partners, and the team.
The outcome
- 2026 Snowflake Product Partner of the Year — Agentic Transformation, announced June 2.
- Two enterprise customer executives telling the story from keynote stages, which no amount of vendor messaging buys.
- Converted into a six-week tail rather than a spike: nurture sequences, reference assets, board material, and a CEO takeaways piece published June 9.
Read the recap
What I would tell another CMO
A conference is not a channel, it is a week of rooms. The question is not what you will say in them but who else will be standing there saying it. Book the customer, then build the week around what they are willing to claim in public — and plan the six weeks after the show before you plan the show.