Asana, Inc. (NYSE:ASAN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Dustin Moskovitz: I just want to jump in and add to the question about future potential, I think this is really sort of indicative of a few of our large customers where, again, the €“ in this environment, the company wants to have more control over the pace of deployment and how spend happens. But underneath that, there’s quite a lot of organic demand in this account and others, and they’re almost being held back from adoption so that the company can pay us in an intentional controlled way. And that’s fine. We’ll work with them, but we’re excited to embrace that sort of latent demand and work with them when they’re back of spending more budget to embrace it and license it.

Steve Enders: Got it. Okay. That’s helpful. And then you made a comment on there around — well there and also kind of in the prepared remarks about kind of taking the lessons you’re learning from the largest customers and trying to apply that to kind of the rest of the go-to-market strategy to drive enterprise adoption. I guess what are kind of the key things that you’ve learned so far? And kind of what are the things that you can control to kind of drive that drive expansion motion into other large potential accounts here?

Dustin Moskovitz: Yes. Two great lessons. One sort of plays off of what I was just saying. These companies want to really control how Asana is deployed and be able to automatically manage thousands of accounts at a time and have that synced up with other things they’re doing with the organizations who integrated with their other ways of managing people and licenses be able to have a lot of great visibility into how people are using the product and what kind of value they’re getting. And so we’re translating that straight into the kinds of views we give in our admin console, how we talk to the customer directly and what kind of data we’re able to sort of provide from them ad hoc. And then the second big thing that we really piloted with this larger customer is more customized in-product education.

So, being able to really speak their language, have the assets, that teach them how to use Asana in that company culture really at the ready and that can really accelerate adoption. That’s something we’re excited to bring to other large customers.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brent Thill with Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Brent Thill: Dustin investors want a faster path to profitability, but we know you have to balance the long term and the potential to take share to be greater in a downturn. So, I’m just curious how you’re thinking about weighing the short-term versus long-term and how you’re thinking through that desire from investors to make the quick turn here?

Dustin Moskovitz: Well, yes, as Tim said, we’re still committed to the timeline that we provided last quarter. So, I think that’s really the overarching picture that we’re just — we need to balance it. In the short run, I always have heartburn around the category changing and moving on without us, but I’m also just cognizant of the fact that if the customer demand isn’t there, then it’s easy to spend money inefficiently. And so the sort of easiest place to sort of turn up and down the throttle there with programmatic marketing spend. And just from a math basis, we know that the payback is getting longer and just the immediate ROI you get on that is changing, and we should react to that. So, I think we’re relatively well aligned when the market is ready to grow when our customers are ready to grow, that’s the right time for us to be spending more aggressively.

But there are also things that play out over longer cycles, like how our product roadmap works. And so there, it’s more of a judgment call on what’s the right pace. But you can see that we’ve been getting leverage throughout this year in R&D as a percent of revenue, and I think that will continue. And we’ll just be looking at exactly what is the shape of that trend line. And when do we have a little more capacity to reinvest there and reinvest in headcount and programmatic spend elsewhere in the company?

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