SentinelOne, Inc. (NYSE:S) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Tomer Weingarten: Hey. I think we have mentioned that, we have just recruited a ton of great talent in the past year and a lot of these folks, especially on the sales side, are actually ramping and still ramping. We are now working to enable them faster. We are working to get them productive sooner. And naturally, as they progress down the line, as you can imagine, people that have been in the company less than a year are not as productive as people that are in the company for year and a half or two. So naturally, we expect more productivity. With that, we have also combined the solution engineering and sales engineering to create a more, sorry, and the sales organization to create a more curated experience for customers. We put a new leader in North America and we are putting more and more emphasis on how we sell to the highest enterprises to the largest global that we have in our pipeline.

All of those have already started to show great signs of success and we will continue doing that. As more and more of our business is moving upstream, that to us remains, again, a strategic go-to-market element and avenue that we feel is just getting stronger and stronger for us. Again, there are many other initiatives that we are taking. But, all in all, the ramp, enablement and eventually the changes we have made in our go-to-market organization are already yielding results for us and we are going to continue and drive that into the future.

Jonathan Ho: Got it. Got it. And then just in terms of a follow-up, can you talk a little bit more about the deal resizing that you are seeing out there, like, are these deals typically more being phased in, are they being reduced in size and scope or are you actually seeing anything in terms of renewals, durations changing at all as well? Thank you.

Tomer Weingarten: The most prevalent dynamic we are seeing out there is really just right-sizing by customers. I mean, they just want to procure for now versus any aspirational note counts that they might have planned for the future and that to me is the prevailing dynamic. I mean, we are not seeing multiphase deployments. People buy for what they need and they come back for expansion. That to me, once again, is the main thing we are seeing out there. We are also seeing it is really more of a future upsell opportunity. I mean these customers are now choosing the core components of our platform and later on as they progress with time, we have the ability to go back and upsell them on adjacent models, on more seat counts and really stay true to what customers need in this environment versus just trying to sell them more and more. That’s our entire philosophy.

Jonathan Ho: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from Fatima Boolani with Citi. Your line is now open.

Fatima Boolani: Good afternoon. Thank you so much for taking my questions. Tomer, start with you just with respect to some of the items that you itemized around the go-to-market and sales operations changes. So the first one is, I am just curious about a potential succession plan post Nick’s transition and how we should think about his transition in terms of overseeing the broader operations of the sales organization impacting the way you thought about the 4Q execution and the topline guidance? And then, Dave, for you, kind of building off the last question, you talked about cash conservation and cash management sensitivity in your customers. So when I look at your deferred revenue performance, it was a little bit lighter than we were looking for. So if you can maybe shed light on what you are seeing from a contractual and invoicing behavior standpoint as it relates to that cash management sensitivity, I really appreciate it? Thank you.

Tomer Weingarten: Yes. So on Nick’s succession, you might recall about 6 months ago, we have added Vats Srivatsan as our COO, and by now largely we moved a lot of these functions that were under Nick under Vats as well. The second part is that, obviously, I am taking a more active role in the go-to-market organization, and as a whole, we have put more emphasis on executive sponsorship throughout the entire process. So we are putting go-to-market front and center is the topmost priority for the company right now and for myself. So we kind of worked to that succession both in terms of continuing the transition that we started about 6 months ago. But at the same time, we also remain opportunistic and if we feel like we can inject another highly tenured sales executive, we might hope to do so in the future.

Dave Bernhardt: And Fatima, to answer your second question in regards to free cash flow, what — I think you are seeing two dynamics. You are seeing, one, where customers just aren’t prepaying for multiyears, which was more prevalent in the past and then you are also seeing the shift to MSSP, where they tend to be paying quarterly versus larger upfront deals. That dynamic we expect to continue for a while.

Operator: Our next question comes from Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Brad Zelnick: Great. Thank you so much and it’s good to see the strong execution in this kind of environment. I have got one maybe for Tomer and a quick follow-up for you, David. Tomer, I was intrigued by the customer win you mentioned that chose Singularity Cloud despite running a competitor on their endpoints. Can you maybe mention who the competitor is, what was the circumstance and is this something that we can expect might be more common in the future?

Tomer Weingarten: Absolutely. We have seen that dynamic now play for a few good quarters. It’s a strategic go-to-market revenue yet another one for us where we go in and unlock accounts that otherwise have been running some models on the endpoint side. And as you can imagine, we have got two main competitors, you can pick each one of them that you wish for the purpose of illustration. But at the end of the day, it allows us to come in with a truly unique offering right now for cloud workload protection that is far superior to what any other endpoint vendor can provide on the cloud side and on those merits we come in, we secure the cloud environment. It’s not the first one. We have had quite a few of those in the past couple of quarters and it remains, again, competitive advantage that we have, not only in our own existing accounts, not only is now a wider platform, wide offering that spends endpoint and cloud and serves as another differentiator.

But once again, in the standalone situations, you are sometimes looking at footprints that are in the cloud are actually bigger than the footprints on the endpoint side. So for us, more cloud deals and the more cloud deals that we can do, it’s incredibly serving to our go-to-market motion. Cloud was again our number one fastest-growing module, and we just invest more and more in an offering that right now is a leg above what anybody else can offer in the space.