Smartsheet Inc. (NYSE:SMAR) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Joshua Baer: Okay. Great. That makes a lot of sense. And then if you could just add any commentary on the linearity of sort of demand trends month-to-month throughout the quarter and into November. Have you been seeing things get worse over the last months leading into Q4?

Pete Godbole: So the — October was a strong month for us relative to the, what I call the close rates and the pipeline close rates we saw. November turned out steady to our expectations. We expected the macro cycle to be in play, and it produced results that are very consistent with our expectations. So remember, in Q4, there is a great deal of business to be booked in December and January. So that’s what’s built into our assumption as we’ve guided to the quarter.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Scott Berg with Needham.

Scott Berg: Congrats on good quarter and I guess that two questions here. First of all, Pete, you talked about capabilities where I think it was 29% of revenues in the quarter. As the company continues to move upmarket more, what does that mix look like at kind of, I don’t know, peak levels? And then how should we think about the ARPU lift that you’re gaining from those customers that are adding on some of these capabilities today?

Pete Godbole: Still the, I think, a statement of sort of where we see capabilities. And I think when you talk about a percentage of capabilities of total, it sort of implies that there isn’t going to be as much growth on the user license part of it. We see both as really solid drivers. We see the width of our use case, if you remember the information Mark provided on the latest reports, we have a wide variety of use cases that drive what I call our expand motion. Think of capabilities as the client piece of it. We think of that number as being — as growing over time because they are fast growing relative to our core license business. And we gave some guidance during our last Analyst Day on how big they could be but we’re stretching the surface on that part of it.

So I do feel like as customers start to unlock the scale that they need after they’ve deployed the solution, you’re going to see more and more customers small and large start to use them in the most demanding way.

Scott Berg: Got it. That’s helpful. And then from a follow-up perspective, maybe this is for Mark. I wanted to see if you can talk about the competitive environment a little bit. And I asked the question in the framework. You had a competitor report their results tonight that were not nearly as strong as yours we’ll go with that. Are you seeing anything different out there that might be driving the strength of your business versus others maybe not continuing as well.

Mark Mader: It’s harder for me to make a relative statement, Scott. I think as I said earlier, I can share what customers appear to be responding well to in our offering. And I think the capabilities alongside the core licenses, that is a composite that people are responding to, and it manifests itself not only in growth but also retention. If you have multiple value points that you can deliver to somebody, I think you have a healthier relationship. And I think that’s helping drive our business.

Scott Berg: Congrats on the good quarter.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of George Iwanyc with Oppenheimer.

George Iwanyc: Also my congratulations. Mark, maybe could you give us a bit of perspective on the desktop app and what kind of feedback you’re getting from this launch at this point?

Mark Mader: Yes, George, I think one of the things that’s always I find funny over the many years we’ve been doing this is somehow software companies get so excited about the next most extremely high-value obscure feature than someone says, but I really want the easy thing. And I think the desktop app is just such a beautiful example of that where people want to see it in the tray on their machine. They want to be able to get quick access to it. They don’t want the tabs that represent all their work in Smartsheet co-mingled with a bunch of other tabs in their Chrome or Safari browsers or Microsoft browser. So these are very simple things that people respond to. And I think when someone is living in your app and you can make their life easier, either through better design, or more quicker access, they’re thankful for it.

I think some of our team members were surprised at ENGAGE. And this is something which you just can’t substitute with the digital conference. When you look at the number of people queued up at a booth, wanting to learn about this thing versus many other things, you really get that topical sense for this matters. And the desktop app is one of those. It’s been something we’ve been working on for some time. Thousands of people, many thousands of people are using it today. I think it’s still an EAP. It will be released shortly, broadly. So we’ll continue to invest behind that.