Smartsheet Inc. (NYSE:SMAR) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

And when I think about driving long-term efficiency into our go-to market, I think it’s built on the back of this. And how do you get more of your people and your success and your journey teams focusing on your mature, growing super large customers and letting your early-stage growing customers move as quickly in a self-directed way as possible. So, it’s, you will see releases this year in self-directed features across our existing capabilities. You’ll see our digital asset management come into a self-directed motion in the later — in the first half of this year. And as I said, the people dimension, our resource management was released to market in a self-directed way just a few weeks ago.

George Iwanyc: Thank you for that. And Pete, one question for you. Could you give us some perspective on how you’re prioritizing the investment this year? Is it leaning more towards sales and marketing or is it really balanced across R&D and S&L?

Pete Godbole : I think, our investments are pretty balanced. we’re not making large investments in field capacity. We were fortunate to have an experienced and sort of what I call highly savvy field already in place. We’ve complimented that with things which Mark talked about, take our most experienced customers to the next level. So, we’ve made some targeted investments there. On the R&D side, we’ve focused on kind of getting a series of new and massively modernized core application experiences out there. And we’ve sort of invested in taking these self-directed capabilities and extending them to other products. So, short answer, balanced across both sales and marketing as well as R&D.

Operator: We’ll move next to Jake Roberge at William Blair.

Jake Roberge : Hi, thanks for taking my question. We are still in a bit of an uncertain macro, especially on that SMB side of the house, and you’re obviously going through the go-to-market transition this year. But if you take a step back, what do you think are some of the factors that could help stabilize an NRR later this year and potentially re-accelerate the growth in the business heading out over the longer term?

Pete Godbole: So, the factors that could stabilize NRR in my mind are some of the initiatives that Mark mentioned, and those gaining traction. So, we talked about these are — we are launching them — we’re launching a totally modernized core application experience that’s coming through. We are launched the first part of it this quarter, but that’s the early start to it. The lift that comes from that experience could be large, but it’s going to take a while to sort of assess that out. The second thing, I would think of is think of our largest customers and taking the enterprise-grade features that we can sort of get these customers to deploy. The portfolio is really rich. If I can get our most experienced median customer to our top quartile customer, that’s an opportunity.

And that’s where I think the leadership for Max to bring his experiences to bear will be helpful. Those are some of the upside elements out there. The one I’d be remiss not to mention is AI. That’s an early stages, if you will, but as I said, it’s a little bit of a wild card and how that plays out.

Jake Roberge: Okay. Helpful. And then I know they’re a good portion of revenue, but with capabilities still being less than 10% penetrated in the entire base, what do you think the unlock will be to get those solutions deeper into the customer base? Is that all going to be self-discovery driving that, or is there anything differently you can do on the direct go-to-market side that could help drive more traction with those solutions?

Mark Mader: Yes, I love the question. It’s you’re absolutely right. It’s much more than just self-discovery. One of the things that we’re working on from a packaging standpoint is how do we enable the median customer to get into a paid state with us on a discovery, on a premium capability in a ramped fashion. And what I mean by that is, to date many of our capabilities sales have come in the context of fairly substantive solutions. Like we go in, we work with a mid-size or large customer, and we discuss a high-value solution that’s delivered. We see a huge opportunity within the tens of thousands of organizations we serve, which start actually small. So how can I consume a capability at sub $5,000, sub a thousand dollars? And it’s, I think, planting a bunch of seeds.

It’s how we built this business over 19 years and we had our capabilities really married to an assisted sales motion. So, when we think of packaging, how do you get that same PLG motion that we have with our seed introduced on a capability? And you should expect from us this year to release mechanisms for allowing people to step into capabilities much more quickly. So, I would see the penetration rate of capabilities to go up significantly and then put us in a position to be able to build on that as they consume more and more of those. So again, one is building them, having them, the other is making them available and discoverable. The third is how do you have a monetization strategy which caters to the people who are starting out with them and those who are using them at massive scale.

Jake Roberge: Very helpful. Thanks for taking the questions.

Mark Mader: Thanks.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Michael Berg at Wells Fargo Securities.