Q4 2023 Smartsheet Inc Earnings Call
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Brent and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Smartsheet 4th Quarter Fiscal 2023 Earnings Conference Call.
Speaker 1: All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise.
Speaker 1: After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session.
Speaker 1: If you would like to ask a question at that time, simply press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad.
Speaker 1: If you would like to withdraw your question, again press star 1. Thank you. It is now my pleasure to turn today's call over to Mr. Aaron Turner, Head of Investor Relations. Sir, please go ahead.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Brent. Good afternoon and welcome everyone to Smartsheets' fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2023 earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market closed today. With me today are Smartsheets CEO Mark Mader and our CFO Pete Godbolt. Today's call is being webcast and will also be available for replay on our investor relations page.
Speaker 2: statements largely on our current expectations and projections about future events and financial trends. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and other factors including but not limited to those described in our SEC filings available on our investor relations website and on the SEC website at www.SEC.gov
Speaker 2: Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, our actual results may differ materially and adversely. All forward-looking statements made during this call are based on information available to us as of today, and we do not assume any obligation to update these statements as a result of new information for future events, except as required by law.
Speaker 2: In addition to the US GAAP financials, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of the most directly comparable US GAAP measures is available in the presentation that accompanies this call, which can also be found on our investor relations website. With that, let me turn the call over to Mark.
Speaker 3: Hello and welcome to our fourth quarter earnings call for fiscal year 23.
Speaker 3: Our fourth quarter results cap off a strong year for Smartsheet, a year in which we extended our leadership position in collaborative work management, delivered our best year ever for new customer bookings, acquired Outfit to strengthen our marketing and creative management solutions, added 2.2 million users to the Smartsheet platform, and
Speaker 3: and generated positive free cash flow for the year for the first time.
Speaker 3: While Pete will provide additional details, I want to call out some of our highlights from the quarter.
Speaker 3: Revenue for the quarter was $212 million, up 35% year over year. We added $62 million in annual recurring revenue in Q4, bringing our total ARR to more than $854 million.
Speaker 3: In Q4 we saw expansions at Volvo, USA Today, and AllScripts, among many others. And we had new customer wins at companies such as Dassault Aviation, Camris, and Xperia.
Speaker 3: Our expansion motion within our customer base continued with 311 customers expanding by $50,000 or more and 118 expanding by $100,000 or more.
Speaker 3: In Q4, we have two transactions of more than $1 million and now have a total of 45 customers with ARR over $1 million.
Speaker 3: Despite these successes, we've seen the changing macroeconomic environment negatively impact expansion rates across customer segments.
Speaker 3: However, even with these less favorable macro backdrops, our enterprise customers continue to exhibit the fastest growth rates.
Speaker 3: Our product investment and go-to-market strategy is focused on winning the enterprise, and we have seen great success in this segment.
Speaker 3: We now have over 3,300 large enterprise customers defined as organizations with over 10,000 employees.
Speaker 3: ARR from just this customer segment is now over $260 million and grew over 40% in FY23. We believe this segment alone represents a multibillion dollar revenue opportunity for Smartsheet.
Speaker 3: While we may have seen some companies be more thoughtful with spending in this environment, we believe that in the long term, enterprises, especially large enterprises, remain the best opportunity to drive long-term, profitable growth.
Speaker 3: And no one in this category is winning the enterprise like we are.
Speaker 3: In FY23, in response to the changing macroeconomic environment, we took steps to improve our profitability. These actions resulted in Q4 profitability, non-GAAP operating income, and free cash flow exceeding our guidance.
Speaker 3: As we look ahead, we expect our scale combined with our increasingly efficient operating model to generate positive operating margins and over $110 million of free cash flow in FY24.
Speaker 3: Our scale and profitable business model further secures Smartsheet as the leader in collaborative work management.
Speaker 3: We are operating at an ARR scale, enterprise adoption rate, and profitability level that are unmatched in category.
Speaker 3: This leadership position is recognized by top peer review sites and publications. We recently earned a top 5 placement on G2's 2023 Best Products for Enterprise list, making us the only CWM platform to rank anywhere in the top 50.
Speaker 3: The list recognizes software companies that have best-in-class enterprise customer service, products and experiences.
Speaker 3: And earlier this month, we were recognized for our industry-leading enterprise work management and digital asset management solutions on Fast Company's most innovative companies list in the enterprise category.
Speaker 3: At Smartsheet, adoption of our capabilities-based products play a key role in our enterprise success.
Speaker 3: These capabilities now make up 31% of our subscription revenue, up five points year over year. Capabilities drove many large customer expansions in Q4.
Speaker 3: For example, a leading enterprise human capital management provider signed a three-year enterprise license agreement that will give all 8,000 Smartsheet users at the company access to our full suite of advanced capabilities.
Speaker 3: Through January , on a year-over-year basis, they created 67% more forums, provisioned 132% more control center projects, and created 210% more work apps.
Speaker 3: A key Smartsheet use case at this HCM provider is in its professional services org, where they use Smartsheet to manage customer deployments.
Speaker 3: Smartsheet has become their global standard for customer deployments in part because our enterprise-grade security gives them the ability to manage sensitive customer data on our platform while still allowing for efficient collaboration.
Speaker 3: Our secure collaboration model has allowed this company to bring more than 42,000 external collaborators from different client organizations onto the Smartsheet platform.
Speaker 3: Q4 was a strong quarter for Smartsheet Advance. The Fortune 500 global manufacturer had a high six-figure annual expansion that included an upgrade to a higher advance tier.
Speaker 3: This upgrade resulted from the viral adoption of Smartsheet across the organization. This year alone, they created over 5,000 dashboards, increased their work apps use by 430%, and provisioned nearly 5,000 projects using Control Center.
Speaker 3: This company will now use Smartsheet to help achieve its billion dollar, three-year operational cost savings initiative.
Speaker 3: Advanced usage through connected users also drove a seven-figure expansion at a Fortune 100 telecom company, which brought the customer's total ARR to over $3 million. Over 50,000 Smartsheet users across 11 departments in eight countries now use Smartsheet. This deal was driven by increased demand and adoption as more teams looked to centralize their work on the
Speaker 3: collaboration with more than 500 external organizations.
Speaker 3: Winds such as these speak to the power of the advanced model, where the value of Smartsheet increases as the use of Smartsheet grows.
Speaker 3: In January , we published our inaugural Future of Work Management report, which showed that over 80% of workers at every level across organizations say project management is being done by people whose title or job description doesn't include project manager.
Speaker 3: The research also showed a significant perception gap between leaders and workers with respect to their current project management tools.
Speaker 3: 60% of leaders say they've made the necessary investment in tools, but just 36% of workers who responded feel this way. This gap drives a robust, continuous flow of opportunity for Smartsheet.
Speaker 3: Here's a great example of how the best tools can empower people and business transformation.
Speaker 3: In Q4, we had an RFP win against three CWM competitors, which expanded our footprint at a Fortune 500 global biopharma company.
Speaker 3: The seeds of this win were planted when one team member in the purchasing organization took the initiative to design a Smartsheet-based system to automate the company's complex and time-consuming paper- and email-based purchase order management process.
Speaker 3: Smartsheet didn't just modernize PO management, our platform also reached the company's transformation office, where Smartsheet is now supporting the company's critical initiatives.
Speaker 3: As the company's business transformation platform, SmartCheek Control Center and Work Apps are now helping them manage five strategic portfolios of work, each containing dozens of workstreams that will guide the company towards its goal of positively impacting the health of 2.5 billion people in the next 10 years.
Speaker 3: On the product front, we closed out another year of customer-focused innovation, having delivered over 400 product enhancements.
Speaker 3: In Q4, we launched the Smartschi desktop application, content automation with integration of outfit, capacity view, and numerous automation enhancements. We also further increased platform scalability to power sophisticated workflows and drive thousands of business-critical workstreams for customers of all sizes.
Speaker 3: In FY24, our investment efforts will be focused on helping our biggest customers grow faster with us as well as driving efficiency in how we sell to and serve our emerging customers.
Speaker 3: To enhance customer experience and value, we continue to evaluate and integrate artificial intelligence into the Smartsheet platform.
Speaker 3: Our AI innovation began in 2018 following our acquisition of Converse.ai.
Speaker 3: More recently, we have enabled petabyte scale intelligent content management to our proprietary powered AI engine, brand intelligence.
Speaker 3: Using recognition models, content is analyzed and tagged, making it easier for people to find creative assets with natural language search.
Speaker 3: And for over a year, predictive models have powered navigation recommendations in Smartsheet.
Speaker 3: Now, our sights are set on the next wave of innovation, generative AI.
Speaker 3: The progress we've made in our early development is very promising, and the impact to accelerating customer onboarding, solving for advanced business designs, and unlocking self-directed discovery can serve as a catalyst for growth in FY25 and beyond.
Speaker 3: In closing, I'm proud of how our team executed in FY23, expanding our enterprise leadership position while navigating macro headwinds and driving significant efficiencies in the business.
Speaker 3: We continue to keep our customers' needs top of mind as we prioritize investments that enable them to drive meaningful change for their organizations. Q4 was another showcase of our CWM leadership, our winning enterprise strategy, the power of our platform, and the scalability of our business model. We are excited to continue this momentum in FY24.
Speaker 3: and beyond.
Speaker 3: Before I turn the call over to Pete, I want to acknowledge the transition of Smartsheet's board chair role. We recently appointed Mike Gregoire as the new chair of our board of directors. He succeeds Jeff Barker, who has been on our board since 2012 and has served as chair since 2017 and will remain on the board following this transition. We appreciate and thank Jeff for his leadership, his commitment to governance and...
Speaker 3: for our next phase of growth. We are pleased to welcome Mike to the chair position and look forward to working with him more closely.
Speaker 3: Now, let me turn the call over to Pete. Pete?
Speaker 4: Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. As Mark mentioned, Q4 was another strong quarter. We exceeded our guidance across the top and bottom line and posted quarterly operating income for the first time.
Speaker 4: We saw particular strength in our largest customers who continue to exhibit expansion rates above our overall net dollar retention rate.
Speaker 4: and advanced, which contributed a record level of billings in revenue in the quarter.
Speaker 4: Despite strength in these areas, we saw the impacts of a worsening macro environment.
Speaker 4: Similar to past quarters, we see these pressures manifest as smaller deal sizes and longer seal cycles.
Speaker 4: which ultimately led to lower expansion rates among our customers.
Speaker 4: In FY23, we placed an intense focus on driving operational efficiencies, which has resulted in a faster path to profitability than previously contemplated.
Speaker 4: We focused on driving operational efficiencies by eliminating lower value activities while maintaining sales capacity.
Speaker 4: These operating efficiencies have contributed to our outperformance in our operating income and free cash flow in Q4 and our guidance for FY24.
Speaker 4: We expect the macro to worsen in FY24, but the plan we have created positions the company to capitalise on an improving economy when that eventually occurs.
Speaker 4: We expect the macro to worsen in FY24, but the plan we have created positions the company to capitalize on an improving economy when that eventually occurs. We are continuing to pursue
Speaker 4: Sustain growth and profitability in a disciplined and thoughtful manner while focusing on allocating capital to growth initiatives.
Speaker 4: Our strategy of focusing on large accounts for the last several years has been a part of that thinking.
Speaker 4: And this year we plan to invest in four areas. First, widen our competitive lead on the dimension of enterprise scale.
Speaker 4: Second, unlock product-led discovery and adoption. Third, enhance IT governance control and security. And fourth, elevate our user experience.
Speaker 4: I will now go through our financial results for the full year and fourth quarter, unless otherwise stated, all references to our expenses and operating results are on a non-GAAP basis and are reconciled to our GAAP results in the earnings release and presentation that was posted before the call. For the full fiscal year 23, we will now go through our financial results for the full fiscal year.
Speaker 4: We ended with total revenue of $766.9 million, up 39% year-over-year.
Speaker 4: Billings of $892 million up 35% year over year.
Speaker 4: Operating loss of $36 million and free cash flow of $9.8 million.
Speaker 4: We ended the year with annual recurring revenue of over $854 million, a year-over-year increase of $215 million.
Speaker 4: Next, I will provide more color on our fourth quarter financial results.
Speaker 4: Fourth quarter revenue came in at $212.3 million, up 35% year over year.
Speaker 4: Subscription revenue was $198.9 million representing year-over-year growth of 37%. Services revenue was $13.5 million representing year-over-year growth of 15%.
Speaker 4: Capabilities made up 31% of subscription revenue, up from 26% of revenue in Q4 of last year.
Speaker 4: Turning to Billings
Speaker 4: Fourth quarter biddings came in at $286.7 million, representing year-over-year growth of 28%.
Speaker 4: Approximately 94% of our subscription billings were annual with 3% monthly.
Speaker 4: Quarterly and semiannual represented approximately 3% of the total.
Speaker 4: Multi-year billings represented less than half a percent of total billings. Moving on to our reported metrics. The number of customers with ARR over $50,000 grew 36% year-over-year to 3,206. 70% of advertisers saw the higher rate increase in construction at those tax comes.
Speaker 4: and the number of customers with ARR over $100,000 from 45% year-over-year to 1,484.
Speaker 4: These customer segments now represent 62% and 48% respectively of total ARR.
Speaker 4: The percentage of ARR coming from customers with ARR over $5,000 is now 89%.
Speaker 4: Next, our domain average ACV grew 20% year-over-year to $8,377. We ended the quarter with a dollar-based net retention rate of 125%. The full churn rate remains below 4%.
Speaker 4: Consistent with our assumption of the macro environment in FY24, we expect our net dollar retention rate to trend lower into the high teens by the end of the year.
Speaker 4: Now turning back to the financials.
Speaker 4: Our total gross margin was 82%. Our Q4 subscription gross margin was 86%.
Speaker 4: We expect our gross margin for FY24 to remain above 80%.
Speaker 4: Overall operating income in the quarter was $7.5 million or 4% of revenue, which represents a 6% point sequential margin improvement.
Speaker 4: Free cash flow in the quarter was positive $16.4 million.
Speaker 4: cash flow in the quarter was positive $16.4 million. Now let me move on to guidance.
Speaker 4: Our guidance reflects the expectations of a worsening macroeconomic environment. Therefore, we have incorporated more conservatism into our guidance philosophy. If the macro environment does not decline, this would be a source of upside to our current full year expectations.
Speaker 4: In FY23, we placed a heavy internal focus on operational rigor and moderating our hiring plan to adapt to the changing macro economy.
Speaker 4: In FY24, these initiatives, combined with the natural economies of scale in our business, will result in significant improvements in our margin profile and free cash flow performance.
Speaker 4: In FY24, we are investing in enterprise growth with a ramped sales team and continue to invest in widening the technology advantage of our platform.
Speaker 4: As a business approaching $1 billion of ARR, we are set up to leverage this natural scale via operational initiatives that we started in FY23.
Speaker 4: For the first quarter of FY24, we expect revenue to be in the range of $213 to $215 million and non-GAAP operating income to be in the range of $8 to $10 million.
Speaker 4: We expect non-GAAP EPS to be 8 to 9 cents based on diluted weighted average shares outstanding of $136 million.
Speaker 4: For the full fiscal year 24, we expect our revenue guidance to be $943 to $948 million, representing growth of 23 to 24%.
Speaker 4: We expect services to be 6% of total revenue. We expect our non-GAAP operating income to be in the range of $35 to $45 million, representing an operating margin of 4% to 5% and a non-GAAP net income per share.
Speaker 4: to be $0.31 to $0.38 for the year based on approximately 137.5 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding.
Speaker 4: We expect FY24 billings growth to be 20%, and we expect our free cash flow for FY24 to be $110 million.
Speaker 4: To conclude, Q4 was another strong quarter highlighted by our continued outperformance, our strength in the enterprise, and emerging profitability.
Speaker 4: We see FY24 as a year where our enterprise investments set us up for durable, long-term growth.
Speaker 4: Now, let me turn the call over to the operator. Operator.
Speaker 1: At this time if you would like to ask a question please press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad.
Speaker 1: If you would like to withdraw your question, again press star 1.
Speaker 1: Pause for just a moment to compile a Q&A roster.
Your first question is from the line of Don Defucci with Guggenheim Securities. Your line is open. Thank you. Well, first of all, congrats on elevating Mike Gregoire to the chairman position. I think he fits really well with our view.
said guidance reflects a worsening macro. So it sounds, you know, it's a little more conservative than usual, which I think is, you know, the right thing to do here.
But last quarter you gave some specifics around go-to-market metrics, and you talked about, you know, positive comments on pipeline, close rates, sales productivity, quota attainment. You also said you'd be close to a fully ramped sales force, and I think you sort of mentioned that too here. Can you sort of hit some of those...
So John , I'll pass that question down to what you asked. So let's start with Q4. We exceeded our guidance relative to the expectations we had set based on advanced booking and larger transactions that we did. But as we built through the funnel, it was very hard to take in Evolution's 10,000ana on our end, of consequentnity with four claiming to be leading to the acquisition of storm
we saw a nominal worsening relative to past trends. What that meant was a slight degradation in the close rate and an elongation in the sales cycles. We're seeing a strong pipeline. It's the close rate that we're seeing the slight degradation on. So given that
phenomena, what we've opted to do is be conservative in building a nominally worsening guide for those in FY24 as it relates to our top-line view. Okay, that makes sense. And if I could, just a quick follow-up to that.
It sounds like the NRR is going to, what you said, is going to decline to the high teens by the end of the year. So it sounds like it will progressively, and I realize that's a trailing 12-month metric, but does that imply that, you know, should I be thinking about that as like the year-over-year subscription growth or perhaps the ACV growth?
would also decelerate throughout the year too, or is it not quite that?
So the net dollar retention rate, John , aligns with our billings guide. If you think of the top line, those are intertwined. And the same factors that affect the billings guide we just walked through are at play for the net dollar retention rate.
So you're seeing our basic macroeconomic impact. We have a pretty healthy growth rate, but there's a macroeconomic impact that puts a slight pullback from those rates, if you will.
Okay, that all makes sense and this is good to see. Thanks a lot, guys.
joyour next question is from the line of friendrent. Fill with jefffriys. Your line is open.
Mark, on the enterprise, it seemed like that held up better. Can you just give us a little more color on what you're seeing and kind of back to Pete's comments in the monitoring of demand or...
Where do you factor in for the enterprise close in the back half? And for Pete, just when you think about the economic headwinds worsening, did you see that across? Yeah, I sort of got the hang of it.
multiple countries, was it more pronounced in Europe versus US, any color you can get from a geographic perspective will be great. Thanks.
Hi, Brent. I think one of the things that I was looking for in the quarter was how the conversion of Pipeline that extended in the previous quarter played out. So one of the things that was really encouraging to see was in business that did extend last quarter, a lot of that business converted this quarter. And when I look at our next net sequential ads on over 50k, 100k, we saw really healthy numbers.
Are you helping me retain my existing ones? Are you helping me drive savings? So some of the things I spoke to in my remarks spoke to that ability to help customers expand or drive savings. And that remains very much alive and well. I think going into the year, I feel like we have a sales team, probably the most ramped team we have.
have had heading into a year. So I think that will continue to yield nicely on that part of our business. Now, as we make investments in our product, I'm also as motivated to continue to drive that product-led growth piece, which builds all the future growers. So we do talk about enterprise a lot, but I think there's also some real
But between the customer base over here, we saw really good success with our larger enterprise customers and we probably saw a little more pressure with our SMB and smaller ARR customers. So that's a little bit of texture where we saw it.
Thank you. Your next question is from the line of Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley . Your line is open. Hi, this is Sophie Lee on for Josh Baer. I'm wondering if you saw any benefits of vendor consulting.
I think on the consolidation front, Sophie, we're seeing it's quite common when we have a multi, you know, $100,000, multimillion dollar opportunity that there is presence of others in the environment. I think where we benefit is we have...
very commonly presence within multiple nodes of the business. We remained, I think, really grateful for those high conversion rates in those situations. I spoke to one of those in the biopharma space this year, which was a bake-off, where we were able to demonstrate the value and they moved quite quickly. That is going to be a very large account for us over the next 10 years.
So I would say the number of times there is that formal RFP, really high diligence bake-off, those are still pretty few and far between, but they typically happen on the accounts that really matter. So we definitely put energy into those when they do come about.
Okay, great. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ellen. Your next question is from the line of Alex Zukin with Wolf Research. Your line is open. Hey, guys, thanks for taking the question. Good to see a solid quarter and congrats on kind of the margin guide.
Just two quick ones for me. First, if we dig in a little bit to the macro factors that you saw in the quarter versus what you guided to getting worse, I guess clearly churn was strong at sub 4%, but maybe if you split up what you're seeing around expansions with existing customers versus net new.
Where are you seeing that bigger impact from the macro? Any downward pressure on renewals? And then I have a quick follow-up. So Alex, I'll take your question in pieces. So first of all, the net dollar retention rates are fairly healthy. And the pullback that we've seen is on the expansion side of it. You know, tight is sort of what's happening in the macro.
And what we've seen is that it's been relatively strong with our larger customers and our enterprise customers, and there's a little more pressure with the SMB and smaller ARR customers. So that's how we've seen it play out. We haven't seen, as I said, the churn number materially get impacted. So we've seen fairly strong commitment to the Smartsheet platform.
Perfect. And then I guess with respect to the margin guidance, maybe talk about the linearity through the year, the exit rate that we should be looking at for fiscal 24. And specifically as you contemplate this new growth algorithm, growth profitability algorithm where you're building...
So this is a big market and we think there's plenty of room in the growth in this market long term. We're bullish on this market and we are the leaders in the enterprise segment and across the whole category. So when we think of this business in terms of the longer term growth, we see this as a solid grower. We're going to see a lot of growth in the long term and we're going to see a lot of growth in the long term.
Now, there's going to be macroeconomic adjustments as we go through different cycles of macroeconomic change. So that's one part of it. But the second part of your question is on the profitability and how we think of that moving forward. We're going to continue to be optimizing essentially the scale we've attained. So if you think of the scale we've achieved…
We don't need to add a lot of resources just given the scale in terms of where we're at. And we're being more and more efficient because every dollar we've already gained costs us a lot less to serve.
compared to a dollar we need to invest to gain. So that's playing into the economics you're seeing in sales and marketing, and it's gonna continue through. So you're gonna see that play itself in the future as well.
Perfect, thank you guys. Your next question is from the line of Terry Tillman with Truist Securities. Your line is open.
Yeah, thank you. Good afternoon. Hi, Mark, Pete, and Aaron. I had to look at the press release like three times because I kept looking at that $110 million of free cash flow and then surely it was. So great to see that. I have two questions. The first one is a multi-parter and then the second question I'll follow up with. But on the first question around product and packaging.
I think Mark, you said you have 3,300 customers that are considered enterprise. What I'm curious about is the penetration of advanced now in that segment. And then if we take a step back, if we're looking at 23 to 24% growth in the total revenue, how should we be thinking about the enterprise segment and then how to follow up around product discovery?
Hey, Terry. The 3,300, again, that ties out to the large enterprise. That's over 10,000 employees. We obviously have many more companies north of 2,000 employees as well. So in that very large segment, it is still really early innings for advance. We have. Lineage from 10 to 40
While the bookings do tie out to a lot of the larger transactions we have, it's a minority of that base. So we think it's still, we're trying to figure out ways in addition to our people-based processes to get these capabilities presented to people. As I said on past calls on some of our roadshows, we are working on both.
getting our professional sales team able to solution advise and do outcome mapping with people while getting our advanced product line into a self-discovered state. So what that means is people at those 3,300 customers using our product in the context of what they're trying to solve, whether it's integration, whether it's...
providing advanced access to data, having those things presented to them in the flow of work, having them experience those things, and then do, really have inbound demand to us saying, hey, we used this thing, we'd like to talk to you about this capability, which ultimately leads to a discussion of advance. So we are still, call it second inning, on the advanced penetration as it relates to these super large customers.
What's neat though is that we have enough data points now that really helps us understand how people are adopting those, what it means for connected users, and how that flows through on the economics. And Jerry, the second part of your question was on the 23 to 24% revenue growth and how that parses out across segment.
So, our revenue growth is a function of our billings and our net dollar retention rates. You think of the largest customers, they grow with us the fastest as Mark shared on our biggest large enterprise customers. You can see the growth rate is really quick. And the best part about that is they will grow faster than our median growth rate.
But what's interesting is that our biggest customers are the most profitable for us as well. That's the scale that leads to the 110 million you see, which you referenced at the start. So we're pretty excited by those economics.
Yes, got it. And I guess just following up on the first part of the question, I mean, Mark, you were kind of going down the path of product discovery. And I know we've talked about that a bunch in the past. You go on the website and if you just look at the sheer number of capabilities, a lot of these folks probably don't even know all of what is under the hood. But is there a point in time this year where there is a major kind of...
milestone where whether it's the technology their AI or people They could really unleash this where potentially this could become an upside driver around some of the product discovery initiatives on whether it's billings Or revenue. Thank you Yeah, Terry we expect to benefit from this beginning in the second half So engineering is underway right now some of that self-discovery will be available heading into the second half
Your next question comes from the line of Michael Turin with Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is open.
Hey, great, thanks. Appreciate you taking the question and nice job with the close to the year. I think given the prepared remarks, the focus on enterprise is clear. Could you just speak to how margin complements that? I would think that could prove more people heavy, but clearly not the case given you're giving...
10 percentage points of implied free cash flow margin expansion into next year. So can you just add more on what enables that from the Smartsheet side and how you're able to balance both an enterprise focus and the margin expansion in the current environment?
Sure, so Michael, two parts of it. The first one is when you think of the enterprise customers, and you think of their growth rate they have, that's a really high number. It sort of is better than our average by a fair bit. And what that does for us is it creates a space where if you're looking at our growth...
and you're looking at how much we invest in retaining the dollars we've already got, that's a fairly low number. So that provides the basis for the margin accretion. We are investing in getting the new dollar, but the base is growing by such a large number that it provides natural scale impact benefit to sales and marketing.
So that's one part of the equation. The second part of the equation is just the simple part of, you know, we hired a lot of people last year. Given the size at which we are, we don't need to hire the same number of people. And that lower hiring that we're going to go through this year is margin accretive. Those are things, think of them as two simple facts that really drive the margin story.
That's helpful. And then I guess just the other point that you mentioned in the prepared remarks, Pete, was just also making sure you're able to capture the improvement whenever that were to surface in the world. So it sounds like you have some natural capacity to grow into, but just...
how you continue to thoughtfully add capacity to make sure you're striking the right balance.
Yes, for us, we are a sales assisted motion and now we've paired it with obviously the self-discovery that makes that motion go faster. But if you think of the way we've modeled it, we've modeled our sales productivity in line with the way we think the macro is going to play. If the macro changes…
and it turns on us, you will see a ramp in sales productivity because we've already got a ramped Salesforce we brought in this year that's now enabled with the best techniques. So we're ready to get there. So that's the upside we see as the environment changes or as Mark mentioned, as we see the benefit of some of these things which we can measure.
We could put more energy behind those initiatives and drive upside to the current plan we have. Thank you. Your next question is from the line of Pindjalum Bora with JP.
those initiatives and drive upside to the current plan we have.
Great. Hey guys. Thank you for taking the question and congrats on the quarter. Mark, good to hear that you're kind of leaning in on generative AI. Maybe help us understand some of the use cases, but more fundamentally, how do you differentiate with generative AI when everyone is kind of rushing?
to implement those large language models? Do you think it becomes kind of table stakes at some point versus kind of increasing comparative advantage? Yeah, I love the question. I think those who sprint towards embedding a standard capability that is non-differentiating can say that they're participating, but I actually don't think it really separates you from the competition. I think.
we see major value unlocks in our world in terms of Smartsheet proper. I think of the thousands of cases we get every single quarter from people saying, trying to figure out how to design the most advanced formula and logic-based workflows in our app. We've already done research, we've already generated.
formulas and logic with the help of generative AI, which we think will be a major design win for customers. So when you think about, it's not just driving down the cost, it is unlocking a whole new set of populations that in the current form may be dissuaded from taking that next step. So I think it's in the context of the work people are tracking and designing in Smartsheet.
the digital asset, and then the third vector is really all of that inflow we get from our customers into our help center. People trying to, when you look at the percentage of cases that come in, it's not break-fix, it's typically grounded in how do I, and how do I unlock regenerative AI is significant.
So the very promising remark that I made in my remarks ties out to those three vectors that we're pursuing. And you'll see us continue to engage our community and our customers through early adopter program in the coming quarters. And I would say I'm quite bullish for the out years in terms of what that means for our customers. Got it understood. Thank you.
And Pete, one question for you on the FCF guide, obviously it's extremely strong, but help me understand kind of the context with respect to stop based compensation on that. Seems like SBC is growing about 23%. Our understanding is that hiring is probably going to moderate. Help us understand the FCF guide versus the SBC number. Or is there a change in kind of quality?
based compensation element that basically shows it's being, we're managing it to be flat year on year. And we've taken the sort of special emphasis and initiative that we can use to reduce the stock based compensation. Obviously, there's a stacking effect that happens in stock compensation of previous historical grants. Germany
So we're very mindful of what we're adding into the pile. And for example, this quarter we made the change to convert the bonuses we paid to senior employees which used to be in stock to convert them to cash.
That's an example of, among many others, of how we're managing stock-based compensation. Got it. Thank you very much. Sure, Pendle.
Your next question is from the line of Rishi Jiluria with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Wonderful. Thanks so much for taking my question. First, I wanted to maybe hit a little bit on the macro side. What sort of impact have you seen from your existing customer base and what are you kind of contemplating from the seed count reductions or I guess the layoffs you've been seeing across the board and what that means on the seed count side.
I know you're very well diversified, but we've seen a lot of layoffs in tech. So maybe you could talk through what you've seen so far, what you're modeling, and any tools that you've kind of had in your arsenal to be able to counteract that, or maybe slightly offset that, and then I've got a quick follow-up. Yeah, so for us the major element of what we're seeing is when you think of…
you know, the expansions, it's really on the gross expansion side of it. We're not seeing, you know, anything more than the normal historical movement on what we would consider reduction.
And to parse that even further, we are seeing sort of what I call some C churn, but that's not unusually different from the capabilities churn we see. So it's sort of aligned and moving in lockstep together. Some part of that obviously comes down to what we're doing. So what we're doing is...
We don't have an ELA type model. What we have is the earned enterprise, which means we don't sell seats ahead of their usage. People are using them. They leverage them. It's the same concept we use for connected users. You're not paying for users you don't need. That really helps keep people on the side of the ledger where they're staying with what they have. And then the question really becomes one of, what are you adding to the list? How much are you going to add and when are you going to add those?
Got it. That's helpful. And then the other kind of macro related question I wanted to better understand. Pete, when you were talking about the impacts that you're modeling, you know, it's you've seen lower close rates. You're assuming that degrades further, which makes a lot of sense. Have you also seen.
deal compression as well, you know, in terms of you thought a deal would be quality of a million in ARR and it ends up coming at you know, less than that 800 or whatever be the case. And what are you modeling in terms of deal compression going forward? Is that embedded in guidance? Thanks. Yes, so Rishi, you know, we've modeled the trends we've seen. And so what we have modeled is, you know, some degradation, the close rate. We've modeled some elongation in the sales cycles.
And the deal compression that happens typically is people deciding not to buy is not the issue. They're buying either things a la carte or in smaller pieces. So it's still a healthy expansion rate, which is what I was looking at. I'm looking at, you know, our expansion rate is healthy, and even the one we've guided to is a healthy expansion rate. It's just a matter of moderation in the macroeconomic phase that exists.
I think one thing also that has been helpful is there are some of the transactions this last quarter I would class as compliance-based licensing.
So we have an agreement with you you use the product extensively you have all these connected users and That discussion happens around okay. Here's the new level at which you're engaging with the platform It's not you making a choice over. Oh, I think this would be interesting I can get value it's a decision you made quarters ago that you're now clicking into and Those discussions using much more high velocity because it's really maintaining completely
The first one, just given that these things are happening.
How confident are you that none of the fuel compression or close rates are impacted by some of the expense cuts that you've made over the last kind of 6 to 12 months? Awesome!
So we have actually maintained our sales capacity, and that's one thing we are pretty excited about going into the year. So when you talk about deal compression, or you talk about elongated sales cycles, that's really about what customers are feeling and experiencing as they are making plans of their own on how to plan their business.
So they're outside of the scope that you would expect to see an impact. Okay. Mark. Mark.
Got it. And then Mark, when we're talking about, you know, those rare instances where it might be a bigger RFP and you know, Smartsheet is already installed in a couple of business units. Are there any business units that you feel like have an outside influence on the ultimate company-wide decision, you know, whether it's finance or IT or sales, marketing, whatever?
I would say it both spans user population as well as those responsible for ensuring a safe and scaled environment. And I would say there are certain things that are non-negotiables where you have to conform, whether that's in how it's administered, how you are licensed.
how you allow non-licensed people to interact with the information that is being stored. Those are all things that are, I think, pretty tried and true tested in that enterprise environment. I would say that the organization from a functional standpoint, which I think are getting outsized sort of weight on the scale right now, are those who are tying out to revenue.
of DJ Hines with Canaccord. Your line is open.
Hey guys, thanks for taking the questions. Mark, can you talk about what you've seen with some of your more marketing-oriented use cases, you know, brand folder, outfit. It just feels like that's a category of spend that's seeing more scrutiny, so it would be great to get any observations there. Yeah, I think conversations in the marketing and creative management arena.
that tie out to sort of concrete financial benefit, that presentation of value is landing very well. I think things that are more qualitative in nature in terms of being more confident about the work you're managing.
being a little bit more clear on the status of something, still important, but probably not enough to tip the scales. So on most of our large marketing-based solution discussions now, we are grounding it in accelerating the completion of work, the elimination of third-party resource to get that work done, and then the quantification of what that campaign or that asset is actually yielding for your company.
People are very interested to learn about how to quantify that, and the more we can arm marketers in going to their CFOs, Pete, no offense, in presenting the value, I think that really gives the marketing teams much more confidence. So it's a newer arena for many marketing organizations, but I think it actually is quite promising for the year ahead.
Yeah, okay. That's helpful. Thanks. And then Pete, just a follow up for you. So look, in the context of the big margin upside next year, and I know this is a question you won't want to answer, but can you help frame like what kind of sales capacity you're thinking of adding in fiscal 24, you know, maybe relative to what you did in fiscal 23. And the reason I asked like, I think investors are going to want some assurances that we're continuing to invest in position for growth and fiscal 25 and beyond. So any
Any color there would be helpful for folks. So DJ, I think we are committed to growth. So think of that growth coming from a more efficient model. So quite simply, if you think of the size of our base that we bring in for renewal, the cost in terms of what it takes to service that base is much lower than what the cost is for bringing in a new dollar of business.
that economic or that effect is going to stack into how many resources we need. And now we will continue to hire. We're going to hire this year as well. We'll hire next year, but the classes in size will be smaller than what we've historically done. So you'll see an accretion to margin as a part of our longer term plan to grow margins.
Okay, thank you guys, appreciate the call. No problem, DJ. Your next question is from the line of Scott Berg with Needham. Your line is open. Hi everyone, congrats on the nice results this quarter. Thanks for taking my questions. I guess Mark, I want to start with a question on a totally different kind of a...
diversified experience in Smartsheet, that will be very much present at two billion. So today we talk about thousands of companies benefiting from advance. Thank you.
experience in Smartsheet, that will be very much present at two billion. So today we talk about thousands of companies benefiting from advance. I think a couple of years from now we're going to see.
tens of thousands of organizations having a much more complete Smartsheet experience. So a couple years ago in analyst day, someone said, what's the thing you would most like to have in your product? I said, you know what? Don't give me another thing. I want our customers to have perfect information on what's possible. Now fortunately, I have gotten a whole bunch of other things in those two years, but I want those assets, those capabilities to land with our median customer.
So we are working very hard not just to cater to the largest of the large, but how do you get that midsize customer and that upper mid customer and even an emerging customer to understand the power of the platform. So I believe you're going to have a much more cross-connected product experience across the various disciplines within SmartShine.
Whether it is on strategic transformation, it's marketing creative management, it's PPM, it's core work management You're going to have much more complete usage and today you would see you'll have evidence of Hundreds of customers using us at scale doing very sophisticated things that will be driving towards the middle of the band and I would say what that will result in is not only more customers, but also a significantly higher average contribution per year.
with partners. Partners continue to be becoming an increasingly more important component of, I think, some of your sales processes. Not that they necessarily sell directly, but they seem to influence it. Are you seeing anything different out of partners recently than maybe what you've had in the past?
I'll start, Scott, by talking to a message I sent to a video message I did for the kickoff of one of our global SIs who has one of their global practices.
building a set of workflows and solutions on the Smartsheet platform. In this, for this large global SI, every single M&A transaction and divestiture within this industry practice is backboneed by Smartsheet.
Every single project they do is navigated with Smartsheet every time they leave the customer site, post that transaction being completed.
Smartsheet is left behind with the customer for it to continue in those operations. So that is, a few years ago, those types of discussions, those types of experiences never existed. It was much more the mid-sized SI. We still have hundreds and hundreds of SIs.
in the middle range who are contributing, influencing. We do as much co-selling with them as we do them closing deals independent of us. But I would say the really notable ones, the ones that sort of give me the most confidence in terms of high impact are those larger players who are developing practices around us. And that is not just one global SI, we have three of those in play right now.
Very good, congrats again on the results this quarter. Thanks, Joe. Your next question is from the line of Robert Simmons with DA Davidson. Your line is open. Hey, thanks for taking my questions. I was wondering, given the way evaluations have generally come down and maybe stabilized a little bit privately, what's your current thought process on doing further M&A and how much cash do you need to keep on the balance sheet?
Got it. And then talking about an existing one, can you tell us about how Outfit has been performing a little more quantitatively perhaps than you did before in terms of the approach to the actual performance?
So, you know, Outfit is performed, you know, to our expectation. It's done a really, you know, kind of effective job. The way we went about Outfit was it really tags along with brand folder as a part of templating that you need when you're doing brand folder deals. We're seeing a good sort of, you know, what I call synergistic effect. And the product integration we're thinking about between brand folder and Outfit.
makes this even more compelling when that comes through. Great, thank you very much. You're welcome. Your next question is from the line of Jacob Robares with William Blair. Your line is open. Hey, congrats on the results, especially on that profitability guidance. That was awesome to see. Understand there was a...
with flight degradation and close rates and sales cycles, but you're still seeing some pretty strong new customer activity with new bookings and the user growth number. I know those customers start small, but were there any particular segments or industry verticals that stood out on that front? I think, you know, you look at the segments that come out for us which are very strong in that new user, et cetera. We've launched essentially, you know, a lot of new activities with customers, and what we're seeing is,
Our largest customers that come in from largest companies, new nodes within companies coming forward, they seem to be really resonating with our product. What they're hearing is capabilities can be launched early. We still do deals with advance, which surprises sometimes us internally, but says it's a new customer, they start with advance. That's somebody deciding that they don't want the primitives as they get started. They just want to start with what gets them the lift in productivity that they need. Okay, great. Then
Would love to just touch on what you're seeing in the market from a competitive perspective. Seems like some of your competitors are calling out some headwinds and undergoing some fairly large risks while you're obviously continue to execute pretty well. Have you started seeing any competitive benefits in the pipeline as a result of those changes?
So what we are seeing is two things happening. First is the market for hiring talent has obviously gotten better, which is a macro statement about everything we've done. And then the one thing we are finding is on a marketing side, the competition for a leader, Adword, etc.
is proving to be easier, the cost is dropping over there, so we're benefiting on those two fronts. I think in terms of the teams in our pursuit, the large opportunities that we pursue where we have established footprints, those are very rarely highly contested. It's really us demonstrating value and seeking greater investment from our...
Great, thanks for taking my questions and congrats again on the great results.
Great, thanks for taking my questions and congrats again on the great results.
Your final question comes from the line of Steve Enders with the City. Your line is open. Hi this is George on for Steve. Thanks for taking the question, squeezing me in. I guess on the macro if you could discuss the degree of linearity you saw through the quarter it sounds like things maybe progressively got worse on me.
conversion rates and sales cycles. So just any comments there and then what you've seen in February and March so far? Thank you. So as we looked at the quarter and how it played out, the bill through the quarter had some element of what I call degradation that took place between November and March.
moving into December and January , that you could describe as the elements I described before that macro degradation was a function of elongated sales cycles and what I call some degradation, the close rate that we saw.
We saw that play out as we progressed through the quarter. So that's the first part of it. What have we observed so far in February ? I think we've got off to a February start, which is consistent with the first month of the quarter. But essentially, the trend we expected to have continue, which is a part of our guide, is built out. We have seen the close rates and what I call sales cycles.
not sort of improve the state, sort of marginally a tad bit worse than they have, so that's how they play it out. Got it, that's helpful. And then one quick follow up on the margin guidance and your sales and marketing spend. I just wanted to kind of understand.
if there are any kind of KPIs that you would see that might lead you to sort of turn on that investment flow or is this kind of all sort of according to plan and regardless of what you see in the macro side, you're kind of going forward with this RAM Salesforce that you have today, thank you. I think George, our model is based on...
reading the signals and seeing what comes out. So I would describe it to you as if we see a macro opportunity, as long as the ROI and the payback is there, we will continue to invest, which sort of provides the stability and off margins, if it allows us.
to accelerate revenue on one side of it. We'll do the same thing with, for example, things we generate internally. We see something that has legs and it's driving to good ROIs. We'll continue to invest behind it. That's the approach we're taking.
Give me now, disconnect.