Okta, Inc. (NASDAQ:OKTA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Page 9 of 13

Todd McKinnon: Yes. It’s a really astute question. And the way I think about it is that there’s a lot of different levers to make the whole team successful. We talked a lot about last call and this call about sales attrition, but sales is like the tip of the spear. A lot has to go well to support them to make them successful. The problem is not sales. The problem is clarity of the message. We’ve done much better at that, clear, compelling positioning, enablement. These are all the things that we’re getting better at. So, I think holistically, when you think about next year, it’s how much do we invest, where do we invest in terms of people, coverage? And how do we get the balance between prudent financial management on how much resources we deploy into the field versus the expected return and the expected productivity and balancing that.

And yes, commission is one important — one variable, but it’s relatively small in terms of the overall investment in go-to-market capacity as it leads to productivity and leverage in the model there.

Brett Tighe: Yes. I would just add that — I mean, that’s one of those things you’ve heard me talk about, Adam when we were talking about the guidance of being — hey, one quarter, we really improved on a variety of things but we’re being cautious about the future because one quarter doesn’t make a trend. I wish it did, make our life a lot easier.

Dave Gennarelli: Let’s go over to Shrenik Kothari at Baird.

Shrenik Kothari: You guys mentioned the 100,000 plus customers grew nicely 32% and the net new customer adds back out. There was also sequentially better quarter-on-quarter, I think overall 22% year-on-year. And yes, I mean, that adds up with the number of sales reps that you said closing the customer identity deals, sequentially getting better over three quarters. One comment you made was the pipeline is more weighted towards upsells. And I mean, of course, we’re seeing some softening in the SMB market. But are you already starting to see that SMB softening in the customer adds as well on that side of things as well? Yes.

Todd McKinnon: I think just the general — I don’t actually know the mix of — the degree of softening of upsells versus new business. We just — we know that the SMB segment of our business was less than we would have liked this past quarter and balance with a lot of other things, the whole — overall mix of the entire book of business being more upsell focused than usual lead us to strongly believe that that’s macro related, both just anecdotally in the conversations, but — plus when we look at it quantitatively in the statistics across the whole business.

Dave Gennarelli: Next, we’ll go to Fatima Boolani at Citi.

Fatima Boolani: Brett, between you and Todd, you sort of talked a lot about the strength in the renewal side of the business and of course, the performance in the quarter being weighted more towards upsells, presumably coming from the installed base. So what I wanted to ask you was just around the conversations with respect to renewals. What we’ve heard from some of your peers is there is increasingly an orientation from customers to manage their cash flow, manage their OpEx budgets. So, I think we saw a little bit of this in your backlog and RPO because you called it out. But I’m curious from an invoicing standpoint, what sort of conversations are you having in your renewal dialogue. And then, as a related matter, and I think I’ve asked you this before, we’ve been seeing maybe more broad-based sort of employment contraction and layoff activity, and it seems a little bit more concentrated in certain sectors.

But I’m curious how that’s sort of factoring into some of your renewal conversations as well. Thank you.

Page 9 of 13