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

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jason Ader with MoffettNathanson.

Unidentified Analyst: This is Kyle Bule on for Jackson Ader. Just to dig a little bit deeper onto that expansion kind of the time line that you guys are seeing. Is the time line for expansion slowing at all? Or do you kind of see that slowing in the near term future here? Or has that kind of remaining constant as to what you’ve seen historically?

Pete Godbole: So the — if you think of expansions and you convert them into its core fundamental, you’re talking about bookings and how quickly they materialize. Obviously, expansions are a key part of bookings and billings. So you should think of it as being — we’ve seen an elongation in sales cycles and we’ve seen deal compression. So let’s talk about how that actually plays itself out. The way we’ve seen elongations, people just stay longer with a number of potential reviews that take place for any purchase, those are happening. The second part of it is the deal compression. The way that would happen with these capabilities and expansion is you can either buy a package, which is likely packaged up value in advance or you can still buy pieces of it, we don’t tell customers how they should buy it, but they buy a la carte capabilities that hit a specific need, those represent if you buy the a la carte capabilities, you’re getting a smaller bite in bookings.

Obviously, over time, you’re going to get all the bookings, but it means a different size. So that’s how expansions play out.

Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Great. That’s helpful. And then I guess just in terms of next year’s IT budgets, historically are you able to attribute a decent or a majority of revenue growth to IT budget expansion? How do you see it playing out if IT budgets kind of come down next year. Do you see that as having a meaningful impact on the top line growth?

Pete Godbole: So I would say that the budgets for our funding. Remember if you’re dealing with — this isn’t one purchaser and 1 department. There are hundreds and thousands of people in enterprise who are buying it. See you have as much of people with line of business budgets that are buying it as they are IT folks in there. So I think it is fairly broad based in terms of budget.

Operator: Your next question comes from with line of Fred Lee with Credit Suisse.

Fred Lee: Very nice quarter, particularly in this environment. I was wondering if you were seeing any change in behavior from your competitions, specifically privately held companies that might be slowing their investment in market expense and then a quick follow-up after that.

Mark Mader: No. Even given the thousands of transactions we do in the quarter, the median transaction is still really helping if someone progressed from their status quo, which isn’t grounded in a CWM player and getting into CWM for the first time. So it’s difficult for us to speak. It will not be really well grounded for us to speak to these huge patterns that we see. We have seen — you do see it manifest itself in some other ways in terms of you definitely get a sense that those companies are hiring less. I think some of the people who joined companies, would have now been let go, obviously talk to people in the community, and I think there’s less chatter around people considering going to such companies. I think that’s one of the things that more established companies will benefit from in the coming quarters. In terms of what we’re seeing in market, nothing that we’ve really heard from customers on that front.

Unidentified Analyst: And just a quick follow-up on the net retention metric eventually in the 20s by the end of the year, I was wondering if you could drill down a little bit on what’s contributing to the sequential decline in the metric?