12/7/2023

speaker
Operator

Good day and welcome to the Smartsheet third quarter fiscal 2024 earnings call. Today's call is being recorded and I would now like to turn the conference over to Aaron Turner, head of investor relations. Please go ahead.

speaker
Aaron Turner

Thank you, Lisa. Good afternoon and welcome everyone to Smartsheet's third quarter of fiscal year 2024 earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market closed today. With me today are Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader and our CFO Pete Godwell. Today's call is being webcast and will also be available for replay on our investor relations website at investors.smartsheet.com. There is a slide presentation that accompanies Pete's prepared remarks, which can be viewed in the event section of our investor relations website. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. We have based these forward-looking 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. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, our actual results may differ materially or 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 or future events, except as required by law. In addition to the U.S. GAAP financials, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of the most directly comparable U.S. GAAP measures is available in the presentation that accompanies this call, which can also be found on our Investor Relations website. And with that, let me turn the call over to Mark.

speaker
Lisa

Thank you, Aaron, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter earnings call for fiscal year 2024. Smartsheet revenue for the quarter exceeded our guidance and grew by 23% year-over-year to $246 million, and billings grew 22% year-over-year to $268.5 million. In Q3, we generated non-GAAP operating margins of 8%, and free cash flow was $11.4 million. We ended the quarter with annual recurring revenue of $981 million and more than 13.9 million Smartsheet users. In Q3, 89 customers expanded their Smartsheet ARR by more than $100,000, and 256 companies expanded by over $50,000. Additionally, we now have 59 customers with ARR over a million dollars, up from 40 a year ago. Our strength in the enterprise continued in Q3, with expansions at companies such as Cushman & Wakefield, Syntos Corporation, biotech company Beijing, and Commvault Systems, among others. Q3 was also a strong quarter for our suite of capabilities-based products. Similar to last quarter, capabilities were present in each of our top 10 expansions. Smartsheet Advance, which is our bundle of our capabilities, was included in 250 of our expansions in Q3. Advance played a key role in a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal with a Fortune 500 specialty beverage company. Their expansion to Smartsheet Advance Gold will help support the company as it executes high-impact projects, including new product rollouts and associated equipment deployments, network upgrades, as well as new store openings and store improvements. In Q3, we also saw a significant expansion that included an upgrade to Advance Platinum at a major airline. For a number of years, Smartsheet has powered aspects of the carrier's flight ops, flight products, and tech ops units. Due to growing demand for Smartsheet from other departments, they decided to upgrade to a Smartsheet Advance. By implementing the platinum tier of Smartsheet Advance, they were able to consolidate their licenses and bring them all under IT's purview to give these divisions access to all of our capabilities, such as control center, dynamic view, and bridge. This consolidation means that the airline has an opportunity to increase visibility into its IT spend and empower Smartsheet users as it brings greater efficiency to critical activities like resource management, maintenance, and scheduling. And that resulted in a three-year commitment with a total contract value of $4.5 million and an opportunity to further scale Smartsheet across the organization. The ability to rapidly scale was also key to an $850,000 deal at one of the country's largest quick service restaurant brands. The company is in the process of a multi-year transformation initiative and selected Smartsheet Control Center and Resource Management to help drive its global digital transformation and implement portfolio reporting on day-to-day and annual operating plan projects for the senior executive team. By using Smartsheet, the company has been able to enhance and simplify collaboration across over 30,000 locations, and in doing so, rendered a number of other applications obsolete. Another customer example relating to scale is the significant expansion at a global media and entertainment organization that was looking to streamline its tech stack. The company was already using Control Center to manage 14,000 projects and 12,000 workflows in Bridge to track and manage their portfolio of projects. Because that work went across its retail, events, theme parks, and publishing divisions, Smartsheet was well positioned to win this consolidation. Going forward, the company will extend its use of Smartsheet to other initiatives, such as improved speed to market for technology projects, efficient headcount management, cost controls, and profit improvement initiatives. This expansion brought the company's ARR to over $4 million. On the product front, in Q3, we introduced a new way for our customers to discover and use two of our premium capabilities without the need to first contact a Smartsheet rep or partner. We believe empowering frictionless self-discovery of high-value Smartsheet capabilities will drive greater adoption of these premium offerings, and early results have been promising, with hundreds of trials started with just within the first few months. One of those trials occurred at a mid-cap biotech company and directly led to the purchase of DataShuttle to migrate significant amounts of data into Smartsheet from legacy clinical storage systems. While the company has been a customer for years, it had never utilized a premium capability. Once discovering DataShuttle, the company's clinical trial team launched automated workflows to import data they used to track the progress of its research on cancer and rare disease therapies. They found that it had a positive impact by allowing them to centralize view and manage data from these disparate sources. And their success with Data Shuttle has now led to interest in other premium capabilities. Over 40% of these deals in Q3 that were closed as a result of capability self-discovery were with customers buying a premium capability for the first time. We continue to make strides integrating AI across the Smartsheet platform. We now have approximately 50,000 enterprise users in early access to AI-powered skills that allow users to generate formulas and content directly in their sheets. Both these skills will be generally available later this quarter to enterprise customers. The feedback from early access users confirms that our AI features will help power enterprise processes and make it simple for any user to gain insight into the work being done across teams. These AI skills are helping customers achieve their desired outcomes even more rapidly with the Smartsheet platform. Additional AI-powered skills will roll out to eligible early adopters next month. We continue to invest internationally in response to increasing global demand. To support data residency requirement for international customers, we launched a Smartsheet platform instance in Germany in 2021, and we will launch an instance in Australia next year. This new Smartsheet region will enable Australian customers to comply with important data residency requirements and offer them the flexibility to choose where they want their content to be hosted. We will be pursuing IRAP certification, ensuring that it will have the right policies and security controls to meet Australian government information security requirements. This enables Smartsheet to serve a growing regional customer base, including organizations and agencies with the most demanding governance and regulatory requirements. Q3 was also a productive quarter for our federal government business in the U.S., reaching some notable milestones. We signed a six-figure expansion at a large government agency, which brought its ARR up to $1.6 million. This agency uses Smartsheet for critical workflows from purchase management to managing grant funding to using Control Center to manage travel budgets and expense management across its multiple regional offices. Additionally, we now have a presence in all 15 U.S. cabinet-level departments and have two government agencies with ARR over $1 million. In closing, as we approach crossing the billion-dollar ARR milestone this quarter, we remain focused on both product innovation and customer value by continuing to execute as the user-preferred enterprise work management leader. Now let me turn the call over to Pete.

speaker
Aaron

Thank you, Mark. We outperformed all aspects of our guidance in Q3. Similar to previous quarters, our enterprise business continues to perform well, which is reflected in the growth of our higher ARR customer cohort tiers and volume of large deals. We continue to see macro-related pressure on our higher velocity transactions and on our SMB customer segments. Given these pressures, we are maintaining our prudent approach to our Q4 and full year guidance. I will now go through our financial results for the third 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. Third quarter revenue came in at $245.9 million, up 23% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $232.5 million, representing year-over-year growth of 25%. Services revenue was $13.4 million. Revenue from capabilities made up 33% of subscription revenue. Turning to billings. Third quarter billings came in at $268.5 million, representing year-over-year growth of 22%. Approximately 94% of our subscription billings were annual, with about 3% monthly. Quarterly and semiannual represented approximately 3% of the total. Moving on to our reported metrics. The number of customers with ACV over $50,000 grew 26% year-over-year to 3,719. And the number of customers with ACV over $100,000 grew 32% year-over-year to 1,779. These customer segments now represent 65% and 51%, respectively, of total ARR. The percentage of our ARR coming from customers with ACV over $5,000 is at 91%. Next, our domain average ACV grew 16% year-over-year to 9,225. We ended the quarter with a dollar-based net retention rate inclusive of all our customers of 118%. The full churn rate was 4%. We expect to exit FY24 with a dollar-based net retention rate of around 116%. Now turning back to the financials, our total gross margin was 84%. Our Q3 subscription gross margin was 87%. We expect our gross margin for FY24 to remain at or above 83%. Overall operating income in the quarter was $19.4 million, or 8% of revenue. Free cash flow in the quarter was $11.4 million. Now let me move on to guidance. For the fourth quarter of FY24, we expect revenue to be in the range of $254 million to $256 million, and non-GAAP operating income to be in the range of $21 million to $23 million. We expect non-GAAP net income per share to be 17 to 19 cents based on diluted weighted average shares outstanding of 140 million. For the full fiscal year 24, we now expect revenue of 955 million to $957 million, representing growth of 25%. We expect services to be 6% of total revenue. We expect our non-GAAP operating income to be in the range of $82 million to $84 million, representing an operating margin of 9%. And non-GAAP net income per share to be 68 cents to 69 cents for the year based on 138 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding. We expect our Q4 billings to be $339 million, bringing our FY24 billings growth guidance to 20%. This includes the impact of our decision to invest more in our partner network that will include shifting more services delivery to this channel. The impact of this shift will be a reduction of around 3 million to billings in Q4. We are raising our free cash flow guidance for FY24 to $130 million. To conclude, we outperformed all aspects of our guidance in Q3 and are encouraged by the signals we are seeing from our incremental growth drivers, such as self-discovery of capabilities and the new AI features. Now let me turn the call over to the operator. Operator?

speaker
Operator

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question on the phone lines today, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to remove yourself from the queue, it is star 1 again. We'll take our first question from Scott Berg with Needham.

speaker
Scott Berg

Hi, everyone. Really nice quarter here. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to start on the billing side. You saw some acceleration in the growth quarter over quarter. speaks to some of the large deal environment there. But how do we think about kind of pipeline and demand trends going into Q4? Do they look kind of normal and similar from what you've seen the last quarter or two, or do you see any changes either up or down for them? Thank you.

speaker
Aaron

Thanks, Scott. This is Pete. You know, as we've looked at the pipeline, we are seeing basically the same strength in enterprise continuing into Q4. Obviously, depends on the composition of deals and closing those deals. And what we're anticipating in Q4 is on the SMB expansion, the trend we saw in what I would call Q3, which was a degradation in the expansion rate. We're extending that out in a trended basis into Q4 as well.

speaker
Scott Berg

Got it. Helpful there. And then from a follow-up perspective, Your operating margins have kind of lowered the last couple quarters. I know that's in line with guidance. Your sales and marketing expense is up a little relative to subscription growth rates that are down a little bit there. Is the higher sales and marketing expense, is that all related to the partner enablement activities that you're going through? Is there some other increased costs there that we should be aware of?

speaker
Aaron

I think when you think of the sales and marketing expense in Q3 and you look at that trend, remember sales and marketing Q3 is a function of the event we had in Q3, which was the Engage event. That plays into that spending. And then there's what I call investments that we're making as needed in the right parts of the sales and marketing machinery.

speaker
Mark

Got it. Helpful. Thanks for taking my questions and congrats on the good quarter.

speaker
Pete

Thanks, Scott. We'll take our next question from Michael Berg with Wells Fargo Securities.

speaker
Scott

All right. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask on the demand dynamics in a different way. Anything to point to in the renewable environment outside the S&D vertical? Is it improving? How does it relate to the first half of the year? And how is it trending as we look into calendar 2024? Thank you.

speaker
Aaron

I think in general, our renewals are staying pretty strong. There's no big difference in environment that we've seen between the first half and the second half. But remember, our business is pretty well diversified across all verticals, so we get the benefit of that, but we're not seeing any big changes in the renewal environment.

speaker
Scott

Helpful. And then one quick follow-up on capabilities. It's been in the low to mid-30s for several quarters now, and it seems to be a high-value proposition type of product. Maybe you can help us think about, is there anything preventing further incremental adoption of that, whether it be driving home the ROI equation, budget priorities, just macro and budget scrutiny? Is there any way we can think about how that adoption can accelerate? Thanks.

speaker
Lisa

I think when we look at this, Mark, when we look at the various phases or elements of driving growth in this area, one of the big initiatives for us in the second half has been how do we get them more aware to people at the right time. So that was part of the self-discovery effort. One of the things that we can see in the next year and the years out is how do we not only increase discovery, but also how do we dramatically accelerate the transaction on those types of things? So we see a future in which the entire portfolio is visible to people, can be utilized by people, and can also be transacted by people in a variety of methods, whether you speak with a partner, whether you speak with a direct rep, or whether you do that online. And we continue to see that aperture opening. But the first phase of the game is, how do you get in front of people? And I think we've made really good progress in the second half on that.

speaker
Mark

Helpful. Thank you. Thanks.

speaker
Pete

Let's take our next question from Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley.

speaker
Josh Baer

Great. Thank you. I wanted to follow up on capabilities, Mark. Wondering what percent of your customer base do you think capabilities can apply to? I think that the third of revenue is generated by only 6% of your customers. Just wondering where that number can go.

speaker
Lisa

Yeah, I think I'm the eternal optimist on this one. I think this relates to every single person in our community. We have a wide portfolio. It has to do with being able to bring information and data into our system, with integrating our system, with visualizing our system, sharing our system. These are all things that virtually every person on our platform does. And I think when you reduce the hurdle height on what it takes to experience and give people multiple options on how to transact at a very low cost-effective way to start all the way up to really massive enterprise deployment, that penetration should go well into the double digits. Yeah, I think over the next over five-year frame, I think 50 or median customers should be buying capability from us.

speaker
Josh Baer

Really helpful. And then just wanted to dig in one more time on billings, Q3, Q4. You did show some nice upside in acceleration in Q3 off of an easier compare. The comp gets easier yet again in Q4. But the guidance implies a little bit of decel, like even adjusting for the shift in the partners. So anything else to call out between Q3 and Q4 or is kind of Q4 just embedding sort of the normal type of prudence and guidance? Thank you.

speaker
Aaron

So Josh, you know, our approach this year has been very consistent. The performance every quarter sort of irrespective of direction hasn't materially changed our view of the year. Within a quarter, there's, you know, many reasons for variability. It's the timing of billing. It's the lumpiness of deals. It's seasonal variances, which tend to sort of offset over a full year term. We provided commentary based on actual sort of data we see in the quarter, but we've been very constant in our view of the year. And the way we see it is, you know, given our performance over the past two quarters, We like to set up in Q4 to hit our 20% full-year billings guide, so that's the way we see it.

speaker
Mark

Okay, great. Thanks, Pete. No problem.

speaker
Pete

We'll take our next question from Jake Roberg with William Blair.

speaker
Jake Roberg

Hey, thanks for taking the questions. Mark, now that you've had those AI solutions out in beta for a few months and in the hands of customers, what's been the early feedback on those? Are there any features that you're really seeing outsized demand for?

speaker
Lisa

Yeah, it's interesting. As I talk to peer CEOs who have launched AI features into the wild, I think what the market is seeing is that I think people are assigning higher value but lower frequency, lower usage to some of these things. So when I look at a company saying, hey, we really assign value to the ability to generate configurations through advanced formulas or content generation, it's not something where we see this being hammered away at 10, 50, 100 times per day. We're seeing a configuration at our large domain, sort of a configuration being created daily. So it's not like every single user is using this all day long. But it's actually quite encouraging because people are utilizing it consistently. And I think as the surface area grows, not only from creating logic, but then having an assistant and having the ability to do insights and having the ability to find templates through an AI mechanism, I think that frequency will climb. But I would say pretty consistently across the peers that I speak with, A lot of investments are out there, and I think the frequency of usage is probably a little bit lower than people had anticipated. But when I look at the feedback we've received across favorable, neutral, or negative, almost exclusively neutral or positive. And that's a really good leading indicator that tells us, you know, continue to invest in this area. Heading into Q1 will be the first time where we have something available in our enterprise product which can really be presented to a business user that they can associate to very cleanly. Like in the past, very often enterprise plans tie out to security features and things that IT and governance really values. This will be the first foray into giving the business user something that they can get excited about. So again, super early days. I'm really pleased to see the neutral or positive feedback on this. And it's like, it's the first inning of this game. But again, definitely the game is being pursued fully.

speaker
Jake Roberg

Very helpful. And then I know a lot of the solutions are still in beta today and will obviously take some time to roll out. But just in terms of that timeline, what do you view as the kind of the biggest product hurdles you have left before getting these solutions really GA and lives in the hands of customers and really starting that upsell motion?

speaker
Lisa

I think especially in this arena, there are two factors. One, for many people, this is their first time interacting with an AI experience. So the importance of being correct, giving the customer high confidence in that interaction, we care deeply about that. So as we think about leaving some of these things in the oven, if you will, for an extra month or two, we think it's a really smart move. So we're getting the first two skills out before the end of Q4, and I think With each of these skills, it's important to really understand what the feedback and interaction with that skill is, as opposed to doing a drag right and saying, well, it worked well for the first three skills. Let's just do that for the next five. I think you really have to prosecute these independent of one another. I think the other piece of this equation is what the posture of the buyer is. So when I look at some of our largest organizations, we have about 5,000 organizations in the early adopter program, spanning tens of thousands of users. There are some organizations, even with our approach to AI, which is unbelievably contained, like we don't ship data across the boundary, even in those situations, The procurement teams and security teams are taking extra care to really understand what their internal policies are. So we've actually had some of our largest clients who are taking an uber-conservative approach and said, we will wait until it's out of EAP as they're getting their internal controls defined. And I think a lot of customers are being very prudent in that approach.

speaker
Mark

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Yeah.

speaker
Pete

We'll take our next question from John DeFucci with Guggenheim.

speaker
John DeFucci

Thank you. I appreciate the prudence and guidance relative to the SMB expansion deterioration, Pete, but can you comment at all on the linearity in this quarter and just give us any kind of read into how November and the beginning of December seem to be tracking?

speaker
Aaron

Yeah, so the first thing is we always have seasonality in the quarter. Our first month is the smallest compared to all three months. So as we went through the quarter, we did see what I call strengthen the enterprise build up. And on the other side of that token, we did see the SMB expansions continue to be impacted by expansion pressures. We saw that trend in SMB expansion pressures continue into November. And on the enterprise side of it, November was for our expectations. So that's a little bit of how the quarter played out.

speaker
John DeFucci

Okay. And that's helpful. And I guess, Mark, you mentioned the example in your prepared remarks on self-discovery of advanced features. Can you give us any metrics at all on how we should be thinking about that as far as traction moving forward?

speaker
Lisa

Hi, John. I think we'll probably provide more text on that as we paint the picture for the upcoming year with our Q4 results. I mean, right now, We're looking at this contributing nearly a million dollars to bookings in the quarters, a great green shoot. We have really positive feedback in terms of how people are seeing these things. But I would say still pretty early innings. We're talking about hundreds of trials with conversions, again, accumulating to a little less than a million bucks. But I mean, I think with another quarter under our belt, we'll feel more confident and be able to frame that in the year ahead for the year ahead.

speaker
John DeFucci

Great. And listen, nice job at ARR. And buildings, too, I don't think a lot of people thought you guys would do this, but nice job.

speaker
Mark

Thanks, John.

speaker
Pete

We'll take our next question from Steve Enders with Citi.

speaker
Steve Enders

Okay, great. Thanks for taking the question. I guess I want to ask about the international opportunity. I mean, good to see the expansion into Australia for data residency, but how are you thinking about, I guess, kind of broader international initiatives and is there going to be any kind of further, you know, go-to-market investments, you know, marketing campaigns or partner build-out to kind of go after that opportunity?

speaker
Aaron

Steve, this is Pete. So, you know, we think of international as a huge opportunity for us. It's 16% of our revenue and clearly one of the areas we go after. But we think of it as a combination of all the changes we're making on the product with PLG and making it easier to have this product be found, be able to expand, all those things. On the other side, we're investing in the go-to-market capability as well, combined with how customers that we deal with would want their data to be treated. So think of it as go-to-market with data centers. So we'll continue to invest in the international dimension, but just like our business here, it's going to take a while because customers with us start small, and then they expand with us. So that's the trajectory you should see.

speaker
Steve Enders

Okay, perfect. That's helpful context. And then on the net retention, I think a little bit of a downtick, at least for how you're thinking about for the fiscal year guide. I guess anything to call out what's kind of the incremental difference there? And then I guess secondarily, how should we be thinking about where that could potentially bottom out at?

speaker
Aaron

Yeah, so Steve, when we think of the net dollar retention rate, Generally, things were pretty much consistent between quarters. The only difference was the incremental SMB expansion, which is what you're seeing in the number we've laid out that's included in there. Now, that's the first part. The second part of what you asked for, what's the direction of this, you know, we've got a big Q4 to go kind of go execute on, not just in terms of the total dollars we need to go through, but these green shoots that Mark talked about, you know, we want to see how those play out. All of that combined with the environment we see in Q4 will really inform what we think net dollar retention rate will look like in FY25.

speaker
Steve

Okay, perfect. Thanks for taking the questions.

speaker
Peter

No problem, Steve.

speaker
Operator

We'll take our next question from Pindulambora with JP Morgan.

speaker
spk12

Oh, great. Congrats on the quarter, and thanks for taking the questions. Mark, can I ask you, based on your conversations with customers, how do you think kind of the enterprise budgets are getting set for 2024 so far? Do you think bus strings might open up a bit or not so much?

speaker
Lisa

I think it's largely a function of a provider's ability to connect to value and helping understand how they realize that value. I think, you know, and this goes back starting in a really pronounced way probably three years ago, where the higher we got in an organization and the bigger project we were talking with them about, the greater the need was to connect it to a prioritized pursuit that they had and be able to articulate how they could, within a certain timeframe, realize that benefit. So when I think of where we're investing, not just from a product standpoint or a partner standpoint, but our articulation of how we deliver value, that is a direct tie into whether a purse string gets tighter or gets more loose. And so I think there are absolutely macro things that one needs to be aware of, but there are a whole litany of things that are within one's control that can help adjust that.

speaker
spk12

Understood. Thank you. And one follow-up. How are you thinking about the sales capacity going into next year? Do you have the capacity for your plan? Do you expect to build capacity higher? And then how should we kind of think about that in context of potential margin improvement for next year?

speaker
Aaron

So, Peter, this is Pete. So when you think of sales capacity and you think of needing sales capacity, you know, we think of it as we have a pretty well-trained team of sales professionals we've hired. We've continued to invest in making them capable. That's the effort we've been on for several quarters. we see the first shot as just the capacity and the productivity of those reps improving. That's the fundamental. Now, will we add resources as we enhance the sales process and specific roles? We will. But I don't think it will be a huge drag on the margin. So as you look at FY25 and you look at margins, You know, we're not giving guidance on that yet, but the way I would describe it is overall margins, you should see those continue to improve. What slope or gradient that improvement takes will be a function of what growth expectations we have.

speaker
Peter

Understood very clear. Thank you. You're welcome, Pendula.

speaker
Pete

We'll take our next question from Taylor McGinnis with UBS.

speaker
Taylor McGinnis

Hi, thanks so much for taking my question. Sorry to press on billings again, but just one follow-up to one of the questions that was asked earlier. So Pete, I think you mentioned that there could be quarter variability in timing, which I know we all appreciate in billings, but just given the strength in 3Q, did you see any renewals that pulled forward from 4Q into 3Q? And then maybe you can talk about like the bookings linearity you're seeing so far and you know, if that's trending to be more backend loaded and if that, you know, if there's any assumptions of that embedded in the guide.

speaker
Aaron

So Taylor, you know, there was nothing unusual in the quarter. Every quarter always has the normal pulls and pushes that happen. but nothing unusual this quarter that played out. I would go back and say, you know, we're seeing sort of bookings linearity being very consistent. There's no big trend to report out there. I'd say the only delta in bookings that we're seeing, which I called out a little bit, was on the SMB expansion side of it. So we're seeing some degradation that we had in Q3 on these expansions. And we're extending that trend forward into Q4, the assumption that that trend continues.

speaker
Taylor McGinnis

Got it. That's really helpful. And one last one for me is, so appreciate that there can be timing and quarterly variability into billings. And sometimes that metric can be noisy, but I guess if you look on trailing 12 months, it's been growing somewhere in the low 20s, but ARR growth has been hanging in there and like the mid 20s, maybe low end of that. So just as we think about what the underlying business is doing and the momentum you guys are seeing, when we look forward, Any thoughts on, you know, which is the better leading indicator or how we think about, you know, the difference between these two metrics?

speaker
Aaron

I think when you think of billings and ARR, I think, you know, they both are different, but they both lead you to the same answer when you finish the year. They're pretty close, even if it's not an identical answer. So when I'm thinking about quarterly changes, I tend to rely more on, you know, ARR because it has a better sense of the timing elements are a little less pronounced. But when you think of the full year, they're both the same.

speaker
Pete

Great. Thanks so much.

speaker
Mark

You're welcome, Taylor.

speaker
Pete

We'll take our next question from Keith Bachman with Bank of Montreal.

speaker
Keith Bachman

Hi. Good evening. Thank you. I wanted to ask two things that are related. And Pete, one's on micro and then a bigger picture question. On the micro, when you talk about and you assume the degradation continues. But just to be clear, are you assuming it gets worse or just stays the same? And then for my follow-up question, I'll just ask them successfully. When you think about the GEN-AI opportunity, and I was out in Seattle for your customer event, it seemed like a lot of excitement. Can it contribute to ARR growth and Billings growth? in what would be fiscal year end of January 25. Do you see that actually being a contributing factor to potential growth, or is it still, you think, going to be more discovery at that point? And, Pete, anything else you want us to think about as we're building our models for FY25 from a demand perspective? You already addressed the margins, but anything else you want us to keep in mind in advance of giving the formal guidance? Thank you.

speaker
Aaron

So Keith, I'll answer your questions as you ask them. First question you had was on SMB expansions, and we are assuming that there is a continued degradation in Q4. So we have assumed it moderately worsens in Q4, taking that trend line. So that's the first part of it. The second part of your question on Gen AI opportunity in the AR assumptions in FY25, You know, it's a little early to call it out because, you know, we've got a few customers sitting in the EAP program. We've got good positive feedback. But I think after we get through another quarter of that feedback and as we get ready to put this into what I call GA, I think we'll start to get a little bit of a sense of what that looks like. So I think it's a little early to call out.

speaker
Keith Bachman

Okay. Anything else, Pete, that you want us to think about as we model the demand side in FY25?

speaker
Aaron

No, I think, you know, it's a little early to talk through 25, but nothing specific to call out at this time.

speaker
Mark

Okay. Many thanks.

speaker
Pete

Thanks, Keith. We'll take our next question from Terry Tillman with Truist.

speaker
Keith

Yeah, good afternoon. Nice job on the earnings in the quarter and the cash flow. One quick question I had, maybe, Mark, first for you on self-discovery. I think you gave us a nugget there in terms of a million dollar of bookings or billings and You called it like an early green shoot. Just given the work you're doing there and all the trials you're doing there initially, I mean, do you expect that, though, to ramp pretty notably from the 1 million level and 4Q? And how would that happen? Is it you just got to put more kind of seeds in the ground with more trials or you're working through the flow of the existing trials or maybe even add more capabilities in the self-discovery and then have to follow up?

speaker
Lisa

Yeah, it's multifaceted, Terry. It's how do you not only serve up the capability to someone to utilize, but then how do you help prosecute that with the existing customer, right? It's moving it from being utilized to being transacted upon. And those are the motions that we're learning. So for these first deals that have closed, there's some things we're like, wow, we got that totally right. And we've also found other things where we can further reduce the friction. And as we scale that from tens of thousands of people who've been exposed to it to well over 100,000 organizations, I would expect that friction to reduce. So I would be, I will bet the over on things continuing to improve in this camp. And I think the other piece is as we look at getting more and more of the portfolio in, we're going to have more at-bats. So when an organization trials the capability you have multiple opportunities to trial. It's not one organization. It's people within that organization. So even if you miss on the first opportunity with an individual at an organization, their neighbor can start trialing that capability. So it's a repeated opportunity to sell into an organization and deliver value. That's one of the things I really like about this opportunity.

speaker
Keith

Got it. That's great to hear. And betting on the over. My follow-up question, I don't know if this is for you or Pete, but In terms of the services, the partner enablement, we see where some of the billings are going to go to partners, so it's explainable. I'm actually curious about sales enablement, so I'll build on this question. Over the last year, your million-dollar customers have expanded quite a bit, 59. That's a lot. You've got customers paying you $4 million, I think you mentioned on the quarterly call. I think you've got bigger ones than that. To me, that starts to seem interesting to a partner ecosystem, whether it's GSIs and others. So I would like to hear more about how sales enablement and influencing new businesses going with potential different types of partners. Thank you.

speaker
Lisa

Yeah, Terry, I really see two very different elevations of partnering. And one is the broad base, the hundreds of partners who came to engage and wanted further clarity on what our intentions were to build our service line versus supporting them explicitly and That's a really exciting growth opportunity both in the States as well as in countries which are partner-first oriented. I view that as very different than our go-to-market motion with the GSIs, many of whom are huge customers of ours. How we go to market with them is both as a customer as well as getting Smartsheet utilized as they deliver their services to their clients. And so it's really a multi-pronged relationship where we serve them as a client, we team with them to get it introduced to their clients, and then figuring out ways where they can build a book of business on the back of the Smartsheet platform to continue that relationship. That's really different than the next newest partner in a remote region, which is targeting SMB, which is still valuable to them, but again, different motion. So we have different folks within our enterprise team, within our services team, which are targeting GSIs. And we have the broad-based partner program, which is catering to that much larger population.

speaker
Pete

All right. And we'll take our next question from Alex Zugin with Wolf Research.

speaker
Alex Zugin

Hey, guys. This is Ethan for Alex Zugin, and thanks for the question. Congrats on the nice numbers. I have a question. We're looking to 4Q, the biggest renewal period. I'm just curious if you're seeing any change in customer behaviors, whether it's less co-terming, smaller expansions. If Gen AI is playing a little bit more into this up-tearing at renewal. I know we have the guide for the 116 for 4Q. I'm just curious how those conversations have started to play out in 4Q. I'm going to have one follow-up.

speaker
Aaron

Ethan, I don't think those expansion conversations and those renewal conversations are going any differently. I think there's nothing unusual about it because Gen AI and all of that is pretty early stage. Remember, it's an EAP with a limited number of customers. So that's not playing into the conversation yet because when you think of renewals and you think of all those things, it ties directly to what am I going to do with it? How is it going to come into my environment? And we're probably a little bit removed from that conversation. that spot at the present time.

speaker
Alex Zugin

I got you. Thank you. And I guess, you know, Pete, I know you're not getting explicitly, you know, for next year, but I guess as we think about maybe a de-risk, a conservative way to think about next year and, you know, kind of help us frame numbers, is there a thing, you know, like I guess a de-risk way for kind of building that look is kind of below what is implied in the fork you got?

speaker
Aaron

You know, I think, as I said before, it's a little early to call out next year just because, you know, Q4 is a big quarter. We've got to go execute it. I think we're all heads down trying to make sure we get the best outcome we can in Q4. That's one part of it. And the other part is clearly the fact that, you know, a lot of the things we've put into play, I'll call it just recently in the pan, if you will. So we've got to let those things play out, see what those do to be really able to put a perspective on what FY25 looks like.

speaker
Peter

Great. Well, congrats again, and thank you guys. Thanks, Ethan.

speaker
Operator

We'll take our next question from DJ Hines with Canaccord.

speaker
Canaccord

Hey, good evening, guys. Marcus, I think back to the IPO, I remember we used to talk about 5K as the threshold at which you would typically see customer spend start to inflect up, and maybe that's still true, but obviously it's a much different and scaled business today. As you look into the mid-market or low enterprise or whatever you want to call it, is there a spend threshold in that cohort or any other signal that you see where typically starts to inflect up again, or is it more linear progression higher up?

speaker
Lisa

Yeah, isn't it interesting how our frame of reference changes from five years ago? I was talking to Pete yesterday about our average time to progress a customer from half a million to a million. And again, so radically different from what we spoke about on the IPO. And I will stay away from pointing to one inflection point because there are so many phases to this game. We're seeing an acceleration of our moves from half a million to a million. We're seeing, again, almost a double up of our million dollar customers. So I think whenever a company gets tempted to focus on an inflection point, it's also known as a missed opportunity when focusing at a higher inflection point. So we're really trying to, as I just spoke to in terms of how we're viewing the partner ecosystem, recognize that there are multiple points at which you can exert energy or deliver value to a customer, which will compel them to move higher and faster. And don't view that as one, but view that as you have one at your very large enterprise, one at your emerging enterprise, one at your mid-major, one at your emerging customer, and treat those all as important. So I think we've learned over the last five years, and I think we're trying to arrange our capital and our resources to go after those.

speaker
Canaccord

Yeah.

speaker
Lisa

Okay. Makes sense.

speaker
Canaccord

And then maybe a quick follow-up to Terry's question on the self-discovery. So you kind of alluded in the answer to his question that you would roll more capabilities into that motion. Just from a technical perspective, will it be easier to enable the next product for self-discovery now that you've already done a couple of them?

speaker
Lisa

Yeah, absolutely. And I think when we think about self-discovery, it's not simply the enablement of a feature. It's how do you give the people who are responsible for managing that environment the confidence, the visibility, the ability to control those elements. So we're creating these frameworks and these heads-up displays within our administration console so that the administrators and the budget holders can have very high confidence and very efficiently manage these situations and Once that framework is set, adding that next one, you don't have to rebuild that infrastructure. We're building that in a modular way and building upon sort of those early foundational investments.

speaker
Mark

Yeah, okay. I appreciate the call. Thank you, guys.

speaker
Pete

Thanks. We'll take our next question from Brent Dale with Jefferies.

speaker
Brent Dale

Hi, thank you. This is a champion for Brent sale. My first question was, you know, as you've noticed, he had very good activity with the larger enterprises that were up then. I'm wondering if there are any notable drivers to call out, anything they really helped? I don't know, any sort of unusual tailwinds from the Engage conference?

speaker
Aaron

So I think your question is about the strength in the enterprise. I think it's the compelling nature of the solutions and the enablement we've done with the field in sort of building that out. These deals that happened in Q3 weren't the result of just what happened in Q3 or just what happened at Engage. It's a series of plays to start with an opportunity, build a compelling value for the customer, and then grow that opportunity over time, and then find the right way to describe that value to close a transaction. So that's what we've seen. I don't think it's a special magic bullet, but just running through it.

speaker
Mark

Good.

speaker
Brent Dale

It's helpful. And then in terms of follow-up, For, you know, in your guidance comments, you talked about enabling services to do more of the service work and having a $4 million impact on balance. I was wondering, was that embedded already in the previous, you know, four-year guide of 20% growth, or was that kind of maybe a little bit newer development?

speaker
Aaron

It's a newer development because we specifically called it out, and so think of that as incremental to prior guides.

speaker
Mark

Great. Thank you. You're welcome.

speaker
Pete

We'll take our next question from Rishi Jaluria with RBC Capital Markets.

speaker
Steve

Hi, this is Chris Fountain on for Rishi Jaluria. Thanks for taking our question. So you mentioned a really large expansion deal in the prepared remarks and that there's still further opportunity to do more with that organization. So I was just wondering what features are they still evaluating or what really drives that next leg of expansion with a customer of that size?

speaker
Lisa

The key driver there is we're serving a subset of their employee population. And one of the things that we've done in doing a multi-million dollar multi-year deal with them is not do a discounted by 90% giveaway all the users, but really being thoughtful about how we grow with them over the years. And when I look at that customer and how they started with us as, you know, a $5,000 or $6,000 customer years ago and where they are today, we're seeing that as an upward trajectory for many years to come. But the key driver there is there are still very nice, large populations who are not yet utilizing the Smartsheet platform. And the nice thing is once you have flight ops and the product teams using it, you have these examples and you can show these adjacent teams. And when you're speaking the language of that carrier, the likelihood of them having higher confidence and following suit, I would argue, goes up. That's what we've seen in our other very large accounts.

speaker
Steve

That's helpful, thank you. And just a quick follow-up, going back to the macro environment on the SMB side, any industries to call out that have remained more pressured or on the flip side have started to show some green shoots? Thanks.

speaker
Aaron

You know, I think the vertical focus What we've seen is we've seen good strength in sort of what I call the retail, the education vertical, and some of the gov. Obviously, gov's a pretty big quarter. Q3's a pretty big quarter for gov. And on the, what I call, where we've seen some level of what I call pressure, it's come in energy, utilities, tech, you know those are the vertical slices we've seen but in general across the smb we've seen you know really good logo growth all through the year that stayed consistent we have seen that pressure in smb expansions so just to make sure it's parsed out okay great thank you pete you're welcome chris

speaker
Operator

And that concludes today's presentation. I'd like to turn the call back over to Aaron Turner for any additional or closing remarks.

speaker
Aaron Turner

All right. Thanks, Lisa. And thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We'll speak with you again next quarter.

speaker
Operator

Thank you. That concludes today's presentation. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

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