So Smartsheet is the quiet giant in the productivity space
Asana, Trello, Monday, Airtable, etc. perhaps get more attention
But Smartsheet is at $400m ARR (!) growing a stunning 42% year-over-year!!
5 Interesting Learnings: ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️
#1. Very High NRR from SMBs. Smartsheet has a very impressive 123% NRR from SMBs.
They also nicely segment NRR by deal size, so you can see NRR grows to 140% from their largest enterprise customers:
#2. Driving deal size up accounts for a >lot< of their growth at scale.
Smartsheet has aggressively driven its ACV up from $3,643 in 2020 to $5,103 today. That’s a lot — 40% higher average deal sizes. This just about equals their ARR growth.
#3. 90% of customers pay annually — even SMBs
This is an interesting contrast to Zoom, which has seen its monthly invoicing grow to 50% of its $4B+ in ARR
It just shows perhaps there is no standard answer to how often SMBs should pay
#4. Their biggest customers are fueling the most growth. But that's new-ish.
Smartsheet, like PagerDuty, Asana, etc. waited a while to go “more enterprise”, but then leaned in
At IPO, Smartsheet was all about SMBs. Today, its fastest-growing customers are $100k+ deals:
#5. A big bet on $500k+ deals
Smartsheet’s next push is $500k+ deals at 10,000+ employee customers
The overall productivity space has plenty of room here, but it’s a different pace & feature set & it will be interesting to watch Smartsheet’s progress on the way to $1B in ARR.
Should you pay the same comp to folks, no matter where they work now? A complex topic.
But one thing is clear: the vast majority of sales leaders I've talked to are continuing to localize comp
Why? They always have. It's not new.
What is new is where the top AEs work
The common pattern pre-Covid was to build up your core, expensive AE team first in SF Bay Area
And then move at least SMB sales, SDRs, etc. to a lower cost center like Phoenix, Portland, Atlanta, Florida, etc.
But now, top AEs are scattered across U.S.
The short-term effect is that an AE in the Bay Area often makes more than an AE hitting the exact same quota in say Denver (to adjust for COL and competition)
But what will 2021/2022 bring?
There will be more pressure not to pay Bay Area AEs 20%+ more vs. closers anywhere else
1/ First, understand this is how VCs are taught and raised. The average Monday VC partner meeting is a bunch of subtle and not-too-subtle flexing around who has the hot companies. That’s where the power is. So you sort of learn to do this from Mom and Dad.
2/ As a VC, you yourself are just a number.
Your LPs know the numbers — and view you as a number. Many firms say “we don’t do attribution”, but everyone knows who sourced & closed the top deal(s)
And LPs figure it out and do their attribution analyses
So Salesforce just cruised past $24 Billion (!) in ARR & a $200B market cap, still growing 20% (!)
With 20% growth, it has to add $5B of new revenue each year. That's like 20 Unicorns!
5 Interesting Learnings: ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️
#1. Its Classic Sales/CRM Product is Now Just Its >Third< Largest Product
This trend has been true for a while, and now both its Service Cloud and its Platform group are bigger AND faster growing than the classic CRM product we all know and use
Amazingly, Salesforce is now more a Service Cloud company than a Sales Cloud / CRM company
Sales Cloud is just 20% of its revenue -- and going down.
A reminder you really need to add a 2nd product after $1B ARR