Samsara

“The 4.6 trillion data points that we ingested last year eighty-five billion minutes of video footage, running AI on that to detect almost two and a half billion AI detections. We're processing billions of API calls as customers connect Samsara with other syste…”

“And something that's near and dear to my heart, Dorn Transfer, a mid-sized logistics company in the Midwest, they are taking 1400 tons of CO two out of the air every year and saving 500,000 dollars a year in the process By optimizing their fuel consumption.”

“Start with a small focused team, even if it's a small ADR team, generate leads that are really laser focused on a product to get the physics of the new product down, to iron out the kinks, to build the playbooks, then to build champions, right? Find the people…”

“We just reported our first first quarter as a public company a couple of weeks ago, closed the quarter at a little over five hundred and fifty million dollars in ARR, which was over 60% growth from a year before.”

“We knew that the world of operations was really big, you know, it's over a third of the global GDP.”

“We really try to not do any features or customizations that are going to be specific to one organization. We really try to find the patterns and when there's something that is one off, we always say, Hey, is there a way that we can build an API endpoint or bui…”

“We now have two products that are over two hundred million dollars in ARR each, both growing well.”

“Sales teams will want to sell the thing that is easy, that is, is, is easy for them, that is familiar, that's proven. And, you know, especially early on, it's harder to get sales mindshare in a brand new product where maybe the revenue impact or the ease of sa…”

“First is we actually put a button in every page of our dashboard. It's called the feedback button. It's on the bottom left side. And any user of the system can hit that button and give us a suggestion that basically captures the context of what they're doing i…”

“We would really seek out markets where there was an established industry where we didn't have to convince customers for the first time of the value of data or software or a particular solution, but then try to find areas where we saw an opportunity to deliver …”

“One is when we weren't disciplined about making sure we were looking for signal across a Broad pipeline. Could get into to deal chasing mode. Build something that we thought was really cool, and actually a customer thought was really cool, but then the broad …”

“Big difference, I think, between how IT departments bought, which is what we were selling in Meraki, and how operations buy us, which is how we're selling it at Samsara. I think first and foremost, operations departments are really busy operating. You know, in…”

“UFP Industries, a transportation logistics and lumber company, they are saving 600,000 dollars a year just by digitizing their paper processes and streamlining their administration.”

“We started working with some of our friends and family, contacts from Meraki, early customers from different industries, and really had a prototype that we were able to get in real users' hands in about a hundred days.”

“The sales engineering team actually ends up being a really valuable tool in being able to aggregate the feedback from sales, especially around feature or product requests, be able to find the patterns and bring them to our product team. And we found that inter…”

“By integrating hardware with our solution, we make it possible to solve different types of problems than we could with software alone.”

“How going multi-product early through adjacencies can make a really big impact on the trajectory and growth of the business.”

“In terms of sales cycle, interestingly enough, it ends up looking very similar To many other SaaS products, where a mid-market inside sales deal might be a 90 day, 90 day sales cycle, a small business might be a few weeks, and then an enterprise sale might be,…”

“And in fact, the way we sell our products today, we don't have a separate skew. There's a question about whether we have a separate sales team for hardware, same sales team. In fact, it's a single Let's say the license subscription. You buy a license for, say,…”

“We'd seen other companies try to build IOT data systems where you have one company building sensors, another providing connectivity, another providing the infrastructure and storage, and someone else building the applications on top. And then you pay an integr…”

“The second area was where We weren't working through adjacencies. If we tried to build products or features that were for entirely different customers, as opposed to asking our customers, what more can we do for you, and then using that to open up the door to …”

“And our revenue comes from five key applications on our platform. That we're delivering to over 14,000 customers.”

“I think, you know, as CPO, the thing that I need to be really disciplined about is to work on new products when it feels unnatural and premature.”

“So actually in our speed to lead at Samsara, We try to get a human in touch with them as quickly as possible. So our speed to lead isn't about sending an automated response. It's all about taking that lead in, understanding who they are, deduping that in our d…”

“Don't assume that the close rates that you have for your mature products will hold. I always plan for much higher pipe ratios for new products as we roll them out to ensure we're hitting those targets, even getting as high as 10 X or above, depending on the pr…”

“And finally, on your multi-product journey, be customer led, have them show you the problems that they need help solving, and then figure out which ones they would be better off getting from you from one company on one platform where you can deliver strong ROI…”

“Building a new product for a new buyer in the company was just as hard as starting a company all over again. We had the most success where we could build a product to sell into the same buyer that we already had a relationship that we were already working with…”

“Hardware created advantages for us, especially early on, because when we are looking at digitizing this world of physical operations, it's everything from what is the temperature in a truck, right?”

“So in charging for our hardware, we put it as part of a subscription. We make sure that our customers know We are giving you a service, and the hardware is one component of that to enable us to be able to give you a certain type of experience. Our customers ha…”

“When you add in new products, you start to section off time, resources, attention from that one product. So when I've talked to companies about this before, my guidance is try to go as far as you can with the one product first, before you start to build out an…”

“We have been able to generate an extraordinarily high amount of our first purchase pipeline through marketing, right? We've been able to generate 40, 50% depending on the segment that we are in, and then we're filling the rest of the bucket with outbound, with…”

“Now, physical operations companies make up 40% of the world's GDP.”

“We really saw how we would have failed if we had just assumed that what we were doing here in the U S would work in Mexico.”

“They hit it, actually, in Q-two of twenty-twenty-two, where this high flyer's growth sort of came down to earth. They stopped accelerating growth. But what happened the last four quarters? Slow re-acceleration, right?”

“They just, in their earnings last week, they said they don't have enough sales capacity now. They're hiring salespeople as fast as they can.”

“Our number one product by ARR was actually not our first product. It has overtaken our first product, and, you know, it's been incredibly impactful for customers.”

“And now we've got about 1500 customers paying us a hundred K or more. We have many dozens of customers paying us a million dollars or more.”

“But about half of our ARR is still coming from sub-hundred K customers, which we think of as the mid-market, right?”

“You know, people often say that at a billion in ARR, you really need your second product. I would argue that you need to start a hundred X earlier, right? Have your second product in market and scaling at ten million, and boy does it pay off.”

“Fast forward to a billion in ARR, so, 10,000 X the scale, and sure enough, we see transportation's just about 20% of our ARR.”

“I was at a customer last week. I literally saw an IBM AS 400 green screen system that they're still using to type in orders. Meanwhile, I pivoted like 20 feet and there's a warehouse robotic system that's like state of the art.”

“So we built this dash camera, we ended up putting AI in it. And what originally I was doing, this is. 2018, 2019 was detecting mobile phone use. What while, while you're driving.”

“And it's just the size and scale, the infrastructure that runs the planet. So then consumers, you got businesses, you also just have this world of infrastructure, which, like I was saying, it's utilities, it's the roads, it's all of this other stuff that's beh…”

“Most of our customers today use multiple products. So they adopt two, actually three or more in the enterprise.”

“The key though for us has been have a couple of wow features that The market has just never seen. So whether it's real time tracking or AI in the camera or apps, there would just be things that legacy player was just, it wasn't on the roadmap even. And we just…”

“Everything we offer on the platform, we came up with organically through these customer conversations.”

“About, I think in the last earnings call, we talked about. 13% of our bookings were in transportation. 87%. The compliment was everything else.”

“So I think we started working on the safety products. We must've been somewhere around 20,000,010 to twenty million in ARR.”

“Once you start hearing like 80% of customers are interested in something, you should probably do it. Like it really is a good sort of adjacent fit.”

“So what we decided is we're going to focus on people with complex operations.”

“Our biggest product now is a driver safety coaching product that uses cameras and AI to basically help break risk, prevent risky things from happening on the road. That was not in the cards when we started the company.”

“Met a customer last week, forty-five million dollars of fuel spend a year. That's a really big gas bill. And we cut it down by almost two million dollars as a byproduct of another program they were running with us.”

“No, it's very consistent because if you think about who these folks are, it's the folks picking up your trash, delivering food to the grocery store, running the electric utility. These are essential services. So they're just constant, right? They're just runni…”

“We never specialized the sales team and we never specialized the product teams, except for public sector. Public sector has a different buying cycle, right? And they have like different contracts. So government sales is a little different for us.”

“Our customers do not go shopping for AI and GPT-IV enabled bots. Like that's just not their world or their language. What they are trying to figure out is how to reduce risk on the road.”

“And if I step back and I look at the telematics product, which was number one, it's over five hundred million in ARR. It's growing north of 30%.”