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SaaS Companies Must Launch Their Second Product by $10M ARR
“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.”
Standout 'wow' features can overcome vertical domain gaps for software entrants
“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…”
Samsara maintains generalist sales and product teams across verticals
“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.”
Patterson: Companies should scale one product fully before launching multi-product portfolio
“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…”
Seed New Multi-Product Rollouts With Top Sales Performers First
“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…”
Expanding Multi-Product Early via Adjacencies Accelerates Business Growth
“How going multi-product early through adjacencies can make a really big impact on the trajectory and growth of the business.”
Physical infrastructure is digitizing like enterprise IT did decades ago
“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…”
Samsara developed its entire product portfolio organically via customer conversations
“Everything we offer on the platform, we came up with organically through these customer conversations.”
87% of Samsara bookings now come from non-transportation verticals
“About, I think in the last earnings call, we talked about. 13% of our bookings were in transportation. 87%. The compliment was everything else.”
Companies should build adjacent products when 80% of customers request them
“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.”
Samsara focuses its go-to-market motion on operationally complex customers
“So what we decided is we're going to focus on people with complex operations.”
Samsara's biggest product is now AI driver safety coaching
“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.”
Essential operations insulate Samsara from macroeconomic tech downturns
“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…”
Operational fleet customers do not buy AI or chatbots directly
“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.”
Samsara's core telematics product generates over $500M ARR at 30% growth
“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%.”
Samsara's Top Product by Revenue Is Not Its Original Product
“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.”
Patterson: Samsara prioritizes live salesperson routing over automated speed-to-lead replies
“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…”
Patterson: New SaaS products require pipeline coverage up to 10x
“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…”
Patterson: Multi-product roadmaps must solve problems where single-platform ROI beats point solutions
“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…”
Patterson: Multi-product expansion requires reusing either the buyer or the product
“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…”
Patterson: Hardware gave Samsara early advantage in digitizing physical operations
“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?”
Patterson: Samsara packages hardware directly into ongoing recurring SaaS subscriptions
“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…”
Patterson: Samsara would have failed in Mexico without localized GTM
“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.”
Samsara Ingested 4.6T Data Points and 85B Video Minutes Last Year
“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…”
Samsara Closed Its First Post-IPO Quarter at Over $550M ARR
“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.”
Samsara Rejects Bespoke Customer Customizations in Favor of APIs
“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…”
Samsara Has Two Separate Products Generating Over $200M ARR Each
“We now have two products that are over two hundred million dollars in ARR each, both growing well.”
Sales Reps Resist Selling Unproven New Products Over Familiar Offerings
“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…”
Target Established Markets Needing 10x Solutions Rather Than Educating New Ones
“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 …”
Chasing Individual Deal Requests Creates Niche Features Lacking Broad Demand
“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 …”
Selling SaaS to Operations is Harder Because Operators Run Physical Facilities
“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…”
Sales Engineering Effectively Aggregates Scalable Product Feedback From Direct Sales
“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…”
Integrating Hardware Solves Problems Pure Software Cannot Address
“By integrating hardware with our solution, we make it possible to solve different types of problems than we could with software alone.”
Industrial IoT Sales Cycles Mirror Standard SaaS Benchmarks
“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,…”
Samsara Bundles Hardware Into Software Subscriptions Without Separate SKUs
“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,…”
Fragmented IoT Architectures Cost Millions and Fail Mainstream Operators
“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…”
Expand Product Lines Through Customer Adjacencies Rather Than Unfamiliar Segments
“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 …”
Product Leaders Must Build New Products When It Feels Premature
“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.”
Enterprise customers mix IBM AS/400 mainframes with modern robotics
“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.”
Most Samsara enterprise customers use three or more products
“Most of our customers today use multiple products. So they adopt two, actually three or more in the enterprise.”
Samsara began developing safety products at $10M to $20M in ARR
“So I think we started working on the safety products. We must've been somewhere around 20,000,010 to twenty million in ARR.”
Samsara cut a customer's $45M fuel bill by nearly $2M
“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.”
Samsara Has Over 1,500 Customers Paying $100K+ in ARR
“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.”
Half of Samsara's $1B ARR Comes From Sub-$100K Customers
“But about half of our ARR is still coming from sub-hundred K customers, which we think of as the mid-market, right?”
Transportation Accounts for About 20% of Samsara's $1B ARR
“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.”
Lemkin: Samsara hit growth low in Q2 2022 and re-accelerated for four quarters
“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?”
Lemkin: Samsara reported a lack of sales capacity and aggressive hiring
“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.”
Patterson: Samsara Generates 40% to 50% of First-Purchase Pipeline via Marketing
“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…”