Streamline Your Construction Projects with Product Pipeline Management for Construction Industry

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foreign you can say what you do but you really have to get to why it matters they're the businesses that keep the economy running I see so many similarities in samsara to where Salesforce was when I joined there's so much unmet need it's taking one killer product and then creating a platform it's going into a whole world that hasn't been transformed and transforming it we are digitally transforming companies Industries our products can help to leave the world a better place being able to actually take data in and make it actionable we've got so much runway ahead of us the customer stories that we can bring to life if you can be real then people remember it they remember how you make them feel how is this going to land with all the samsaris around the world are we going to help them do their jobs better are we going to make an impact motivate everyone explain the huge opportunity we have to help people in the world that's what I think about [Music] thank you Charlotte hi everybody I'm Sarah Patterson and I'm excited to be kicking off our time at saster today so first a little bit about me I am originally from Boston I'm a Massachusetts native but I live here in San Francisco now and I am the mom to two incredible kids you can see us actually in the bottom right corner here this picture was from our Halloween we had two skeletons and two rainbow unicorns going trick-or-treating in the city so when the kids aren't playing dress-up there are other Hobbies I always get asked about are currently destroying our house by playing indoor soccer yes that's right indoor soccer and we do not have a big space and baking everything from chocolate brownies to lemon and banana bread definitely feeding uh all of the things that we have learned about in more of this work from anywhere world my other day job besides being a mom to these two is being CMO at samsara and before coming over to samsara I was at Salesforce from 2008 until 2021. while there I helped launch several products and scaled company's customer service product line called service cloud from under 700 million in ARR to over 5 billion in Revenue when I left I joined samsara in 2021 as CMO and I helped take the company public a year ago in December here you can see a picture of me and some of my marketing leadership team from a few weeks back we were getting together to do an onsite at our office one of the other passions I have is making sure that we incorporate time to give back into everything we do so here we spend time writing cards for hospitalized kids if anybody is looking for any type of a VTO activity to do during this holiday season I highly suggest doing this one all right so a little bit about samsara the company was founded in 2015. we make telematics and safety devices for physical operations companies now physical operations companies make up 40 of the world's GDP these businesses Encompass everything from utilities companies to field service construction and transportation and warehousing businesses they truly are the companies that keep the world running and our products help these companies make their businesses safer more efficient and sustainable which is solving a huge unmet need in the world and it's been incredible to work at a company where we can have an impact on people's lives and the world but more importantly right that need in the market is one of the reasons why we have been able to scale why we have been able to get out there and get our products to help so many people the result of that is that we reach 724 million in ARR as of our earnings last week I've seen rapid scale and growth here at samsara and also at Salesforce and I'm excited to share the lessons I've learned on how to build a marketing engine to grow pipeline from Millions to billions now the first lesson here I have found is all about speed to lead to build pipelines from Millions to tens of millions and Beyond you need to start with a strong Foundation and that all starts with building the right way to get in front of your prospects and connect with them quickly and the first step here is just getting a prospect interested in talking to you that all starts with knowing your audience this is the age-old marketing guide right research your customer get to know who they are and what problems they are trying to solve but I often get asked the question of great I know about my customer I know what problems they have now what how do you show a customer that you truly know them I simply see this as speak their language reflect your Cuts your customers world back to them through messaging use their acronyms the way they talk about their problems and then show their world back to them through images on your website and your marketing materials and finally show them value make sure that you can highlight the value you drive for them in your materials it's not just about speeds and feeds it's about the benefit that they're going to get from using your product and the impact that that will have for their business and their customers now once you have their attention and they want to talk to you how fast is fast enough to get back to them I want everyone here to stop and take a minute think through how long does it take for your team to get back to a potential customer when they reach out to you hopefully you all know the answer to this and if you don't this is your homework for after this session go and actually sample that customer experience and see what it is the average time for B2B companies to respond to a lead is two days that's 48 Hours think of all that can happen in that time and if you think that your prospect isn't checking out your competitors products their website when they reach out to you you're wrong now how much do you need to focus on speed to lead how important is this well the faster you can get in touch with a prospect the more likely you are to convert them and in fact from an hbr study they found businesses who respond to leads in less than five minutes are 100 times more likely to connect and convert them into opportunities it is absolutely crucial that you invest in getting this right early on because it only becomes harder to put in this infrastructure as you scale so what are some tips for building this out the right way the first time so the first one that I have is follow the lead a marketer's job doesn't stop when a lead comes in track how long it takes for leads to be routed to your sales team and followed up on if it takes hours or days you need to fix your process and there are ways that you can make this better quickly lead scoring know which of your leads are your best converting leads and let your sales teams know we as samsara we send alerts to our sales teams based on the type of leads that come in and we ping them when they haven't responded to what we know are our highest value leads that they need to get back to quickly knowing what your top leads are and making sure that you have an SLA with your ADR team to follow up on them is key to driving more sales the second piece here is prep your sales team the more tightly aligned you can be across what your sales teams are saying with what you are putting out in your messaging the better your outcome it's connecting this into a seamless experience so let your teams know what campaigns you're running what values and benefits your showcase and how they can continue the conversation with those customers and keep in mind that this experience doesn't stop with your sales teams aligned with your customer success and your renewals teams this becomes increasingly important as you think about cross-sells and upsells and making sure that you are driving a seamless experience for your customers all across your company number three build your marketing stack this is crucial to scaling it's not all on you and your team to drive this with manual processes there are a number of tools that are out there on the market that can help you follow up on leads faster a strong stack will be one that will help you to prioritize the leads to follow up on to Route them quickly to your sales team and that enables you to reach out with the right conversation that's serving that information up to your AE so that they know what to say when they get on the phone with that customer also make sure that you know when you're being curious with what messages are resonating with your customers tools like gong help you get great insights into what questions your prospects are asking on calls and how your sales teams are responding you can also use that to listen in and borrow best practices from your top performing reps and build that into your marketing a strong feedback loop is absolutely critical all right number four test measure and iterate when starting anything test it out first whether it is a new tool a new message or a new tactic develop your hypothesis test it out and then focus on scaling what works best I've seen many companies that I've talked to are advised run into trouble when implementing a really costly And Timely process without testing it out to see if it actually works for them for the way their sales teams are set up for what their customers need they over engineer something that isn't going to work for them in the long run and they waste valuable time so to test and measure what do you need to do I always say build the right dashboards to measure what matters strong measurement is going to help you focus on what is truly driving business results and help you make objective decisions and finally when you know something is working that's when you invest in scaling scaling and the tools to help you grow capacity without needing to add new heads to do every single process over and over that is huge for growing your pipeline efficiently all right the second lesson here is all about scale after building your foundation and tackling your primary Market even scaling your pipe now to get to the next stage I'm often asked by companies when should they begin expanding into new geographies and how should they start to approach this well finding the right time to expand internationally is difficult and it's important to think through how to do this strategically if you expand too quickly you can spread yourself too thin to be able to scale effectively having a framework for how you enter new GEOS can help you now at samsara we operate in the U.S in Canada Mexico and Europe choosing when and how to expand into each country we've had a number of strategies and Lessons Learned along the way I want to take you through a case study of how we expanded into Mexico and share our best practices from this now for us our telematics and Safety Products found a huge Market here in the U.S our telematics products for those of you who don't know what they are they help us measure what's happening in a vehicle when it's driving how fast it's driving whether something is going on in the vehicle that the driver needs to be aware of our Safety Products our cameras that we can use to detect if something is happening on the road or in the vehicle that could cause an accident and then we alert the driver in real time now while these products were really successful in the US we knew that there were differences in Mexico everything from traffic patterns speed limits to Simply would people be open to having these products in their vehicles there's a lot of cultural differences we wanted to test out if we had the right product Market fit before going in with a big investment so we started small from the marketing side we took a person from our us team who knew this product in and out and who also spoke the local language we had that person spend time in the market understanding what customers needed and also how they made their purchasing decisions we use that intelligence to start to form a marketing plan starting with our messaging our product marketing and testing out different lead gen channels to see what would work for us we looked at how we could support that work from the US team this was another important lesson that we had we carved out a bit of time from some rock stars on our us team where we said hey this will be a great growth opportunity for you to go in there open up your mindset and say I want to go in and see do the methodologies we use here in the US work are there different ways that we need to approach this Market in order to help be able to scale so what worked first the customer insights were absolutely key there were nuances in the market that we didn't realize around what customers cared about that we needed to change in our product and then really be able to Showcase in our positioning that positioning fed into all of our content we couldn't just take and localize the content that we had here in the us if we had done that the content wouldn't have resonated in the market so we took all of that feedback in we repositioned ourselves we fed it into our content our messaging and even in the way that we were targeting and engaging customers in our sales process all through this 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 so once we had that down once we had the right product fit and we saw the repeated success in our go to market motion we knew it was time to invest that's when we started expanding and building out a local team bringing in folks who had more expertise on the ground to help us reach that next level of scale now expanding globally is key to Growing your pipe but the main lesson here is be sure to do so in a smart way start by evaluating the market is the opportunity big enough what does the competitive landscape look like then check your product Market fit your product may be perfect in one region but not in another don't assume that your product works the same everywhere understand what those Market nuances are and then finally bring that into your marketing motion and understand do your customers act the same way in these new markets are there different ways that you need to Market to them are there different features you need to call out different benefits of your products maybe those customers also rely on other ways to get information maybe they rely on Partners to tell them about what products to use versus figuring it out for themselves maybe there's a Consortium an industry Consortium you need to be a part of above all be curious that's the way that you're going to have success so that you can figure out what to do when you enter into new GEOS and finally when you figure out what you can scale with the people and skills that you have be cautious until you know you have the recipe for Success down and then you can amplify it by adding in more people and more budget now on to our third lesson the journey to multi-products almost every company that I have talked to that's looking to scale to hundreds of millions to billions looks at how to add new products into their mix the first step and this is a basic lesson but it is worth repeating help customers be successful with your first product if they're not successful with that product they're not going to see the value of working with you and they're not going to buy anything else from you after you have that strong motion for how to bring your customers along and help them be successful it comes down to figuring out Simply what other problems you can solve for them we started by solving the one problem our customers had around leading telematics in their vehicles as we kept working with our customers they started telling us about other problems they needed help with this became our samsara customer feedback loop and this was how we started building out our roadmap for new products and along the way we had a few Lessons Learned on how to scale our marketing to support this first 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 or where we could take our existing product and sell it in to a new buyer within that same company now this all makes sense of course right it was one of those ones that was difficult in hindsight we were getting told by our customers we've got this really big problem over here go help us focus on it for us and we did that in a couple of instances and found that when we were building the relationship with those new buyers around a new product internally we had less to rely on in terms of messaging in terms of marketing collateral in terms of the right sales motion so really making sure that you're focusing in on which problem you solve first to be able to get scale is absolutely critical and of course look for where there's a big Market opportunity this helps you make sure that you get enough Runway out of your investment you could build an incredible product but if there are only 10 buyers in the world for it you have to figure out if it's worth the investment so when listening to your customers make sure that you're taking those insights and testing them across the board with all of your other customers to see is the problem that they are trying to solve the same how scalable and repeatable is that motion for you I also find that looking for product areas where you can show a really strong Roi from buying multiple products on the same platform from the same company is key I find that Roi and metrics driven marketing is a great way to showcase the value that you are delivering to your customers and to build pipe quickly especially in an environment where people are having to justify everything they're spending money on show them how you impact their bottom line help them sell this internally second when figuring out which customers to work with on new products it is just the same as when you were launching a new company figure out who you can work with who is open to revving with you and it was okay if they're helping to debug the product with you as you're building it finding those early adopters who are interested in being in on the ground floor with you is key and this is important on the product side but also on the marketing side for marketing these are your Advocates the people that you're going to use as marketing references at events in webinars in your marketing collateral make sure you are giving them a great experience and set their expectations up front about what they are going to get from working with you and finally think about pipe coverage when launching new products rethink all of the metrics that you are going to use to measure success 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 10x or above depending on the product and the market so that is how you can help scale a business and as you all know this is a hard journey but it is also really rewarding my biggest takeaways from my time at samsar and Salesforce are to really focus on these three things first build a strong Foundation really narrowing in on building the right way for Speed to lead so that you can get to your prospect first before the competition this sets you up with a strong Foundation to build from as you scale your business second when expanding globally get local knowledge but Global leverage get on the ground be curious understand everything about the customer and question any assumptions that you are making when you're entering into those new markets once you've figured out your motion for success in that market that's when you can scale your marketing with more people with more budget 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 for them and when launching products build pipe be realistic that you need a cushion to hit your growth goals and most of all my biggest learning from this is enjoy the ride this world of scaling is really challenging but extraordinarily fulfilling with that thank you all for your time and I'd love to open it up to questions all right thank you so much Sarah um all right so if everyone has questions please drop them into the Q a icon on the bottom looks like we have one from Harold so far um Sarah outside of Transportation what other use cases does simsara currently have or plan to have uh so we serve a huge swath of companies across a number of Industries in the world of physical operations right so if you think about there's Transportation there's construction companies with machines on construction sites um there's oil and gas Public Utilities um companies like your local utility provider on top of that we serve public sector um I've gone out and visited different Departments of Public Works where we're helping with the different Services where people are coming around they're keeping your streets clean they're picking up the trash that you put out every week they are fixing what you need fixed in the cities that you live in so all of that those are the industries that we're serving across the board amazing okay thank you for that response we have another one from Belle um he says thank you Sarah great talk any recommendations on tools you have in a marketing stack or a B2B SAS startup oh there are so many in this um I look through and in our marketing stack there's pieces around how are you reaching out and engaging your customers what are email marketing tools that you're using there's ones like Salesforce has email marketing Adobe has Marketo iterable is another great product to get out there anything where you can take the data that you have in your CRM and you can segment it and then get your specific message out to those um specific individuals your CRM is absolutely critical for you not just which one you have but how it integrates with the rest of your marketing stack based on what you need to do what types of messages you need to send out and I always like to stress your CRM is only as good as the data that you put in there there's other great tools that can help you to automate different workflows Xavier is one that comes to mind and then on top of that I mentioned gong right a tool where you can really listen in to what your sales teams are pitching to your customers what the response is that helps you to refine your marketing message so there are a ton of great products out there hopefully as you're building your stack the way I like to think about it is identify the biggest problems that you're going to have go out there run an RFP see who else is using those products are they going to fit the needs you have today and are they going to scale to where you need to get to in the next two years if you spend a lot of time implementing something that only works for the problems you have today and you're not anticipating where your business is going to be you're going to end up needing to redo all of that work in a couple of years and that is going to be absolutely painful and then the last thing I'll say analytics how are you measuring your website traffic how are you measuring your conversion raise how are you taking a look in a dynamic real-time way and all of the pipe that you're driving in what stage of opportunity it's getting to and where it's getting stuck so tools like I have great Tableau dashboards and visits that I spend a lot of time in um check out and see what are those different tools that you're using to measure your web traffic and to measure all of your opportunities awesome thank you all right we're getting a lot of questions now um Jake says great talk uh how do you set expectations with sales when they burn through marketing pipe without a sales process um I find that data is your best friend here right so that all comes back to if you were if they're burning through pipe and they are not converting it they don't have the right sales process what's your customer acquisition cost how much are you going out and spending and how many leads are then falling out of your bucket so I showed the Journey Back Again to the data that you have I show how that's increasing our cost to bring in new customers because we are not converting those leads that we already have and then really showcase the value of hey we've lost this deal to potentially this competitor it we have lost our opportunity and our chance are at bat with them for potentially a custom couple of years if not longer what is the cost of that to our business that lost ACV and Revenue okay awesome um all right lots more questions here um let's see here uh when you expanded to a local MX marketing leader at what level did you hire c-suite VP director manager things like that great question we hired in a really strong fantastic director level individual in our Mexico team and she's been able to build the team up in region really focusing on which of the functions do we need to have in the local market and then where can she tap into a center of excellence or shared service that we have in our headquarters team to help her scale and negotiate all of those different conversations but we went for a director level okay thanks for sharing that um another one we have is from imray what is the ratio between marketing and inbound Source leads and outbound Source leads and out in samsara ah so this I find varies by product line um it varies by product line I have found that this varies in terms of maturity across different businesses so given we have been a newer company 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 percent depending on the segments that we are in and then we're filling the rest of the bucket with outbound with Partners right with AE generated pipe with upsell and cross-sell at Salesforce as the company matured more and got more into Enterprise part of this is thinking about who you're going after who you're targeting if your business is targeting Enterprise companies and you're not going into a bigger mid-market area think about the fact that there's a known universe in there right of those Enterprise companies and so as you start to bring them on board um I often say to people it's not like another Fortune 10 company pops up overnight those companies have been around for a long time and in the making for a long time um so you can take my numbers in as just one gauge but you really need to take a look at your business who you are targeting to figure out what the right ratios are going to be for your teams thank you okay question from Syed any advice for SAS companies with no touch sales models but some ad marketing campaigns oh for no touch sales models um back in the day at Salesforce I worked a lot around how to basically ensure that our ADR teams at Salesforce were not answering a lot of questions to help get people started um and really were able to focus more on just answering the questions to help people evaluate whether the tool was the right one for them the work we went through was trying to have the best knowledge database possible for our customers and that's what we have seen work the best in a self-service model when a customer is going out there you need to understand what their journey is what questions they're going to have and you need to orchestrate that so that they can find those answers along the way on their own and remove any friction that you have from that process so your tooling your stack um the speed of that right all are things that you need to focus on and those are all tips thank you okay that makes sense um next question here is you mentioned both samsara and Meraki were multi-product focused from an early stage how early should companies start thinking about multi-product expansion great question this comes back to what is your Market opportunity um if you have one product you should be getting out there with that one product and really ensuring that you are able to scale it effectively and to continue that growth 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 and expand your product portfolio with multiple products um the more you can do that the more synergies you get across your business and the more economies of scale so that's not a direct answer of giving you this time it really depends on how you were able to scale with that one product but I would really try to push yourself to go as long as possible on that one product before starting to add in others okay thank you um another question came through how do you overcome the hardware disadvantages in the SAS ecosystem did Hardware also create advantages for you great question and it sounds like somebody who knows our business um for us 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 we had an early customer Cal girl Creamery where a shipment of their cheese was refused by a local supermarket because shockingly there was a heat wave in San Francisco it doesn't happen often but the store said there's no way that this cheese these products have been stored at the right temperature I don't want to take that on if this is all about to go bad that data of finding out what temperature that truck was at um throughout that heat wave was something that was impossible to get early on without having a physical Hardware product so we had this Advantage by having the hardware product to be able to get that information out the benefit of this is that we have been scaling and collecting this data now at samsar since 2015. we have been able to see and set benchmarks for our customers around for specific companies in specific Industries what are ways that they can increase their safety what are benchmarks that they should have because we have all of that data on one platform and so the scale that we've been able to get to with the data we have from those products has just been paying off exponentially for us and that has been a great Advantage for us through our business thank you love an example that involves Cowgirl Creamery um all right the next question is samsara has to find core customers as 5K and up with 100K plus being the big growth engine how do you allocate resources to non-core customers are they still brand ambassadors so we take a look at how we can serve our customers based on their needs right so we take a look at what are the needs of different customers and how do we go and meet those needs that for samsara and that for Salesforce was always the way that I feel companies should be addressing those different needs different companies of different sizes have different problems that they're trying to solve so I don't see it as taking a percentage of people's time or budget I see it as making sure that you as a company are understanding what your customer needs from you and then figuring out the most efficient way to go and to be able to serve those needs okay excellent that makes sense um all right we are still getting a lot of questions here I love this um let's see this says what are some of the most impactful things samsara has done to build relationships with existing customers hmm great question so first it goes back to what I was talking about around help your customer be successful really be a partner to them get into their business and help make sure that your product is hitting their need what customers have told us is they love the fact that we go on site that we spend time with them understanding truly what they're going through on a day-to-day basis and if something isn't working for them we help adjust that right so first and foremost I see it as really get in there help understand what a customer needs and then be able to solve that from there you can scale out to helping them solve all sorts of other problems that they have in their business as they start to come up but really putting on your hat to be curious about what your customer needs being open to partner partnering with them is truly a key to success for any business customer first mentality yeah yeah I hear you and I think you bring up such a good point with the in person um you know time being so valuable so that's a great Point um next question is you mentioned the speed to lead and how often you use automated software to get responses out fast to prospective clients at what point do you bring in the human touch of a sales team member versus that automated sales messaging 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 database to say is this an existing account where we can put them in touch with someone who already knows them or is this somebody new where we can put them in touch with somebody else we want to give them that personalized experience and then getting it to an AE to a salesperson as quickly as possible who can call them up who can get on the phone with them and talk to them and answer their question so that is all of our our speed to lead it truly is about trying to make that human connection as quickly as possible okay wonderful all right I think we have time for just a few more questions here we have one that came in uh from C hassanists says did you encounter did you encounter with any difficulty for charging the hardware as recurring Revenue especially in Mexico if your answer is yes how did you overcome this 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 have been really receptive to this they love the fact that we are showing them the value that they are going to get out of that product and that that product is not just about putting a device into their vehicle right into their operations it's truly about the ongoing value so once customers once we've explained that to them we have not had issues with them saying that they do not like the fact that we are really just taking that hardware and making it a part of their ongoing subscription they love the fact that we are really showing we are in it for the long term by having a subscription pricing with them to show that it is a partnership on delivering value got it okay thank you all right I think we have time for one more um so let's see here can we ever get to the point where a lead can immediately talk to sales or close to it when we call small businesses someone picks up the phone and helps can we ever get here with sales prospects don't always want to wait great question so there's lots of ways that companies do do this and it depends on what is the way that somebody wants to talk to you um for me personally when I want to reach out and talk to someone I often don't want to talk to them on the phone because I am a busy working mom trying to get in touch with people while multitasking many things my preferred way of getting in touch with someone is text or I am chat those are two great ways that a lot of companies have put out their chat Bots right or on their website that can immediately then route a lead into a person there's other companies where they put phone numbers um onto their site so that someone can call in and talk to a person those are other ways that I have seen a lot of companies really try to make that connection for their customers but again it all goes back to what can you support and what are you able to deliver to your customers if you put that phone number out there are you always going to have somebody on the other end of the line that is going to pick up and that is going to be able to answer their questions thinking through that whole interaction is what's ultimately most important yeah that's a really good point you can only do so much but then you have to make sure you have the other resources and bandwidth to be able to follow that way make sure you deliver on those promises that you're putting out there to your customers so that they know they can rely on you for their business yep exactly okay um I'll give people another few seconds to submit any other questions they might have you have about five minutes left if we need to to use some more time here uh let's do this question uh samsara please in many industries from transportation to wholesale to energy to Logistics to food and beverage how do you Market to so many Industries at once each has its own events Partners channels Etc so how do you manage that is a there's so many pieces to that question it's a great one um when getting out there and when starting you have to figure out for your business do you have a message that you can start with that works across lots of Industries or when do you get out and start to customize it for each industry that you're getting into the more horizontal you can be up front the more scale you get right the way that we do it is we build out we've got industry focuses we take a look at which Industries where we've got the best product fit with our product and we go out there and we take a look at which industry trade shows do we want to go to we put up industry pages on our website to show those customers we're speaking their language and we also get into not just the industry Focus but the sub industry right there are a lot of different nuances based on all sorts of sub-industries and that is an important lesson that I learned from Salesforce and that we are leaning on here at samsara which is don't assume that you can speak to everybody in One industry in one way the problems are different the value you're providing is different the product features that they might need to use could be different but you really need to focus and not spread yourself too thin and think through the right way to build and deliver that content to your customers foreign [Music]