3 Lessons from Building a Marketing Engine to Grow Pipeline from Millions to Billions | Samsara CMO

Sarah Patterson, CMO of Samsara, shares how to scale marketing from millions to billions in pipeline. Respond to leads in under 5 minutes and you get 100x higher conversion. Test product-market fit in a single market before expanding to new geographies, and plan for 10x higher pipeline coverage when launching new products.
Questions this video answers
2015.
$724 million ARR (reported as of earnings the week of the talk).
2008–2021.
Sarah joined Samsara in 2021; Samsara went public in December (one year before the talk).
Director level.
Chapters
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 Samsarids around the world? Are we going to help them do their job? 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. Thank you, Charlotte. Hi everybody, I'm Sarah Patterson and I'm excited to be kicking off our time at Saastr 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. Their other hobbies I always get asked about are currently destroying our house by playing indoor soccer. 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 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 the company's customer service product line called service CL 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 on site 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 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 results result of that is that we reached 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 for 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 customer's 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 at 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. Align 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 and you're being curious with what messages are resonating with your customers. Tools like GONG help you get great insights. 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 or 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, you've been 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 US 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 US 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 are 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 used 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 U.S. 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 US 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 or 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 onto our third lesson, the journey to multi product. 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. At Samsara, we started by solving the one problem our customers had around needing 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 are launching a new company. Figure out who you can work with, who is open to revving with you and who is 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 in 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. All Right. So if everyone has questions, please drop them into the Q and A icon on the bottom. Looks like we have from Harold so far. Sarah, outside of transportation, what other use cases does Samsara currently have or plan to have?
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, there's oil and gas, public utilities companies like your local utility provider. On top of that, we serve public sector. 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 Mo. He says thank you. Sarah, great talk. Any recommendations on tools you have in a marketing stack for a B2B SaaS startup?
Oh, there are so many in this 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 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 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. Zapier 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 to 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 rates? How are you taking a look in a dynamic real time way at 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 Vizzes that I spend a lot of time in, 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. Jake says, great talk. How do you set expectations with sales when they burn through marketing pipe without a sales process?
I find that data is your best friend here. Right. So that all comes back to 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 show 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. We have lost our opportunity and our chance are at bat with them for potentially a couple of years, if not longer. What is the cost of that to our business that lost ACV and revenue?
Okay, awesome. All right, lots more questions here. Let's see here. 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 director level.
Okay, thanks for sharing that. Another one we have is from Imre. 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. 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% depending on the segment 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 are 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 is a known universe in there right. Of those enterprise companies. And so as you start to bring them on board, 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. 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 ratio are going to be for your teams.
Thank you. Okay, question from Saeed. Any advice for SaaS companies with no touch sales models but some ad marketing campaigns.
Oh for no touch sales models. 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, help get people started and really we're 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, 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, 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. Next question here is you mentioned both Samsara and Meraki were multi product focus 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? 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. 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. Another question came through. How do you overcome the hardware disadvantages in the SaaS ecosystem? Did hardware also create advantages for you?
Great question and sounds like somebody who knows our business. 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, Cowgirl Creamery, where a shipment of their cheese was refused by a local supermarket because, shockingly, there was a heat wave in San Francisco. 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 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 2020 15. We have been able to see and set benchmarks for our customers around for specific companies and 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 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. All right, the next question is SAMSARA has defined 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 and 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. All right, we are still getting a lot of questions here. I love this. Okay, Let's see. This says, what are some of the most impactful things Samsara has done to build relationships with existing customers?
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, 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.
Yep, yep, I hear you. And I think you bring up such a good point with the in person, you know, time being so valuable. So that's a great point. 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 de duping that in our database to say, is this an existing account where we can put them in touch with someone who already knows them 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 from see Hasanis 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, 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 operation. 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. 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. 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 IM chat. Those are Two great ways that a lot of companies have put out their chatbots right. On their website that can immediately then route a lead into a person. There's other companies where they put phone numbers 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. Exactly.
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, I'll give people another few seconds to submit any other questions they might have. We have about five minutes left if we need to use some more time here. Let's do this question. Samsara plays 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. 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 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.










