1) Sales Leadership
-In sales, some of the front line and skip level leadership is awesome, some are horrible.
-Over the last 3/6 months, most of the good leaders have been forced out or chosen to leave on their own. With a few exceptions, those still left
- new sales leadership at the upper levels is horrible. Unrealistic expectation, do not care about their employees, do not understand the product or the market, running old tired playbooks that failed at their prior companies
2) Sales Peers
- The majority of good, smart, successful AEs have left the company over the last 3-6 months. Huge departure in talent has hurt culture and institutional knowledge.
3) Pricing Model Changes & Customer Churn
-Smartsheet recently changed their pricing model. For most customers this means they are being hit with 20-70% price increases for the same product with the same product and no additional value. This is leading to a ton of churn. On top of that, AEs now have a net retention metric added into their comp plans.
-the backend tools that calculate new product cost for customers are broken, leading to overcharging customers event more than the planned hikes (in some cases as much as a 400% price hike. Leadership has had to back off forcing the largest customer to migrate to new pricing model for fear of churn, but is still full speed ahead with the knowingly broken model for non Large Enterprise customers.
4) Private Equity Sale
-Private Equity bought the company and delisted it from the public stock exchange.
-no More RSUs as part of comp package, comp was not adjusted to make up the difference.
-even when RSUs were still being awarded, below average comp by industry standards.
5) Product
-Product is directionless and has fallen behind
-competitors caught up to Smartsheets product offering about 2 years ago and have slowly but surely been chipping away at Smartsheets marketshare.
-smartsheet is now outdated, more expensive, harder to use, has more difficult customer onboarding, and is inferior to several other competitors. Customers are taking note. Harder to land new business, churn from existing customers is way up
-Product leadership has been hallowed out. The leadership left has no vision and is just trying to keep the lights on.
-product has not shipped new impactful features in months
