Upsales Technology AB

STO:UPSALE

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q1

[Daniel Wikberg, executive]

Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining the Upsales Technology earnings call for the first quarter. My name is Daniel Wikberg. I am the CEO and Founder of Upsales. And today, I'm joined by my colleague, Elin Lundström, who is the CFO. And together, we will be doing a presentation of Upsales together with the financials from the first quarter. [Operator Instructions]. And we will answer all questions at the end of the presentation.So today's agenda, I will do a presentation of Upsales together with an update on the growth initiatives and also an update on what we're doing in the product, on the product side. And then Elin will do a summary of the financials from Q1, and we will end with the Q&A. So introducing Upsales. So the problem we want to solve at Upsales is helping B2B companies succeed with sales. So sales is the #1 reason why B2B businesses fail. So all companies, all start-ups, with very few exceptions, start with great ambitions with a great plan and typically an ambitious growth plan in terms of growing revenues. But in reality, if you look at the data of the companies founded 10 years ago, only 9% ever reach a revenue of more than SEK 10 million. And the reason is always the lack of sales. So people usually talk about strategy and competition and product. But when looking at the data, when looking at the studies that have been done, sales is the #1 reason why these businesses don't grow.So we are in the business of helping companies to succeed with their sales efforts. We're a software company, and we build tools to help businesses become a revenue engine. The company was founded in 2003. We currently have an annual recurring revenue of around SEK 136 million. And we are a SaaS company. So 94% of revenue is recurring revenue, license revenue. So we do very little services or consulting services. We have always been a bootstrap company. So we don't have any debt. We're a net cash company with almost SEK 60 million in cash.The company is still around 42% management owned. And the last 12 months, we have an EBITDA margin of 28.5%. So briefly talking about what are the problems we want to solve for our customers. So the first one is helping companies to find new opportunities to fill the pipeline to generate leads. We do this in several ways, one of which is giving our customers data about existing and new customers to enable them to be data-driven when identifying potential customers. Another example is helping customers to use marketing to build a more scalable selling process and to reduce cost of sales.The second area we focus on is pipeline management and forecasting. So in this area, we build tools to enable customers to become more structured and data-driven when managing the deals they have in their pipeline. And we also help sales managers to understand -- to better understand the pipeline as a whole for the company and to create better forecasts.The third area is growing existing accounts and finding Upsale revenue within the existing customer base. So one example you see on the screen here is helping companies understand which are the accounts that have bought one product but where the data suggests that there should be a prospect for another product. So in this example, we use the existing data our customers have in their ERP system, in their invoicing history, and we create this report and other kinds of reports to help them focus on where the most promising opportunities lie within the existing customer base.And the final area is kind of tying it all together, helping management, sales management and the CEO as well to analyze important sales and marketing KPIs to understand are we keeping a high enough pace, which are the customer segments we should be focusing on, how does the forecast look like and so on. So this area is mostly based on different kind of reports and analytics services.So talking a little bit about our positioning and how we win against the competition because, of course, we're not alone in this space, in the CRM and marketing automation space, there are a lot of other providers of software. So the way we win is first, by focusing on a clear niche. So we try to focus our efforts on Nordic medium-sized B2B organizations. And we help these customers by solving the specific use cases that are most relevant for these customers. So some examples of this is we have the best integrations towards the local, the most common local ERP providers in the Nordics, we have a lot of local data such as financial data and demographic data about companies in the Nordics. And these typically are use cases that are international competitors don't really focus on because Sweden and the Nordics is a very small market from a global perspective.And the third area, which is very appreciated by our customers is that most of our competition work through a channel, and they use partners to do the implementation and help customers get started using the software. And we think it's better to provide a software together with the necessary services helping customers to get the value they need out of the product because this is typically the problem. If you look at customers who have bought the CRM and you talk to them after a year or 2, a lot of them don't really get started, and they don't really get the value they wanted when they bought the software. And we think that this is because the partner who is traditionally in the case of our competition doing the implementation is not really aligned with the customer. The partner wants to sell a big project, a big consulting project, and in the case of Upsales, the alignment is very clear because we don't want to build a consulting business. We just want to solve the problems our customers have. So this is highly appreciated by our customers.I talked a little bit about this, but especially now, these days, when more companies are looking at their costs, and they want to -- they need to have something to improve sales because sales is more important in a tougher market, but they don't want to spend 2 years and several millions of kroners on a consulting project, working with a provider like Upsales is very attractive, especially for medium-sized businesses. So when we look at the market and the competition, this is usually how I describe it. So if you do a Google search for CRM or marketing automation, you will get thousands and thousands of hits on Google. Most of these providers provide a very simple solution that solves very few problems. So these are great software if you are a 5-man company or a start-up.But as you grow and as your needs become more complex, you need something a little bit more advanced. So you need a provider that solves more problems for you. And typically, you end up with looking at 1 or 2 very large international companies, which is our competition, but you also have to spend a lot of money and time and you get more complexity than you need. So this is where we are very well positioned for companies that are between 100 employees up to 1,000 or 2,000 employees. So they need something a little bit more complex, but they don't want to buy a software that was built to be used by the Fortune 500 companies.So we get very good reviews from our customers. Overall, Upsales have a very, very satisfied customer base. And the companies using Upsales typically are B2B companies. You find them in industries such as IT software. You find quite a lot of companies in the manufacturing industry, professional services. We have quite a few media companies as well. But they all have in common that they are B2B companies who have some kind of sales ambition and problems that they want to solve.So looking at the growth drivers for Upsales and talking a little bit more about the market. So as I mentioned, our current ARR is around SEK 136 million. We think we can take this number to SEK 500 million only through the existing customer base. So there are plenty of opportunities to help existing customers solve more problems. And looking at the market as a whole, unfortunately, there is not any accurate market data, specifically for the Nordics, about the size of the CRM or marketing software market. But when we look at the typical profile of the customer we work with and then looking at how many of them are there out there, we estimate that our market share is around between 3% and 5%. So there is still a very long runway of growth for Upsales in the market.So growing existing accounts. We do this through adding more seats and users as our customers grow and hire more people to their sales organization. Some parts of the product scale with usage. So for example, our marketing product, the more contacts you put in there, the more context you are contacting and the more value you get out of the platform, the pricing increases. We also have a number of extra modules or add-ons, which our customers can buy. So examples of this are revenue automation module that provides subscription billing and revenue recognition and stuff like that. And the fourth area is selling to more divisions and subsidiaries within existing company groups.And on the other hand, how do we add more new customers. So the strategy is quite simple. As all companies, we invest in marketing and try to do that in as cost effective as possible, and we hire more people to the team. So more boots on the ground means we can meet more customers, talk to more customers and add more new logos every quarter.So an update on the ARR growth. If you've been following Upsales in the past, you will see that we have a very long track record of growing ARR, almost 20 years. However, in 2023, and also in the first quarter of 2024, ARR has not been growing. This has been due to a large reorganization of the sales team where we are moving towards selling to slightly larger customers and doing larger deals. At the same time, we have been working with improving retention, where we see a very positive trend with lower churn rates. And we, as we have communicated before, we expect ARR to start growing again quarter-over-quarter in the next quarter in Q2. And we continue to see results with this new strategy. We are talking to larger companies. We are winning larger deals, and our average deal size is going up.Looking at the product, which is also, obviously, a very important part of finding new opportunities, finding new customers, but also retaining existing customers. So we invest heavily in the product to be able to increase our average contract value to solve more problems for our customers. So we recently released our customer support offering. So we have a broader product now which also increases the total addressable market because now we have another product we can sell to all of our customers.In Q1, we also continued to develop our subscription billing product and our CPQ product, which is very promising and then received very good feedback from the customers who started using it. So this product is used by companies who are selling a complex product, where the work of putting together the proposal takes a lot of time from the sales rep. So this is a process we help automate and simplify and make sure that there are no errors. So this has gotten very good feedback from the customers who are using it.And we also released the Upsales project management tool, which we've been working on for quite some time now, which is being used by data customers in Q1. So it's becoming more of a full suite product, which is in line with the feedback and request we're getting from the customers in our niche. And of course, we will continue working on all these 3 areas in Q2 and the rest of the year. And also a comment, I get a lot of questions about how we are affected by the market in general and macro.So again, we are -- I think we have a very good position. We are a profitable business. We are net cash. We have no debt. So we are not affected by interest rates and so on. And as I mentioned, I think that sales effectiveness and investing in sales is even more important in a challenging market. When times are booming, businesses don't really have to do sales excellence. They just have to answer the phone and business come walking through the door. And as I also mentioned, I think that for the clients that need to do something in these times but they're also trying to look at cost effectiveness, I think Upsales have a very strong positioning for these kind of customers.And when we are looking at our data, we still don't see a -- we see a slight, slight increase in bankruptcies in Q1, but it's from a very, very small level to a small level. So it's negligible. We are also seeing that our incoming churn, which is a leading indicator, is actually going down. So we might see some macro effect in the future, but when looking at our data, we still don't see it. So we see a continued opportunity for Upsales to grow. So that was it for the update. Now Elin will talk about the financials.

[Elin Lundström, executive]

Yes. Thank you, Daniel, and good morning, everyone. Let's begin to look at the ARR and revenue. So our annual recurring revenue has decreased by 3.9% compared to the first quarter of 2023, and ARR as of the end of the period was SEK 135.9 million compared to SEK 14.4 million during the same period in 2023. Net sales increased by 3% to SEK 37.3 million compared to SEK 36.2 million in Q1 2023. And looking at revenue, we divide revenue between recurring revenue from subscriptions and one-off revenues, such as onboarding and consulting services. And in Q1, recurring revenue accounted for 91.6% of total net sales.Let's look at profitability. We had an EBITDA of SEK 8.7 million compared to SEK 9.4 million in Q1 2023, and EBITDA margin was 23.2% compared to 26% during the same period last year, with an EBIT of SEK 6.5 million compared to SEK 7.4 million in Q1 2023, and net income was SEK 5.4 million during the quarter. And looking at cash flow. We had an operating cash flow of SEK 7.9 million during Q1 compared to SEK 13.6 million during the same period in 2023. And looking at cash flow, if you're looking at the cash flow statement, you can see that the decrease is mainly due to increase in paid income tax compared to the same period last year. And we had a net cash of SEK 57.7 million at the end of Q1.And looking at the cash flow statement. In the comparison period, we -- you can see that we paid a dividend of SEK 1.25 and an extraordinary dividend of SEK 0.756 in 2023. And for the Annual General Meeting for the financial year of 2023, the Board has proposed a dividend of SEK 1.5 per share. That was all of the financial highlights. Let's continue with the Q&A section.

[Daniel Wikberg, executive]

All right. So we have quite a few questions. [Operator Instructions]. So let's go ahead with the Q&A. So we have a question about customers don't extend contracts that they are new clients or clients that have been clients for several years. When I mentioned that a lot of customers buy a CRM and they don't use it, I'm not talking about our customer base, I'm talking about the problem in general. So looking at first year renewals, we are quite happy with those numbers. And I would say we are quite happy with our churn levels in general. So the slowdown in growth in the last 5 quarters is mainly a sales problem. It's not a churn problem. It's a sales problem. So we've always had churn for 20 years, like any SaaS company, but for the first 19 years, sales was higher than the churn. And now we had lower sales for a couple of quarters.Then we have a question about the most common reasons why customers churn. And I would say we don't have any specific, like, this part of the product or this feature or this type of customers, there's not a super clear pattern when we look at churn. I mean sometimes companies go bust, sometimes companies are bought by -- they are acquired, and they are forced to start using a competitive solution that the acquiring company is using. That's one reason. But I would say, like, the main reason is still -- there is still room for improving even more, I think, getting customers using the product even more than they are doing. I think this is the focus we have as all SaaS companies, like really helping the customer getting the value they need. This is the way to create stickiness. And we do this both through the customer success organization by working with the customers, but also improving -- developing the product to build features that are more sticky.And then we have a question about the number -- how much ARR is generated by clients that have been your clients for 3-plus years. We don't report that in that kind of detail, the cohort. So I don't have an answer to that question. Then we have a question about the sales, what fraction of our sales expenses are devoted to growing ARR versus running the business as it is. Again, we don't report this kind of detailed cost breakdown. What I can say is that we have always had a history of being able to grow with a very effective relationship between cost of sales and new ARR. And this is not something I expect to change. So we have been doing a big reorganization of the sales team in the sales organization. I don't see this materially being different from what it have been in the past. And I don't expect to that our margins need to be lower for us to be able to grow compared to what they have been in the past.So then we have a question about, in the report, you mentioned a deal that did not materialize. Was this deal only postponed or was it completely canceled? So I wrote in my CEO note that we had slightly more optimistic expectations for the first quarter. And the key word being slightly. So if you wrote -- if you read my CEO note in Q4, I talked about in the first half of 2024, we expect to start growing, which is what we're seeing now. We expect to start growing in Q2. So we didn't have very high expectations for Q1. We had slightly higher expectations. And this deal that I mentioned, it was completely canceled. It might be something we will pick up in the future, but it's not something we expect to materialize in Q2.Next question, has there been any changes in the competitive landscape when you win or lose, what are the key reasons? I mean, of course, the -- a lot of stuff is happening in the market, in the tech landscape in general. I don't see a big shift in any direction, like any kind of new competitor or something like that, it's like the usual suspects that we've been seeing for the last 10 or so years. And I would say, when we win, it's typically because we are able to find customers that has the problems that we are good at solving. So it's all about focusing on the right type of accounts, making sure we're talking to customers that have the problems that we are good at solving. This is the way to build effectiveness in the sales operations.Next question is, what are the major challenges you see in the next 5 years that prevent you from returning to and maintaining 30% ARR growth. So I would say it's the same challenges we've had for the past 20 years when we have been growing. It's all about making sure we help customers get value from the product, and it's about driving an effective sales team, investing in the sales team and making sure that we have sales excellence. And of course, the challenge is to do this is it's just doing the hard work every day. [Audio Gap]is a critical factor. We are actually seeing now that, that's slightly easier now compared to 2 years ago because the labor market is not what it used to be. So it's slightly easier for Upsales to find the people we need compared to a couple of years ago.Next question. What are your strategic thoughts on capital allocation? How do you decide between growing the sales force versus investing in the technology platform versus returning capital to shareholders. So here's my thoughts on this. I often get the question, how do you balance profitability versus growth? And since you're a net cash company, why don't you just invest more in growing the business? And my answer is always this. That's not how it works. If you throw money at the problem, growth just doesn't automatically come back. So I mean, growth is priority #1, #2 and #3 here, but we want to grow in an effective way. So more money simply doesn't solve or even simplify the problem, in my opinion.So we -- if we see an initiative to hire 5 more people or do a marketing campaign or do an investment in the product that we really believe will create ARR growth, we will do it. Even if that means that profitability might go down temporarily for 1 or 2 quarters. So we never try to optimize for a certain EBITDA margin or something like that. But our way of driving growth is driving effective growth. And when we do that, we do it in a profitable way. So -- and now we are paying a dividend for the third year in a row because we feel that we have the cash we need to support all of the initiatives we want to pursue.So next question, do you expect profitable growth to eventually reach the same levels as before the current downturn? Or are we now permanently in a new era where we must settle for lower growth and profitability figures? So again, I expect to start growing again in Q2, and then this is the absolute priority for me and the entire organization. With regards to profitability, I'm actually quite happy with being able to report[Audio Gap]we are doing now, despite revenue almost being flat because yes, revenue growth helps profitability, obviously. So we -- I won't give a number or a specific guidance for EBITDA margins or anything like that. But nothing has permanently changed. Nothing has materially changed. So the outlook remains the same as it was before with profitable growth.Next question, can you describe how new customer acquisition and expanding existing customer base are progressing? Are you focusing more on one over the other? So I would say we are focusing on both of them. So the sales organization consists of 2 different teams. So one acquisition team, which works dedicated with new accounts and 1 expansion team working with existing accounts. And both are equally important. So we are doing a lot of initiatives in both of them.Next question. Now that your growth has been stagnant for about 2 years. When looking back, what are the 3 key reasons for the interruption of your convincing growth track, what should have been done differently? So of course, in hindsight, it's always easy to do the analysis. It's not as easy as doing it in real time. But there are not 3 key reasons. There is one key reason. And the key reason is that we had to do a big change in our sales organization. And this, unfortunately, had a short-term impact on the sales levels.What are the key business risks for Upsales that possibly could keep you up at night? So currently, I sleep very well at night. I'm quite happy with the progress we've made in the last few quarters. I think the product is moving forward in a very good pace. I think the work that my customer success team is doing with taking care of customers, making sure they get the help they need and reducing churn. I'm very happy with that work. And I also see a very good progress in the sales organization. We are selling more. We are talking to the right kind of customers. We are increasing the deal size. So I'm quite happy where we are right now.But I mean, in the words of Andy Grove, "Only the paranoid survive." So I think a lot about the market in general. I think a lot about where the tech development is going in general. And of course, the long-term success of any software company is innovation. So I think a lot about where do we have to -- where does a product have to be in 5 years to still be competitive. So these are the things that I spend a lot of time thinking about and also spend a lot of time talking to our customers to try to understand where the market is going. All right. So no further questions. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today, and hope to see you next time.