Upsales Technology AB

STO:UPSALE

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q2

[Daniel Wikberg, executive]

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call this morning. This is the earnings call for the second quarter for Upsales. My name is Danny Wikberg, I'm the CEO and founder, and I will do a presentation today with our CFO, Elin Lundstrom. So, if you wish to ask a question, you can do so throughout the webinar by using the Q&A function in the Zoom toolbar and we will answer all of the questions at the end of the webinar. So, today's agenda, I will do a short introduction about Upsales, a brief company presentation and then I will give you a growth update on the initiatives regarding growth that we are pursuing right now. I will also give you a short product update about the stuff that's happening on the product side and then Elin will briefly cover the financials from the second quarter. So, introducing us Upsales, Upsales is the company. So, we exist to help companies succeed with their sales efforts, and sales is the top reason why B2B companies fail. So, if you look at the data, if you look at the statistics on companies founded 10 years ago, less than 9% of them ever reached a revenue of only SEK 10 million. So, all companies, of course, start out with great ambitions but very few of them succeed. And the #1 reason is the poor execution of sales, so this is why we exist. So, we give companies the tools they need to turn their business into a revenue engine. So, our vision is to build the best sales tools for the fastest growing companies, and we have been doing this for more than 20 years. We are a Software as a Service company with a very long track record of profitable and organic growth. Our ARR right now as of the end of the quarter is SEK 137.5 million and we have a very high share of recurring revenue so almost 95% of our revenue comes from our subscriptions. We're a net cash company, we have 0 debt. The company is management owned almost by 42% and trailing 12 months, we had an EBITDA margin of 25.3%. So, introducing the product and the areas, we focus on to help our customers. So, the first area is helping companies to fill their pipeline with leads and opportunities. We do this in numerous ways: we connect to different data sources to help our customers identify potential customers, we also help our customers run marketing campaigns to lower the cost of sales and generate leads more effectively. The second area is to help our customers to create a structured way of working with the opportunities in the pipeline. So, if you've ever seen a B2B sales organization, you know that this is a huge problem in a lot of companies, the lack of a systematic approach to value, prioritize and work with the pipeline and also forecast the opportunities in the pipeline. So, this is also something that increasingly will be done by AI because there is so much data available that you can use, which is much more effective than asking the sales team how they value individual deals. So, it's an area which I personally find it's very interesting to use AI to improve. So, the third area is how to grow existing customers. So, in the Upsales product, our customers can use the data they have about their existing customer base and very easily identify upsell opportunities to existing accounts. I believe this is an area that has been overlooked by the industry for a long time. So, most CRM systems, most sales tools are overly focused on acquisition and attracting new customers while when you talk to most companies who kind of went past the initial stage of a start-up, much more of the growth is actually coming from existing customers. So, this is an area we have been working on for some time now, and we get great feedback from customers using these features. So, the fourth and final area is to help management, sales management and also the CEO and CFO in our customers' organizations to use all the data in their Upsales account to make better decisions to prioritize their efforts to understand which customer segments should we focus more or less on and so on. So, our positioning, obviously, we're not alone in this market, I will talk a little bit more about the competition in the next slide, but our positioning is based on these 3 items. So, we have a very clear niche on a couple of industries in the Nordics. So, we focus on medium-sized B2B organizations in the Nordics, and when we do this, we try to figure out what are the specific use cases that are important for these customers that our competitors are not pursuing. So, this is the way we create a strong positioning for our specific niche of customers. And we've always had a philosophy of not working with partners. In our industry, it's very common that you work with consulting companies as partners. We believe it's a more customer-centric approach to have the consultants or the services team in-house because they are able to create value for the customers much quicker at a much lower cost. And this is one of the reasons why our customers love Upsales because the traditional way, if you're a midsized company, you spend a lot of money several months, sometimes years to implement the system. We've always had a focus on fast time to value. So, I mean, if you're a company buying a CRM, you're not buying the CRM to get a piece of software, you're buying the CRM to solve a problem. You want better forecast, you want increased revenue, you want lower cost of sales, et cetera. And we spend a lot of time focusing on how can we shorten this time to value and it's one of the things with Upsales that is very, very appreciated by customers. So, looking at the market as a whole, if you look at the market, if you do a Google search for CRM software or sales software you will find thousands and thousands of options. Most of these options are a very good fit for very small companies. So, there are thousands of solutions out there if you're a company with 3 or 4 or 5 salespeople. And then you have 2 to 3 really large companies, mostly American companies that focuses on solving the problems for huge companies, for the Fortune 500 companies. So, we believe that there has been a gap in the middle of this market, so, once you hire your 10th or your 20th sales rep, the simple solutions you found through Google doesn't work anymore. But you're not willing to spend SEK 10 million in 2 years of implementation to buy an American piece of software that was built to work for General Motors, so this is the part of the market where Upsales really stands out. We are able to solve quite complex problems without the need for these expensive and time-consuming implementation projects. So, the typical Upsales customer is a B2B company with between 100 up to 2,000 employees. You find them in several different industries. Historically, we have been very strong in the IT, the software SaaS industry. We have quite a few companies in professional services and consulting. Manufacturing is an industry that has been growing for us for quite some time now. It's an industry, I find this very interesting for us to continue pursuing. So, just looking at the growth drivers, how do we create ARR and revenue growth? So, our existing customer base, as I mentioned, it's currently SEK 137 million in ARR. We believe that we can triple this number without bringing any more new customers because there are a lot of problems to be solved, a lot of problems to be addressed for existing customers, which makes them buy additional modules and services from Upsales. So, this is also an important part of how we prioritize the backlog when we build the product to address these additional problems we can solve for our existing customers. And if you look at the market as a whole, there's not so much reliable market data about the market share in Sweden and in the Nordics. But when we look at the typical Upsales customer, the demographics of such a company, we estimate that we have around 3% to 5% of the market share in Sweden so, there's a very long runway of growth with both existing and new customers. So, how do we grow existing accounts? We do this in numerous ways. The most obvious one, of course, is that our customer is growing and they are adding more seats, buying more licenses because they need more people in the software. We have almost 20 different add-ons, extra modules that our customers can add as their needs get more complex. Some of these add-ons also grow with usage. So, one example here being the marketing automation tool where you pay for the number of contacts you are working with in the software. And also, we have quite a few customers who belong to larger company groups where we can expand within the customer's organization by selling to more divisions and subsidiaries and so on. And, looking on the acquisition side, how do we find new customers? Well, the strategy here is fairly simple. You grow the sales force, which we have been doing in the last few quarters, we hire more people, you need more boots on the ground to talk to more customers. You invest in marketing to attract more leads, the right type of leads. And, of course, I mean, when I get the question as to how has Upsales been able to grow with profitability for such a long time, this is pretty much the secret source, is to have a very effective sales organization and to really keep a close eye on the important KPIs relating to sales effectiveness and cost of sales and so on. So, a short update on growth. So, I'm very happy to report that we are back to quarter-over-quarter ARR growth in Q2 after 5 quarters of stagnant or negative growth. We were expecting a slightly higher number and, of course, growing with SEK 1.6 million quarter-over-quarter, it's not near the growth ambitions we have but nevertheless, we're happy to be back with positive growth numbers. So, one of the reasons to this is, I mentioned this in my last report also, we launched a new function, a new team a while back, which is called the customer engagement team. So, this is a team working exclusively with retention and helping customers just get more value out of the product and we really see that this is really starting to show in our churn data. And, we continue the work of being more focused towards the niche group of customers, where we believe we can provide the most value and this also helps sales efficiency when we are increasingly talking to the right kind of customers. As always, we continue to invest in the product. We want to solve more problems for our customers, which is the best way for Upsales to grow revenue and average contract value. We released a while back the customer support add-on and the product management add-on which broadens the set of problems we solve and broadens the overall use case that the Upsales customers can address by using the product. We continue to invest in integrations, integrations to ERP systems and other key systems in the ecosystems that our customers are using. And, as I mentioned, regarding growing existing accounts is increasingly an important part of the product. So, we continue to build more features in this area, helping customers to find more easy win opportunities, if you will, within the customer base. So, I get some questions about the market in general and what's the market outlook. So, we continue to see a massive opportunity. There are a lot of companies that need help with the kind of services that Upsales provides. I think I'm seeing also I mentioned this in previous calls and in the report that, sales effectiveness is a higher priority in challenging economic times compared to booming times because you have to be more proactive to grow your business in the current market. And, I think we have a very strong positioning for -- I mean, you have a lot of companies now who they need to do something, they need to improve their sales and they need to do it quickly, and they don't want to spend a lot of CapEx and time to get started. So, I think we have a good positioning there. And, generally speaking, I mean, we are a net cash company, we are profitable, we have a model where we have been growing with profits for many years, and we have 0 debt. So that makes me sleep good at night. So, we continue to be enthusiastic about the future. All right. Now, Elin will cover the financial highlights from the second quarter.

[Elin Lundström, executive]

Thank you, Daniel, and good morning, everyone. So, let's begin. We're looking at ARR and revenue. So annual recurring revenue grew by SEK 1.6 billion during the quarter and was SEK 137.5 million at the end of the second quarter compared to SEK 141.4 million in Q2 2023. So, year-on-year, this is a decrease of 2.8% even though it grew during this quarter. Net sales amounted to SEK 35.4 million compared to SEK 36.7 million in Q2 2023. And looking at revenue, we divide our revenue between recurring revenue from our subscriptions and one-off revenue such as onboarding and consultancy services and in Q2, recurring revenue accounted for 95.8% of total revenue. Let's continue with profitability. So, our EBITDA was SEK 6.7 million compared to SEK 11.9 million in Q2 2023, and EBITDA margin was 19% compared to 32.3% during the same period last year. We had an EBIT of SEK 4.5 million, which corresponds to a margin of 12.7% and net income was SEK 3.5 million. Let's continue to look at cash flow. So, during this quarter, we had an operating cash flow of SEK 1 million compared to SEK 7.2 million during the same period in 2023. And net cash at the end of this quarter was SEK 33.5 million and we don't have any debt. Yes. So, that was all for the financial highlights. Let's continue to the Q&A section.

[Daniel Wikberg, executive]

All right. [Operator instructions]. I can also comment. I wrote this in my note regarding profitability. So, as a result of several quarters with low growth, we still continued to execute on our long-term plan which includes hiring more people. So that's why we are seeing slightly lower margins, we expect higher margins as the revenue growth comes back in the coming quarters. All right. So, let's look at the questions. So, the first question, after you hire a sales person, how long does it take until that person is fully onboarded in a sense that here, she can meaningfully contribute to ARR growth? So, I would say it's quite binary. I mean, either you make it or either you don't. So, the people who are successful, usually, they are productive within a couple of months, 3 to 4 months, I would say. And typically, if you are not productive within your first 6 months, within the first half year, then typically, you leave the company. So, it's quite binary in that sense. Next question, over the past year, how has ARR growth per salesperson excluding recent fires developed? I don't have exactly that data but I don't see a big shift here compared to what it has been looked like historically. So, yes, I think it's pretty much at the same level as it always has been. Okay. Next question, if you consider ARR growth over the past quarters, how has the balance between new customers versus existing customer growth been? And how do you estimate this ratio going forward? So, I would say, in the last quarters, new sales have been slightly higher than what it used to be historically. Again, I don't have the exact data but you must also consider that Upsales is a very small company so these numbers and these ratios and pretty much all of the KPIs in a company like Upsales can vary dramatically from one quarter to the next quarter. So, it's hard to say, I mean, it could be next year that 60% of growth comes from existing customers, it could also be that 30% is coming from existing customers because we are still a small company and 1 or 2 very good sales reps can make a huge difference in one or the other team. So, next question, you mentioned that the quarterly ARR increase of 1.6% is not near the growth rate you want to have, what level are you aiming for approximately? Well, so before we started seeing the temporary growth problems we've had, we were able to grow by SEK 10 million per quarter on a quarter-over-quarter basis and we have been growing annually 30% per year. So, I mean, we don't provide any specific guidance or financial targets relating to the growth but we want to get back to the levels we have had historically and I absolutely see that, that is possible. Okay. Next question. Do you find it easy at the moment to hire successful salespeople compared to the past year? Yes. So, this is a change in the market, I would say. I mean the bottleneck for Upsales and I guess, for all companies in the past decade has been to find talent. There has been a lot of hype and a very booming market, which has made this quite challenging. But this is something you see it's kind of easing up, so, it's slightly easier to attract both on the sales side, but also on the product side, where we're also hiring a lot of people. So, yes, it's not easy, but it's easier than it was 1 or 2 years ago. All right that concludes the Q&A. So, thank you, everybody, for joining us today, and have a good day.