Upsales Technology AB

STO:UPSALE

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q3

[Daniel Wikberg, executive]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the earnings call for Upsales for the third quarter of 2023. My name is Daniel Wikberg, I'm the CEO and Founder of Upsales. And together with our CFO, Elin Lundström, I will do a presentation of the third quarter. So the agenda for this presentation, we will start with doing an introduction to Upsales, a company presentation. After that, I will do an update on sales and growth. And then we will talk a little bit about the product and what we are doing in terms of product investments. And then Elin will cover the financials from the third quarter, and we will finish off with a Q&A. If you want to ask a question, you can ask a question throughout the presentation by using the Q&A feature available in the Zoom toolbar and we will cover all questions at the end of the presentation. So introducing Upsales. So sales is the top reason why B2B businesses fail. And looking at all start-ups, most of them start out with ambitious plans. You have a business plan and you want to grow fast. But in reality, looking at all the companies that were founded 10 years ago, only 9% reached a revenue of more than SEK 10 million. So most companies don't end up successful businesses. And the #1 reason for this is the lack of sales. So our mission is to give companies the tools they need to turn their business into a revenue engine as fast as 60, within 60 minutes. So we are a Software-as-a-Service company with a long track record of profitable and organic growth. So we sell our software as a subscription, and we have been in this business for almost 20 years.

So a couple of highlights from the product and the areas we focus on when working with our customers. The first area is to help companies find new leads and generate pipeline. And we do this by using the data that the customer has in their own systems, in their own accounting and invoicing system together with the largest company database in the Nordics with financial and demographic data about all the registered companies throughout the Nordics. So the second area is to drive an efficient selling process and help our customers do accurate forecasting and win more deals in an efficient way.

The third area is enabling customers to find upsell opportunities within the existing customer base. So we do this in numerous ways. But again, we always try to take a data-driven approach. So what you see here on the screen is an example of customers can connect their financial software, and we import their sales and invoicing history and enabling them to get an overview of which are the accounts, which are the customers we can help by selling more products and services to. And the fourth and final area is the area of sales management, where we help customers to use all the data they have inside of Upsales to understand existing customers, to understand which customers are the best customers for us to work with and to get a grip of the overall sales effectiveness and find areas to improve.

So -- and talking to customers why they choose Upsales and what they appreciate with being a customer of Upsales is we talk a lot about speed of execution because when customers come to us or when they come to any of our competitors, they don't come looking to buy a product or looking to buy a software. They're looking for a solution to a problem and the solution, what they want, the desired state is typically about increasing the return on their cost of sales or their sales and marketing investments, increasing the overall effectiveness of the business and in general, just increasing revenue, finding new customers, finding more upsell revenue. So we spend a lot of time focusing on how can we get our new customers from the current state to their desired state as quickly as possible. And by doing everything in-house. We develop the product, we sell the product and we deliver the product to customers. We don't work with any third parties or partners or middleman. This enables us to to get the software implemented quickly and help customers get the value they're looking for as fast as possible.

So this is some examples of companies using Upsales. So our focus is on B2B companies between 100 employees and up to 1,000, 2,000 employees. That's our sweet spot. And if you look at the market overall, for startups and for small companies, it's a very crowded space. So if you do a Google search for CRM or sales software, you will get like tens of thousands of hits and then there are a couple of international competitors mainly focusing on like really large enterprise companies. So our sweet spot is the companies in the middle. So fast-growing medium-sized businesses that need something more complex than a spreadsheet and more complex than what you can buy with a credit card online but they want something faster than what you get if you go with any of the large international suppliers. So that is very appreciated from a customer point of view.

So looking at our growth drivers. So as any SaaS companies, we grow by growing existing accounts and closing new logos. And our current ARR is around SEK 141 million. We believe we can more than triple that number only in the existing customer base by selling more seats, more add-ons, working with more divisions within larger customer company groups and so on. And talking about new logos and new clients, if you look at the typical Upsales customer, how many of them do we have and how many of them are out there. We estimate our market share is still less than 5%. So there's a very long growth runway ahead of us. And the market, in general, is still a growing market so there are plenty of opportunities for Upsales to continue to grow.

So one of the important things that has enabled us to grow with profitability for a long time is our culture. So we don't follow the typical software company playbook where you raise a ton of money and then you hire a lot of people, and you run the business in the red, and then hopefully, someday, you will turn a profit. So we believe in building an effective team and growing with profitability over time. And there are 3 core values we talk about when we build the team and when we are hiring new people, so move fast and get s*** done. It's about producing results every day and not getting stuck in this overall lengthy planning workshops, take extreme ownership where we try to run the business as a meritocracy. Where we like to give people a lot of responsibility and a lot of room to grow instead of having these specialized, overly specialized roles, which is quite common in our industry. And the third one is about -- we talk about no a******* allowed. So I mean we are a performance-driven company but we still want to be a place where people feel that they can grow and not just get stuck in internal politics and stuff like that, which exist in a lot of other companies. So I think the culture is probably one of the things I'm the most proud of that we've built in the business, enabling us to have this high level of effectiveness and have a great team doing great things for our customers.

So talking about the sales and growth. So for the first 3 quarters of 2023, our ARR growth has not been -- we have not been growing. And this is because we are in the process of moving towards a new sales organization, moving towards a new strategy that evolves around closing larger deals and working with larger customers so a big part of this strategy was to find new leadership. So our new Chief Revenue Officer, Christian Nyberg, joined Upsales in August together with a couple of additional members to the sales team. During the quarter and continuing in Q4, we have a high pace in hiring more members to the sales team. So everything we're doing now is about building sales capacity to sustain long-term growth. And what we see in -- we continue to see in Q3 that our average deal size when closing larger customers or new customers continues to increase. So even though it's not showing in the ARR numbers yet, I'm very happy with the progress we made during the quarter with everything from hiring, improving sales processes and so on. So I'm positive towards the future growth of Upsales.

So talking about the product. So one important part of selling to larger customers, but also to growing the existing accounts is continue investing in the product, which is a main driver for increasing the average contract value. So 2 things I would like to highlight from the third quarter is the launch of our new company, Data Hub, which is our data product with companies from all the Nordics that our customers can use to understand existing customers better, to get more data about existing clients, but also finding new customers. And a very appreciated part of this is that we added the ability to get risk data. So what this means in practice is that if you connect your financial software to Upsales, we support most of the ERPs out there. We sync all the data about your existing customers and the sales and all the invoices from them. And then we give management and CFOs a risk overview. So basically, what we do is we get a credit report in real time on all our customers -- end customers. So that enables management and CFO to stay on top of, do we have customers that are paying us a lot of money, but where we can see these early signals that companies will have financial problems in the future. And obviously, in today's market, with bankruptcies increasing and a lot of companies having financial problems, this is a very appreciated feature from existing and new customers.

So the second thing I want to highlight is our revenue hub. So for many years, Upsales have this advanced features for managing orders and revenues, which, in a lot of cases, are actually part of an ERP software. So examples of this is you can use Upsales to do subscription billing, if you want to automate that. You can do revenue recognition. You can do a complex pricing and CPQ and that kind of solutions. And the latest feature we are adding now is the ability to set rules and processes for discounts, so you can restrict the amount of discounts the sales team can give to the end customers. So all of these features are now being packaged in what we call the revenue hub, which we also believe will be an important driver going forward, especially when talking to larger customers because they want to solve more complex problems than just the basic use cases you have for buying a CRM, which is mostly related to sales and pipeline. So that is some highlights, and we're doing a ton of exciting stuff in the product, and we will post more updates about that going forward. So before I hand over to Elin, I would like to talk a little bit about the market in general and how Upsales is affected by macro and our resilience. So we are a company with 0 debt. We are a net cash company and we are profitable. So we also see that sales effectiveness is a high priority -- it's a higher priority in challenging economic times than in booming times. And I think this is something we see when talking to customers that more companies realize that when times were booming, the phone was ringing and customers were coming in through the door. Now you need to work more proactively and have a deliberate effective selling process so I think there are actually some opportunities in a market like this for a company like Upsales.

And what we're also seeing is that larger clients, a lot of these companies have over-invested in this really big systems that are built for Fortune 500 companies, and they're looking to find something that's more suitable for their needs, where Upsales is a very cost-effective alternative so that -- we have a couple of discussions with companies like that. And we still can't see -- if we look at our indicators, churn and cancellations and all of that data, we can't see any direct macro effect in our data. We might see that in the future, but we still can't see any data like that. So the main reason for our ARR growth being slower in the first 3 quarters of 2023 is not market related. It's related to internal stuff, internal organizational matters, which we are addressing and which we are on top of. So I will hand over to Elin now for some financial highlights.

[Elin Lundström, executive]

Thank you, Daniel, and good morning, everyone. So let's begin to look at ARR and revenue. So compared to the same period in 2022, annual recurring revenue has grown by 3.5%. And ARR as of the end of the period was SEK 141.2 million compared to SEK 136.3 million in Q3 2022. Net sales increased by 10.2% to SEK 36 million compared to SEK 32.7 million in Q3 2022. And looking at revenue, we divide our revenue between recurring revenue from subscriptions and one-off revenue such as onboarding, consulting services, et cetera. And in Q3, recurring revenue accounted for 96.7% of total net sales. Let's continue to look at profitability. Our EBITDA was SEK 12.2 million compared to SEK 13.1 million in Q3 2022 and EBITDA margin was 33.9%, compared to 40.2% during the same period last year. EBIT was SEK 10.1 million compared to SEK 11.3 million in Q3 2022. And net income of this quarter was SEK 8 million, which is a 22% margin. Let's continue to look at cash flow. During this quarter, we had an operating cash flow of SEK 1.8 million compared to SEK 7.3 million during the same period in 2022. And as we have mentioned before, we have some seasonalities when it comes to cash flow. Net cash as of the end of the quarter was SEK 44.8 million. And as Daniel mentioned, we do not have any debt. We're a net cash company. And if you look at the cash flow statement for the full year, you will see that we paid a dividend of SEK 2 per share earlier, which has had an impact on net cash, of course. Yes, that was it for the financial highlights. Thank you, and let's continue to the Q&A section.

[Daniel Wikberg, executive]

All right. So again, if you want to ask a question, you can use the Q&A feature within the Zoom toolbar and we will answer them. So first question, regarding the reason as to why our booking is down so significantly was the reason we see? Is it seat reduction, pricing, cancellation of packages or even up take in churn? So again, I -- the main reason for slower growth in 2023 is not increased churn. It's not related to macro or market. It's a sales issue. So when we have done this rather drastic changes in the sales team, you get this short-term impact and I mean, it's kind of obvious, but I think I might remind everybody that Upsales like any SaaS company in every quarter, in the last 20 years, probably, we have always some churn. So if you have a quarter where the growth is 0, it doesn't mean that the sales is zero. It means that the sales is at the same level as the churn. So -- and then you get the end result of a really slow ARR growth. So that's the focus from the entire management team, and it's my #1 focus and priority to continue building sales capacity and recruit more people to the sales team. And again, I'm happy with the progress I saw in Q3.

And then we have a related question, deferred revenue sinking from SEK 70 million to SEK 56 million.

Yes, I think this is -- I mean one reason for this is that if ARR growth is slowing, then obviously, we will have less revenue in -- as part of the net working capital. I think also we have some customers, larger customers moving from annual billing to quarterly billing. So that may have had an impact as well, but I think the main reason is just slower growth means less deferred revenue.

All right. Any other questions? Again, if you want to ask a question, just use the Q&A feature. You can use the chat as well, if you'd like to ask a question. So a follow-up question about quarterly billing for larger clients. Are there also monthly contracts?

We -- all customers have annual contracts. So -- and a lot of larger clients have longer contracts in that so it's only the billing cycle that's changed for and these are a handful of customers. So I don't think that's a -- it's not a material impact on cash flow or net working capital. So if you have a question, just use the chat feature or the Q&A feature. All right. As there are no further questions, that concludes the -- today's presentation and the earnings call for the third quarter. Thank you very much for joining us today.