Upsales Technology AB

STO:UPSALE

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q4

[Daniel Wikberg, executive]

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Upsales Q4 2023 Conference Call. My name is Daniel Wikberg. I am the CEO and Founder of Upsales. And I will, together with Elin Lundström, our CFO, be responsible for this presentation today. [Operator Instructions] So let's have a look at the agenda. I will start by doing an introduction to Upsales and do a short company presentation, then I will talk a little bit about our growth efforts and what we're doing in the sales organizations and other initiatives to grow revenues. I will also do a short product update to give you a snapshot of what's going on in the product aspect of the company. And then Elin will cover the financial highlights from the fourth quarter, and then we will have the Q&A section.

So a short introduction to Upsales. So we believe that the main reason why B2B businesses fail is the lack of sales or the poor execution of the business plan in terms of sales. So all companies start with an ambitious plan to grow revenues and to become a successful business. But in reality, if you look at the data of the companies, of all companies founded 10 years ago, only 9% have a revenue of more than SEK 10 million. And the #1 reason for this, it's not the competition, it's not the product, it's not the strategy, it's the lack of sales and the lack of an effective sales execution.

So this is a huge problem, and it's the problem we address at Upsales. So we build the software to give companies the tools they need to turn their business into a revenue engine. We are a Software as a Service company. We were founded in 2003, and we have a long track record of profitable organic growth.

So looking at some of the highlights in the problems we want to solve for our customers. The first one we address is the challenge of finding attractive potential customers and leads. So what we do here is we help customers connect the data they have in their ERP or accounting or invoicing software. We import this data into Upsales, and then we mix this data with a big company database with annual reports and financial data about all companies in the Nordics to enable our customers to find more new potential good prospects and customers.

So the second area is helping companies become more effective when it comes to working with the existing deals in their sales pipeline. So typically, in most companies, most companies don't have a structured and systematic process in how to handle and where you should spend your time, what deals you should pursue and which deals you should not pursue and so on. So this problem, we help our customers to address in numerous ways.

So the third one is enabling customers to find upsell revenue within their existing customer base. So this is also something we take a data-driven approach. As you see on the screen here, one example is helping customers identify which are the companies that bought product A, but did not buy product B. And there are numerous other ways in which we help our customers to sell more to existing accounts.

And the fourth area is reporting and analytics and enabling sales management and CEOs to better understand what's working, where should we invest more, what parts of the selling process needs to become more effective and so on. So in this area, we help our customers to run their sales organization in a more professional and data-driven way.

So why do customers come to Upsales instead of the competition? Because there's a lot of competition. If you do a Google search for CRM system, you will get many hits. So we focus on the mid-market. So companies that's typically more than 100 employees up to around 2,000 employees. And in this target group, the only competition is a lot -- is sold by a lot larger competitors, mainly from the U.S. And to get started with these types of products, you typically need to invest a lot of manpower, either you have a big IT department or you buy a lot of -- you buy help from a third-party consultant. And it typically takes a lot of time. It has a lot of complexity, and it's very expensive in terms of one-off to get started.

So our approach is a bit different. We have a very low share of the revenue, which is one-off. So we are not in the business of trying to build a big consulting business. So less than 10% of the revenue is consulting revenue. And we try to -- we always try to improve the product to make it even faster to implement and to get value for the customer. And of course, this is highly appreciated because no customer goes out in the market looking to buy a piece of software. The customers go to the market to solve a problem, and they want to solve the problem as quickly as possible.

So this is highly appreciated, the ability to get started quickly and also to be able to be working with, we don't have any partners or third-party consultants working with our customers. So customers really appreciate buying the software, getting the support and getting the implementation from the same partner.

So these are some examples of [ customers ] that are using Upsales. And so the customers have some kind of B2B selling process, that's the common denominator. And typically, you find them in many industries such as IT and software. You find a lot of manufacturing companies, professional services, media, but there's a long tail. There's probably 50 different industries of companies using Upsales, but these are some of the highlights.

And they share the ambition to grow faster and to make their sales more effective, basically. So looking at the growth drivers and the runway for continue growing the business. So the ARR is currently at around SEK 140 million. And we believe that we will be able to triple our revenue only within the existing customer base. I will talk a little bit more in detail what I mean by that.

And if you look at the market as a whole, there's not so much reliable data on exactly the size of the market. But when we do our estimates, we look at what is the -- what are the characteristics of the typical Upsales customer? And then we look how many of them are there out there? And our estimates say that we still only have a market share of between 3% to 5%. So there's plenty of more new customers to work with.

So how do we grow existing accounts? So the product team is working tirelessly to improve the product and to solve more problems for our customers. So some of the ways we can grow existing accounts is obviously customers are buying more seats, licenses, adding more users as they grow. Some parts of the product is also, the pricing is driven by usage. So for example, our marketing automation module, the pricing is based on the number of contacts. So in those scenarios, I believe we have a very clear win-win scenario with our existing customers because the more value they get from the platform, the more they use the platform, we charge a little bit more. So everybody wins.

So the third area is selling additional modules or add-ons. So in total, there's almost 20 different add-ons you can buy to Upsales, as the company grows and you need to solve more complex problems. And the fourth area is to expand within larger company groups, finding more divisions, subsidiaries and so on that also needs our help.

So -- and the -- looking at the new logo side, how do we increase the number of customers using Upsales. So this is a little bit more straightforward. So we build sales capacity by finding the right people and just recruiting more people to the salesforce. So more boots on the ground means you can have a higher sales target every quarter. And the other part is to continue invest in marketing and branding, making sure that the companies in our target list know about us and have a positive view of Upsales as a potential partner.

So an update of what we're doing in terms of ARR growth. As you might know, we've had roughly flat ARR growth in the last 4 quarters. So the reason for this is we did a big change in our sales organization last year with the aim of -- our strategy is to work with larger clients to increase the average contract value and moving up market.

And when executing this strategy, we have been doing a lot of changes in the organization. And unfortunately, this has hurt our growth rates in the short term. But I'm very happy with the progress I see. I see that the changes we have made are -- we're starting to see the results of these changes. One of the changes is we recruited a new Chief Revenue Officer, who joined in August. And I see he's coming up to speed. And we're doing several successful hires in Q4, and we continue to have an ambitious hiring plan going into 2024.

And I also see, when looking at the data, the strategy of selling to larger clients, it's really starting to pay off. The kind of customers we are signing now and the kind of customers we are talking to, it's very different from 1 year ago.

And the fourth thing I want to highlight is we added a new team and a new role to Upsales a while back, which we call the Customer Engagement team. So this is the team that works specifically with reducing churn and increasing retention. And we're also starting to see some clear results from having this team as a part of the organization, and it's only been a few months. So I'm very positive about the outlook from that.

Moving on. So a short update about what we're doing in the product. So again, the rationale for investing in the product. It's obviously, as a tech company, you always have to continue to stay relevant. But the more we invest in the product, the more problems we can solve. And this, in the long run, enables us to increase our average contract value working with larger customers.

So we recently released our customer support offering. So historically, Upsales has been focused on sales and marketing. And many of our competitors have also had this inbound ticketing customer support system as part of the suite. And it was very clear when we were talking to some of the prospects we have in the pipeline that this is a clear need from the target list of customers we want to work with.

And we also saw a lot of data in our existing customer base that a lot of Upsales customers is actually using Upsales already to solve this problem, but more in ways. They kind of hacked the platform to support its use case. So I'm very excited about this. It's also something that will increase our total addressable market because we solve another big problem for our customers.

So the second area I want to highlight is the continued investments we have been doing in our CPQ and subscription billing product. So since we're working with a lot of SaaS companies, they need to have a good solution for managing their recurring revenue and their subscription billing and doing reports on ARR growth and churn and so on. And there's also a lot of other industries which are moving towards a recurring revenue model. So I believe supporting this business model and this use case will only be increasingly important. So that's also an area where we are spending a lot of time.

So I just want to wrap things up by talking a little bit about the market and the general market conditions we see. So first off, Upsales is -- we don't have any debt. We're a profitable company. We have been profitable for 20 years. We are net cash. So we are not really affected by increased market rates directly.

And what I see also is in a tougher market, I see effectiveness being an increased priority for all businesses. Because in booming times, customers come walking through the door. But when the market gets a little bit tougher, then you have to make sure your sales team is doing a good job. So I think that might be positive things for companies like Upsales.

Another thing we see is that the scalability and speed of getting started is very attractive for clients who need to solve the problems we solve. But especially now, you don't have the time or resources to invest in these larger platforms from our competitors. So I think Upsales is in a very good position for the times ahead.

And I get the question quite often, do you see any effect from the general market conditions? So obviously, the market has changed in the last 2 years with what's going on in macro and interest rates and so on. When we look at our data in terms of churn rates and incoming churn and these type of early warning signals, if you will, we cannot see any macro effect in our data. We might do it in the future, but we still don't see it in our data. And I'm quite optimistic about the future. I think there's plenty of customers to work with. We're still a small company, and we can adapt to focus our attention on where the potential for finding revenue exists.

So that was all I had. I will now hand over to Elin for some of the financial highlights.

[Elin Lundström, executive]

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. So let's begin to look at the ARR and revenue. So annual recurring revenue has decreased by 3.7% compared to the last quarter of 2022, and ARR as of the end of the period was SEK 140.4 million compared to SEK 145.8 million during the same period of 2022.

Net sales increased by 3.1% to SEK 36.3 million compared to SEK 35.2 million in Q4 2022. And looking at the revenue, our share of subscription revenue was 94.8% in the fourth quarter.

So looking at profitability, our EBITDA was SEK 9.2 million, slightly lower than SEK 9.3 million in Q4 2022. And EBITDA margin was 25.3% compared to 26.5% during the same period in 2022. We had an EBIT of SEK 7.1 million compared to SEK 7.5 million during the comparison period, and net income of the quarter was SEK 5.8 million.

So during this quarter, we had an operating cash flow of SEK 9.8 million compared to SEK 18 million during the same period in 2022, and net cash as of the end of the quarter was SEK 52.6 million. And as Daniel mentioned, we do not have any debt.

And looking at the net cash, we have been paying a dividend the last years. And for this year, the Board of Directors has proposed a dividend of SEK 1.5 per share, which corresponds to a total amount of about SEK 25 million. Yes, that will be it for the financial highlights. Let's continue to the Q&A section.

[Daniel Wikberg, executive]

[Operator Instructions] so as there are no question, this will conclude the presentation. Thank you, everybody, for joining today, and have a good day.