Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining the earnings call for Upsales Q1 2023. My name is Daniel Wikberg, and I'm joined by our CFO, Elin Lundström. The agenda for today's presentation, I will start to talk a little bit about Upsales, introducing Upsales and what we're doing in the product, and also an update from our sales effort. Elin will talk about the financials from the Q1 report, and we will end with a Q&A session. Introducing Upsales. If you want to ask a question, you can use the Q&A button at the toolbar at the bottom of the Zoom window, and we will answer the questions at the end of the presentation. Introducing Upsales.
Upsales, we're a software company, our mission is to help companies increase sales and become more effective with everything they're doing in sales. The problem we want to solve is the number one reason why B2B companies fail. All companies start with high ambitions. In reality, of all the companies founded 10 years ago, only 9% of them reach a revenue of more than SEK 10 million. The number one reason for this is the lack of effective sales. What we do, we give companies the tools to turn their business into a revenue engine within 60 minutes. We are a Software as a Service company.
We were founded in 2003, and we have a long track record of profitable and 100% organic growth. Introducing the product, we focus on four key areas when we develop the product and when we talk to our customers about the problems we want to solve. The first one is to help users and customers to generate pipeline and generate business opportunities by finding leads. We enable our customers to use the data they already have within their existing accounting software to find similar companies. We also integrate to various company databases, so our users are able to find all the information they need about potential customers.
The second area is about driving opportunities through the pipeline in order to win more deals and to become more effective when working with a pipeline. In this area, we enable our users and customers to become more systematic and more data-driven in how they approach the activities when they are working with deals in the pipeline. The third area is about existing accounts and how to grow existing customers and increase revenue from the existing customer base. In this area, we help our users and customers to uncover upsell opportunities that exist within the existing customer base.
What you see on the screen is an example of this to get an overview of customers who bought one product but not the other product. This is one example of how you can find upsell opportunities within Upsales. The fourth area is where we tie it all together and help our customers to run effective sales management, looking at the right KPIs and get the data and statistics they need to make better decisions. One core part of our philosophy when we build a product is to invest in the product to make it more scalable.
Traditionally, when you buy a CRM or marketing software, you need to either be very tech-savvy or have a large IT team, or you need to invest in a lot of consulting to configure and to implement and to actually get the value from the investment. Our philosophy is different. We try to build a product that requires as little customization and implementation as possible. A lot of customers get started within a few hours and larger customers get started in weeks rather than months or years. This is also the main explanation to looking at the Upsales revenue. 93% of our revenue comes from subscriptions.
We don't have any implementation partners, there are no partners selling consulting to the Upsales customers either. Our focus target group is B2B companies that has an active selling process with employees between 100 employees up to 2,000 employees. Our main focus are the lower end of the mid-markets. We have identified this as a very clear gap in the market. Looking at the competitive landscape, you have thousands of providers who are great if you're a startup or if you're a five-man company, you have a few providers, maybe U.S.-based providers that's primarily designed to be used by large enterprises.
If you're a fast-growing company, you might just hired your 15th or 20th sales rep, you need something more complex than the spreadsheet you were using, but you're not ready to invest in these mega systems, then Upsales is a very good fit. Looking at our growth drivers, our ARR is currently around 140 million SEK. We believe that there's a huge potential within the existing customer base that we, that we continue to work with. We believe we can take the existing customer base to 500 million SEK.
Looking at the market as a whole in Sweden, the ideal customer, if you look at the ideal customer profile we're working with, we believe we have around 3%-5% of the market. There's plenty of new customers to work with as well in the future. We also have been working for quite some time now with an initiative for the U.K. market, which is still very early stage. I usually say when I talk to investors that the main investment case for investing in Upsales is not international expansion. We believe that the majority of the growth for the foreseeable future will come from Sweden.
We have this exciting initiative in the U.K., where we are working with a number of clients, and we're closing a few clients every quarter. These are the three growth drivers that we see currently. I usually also talk about the kind of background as to how are we able to grow, to grow with profitability. I usually like to talk about our culture. We believe in hiring the best people, investing a lot in individual learning, and making sure that everybody working at Upsales has as much personal growth as possible.
The culture at Upsales is a lot about moving fast, not getting stuck in endless strategy sessions or planning. We like to get our hands dirty and execute. Our culture in the team is a lot about taking extreme ownership, since we are a smaller team than many of our competitors. So the people at Upsales have a on average, a broader set of responsibilities in the roles. The culture is also a lot about working as a team, helping each other out. We talk also about no primadonnas allowed at Upsales. More specific updates what happened in Q1 , starting with the product. We're moving up market.
We're targeting the kind of higher end of our target group, increasingly. When working with these customers, we realize that there are many more problems that our customers need our help with solving, which enable us to invest in the product and to add features and add solutions, which also drives revenue from existing customers. Two initiatives I wanna highlight from Q1. We have seen an increasing trend from certain industries that after GDPR, and more specifically after the Schrems II verdict, some industries are very wary to work with US-based software providers in order to stay compliant.
We recently set up a local data center, which we sell as a premium service to some of our larger customers. We actually won a specific deal in Q1 that where this was a very specific requirement. The second thing I wanna talk about is we're increasingly working with companies that have a more complex quote and order process if you sell a complex offering, where you need to where it's not so straightforward to put together a quote or an order to a potential client. We've had a number of features for a long time now that enables customers to handle these complex situations.
Now we are investing more in this area. We are investing in a full-fledged CPQ offering, which will be part of Upsales. One part of this is already released and is being used by some customers. We're releasing the next phase in the end of Q2, which is also something we believe will help us win, help us stay competitive and drive revenue from existing customers. Talking about the sales organization. Our mission in the sales team, the sales team is divided in two separate teams.
We have one team working with specifically new clients, and then we have the expansion team working with the net revenue retention and driving upsell revenue from existing customers. We've done a lot of changes during Q1. As we are moving up market, we have put together a new tailored offering in terms of our top 10 clients, we will have their own pricing. We're also launching enterprise pricing to differentiate between our smallest customers and slightly larger customers. We're also investing in a more experienced profile when we are looking to hire people to the sales team.
We are hiring more experienced people, adding more, more specific competence related to these larger enterprise deals. As you already know, I guess, we released the ARR numbers at the beginning of April. Sales was slower in Q1, which led to slower ARR growth year-over-year, and slightly negative growth compared to Q4. Before we talk about the specific financials, I just wanna talk a little bit about resilience related to everything that's going on out there in the market. We are not seeing a slowdown in the market. We are not seeing an increase in churn or longer selling cycles or anything like that.
We still believe that sales effectiveness is kind of an anti-cyclical thing, because in challenging economic times, all companies need to focus more on sales when business don't just come walking through the door. We also believe that the scalability of Upsales makes us an attractive alternative for the larger end of our segment, where you might not be as willing to invest in these large consulting projects as you might have been two years ago. Again, the stability, these are actually old numbers, we are now 93% recurring revenue, makes us, yeah, it creates a stability for the business. We are net cash profitable and have zero debt.
Moving on to the financials.
Yes. Thank you, Daniel, and good morning, everyone. Let's begin to look at ARR and revenue. Compared to the same period last year, our annual recurring revenue grew by 17.4%, and ARR as of the end of the period was SEK 141.4 million, compared to SEK 120.4 million during Q1, 2022. Net sales increased by 22.7% to SEK 36.2 million, compared to SEK 29.5 million in Q1, 2022. Looking at revenue, we divide our revenue between recurring revenue, from our subscriptions and one-offs, that comes from onboarding and consulting, just as Daniel mentioned. In Q1, subscription revenue accounted for 92.1% of total net sales, compared to 88.4% in Q1, 2022.
Trailing 12 months, the number is 93% of our total revenue that is subscription revenue. I saw that we had received a question regarding our revenue compared to our ARR. Annual recurring revenue decreased by SEK 4.4 million during Q1, while revenue grew by SEK 1 million compared to Q4 2022. I think that the easiest way to think about this is that if we begin Q1 with a higher ARR than in the previous quarter, we have more deferred revenue going into that specific quarter. That's why we can see an increase in revenue even though the ARR at the end of the quarter was lower. Let's continue to look at profitability.
We had an EBITDA of SEK 9.4 million compared to SEK 5.6 million in Q1 2022, and the EBITDA margin was 26% compared to 19% during the same period last year. We had an EBIT of SEK 7.4 million compared to SEK 3.9 million in Q1 2022. We had a Net Income of this quarter of SEK 5.9 million. Let's look at cash flow. During the quarter, we had an operating cash flow of SEK 13.6 million compared to SEK 5.2 million during the same period in 2022. Net cash at the end of the period was SEK 72.6 million. We don't have any debt. I can mention again that we paid a dividend in 2022.
For 2023, the board has proposed a dividend of SEK 1.25 per share and also a extraordinary dividend of SEK 0.75 per share. The proposed dividend to be paid is a total amount of SEK 34 million. That was all for the financial highlights. Thank you, let's continue to the Q&A section.
All right. We have a question about the ARR development in Q1. There's not one main reason as to the decrease in ARR. I mean, the obvious explanation is that during the quarter, churn was higher than new sales and expansion. The main thing that affected Q1 was weaker sales. I mean, I would say, we have done a lot of changes in how we approach customers and how we run our selling process with the aim of increasing sales by increasing average deal size. We typically do these changes one or two times per year.
I mean, we have evolved as a business in the last few years. The effect in this quarter was not as we were not seeing the positive effects as quickly as we hoped. That's the main reason for weaker sales in Q1. We have a question about the number of employees, which is down compared to last year. I mean, looking at the team, I'm very happy with the Upsales team. It's a very effective team with ambitious and smart people. We continue to have an ambitious hiring plan both for the sales team and for the product team.
The customer success team grows a little bit more linear with growth and number of customers. I mean, as we grow, we expect to add more people to the team. There's a question about, are you going to increase the personnel going forward, or is this a more mature level? I mean, driving sales and investing in the product, we need to add headcount. Headcount per se is not a KPI that we. I mean, there's no specific number as to the number of people we want to add. It's more about finding the right people, finding the best people, and working in the most effective way.
There's another question about if we made changes to our pricing or how we bundle products that had an effect in Q1. We used to have one version of Upsales, now we have two versions. We have a differentiation between the lower end of our segment and the higher end of our segment. That is not the main explanation as to the weaker sales in Q1. The main explanation is that the deals we were hoping to close, these newer category of larger deals, took longer time than we expected. All right. We have a question regarding churn. We don't report churn as a KPI.
I think I touched upon this, that we're not seeing a general increase in churn. We on a weekly basis, we also track the kind of early indicator of future churn, which is cancellations, contracts that are canceled. We're not seeing a trend there either. All in all, we don't expect the churn to increase or making it tougher to grow in the future. All right. We have another question regarding team and the kind of people we expect to hire. Do you plan to hire external people, senior, who have significant experience in scaling up the company?
If yes, can you share how the average salary will move in the future? I expect the average salary to slightly increase. I mean, the main bottleneck for growing Upsales or for growing any business is finding the best people. I would say that's 99% of the game. The challenge we have is to find people who can bring outside experience and help us scale the business. People who are at the same time hands-on and people who are used to work in a smaller business like Upsales. These are the people we're looking for.
One trend we are seeing is that, I mean, the labor market in Sweden is not as crazy as it used to be, with a lot of layoffs happening recently in the tech industry. We are seeing that it's slightly less hard to find talent than it used to be, just one year ago. Are you reversing the changes to the sales process, or do you see better outcomes going forward? Not at all. We are very happy with all the stuff we've done in Q1. I mean, we're not happy with the ARR development, but we're very happy with the changes we have done.
I mean, I always take a long-term view of everything we do, and I think that, I mean, we never try to optimize growth, profitability, or revenue for a specific quarter in the short term. We always look at long term when making decisions. Sometimes they have a negative effect in the short term, but we always try to make decision that's best for long-term growth. Do you expect these new contracts with larger enterprises to be finalized in the coming quarters? I mean, our view for the rest of the year is positive. We expect Upsales to have ARR growth in 2023. Yeah. Let's see if we had any more questions. Okay.
As there are no further questions, this concludes the Q1 earnings call. Thank you very much for joining and have a good day.