Good morning everyone, and welcome to the Docebo Inc. third quarter 2021 earnings call. Today's conference is being recorded. All participants are currently in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will open the line for a Q&A session for analysts. Instructions will be provided at that time for research analysts to ask questions. We ask that analysts please limit themselves to two questions and return to the queue for any follow-ups. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Docebo's Investor Relations, Dennis Fong. Please go ahead, Dennis.
Thank you, operator. Before we begin, Docebo would like to remind listeners that certain information discussed today may be forward-looking in nature. Such forward-looking information reflects the company's current views with respect to future events. Any such information is subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. For more information on the risks, uncertainties, and assumptions relating to forward-looking statements, please refer to Docebo's public filings, which are available on SEDAR and EDGAR. During the call, we will reference certain non-IFRS financial measures. Although we believe these measures provide useful supplemental information about our financial performance, they're not recognized measures and do not have standardized meanings under IFRS. Please see our MD&A for additional information regarding our non-IFRS financial measures, including reconciliations to the nearest IFRS measures.
Please note that unless otherwise stated, all references to any financial figures are in US dollars. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Docebo CEO, Claudio Erba.
Everybody, thank you for joining us on our third quarter 2021 earnings call. With me today is Alessio Artuffo, our President and CRO, and I'm happy to be welcoming Sukaran Mehta, our acting CFO, on his first earnings call. Over the past year, we have seen the momentum in our business accelerate, and this carried through the third quarter as I'm excited to report another quarter of 60%+ revenue and ARR growth. Despite the summer holiday in Europe, which in general is a headwind for us, we have recorded net ARR addition driven by record new logo sales and strong upsell and cross-sell performance. The investment that we have made in our customer experience and success team have helped to build and support a strong pipeline of enterprise customers that have driven substantial growth in average contract value.
We added 151 net new customers in the third quarter. While our growth remains balanced and broad-based across customer verticals, the frequency of the larger enterprise deals has increased as more leading organizations are turning to Docebo to solve their employee, customer, and partner training needs. In the current labor environment, where there is a war on talent for skilled workers, the LMS has become an important tool to improve employee retention. In the third quarter alone, we signed significantly more new deals with ARR greater than $100,000 compared to the second quarter of 2021. In fact, nearly half of new logo business this quarter came from contracts over $100,000 in ARR.
Our success this quarter has not been tied to a handful of large contract wins, but as these organizations adopt Docebo, even at departmental level, they generally have larger use cases. Consistent with our go-to-market strategy, we continue to help organizations solve both internal and external use cases, demonstrating that use cases goes above and beyond industry standard concepts of the traditional LMS. Consistent with the previous quarter, greater than half our deals in Q3 were external hybrid use cases. One of my favorite example in the third quarter is an agreement we signed with Zoom Video Communications. As an integral part of our day-to-day life, Zoom selected Docebo as their trusted learning provider to create personalized learning experience with the ability to robustly scale and service employees, partners, and customers under a single platform.
[Doubly], this partnership will support their rapidly growing customer base and continue to create an impactful learning journey for their audiences. We are also seeing continued success in the retail industry, where there is a need to deliver consistent training experiences across larger distributed workforce. In Q3, we were delighted to partner with Neiman Marcus, the American chain of luxury department store, to help them provide the best-in-class learning solution to accelerate their digital transformation project. Another vertical that has been strong for us has been the biotech and healthcare sector. We added several new customers this quarter, including an agreement with Smiths Medical, a leading global manufacturer of specialty medical devices. Smiths Medical also invested in the wider Docebo Learning Suite with the selection of Docebo Learning Impact. Upsell and cross-sell were also a strong contributor to our growth in the third quarter.
We expanded our partnership with Deliveroo to grow the number of learners with their programs. We also tapped into the wider Docebo Learning Suite by introducing a new way to develop content using Docebo Shape and to measure the effectiveness of the learning program while benchmarking against other companies using Docebo Learning Impact. The flexibility of our platform also allows us to expand to other departments within an organization and address this. In the third quarter, we were pleased to be awarded an agreement with a new division with one of our largest e-commerce and cloud computing customers. This year, we launched the Docebo Learning Suite of products and began selling Docebo Learning Impact in the first quarter and Shape and Learning Analytics in the third quarter.
Although we are now successfully selling each of those new products, we are still in the early days of this journey, and I expect the demand for our core Docebo Learn LMS platform will remain the primary driver of growth in the coming quarters. In early October, we were excited to relaunch and host our annual Inspire user conference. This time it was virtual, and we had more than 560 customers, partners, analysts, and sponsors join us for two days of live stream content and insight from learning and development experts around the world. During the conference, we launched the two new innovative modules that extend the capabilities of our core LMS, Docebo Connect and Docebo Flow.
Docebo Connect is a powerful tool that allows any administrator, no matter how technically skilled, to manage the data import, export process from their LMS across their enterprise tech stack using more than 400 pre-built integrations to a low-code, no-code interface. Docebo Flow takes the power of the core Learn LMS and delivers learning in the workflow within the software environments learners are in, so they can get the contextual knowledge they need when and where they need it. Both products are great example on how we innovate to help organizations connect to the core of their businesses, serving multiple audiences and use cases like customer education, sales enablement, and frontline training and compliance. We consider our learning software a building block to integrate with every other software in the enterprise tech stack.
This philosophy and approach sets us apart and has been fundamental driver in our growth. The delivery of knowledge and training is a revenue enabler for many companies, and our OEM and partnership program are designed to enable this capability. Year to date, we have announced six new agreements and expanded the partnership we have had with Bluewater and MHR that were signed in 2020. As we have consistently said in the past, working with our partners to develop and bring solutions to the market takes time, but we know from our experience with our first OEM partner that the returns can become meaningful. MHR, whom we added in 2020, is now in the process of ramping and becoming a more material contributor to our OEM partner business. We expect several more of our recent partners to launch commercial offerings starting in 2022.
We believe this will be an exciting growth vector for us in the years to come, and we are increasing our investment to expand our partnership program further, and we share more details in the coming quarter. Lastly, when we spoke last quarter, I touched on some of our intention and effort around ESG, and this is a journey that we are very focused on moving forward. I'm honored that Docebo was recognized in the third quarter for its CSR efforts with the 2021 Tech Cares Award from TrustRadius for empowering women in technology with growth opportunities. Instilling a culture of caring is extremely important to our organization, and it is also an important factor in how we attract and retain the best talent.
We have a number of internal initiatives underway, including Docebo Green Ambassador, Docebo Pride, Docebo Women's Alliance, webinars for inclusion and diversity, recognition of World Mental Health Day, and the Day of Truth and Reconciliation, among just a few. I'm proud of the team effort in bringing the environment, diversity, equality, and inclusion to the forefront of our effort as a company. With that, I will now pass the call to Sukaran to speak to the financials.
Thank you, Claudio, and good morning, everyone. For those interested, a detailed breakdown of our financial results for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2021 can be found in our press release, MD&A, and financial statements, which are now available on our website and are also filed on SEDAR and EDGAR. The slide deck accompanying this earnings call was made available on our investor relations website this morning. For those who want to follow along, I'm starting my remarks on slide four. The strong momentum that we demonstrated in the first half of the year continued in the third quarter, with total revenue for the period growing to $27.1 million, an increase of 68% from the prior year.
Subscription revenues were $25.1 million, representing 93% of total revenue for the quarter and up 66% from the prior year same quarter. Professional services revenue in the third quarter were $2 million, an increase of 102% from the prior year period. As Claudio noted, the $10.2 million net ARR added in the third quarter was the highest ever for Docebo and continued the robust trend of quarterly net ARR additions, as shown in slide four. At the end of the third quarter, we had $103.5 million in ARR, an increase of 60% over the $64.6 million in ARR at the end of third quarter of 2020.
With 2,636 customers at the end of the third quarter of 2021, our company-wide average contract value, or ACV, increased to $39,000, up 23% from $32,000 at the end of the third quarter of 2020. This quarter, ACV from new customers grew to approximately $59,000, compared to approximately $46,000 in the second quarter. Nearly 80% of our new logo and cross-sell contracts were multi-year deals. One of the underlying trends that we were excited to see this quarter was the broad-based growth in enterprise deals. Almost half of the ARR generated for new logos this quarter came from deals over $100,000, and there were no deals over seven figures in value.
To further emphasize the breadth of our enterprise wins, the quantity of deals signed valued over $100,000 in ARR was almost double when compared to the second quarter. Overall, we are very pleased with the direction that our KPIs are trending, reflecting the continued progress in executing our growth strategy. Moving on to slide five. The gross profit margin for the third quarter was 79% of revenue, which compares to 80% for the second quarter. The slight reduction in gross profit margin is the result of the investments we've made this year in our customer success and professional services team to facilitate the rollout of our multi-product strategy and to further enhance customer support. To be clear, these costs primarily relate to staffing, and we expect to gain leverage on these investments as our revenue scales.
We expect to return to low 80% – 80%+ growth profit margin levels in the next several quarters. On slide six, you can see a summary of our operating expense lines. Total operating expense for the third quarter increased to $19.9 million compared to $13.9 million for the prior year period. Included in the $19.9 million of operating expenses is a foreign exchange gain of $4.8 million that relates primarily to the cash on our balance sheet and is therefore, for the most part, unrealized. Operating costs, excluding this gain, were $24.7 million, slightly higher than the $23.6 million in operating costs reported on a comparable basis in the second quarter of 2021.
G&A expense of $6.8 million declined as a percentage of revenue from 27% for the second quarter to 25.2% for the third quarter as we realized some further efficiencies from increased scale. Compared to the second quarter, sales and marketing expense increased slightly as a percentage of revenue to 41.2% from 40.8%. R&D expense as a percentage of revenue remains unchanged at 20.2% compared to 20.4% for the second quarter. Heading into 2022, we will continue to invest in sales and marketing, but with the long-term expectation of maintaining expenses as a percentage of total revenue in the range of 35%-40%. We have always been efficient in the level of capital we deploy to generate organic growth. This will continue to be our approach.
Leading with innovation remains core to our DNA and R&D expenses should remain near our expectations of 20% of revenue. We reported an adjusted EBITDA loss of $2 million for the third quarter of 2021 compared to income of $0.6 million in the prior year period. We reported a net profit of $0.7 million for the third quarter of 2021 compared to $1.2 million net loss for the prior year period. As already noted, the net profit for the third quarter reflects an unrealized foreign exchange gain of $4.8 million. Finally, free cash flow was -$1 million in the third quarter, and we continue to have a very healthy balance sheet with net cash and cash equivalent of $216 million.
Last quarter, we noted that we were finally getting to the point where we expect to begin to realize greater benefits from scale, and I think we started to see this on the G&A line in Q3. We think we will continue to see operating leverage in G&A next year, but as we finalize our 2022 budget, our focus is to continue investing to organically grow revenue as fast as we responsibly can. Our sales pipeline remains very strong and we think is the best use of invested capital given our low customer acquisition cost, which we believe is among the best in class in the SaaS industry. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator now to take some questions from the analysts.
Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. Please ensure the mute function on your phone is switched off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. If you find that your question has already been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two. As a reminder, we ask that analysts please limit themselves to two questions and return to the queue for any follow-ups. Again, it's star one to ask a question. We will take the first question from Stephanie Price from CIBC.
Hi, good morning.
Good morning, Stephanie.
Sounds like the average ACV on new deals in the quarter was obviously much higher than the total ACV. Sounds like enterprise was driving that growth. Just hoping you could break that down a little bit more for us in terms of what you're seeing from enterprise this quarter versus prior quarters?
Stephanie, good morning. Alessio speaking. You are correct. We continue to see strength in our enterprise segment, as a result of investments, but also recognition that our product is mature, scalable and strong, and satisfies the needs of large organizations. When it comes to breaking down the why behind it, I'd say that there is one primary contributing factor, Stephanie, and that is our product is proven to be able to solve for multiple use cases altogether. We refer to that in our language and in the script as hybrid use cases. When it comes down to realizing why it also is producing higher ARR on revenue, it's simply we're addressing different user populations in organizations. We're helping organizations retain their people.
We're helping organizations keep their customers' experience high, the customers educated. When you're able to do that on a frequent basis, the end users on the average contract are higher, and they're resulting in higher ACV. That is the biggest trend we're seeing. There's certainly a positive momentum from very early still adoption of new products, which we are getting better and better at including in our conversations. Despite it being early days for most of these products, we're very satisfied with the initial response of the market that we're having.
Great. Maybe on that Learning Suite, maybe you could talk a little bit about the sales approach for the full suite and whether you're leading with the Learning Suite or the core modules, and any color on growth in customers that are signing up for more than one product would be appreciated?
100%. There are several ways to look at the customer journey and the simplest way that encompasses it all, I think, is looking at the first iteration of let's say the new logo posture of the company, and then at the continued expansion of our customers. We've been clear that our approach to driving the efforts of Learning Suite are not to sell the suite at all costs at stage one, meaning a new logo. We would much rather win the trust of our customers and then continue to do an excellent job and continue to solve problems for them rather than squeezing as much as we can upfront.
Having said that, the capability of selling the suite and the way we approach it is still very Learn driven. We believe our flagship product, Learn, is the strongest in the market to satisfy enterprise needs of hybrids, and it becomes very natural again to then open up the conversation to other products. On the upsell front, as long as we do an excellent job at creating intimacy and coverage at the field level of our customers, which we're extremely focused on, again, we have an opportunity to not only upsell but also cross-sell across the entire customer 360 environment. I hope that answers, Stephanie.
It does. Thanks so much.
Thank you.
We'll now take the next question from Daniel Chan from TD Securities.
Hi, good morning. Just wonder if you can give us more color on the cross-sell agreement with that, e-commerce and cloud computing customer. What will they be doing for you, and what's the agreement structure? In other words, is it like a revenue share model? Any color would be appreciated?
Hey, Dan. I'm sure you understand that, when we're not public about actual, you know, logo names, there are certain restrictions that we're subject to as to what we can share. You know, I appreciate the question. I'd say, along with what Stephanie just asked, that success and that agreement reflects entirely our strategy. When we sign an organization, and particularly true with organizations that are of a very large magnitude geography, when they have multiple businesses, one of our jobs is dedicating strategic account management to it to map and understand the opportunity that we have across the organization. This success with this organization is a reflection of that. We have a good understanding, deep understanding of our customer's potential.
In this case, with this e-commerce and cloud provider, we, you know, we were granted the opportunity to serve another business to address their needs. Once again, I would love to give you all the color in the world, but there are certain terms that we're bound to, and I hope you understand. Thank you.
Yeah. That is Claudio speaking.
The way we expand through cross-selling, it's common on every industry and vertical. I mean, in this case, he's an e-commerce vendor, but you can imagine another industry group that have companies across the world or division across the world, and they buy multiple Docebo instances for every parent or sister company. It's a common use case expanding not only vertically to having more users or buying more products from the same entity or the same department, or expand horizontally buying multiple LMSs or expanding through the extended enterprise Docebo module, more use cases through a single LMS, but in multiple departments or multiple divisions or multiple companies. It's very common for us.
Thanks for that. It's very helpful. Your customer wins continue to be really good. Just wondering whether you're still displacing incumbents or whether these are mostly greenfield opportunities? Thank you.
You know, displacement is the pattern in all the enterprise segment. There's no doubt. There's a caveat to that. That is that when we talk about addressing the needs of hybrid, of customer workforce, of improving the experience of the customers of our customers, we find that in many instances, even large organizations are not addressing that problem yet. There is a, if you will, green space within, an environment where there are already vendors. These vendors that are more legacy perhaps, and that were used for compliance or internal training, were not addressing what we believe is the full scope of the digital learning experience, again, internal and external. On the smaller markets, again, we're very fortunate. We operate horizontally across multiple industries, and we are adopted by companies of different sizes, mid-size and enterprises both.
In the smaller size of our customer base, for sure, we find still the organizations are not always equipped with the best-in-class LMS, or they have a very first iteration that they outgrow. When they do outgrow it is our time to step in because once again, thanks to our scale, architecture, experience and recognition in the market, we help them get one step ahead and one step further.
Great. Thank you.
We'll take the next question from Gavin Fairweather from Cormark.
Oh, hey there. Good morning.
Morning.
Just on the enterprise deals, curious, you know, what's driving the pickup? Are you seeing more deals entering your funnel or a greater win rate or both?
Win rates remain fantastic. We're very pleased with it. We believe that is a product of many factors. For sure there is an element of recognition in the market because when you start having a funnel consisting of enterprises, your brand also gets recognized as the leader, and we believe that is the case with ours. There is also the true fact of intentionality. We have been investing in the enterprise segment as we continue to mature our capabilities to satisfy the needs of enterprises. We were more conservative, if you will, in that segment years ago. As we continue to win very large organizations, our strategy has been to drive more enterprise success. Finally, I would say that our customers grow with us.
That's the beauty of our business. You know, we may have customers that have entered in our, if you will, sales funnel and became part of our family, in what we would consider mid-market customers. Over time, due to adoption and continued expansion, enter in our enterprise book of business because of their size, growth and maturity. Overall, our posture towards enterprises is very intentional. We're staffing the organization to be really good at it, but we remain a horizontal company that serves multiple industry and multiple sizes of enterprises.
Thank you for that. That's very helpful. Just secondly for me, you know, having heard from, you know, some other SaaS companies that it was a bit of a slower than normal summer with elevated, you know, vacations and the like. Obviously, you didn't see any slowdown in your sales production, but curious for your general take on the operating environment that you saw in Q3?
We know seasonality. We understand the sort of the market motions in different geographies according to different months. This year was no different, frankly. We've seen, you know, there was a huge return to getting out of the house and having a normal life in many places. What we've seen is a reflection. Again, our ability to deliver a record ARR performance and continue to grow strong pipeline, we believe is a testament to how solid we are and how versatile our offering is. It's irregardless of the environment, whether people are in office or they are remote. We believe satisfies both scenarios, and we've seen that in the numbers.
Great. Congrats on the strong results. Thank you.
Thank you.
We will now take the next question from Richard Tse from National Bank Financial.
Yes, thank you. In regards to these enterprise wins, my guess, and this is just a guess, is that the absolute dollars to acquire those customers is probably higher. But on a relative basis, you know, let's say, you know, on a per dollar of ARR, are they higher or lower, or are they about the same as your remaining base?
Yeah. Hi Richard. I would say in terms of the dollar acquisition for the higher enterprise customers, I don't think there's a significant jump in terms. If you kind of do the math around our CAC ratio, looking at the sales and marketing expense over the ARR that we add in the quarter, that's tracking relatively consistent. So I think part of the story that Alessio spoke to earlier is we continue to one of the ways we continue to expand the ACV is landing and expanding that book of business within the customer base. So we've been very efficient in doing that.
In overall landing enterprise customers, you know, we're relatively efficient in our CAC ratios, and so I wouldn't say there's a much higher cost to acquiring those customers.
Okay.
Yeah, there is also probably a factor of sales organization maturity. I mean, we have onboarded and invested a lot in sales and marketing over the past year. Now these incredible talent which we have in the organization are gaining confidence, are trained, and also thanks to the enablement to sell our products, to pitch correctly, to position correctly, to identify customer needs. It's a mix of factors. Part of this factor are all the investment that we made, and we are continuously making to strengthen our team and our organization.
Okay, great. Sorry, second question. You know, relative to sort of growth, I don't know if you want to use sort of ACV or a annual recurring revenue. But if you look at the growth, can you maybe share with us, you know, the split in terms of the contribution of that growth, where it's coming from, whether it's new or from existing expansions here?
Yeah. I mean, I think if you look at the ACV, Richard, I mean, I would say the primary driver for the growth in ACV. I think the numbers you've seen on the new logos, it's gone up from $46,000 within the quarter to almost $60,000. I would say the primary driver for the continuation of growth in ACV is the size of use case for our Docebo Learn product. Maybe a bit more color, as I think Alessio spoke about the new products.
You know, some of the products have just been launched in the past few weeks, in the past quarter, so they haven't been a big driver in Q3, and I think we need to bear that in mind, 'cause as they've been launched very recently. We certainly think, you know, we're positive on those launches, and we have a strategy that Alessio alluded to at the start of the call, and we'll factor or report any progress on that as we kind of get some more data in the near future.
Okay. Appreciate that. Thank you.
We will now take the next question from Paul Steep from Scotia Capital.
Good morning. Can you maybe just talk to how much of that enterprise channel has been driven by either OEM partners, or has it been primarily direct, Alessio, when you've been picking up these wins? Maybe the second part of this, we talked lots about it, but I guess I'm just trying to understand why now. What's driven this change that's sort of lifted hybrid? Obviously, you're getting multi-department or bigger wins. Is it just simply profile, or has there been any other changes you maybe made up to even a year ago that you're now seeing the fruits of? Thanks.
Paul, thank you. Great questions. On the OEM front versus direct remains our largest contributor in terms of revenue add. OEM is a business that we started building, and we have some incredible partnerships that continue to bear fruit. They are according to our expectations, and we have plans to continue to grow that business. You know, again, the biggest contributor, but more than 50% is the direct channel, in the form of new logo and upsell extensions both. When it comes to the why now, why are these organizations coming to the table with more need? It's not a new trend, Paul. We believe this trend has been an underlying trend, largely underserved for a long time.
Docebo started selling, in fact, their first initial what we would call hybrid today customers five, six years ago. The market wasn't quite there yet. We've continued to invest in this technology. We've become over time gained a competitive edge over others, and our technology is now designed to satisfy that use case with a degree of flexibility and depth that perhaps other vendors are not there. We think that there's a market posture that is also reinforced by the need of organizations to do a better job at retaining their employees. We live in a Great Resignation world. Companies have to do extra work to keep their people happy, trained, motivated, and upskilled. On the flip side, we live in a subscription economy.
When that happens, you need to do the same exact thing that you do with your employees, with your customers. Our technology is prime for both those scenarios, and enterprises across all verticals are understanding that. We believe that fundamentally we're seeing just a maturity of a trend that initiated a long time ago. It meets our technology capabilities, and it's in an environment, the one with the market that just supports the needs for that.
Yeah. Let's not take for granted that all the industry understands that training is not only internal training and is an HR duty. Because most of the organization, and that's what we are learning, speaking with many big strategic vendors in several kind of conversation, is that they continuously think that learning is an HR thing due to make training for compliance, soft skills, and language training. There are companies quarter- over- quarter that are realizing that their vision of online, of learning, of training was old school and outdated. This is helping us because we are pitching a different story since years.
Paul, I'll just add one point to it. I think if you think about the environment out there from a labor market perspective, and Alessio touched upon this. Our learning suite and our platform is one of the most cost-effective ways to engage employees, improve their efficiency, but one of the most important problems out there is to decrease attrition in what we're seeing out there in the market. That is also something to be factored in as customers think about solving and engaging their employee needs as well as their customer needs.
All right. One last very quick one, promise. Just, if we think about moving. Because you've highlighted that you didn't get any large sort of whale deals in the quarter. Should we now be thinking that the time to full deployment in an enterprise has materially shrunk? That like you're going in with larger deals and that we now should see full deployments much faster than we might have thought about? Thank you.
Every customer has his own use case, and every use case is unique. There is no, a recipe to think that some deployment is faster or some deployment is longer. What we are seeing is that the more the LMS is integrated inside the enterprise software stack, the more we need to integrate. That said, we are working to help our customers to integrate better Docebo with others. This quarter, we launched Docebo Connect, which is a pre-built integration containing probably more than 400, we call it, recipes that are pre-built integration with many other software. This is not shortening materially the deployment, the onboarding, and the launch of the project, but is increasing the data that we can trade inside and outside Docebo, thanks to integration gateways.
Paul, I would just add to that. We were extremely pleased with the increase. In my remarks, I noted the fact that almost half the net ARR add this quarter were deals over six figures. If you look at the quantity, it gives us the consistency and we're penetrating into the next level in a nice fashion. I think we're extremely pleased to continue to build on that success.
Thank you.
We will now take the next question from Martin Toner from ATB Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hey, thanks a lot for taking the question, and congrats on the good numbers, guys. Question is, you guys' ARR, incremental ARR was around $10 million for the second quarter in a row. Is there any reason why that's the ceiling or, you know, are the pieces in place for you guys to continue to increase incremental ARR quarter after quarter?
Martin, thank you for your compliments first of all. We, you know, conceptually, we see no ceilings. We believe we are designing the organization to continue to perform. Altogether, we have plans and the results we're bringing to the table are consistent with our plans. Our plans are to continue to grow that top line ARR. Our plans are to continue to succeed along the lines of what we've just discussed. We don't believe there's a reason why we shouldn't be seeing that 10 million number continue to grow in the future. I'm not trying to be cautious in any way, but I would say just that. This is not a-
This is a reflection of what we have planned today, and we'll continue to plan for improved performance in the future. Yeah, and I'll leave it at that.
On top of that, we really believe that consistency is one of our key value. I don't like spikes. I don't like 10-30% and -20%. I like 10%, 11%, 12%, and so on. Let's say that internally we do have three pillars to increase the ARR. One is our comfort zone, our love, which is our LMS, which is living with me since 17 years. It's also my second son. Whatever. I have a daughter, and then I have another son. Let's say that the second is the OEM. OEM is an incredible product, and we are working to get more partners working on OEM, but also different way to pitch the OEM.
Don't forget that we launched the Docebo Flow, which is another way to have Docebo embedded everywhere. That there is a standard terminology which is learning in the flow of work. The third one are the new sons and daughters we have, which are our new products, Learning Analytics, Shape, Impact, and those are the new ideas we are working on. The future for Docebo is an execution of a mixed strategy and not making only one bet on our comfort zone or an only one bet in innovation that still needs to prove if they are working or not.
Martin, I'll add one more to Claudio, what Claudio said. The other area that we continue to work on, as you know, is geographical expansion. We've opened an office-
Correct.
As we think about, you know, we acquired forMetris, we've now got momentum in France. We've opened an office in Germany and built that from ground up. There are areas in the world that we haven't tapped yet, and that will be another area of focus from growth perspective.
Great, guys. Thank you very much for that. That's all for me.
Thank you, Martin.
You're welcome.
We will now take our next question from Robert Young from Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.
In a case where your ARR is growing going forward, do you see that you need to expand your sales function by like materially or do you see your current sales function as sufficient to kind of grow at this order?
Great question on growth of the sales function. We continue to grow the company organically across the board, from engineering, product services. For sure, there's consideration about continuing to invest and grow in sales, notwithstanding that every time we add a sales function, we contextually grow our demand capabilities. You know, our focus really is we believe that we've reported, I believe, 2,600 customers. It is really important for us to continue to delight our customers, to make sure that our customers have the best service in the industry. We really think about that day and night and try to implement the strategies that lead to that happening. Those are not in sales alone. They're across the board in the company really.
Now when we think about growth and what Claudio said just now in the prior questions, you know, we're distributing our success across few growth vectors. One of those, if you will, is also our ability to continue to grow our customer penetration. In order to do that, an investment which we believe will be accelerated is validated by our learnings and is to continue to increase our share of wallet in our base. We believe our installed base or our existing customers deserve more coverage, which will in turn allow us to have a more, if you will, sales field effort and capability in our base because we have more stories to tell. We have more problems that we can solve with great technology.
It would be a pity not taking that opportunity and therefore we're planning accordingly. Absolutely more coverage in the base at all levels, sales, support, customer experience is what we aim for.
Okay. That's really helpful. Thank you. Just on a second question, I was just wondering if, you know, the inbound that you're seeing from enterprise customers and the overall demand for LMS and learning, has the velocity of cross-sell kind of increased? Have you seen that the chasm to, you know, cross-sell your modules?
Oh, yeah.
to your customers, have you seen that sales cycle come kind of reduce?
It is true across the board that every upsell or cross-sell sales cycle has the huge benefit of having much higher velocity when compared to a new logo cycle. Look, it is no secret. You're now gonna go in most instances through a new contract negotiation that the terms are pre-established, that is already a customer that has given you faith. If they're interested in buying more, you know, they already have that. Whereas when you first meet somebody, you have to win that trust and faith. There are psychological elements that result into that, and the facts and the numbers confirm your hypothesis and intuition.
We love the upsell, cross-sell business also because of the velocity element, which is again, though, a result of our investments in customers' experience. I continue to underscore that because, you know, our desire is for our customers to rave about us publicly, to say that we're the best at what we do, and we're working very hard to accomplish that.
That's very helpful. Thanks for taking my questions.
We will now take the next question from Phillip Leytes from Berenberg Capital Markets.
Good morning, guys. Can you provide some more color on how the OEM partnerships are performing? How much of the revenue for the quarter came from the OEMs? How is Ceridian performing, and how does the pace of the MHR ramp compare to the earlier days of Ceridian? Thanks.
Thanks. Morning, Phillip. It's Sukaran here. I'll speak to the overall OEM. When you think about Ceridian, first, I'll start with Ceridian. We're continuing to be very pleased with how we're performing with Ceridian, and as you know, it's a meaningful contributor to our growth story. When I think about the other OEM, and I would call it alliance partners that we signed in the past few quarters, I'll start with MHR. We signed MHR, I think probably a year or so ago now. As we kind of continue to stay in the same story around Ceridian, you know, with patience and working with our partners in implementing the solution that they provide to their customers, that patience over time pays dividends.
We're seeing that in MHR, which is now becoming a meaningful contributor towards the growth in our ARR. When I think about the alliances and OEMs that we signed in the past few quarters, you know, that patience and those dividends, you know, with patience, we'll see some of those dividends come through in the next, you know, early part of next year is what we think. All that said, I think the other factor that we also still see today is that, you know, our solution solves for multiple verticals, multiple use cases. It's not just from an HCM perspective. As you know, we signed an IT service managed provider and other sales enablement providers.
We actually do see a really good pipeline of future alliances and OEMs that we can partner with. We are optimistic in this area.
Thank you.
As there are no further questions, I would like to hand the call back to Claudio for any closing remarks.
Thank you guys for staying with us for another quarter. Let's meet Q4.
Yeah.
Have a nice day and happy Christmas because I think that the next one will be after Christmas.
Yeah. Happy holidays, everyone.
Happy holidays.
Thank you. That will conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, ladies and gentlemen. You may now disconnect.