Good morning everyone, and welcome to the Docebo Inc. Q3 2022 Earnings Call. All participants are currently in a listen only mode. We will open the line for a question-and-answer session for analysts following the presentation. 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 would now like to turn the conference call over to Docebo's Vice President of Investor Relations, Mr. Mike McCarthy. Please go ahead, Mike.
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 related 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 are 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 U.S. dollars. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Docebo's CEO and founder, Claudio Erba.
Hello everybody, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter earnings call. With me today is Alessio Artuffo, our President and COO, and Sukaran Mehta, our CFO. Docebo continues to execute well in an environment that is increasingly impacted by macroeconomic headwinds. Even in the face of those challenges, we delivered strong revenue growth and free cash flow. We are especially pleased to report a positive adjusted EBITDA that was ahead of schedule and surpassed consensus estimates. Adjusted for foreign exchange, we delivered a year-over-year growth in ARR of 44%. Consistent with what we saw last quarter, this cycle elongated in certain segments as global macroeconomic issues weighed on decision-making. Growth remain a top priority for Docebo. What is also important for us is to continue to demonstrate operating leverage and drive profitability as a means of unlocking value for our shareholders.
This is consistent with Docebo long-term journey, which is best characterized as one of balanced growth, complemented by our strong balance sheet, world-class capital efficiency, and the large underpenetrated total addressable market. While our competitors continue to offer legacy solution with inefficient businesses that are now in consolidation mode, we have first mover advantage that is driving organic growth and redefining how customers choose to implement Docebo modern architecture. We see this as a time to push our strong competitive position in a disciplined fashion, and we are concentrating on a few key areas as follows. One, lead by innovation and showcase how our solution address the need of the customer-specific use case to achieve this business outcome. We are doing this quite effectively in areas such as customer education, franchisee, and quick service restaurant.
Two, double down on our enterprise segment, where we continue to see large greenfield and external use case opportunities ahead. Finally, doing strategic and responsible hiring necessary to drive long-term growth objective in both R&D and sales and marketing. As some of you may have seen during our Inspire user conference last month, Chris joined Docebo, Fabio Pirovano, Chief Product Officer, as Senior Vice President. He brings with him a wealth of product design and strategy experience, joining us from Workday, where he was part of the product leadership team for Workday flagship core HCM product. With Nina Simosko and Ryan Brock taking on senior leadership roles in sales and marketing, I am delighted to announce that we have expanded Alessio's role as our President & Chief Operating Officer.
He will work even more closely with me to drive the operational efficiency and revenue growth necessary for Docebo to achieve his ambitions. We also extend our thanks and appreciation to Rudy Valdez for his contribution, and wish him well in his future pursuits. In closing, I want to emphasize that we remain growth-focused. Our commitment is to continue to deliver sustainable growth with steadily improving profitability. While the near-term outlook may become incrementally more challenging, our customer, employees, and shareholders can be assured that we'll be proactive in making the adjustment necessary to achieve those objectives. Now I'll hand the call over to Alessio.
Thank you, Claudio, and good morning, everyone. Before I begin, I want to thank my colleagues and board members for entrusting me with the role and responsibilities of President and Chief Operating Officer. Sales and marketing will continue to report to me through the strong leaders we have put in place. Going forward, I'm working more directly to align Docebo's day-to-day operations with Claudio's strategic vision. Now on to the discussion about our third quarter results. Quarter three was another strong quarter for Docebo, reflecting our continued focus on innovation and execution. This is especially true with our larger customers that are tapping into our external and hybrid capabilities and then leveraging our internal use case solutions. This enables them to reduce complexity in their tech stacks and drive better returns on investment during this period of uncertainty.
Q3 is generally a seasonally slower quarter, and much as we experienced in quarter two, we saw deal cycles elongate. We are calibrating our execution to the ever-evolving macro environment. As we look forward, we take confidence in the quality of our growing pipeline and our win rates, which remain very, very strong. As we grow, we continue to strengthen our view on how to succeed in the longer term. Today, approximately 50% of our customer base is using us for three or more use cases. What we also see is that these customers drive best-in-class growth retention and net retention in excess of 120%. Many of these use cases position Docebo in strategically critical areas that customers are focusing on to enhance existing revenue streams while opening up new ones.
What these data points also highlight is that we have a vast land and expand cross-sell opportunity that we have now structured the organization to go after methodically. From a go-to-market perspective, we're concentrating investment in certain key areas. One, we are creating a tight correlation between use case needs and Docebo platform. This solutions-based approach to use case, such as customer education, sales enablement, franchisee and partner training, package the Docebo Learning Suite as a solution that delivers business outcomes that our customers want. Second, we are integrating value engineering resources into working collaboratively with our sales teams to document and demonstrate ROI tied to business outcomes. Finally, we're building out a more sophisticated digital demand generation engine, combined with a comprehensive planned investment in brands. With new marketing leadership in place, we're now enhancing the system and processes necessary.
During the quarter, we signed 139 net new customers, including three notable enterprise deals. First is Sonos, the world's leading sound experience company and inventor of multi-room wireless home audio. It chose Docebo for multiple internal and external use cases that include compliance, sales enablement, customer and partner training. Next is Advance Auto Parts, a leading automotive aftermarket parts supplier. It selected Docebo for multiple internal use cases, including sales enablement, leadership training, onboarding, and compliance. The third is a leading European-based sports authority. This customer selected Docebo to implement a unified digital learning solution for both external and internal stakeholders. Up-sells continue to be very healthy for us as customers already using Docebo are finding additional benefits to be gained by implementing our platform across multiple use cases and expand the current product offering.
This includes Deliveroo, an innovative on-demand food delivery company operating in 11 countries globally. Not too long ago, Deliveroo had multiple legacy and internally developed LMS in place. Today, Docebo addresses their needs with a single LMS for internal and external stakeholders. We also saw a significant expansion into MHR, one of our OEM partners in the U.K., where we have been providing them with additional products and modules beyond our core LMS. Geographically, North America remains our largest market, with external and multi-use case opportunities providing excellent greenfield opportunities. In EMEA and APAC, we're steadily expanding across the region in a measured fashion, consistent with our long-term balanced growth strategy. In particular, I'm very pleased with the strong progress we're seeing in the Nordics as we increase our presence in the region with strategic partners such as Tic Tac .
In conclusion, we see a demand environment where our fundamental growth drivers are stronger than near-term economic headwinds. Our focus is on controlling the things we can, thereby improving our position and execution. Our long-term balanced growth strategy is just beginning to show the results that we desire, and we will continue evolving Docebo to ensure we're prepared for the next leg of our journey. I would like to hand the call over to Sukaran for a review of our financial performance.
Thank you, Alessio, and good morning, everyone. For those interested, a detailed breakdown of our financial results for the three and nine months ended September 30th, 2022 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. As reported, total revenue for the third quarter grew to $37 million, an increase of 37% from the prior year. Total revenue increased by 42% after adjusting the impact of foreign exchange. Subscription revenues were $34.3 million, representing 93% of total revenue for the quarter.
Annual recurring revenue was $144.6 million, an increase of 44% after adjusting for foreign exchange impact from the strengthening of the US dollar, which was about 4%. Our company-wide average contract value, or ACV, increased 17% after adjusting for the impact from foreign exchange. As reported, company-wide ACV was up 13% to approximately $45,000 from $39,000 at the end of the third quarter of 2021. New and cross-sell logos with ARR greater than $100,000 represented approximately 30% of the net new ARR in Q3 as the elongation of the enterprise sales cycle previously discussed extended through the quarter. Customers using Docebo for external or hybrid training increased to 65% of our total ARR. What is important to note here is that these multi-use case customers drive best-in-class growth and net retention rates.
Gross profit margin for the third quarter improved sequentially to 81% of revenue. This was in part driven by continued focus on optimizing hosting architecture and higher subscription revenue. Total operating expenses for the third quarter increased to $20.8 million from $19.9 million for the prior period. Included in the $20.8 million of operating expenses is a foreign exchange gain of $10.2 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 $31 million, slightly higher than the $30.8 million in operating costs reported on a comparable basis in the second quarter of 2022. A full summary of operating expense line are presented in our investor deck.
G&A, as a percentage of revenue, declined to 21.2% for the third quarter compared to 21.7% for the second quarter as we continue to drive incremental benefits from scale. This is an area that we will continue to manage to drive leverage going forward. Sales and marketing expense decreased slightly as a percentage of revenue to 42% from 42.6% for the second quarter, and we expect to naturally drive efficiency in this area as we scale. R&D investments in the third quarter were $6.1 million or 16.5% of revenue. R&D investments were flat on an absolute basis compared to the second quarter. As the U.S. dollar strengthened, we experienced a two percentage point benefit as a percentage of our revenue due to the core R&D operations being based in Europe.
We are extremely pleased to report a positive adjusted EBITDA of $0.6 million for the third quarter of 2022 compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $0.3 million for the second quarter. We reported a net income of $10.3 million for the third quarter of 2022 compared to $2.1 million net income for the second quarter. We generated positive free cash flow for the second consecutive quarter of $0.6 million. At the end of Q3, we held cash and cash equivalents of $213 million. Our strong capital structure gives us the flexibility to invest strategically and navigate through this challenging macroeconomic environment. Share-based compensation as a percentage of Q3 revenue was a very modest 2.7%. Before opening the line to questions, I want to close with these thoughts.
We are committed to delivering steadily improving operating leverage and profitability as an essential part of our healthy Rule of 40 performance. Consistent execution and operational excellence has enabled us to achieve our positive adjusted EBITDA target a full quarter early. We are not only pleased to be adjusted EBITDA positive, but with our intense focus on shareholder return, we are also GAAP net income positive for the period that includes the impact of share-based compensation and even after excluding the foreign exchange gain. Finally, as we look forward in these uncertain times, if we see a marked slowdown in growth, we have the discipline to drive operational efficiency and profitability to remain Rule of 40. That said, Docebo remains a long-term growth story, and we will lean towards growth as being the primary contributor to the Rule of 40. That concludes my prepared remarks.
I'd like to turn it over to the operator now to take some questions from the analysts.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you have a question, please press star followed by one on your touch-tone phone. You will hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging a request, and your questions will be pulled in the order they are received. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press star followed by two, and if you're using a speakerphone, please lift your handset before pressing any keys. One moment for your first question. Your first question comes from Rob Young with Canaccord. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. You already noted the elongated sales cycles like continued impact. I thought you would talk a little bit about the pipeline. Are you still seeing the same emphasis on external LMS sales enablement, the higher ROI use cases? Do you see, you know, opportunities to close larger deals in the pipeline?
Yeah. Hey, Rob, this is Mike. Can you repeat that question for us, please?
Louder.
Sure. Okay. You already noted the change in customer behavior around deal closing times and slower signings. I'm just curious about what that means relative to the pipeline. Are you still seeing the same strength of pipeline? Is it still, you know, emphasis on external LMS use cases, higher ROI use cases, and are you seeing opportunity for growth deals in the pipeline still?
Hey, Rob, Alessio here. Thank you for repeating. We had the audio issue that we've resolved since. Rob, our pipeline remains very good. It is a pipeline that, as we explained in the past, we have a good grasp on over the next 1-2 quarters ahead of us. The mix across segments remains very healthy, and the combination of use cases across the pipeline is consistent with what we've seen all along. In terms of, is there an opportunity to continue to win large deals? There is, and historically, I think this is fair to say it's a trend, quarter three is less of an enterprise quarter, and quarter four and quarter one tend to be.
We're truly looking forward to delivering great news about you know incredible outcomes in the near future. That said, we remain very optimistic and satisfied with both the quality and the quantity of our pipeline.
Alessio, on top of that, is it fair to say that we love multi-department deals, especially when they blend internal and external? A dynamic that we are seeing is also that on top of the pyramid, I mean, the very big deals, we are seeing a shift from other vendors to us due to the consolidation that is happening between legacy players that are now creating a single entity, and there are customers that are not happy about that and are shifting, and we are seeing an inflow of those kind of requests of migration.
100%.
Okay, great. Next question for me would just be around the cost of acquisition in the quarter. The sales and marketing relative to the incremental ARR that you brought in in the quarter. It's very high level of spend for each incremental dollar of ARR. So I'm curious, as you look into Q4, I mean, you noted that the seasonality is intact, how do we think about this cost of acquisition going forward?
Rob, morning. Sukaran here. I'll start this and then I'll let Alessio come in. Firstly, I think when you look at CAC, I would say, CAC is relative. You wanna probably focus it on rather than quarterly, more of an annual basis, because you have seasonality between quarters. As you kind of think about we moving forward, you've seen this in the results, we'll continue to show discipline. We've made some investments at the start of the year in sales and marketing, and as we've kind of gone through the latter part of this year, we've shown the discipline across other areas, but you should see that, some of that fruits of those investments come through as we move into next year.
Alessio, I don't know if you want to comment anything else.
Not a lot to add other than we're extremely focused and spending a lot of time in tuning both our sales and marketing machine, to reap the benefits of the investments we've already made and to truly focus our investments on the areas that matter. I personally am spending a lot of time with our new CMO, Ryan Brock, on this optimization and calibration of the machine, and again, consistent with the pipeline comment, we believe we are setting up the engine for long-term growth.
Okay. Thanks for the questions.
Thanks, Rob.
Thanks, Rob.
Your next question comes from Stephanie Price with CIBC. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Your prepared remarks mentioned the MHR relationship and that they've added some Docebo solutions. Hope that you could, maybe expand on that and talk a little bit about that relationship here.
Sure. Hi, Stephanie. We are absolutely, you know, thankful for the partnership with MHR and, you know, like we said in the past, what we like about partners like MHR is that they operate in an environment and with the type of buyer persona that does not, if you will, raise any so-called channel conflict. MHR is a leader in their market, in their space, in the region, and we very naturally complement their offering with something that was innate to their technology. With that said, you know, additional color on MHR per se is we maintain a great connection with their leadership team and we continue to nurture the relationship like we do with every strategic partner and with every strategic customer.
Yeah, that's as much as I can share about MHR.
Yeah. Ale, on top of the relationship with MHR operate in a segment which for us is not familiar, which is government. They sell a lot to government, and they are sending signal that government spending in learning is very interesting as a segment, as an industry. We are looking and studying this segment to invest in the future in these areas which are almost, I'm not saying greenfield, but
Quite untouched.
Yeah. Or untouched or managed or served by very legacy player. Unexpected legacy player, by the way.
That's good color. Thank you. Then you mentioned several customer wins where they're using Docebo for both internal and external use cases. Hoping you can touch a bit more on this opportunity. You know, is it vendor consolidation you're seeing from clients, and what's the cross-sell opportunity there for internal use cases?
Sure. The trend of multi-use cases not only continues but becomes an element of strength in an environment, Stephanie, in which companies, particularly enterprises, are looking to extract more value and rationalize. What that means is CIOs, but also CFOs, are looking for economies of scale. When they look at the learning tech stack, they try and understand if the expenditures they have is manageable to where they can extract more value from single vendors that may be doing more and remove duplicates. It is in that context that our ability to solve more than one problem, whether it's internal or external combined, we solve for 8, 9 key use case across the entire learning delivery life cycle.
That quality that is embedded in our DNA becomes our best or one of the best hedging strategies in a recessionary environment. Because once again, where a vendor can solve the problem, solves only that problem, and its challenge is solving other problems that they have not built for, we can flex around the various problems to solve, and that is winning us business.
Stephanie, just to add to that is why one of the numbers that I think Alessio or I spoke about was we went from 61%-65% in terms of our total book of business, which is external and hybrid use case. What also we were trying to make sure it's understood is that as the more you do that multi-department external, internal use case, that is what drives best-in-class gross retention and net retention.
Great. Thanks for the color.
Thank you, Stephanie.
Your next question comes from Richard Tse with National Bank Financial. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. You know, with respect to the strategy to kind of move upmarket on larger enterprises, you've obviously had quite a bit of progress there. How does that sort of change your go-to-market model? You know, I recognize that you are spending a bit more, but, like, tactically, it seems like it's a little bit different from, you know, what you were doing years ago. If you maybe sort of elaborate a little bit on that'd be helpful.
Richard, thank you. Tactically, we are implementing, you know, the script I mentioned, we're calibrating our approach and execution to conform also to the ever-evolving changes in the market recently. I would characterize some of the changes that I'm about to list more related to the current environment than a shift in our strategy from the past. We have continued to execute upmarket for the past several years, and our move into enterprise is only very natural, and it's a reflection of our brand affirmation and strengthening in the market. It's not a forceful push in any direction. With that said, there are some things we're doing to getting more efficient, smarter, and more productive.
Number 1, we are spending more time and being more intentional in how we get to the C-suite and very senior leadership sooner and better. This is something that maybe because of our mid-market SMB past, we were not as used to do on a methodic basis. Number 2, we are training our people to getting to core differentiation sooner, meaning being able to speak to why we are different in the current environment, and what the benefits do we provide sooner than later in the cycle, and separating us from, if you will, the pack or the legacy vendors. Number 3, we mentioned this with value engineering.
We are working already very hard, and we'll get better and better over the next few months at outlining quantifiable value, return, savings, and optimization opportunities with numbers on the table, so that at the time that the CIO and CFO asks why, there is a very clear numbers-driven answer as opposed to a qualitative learning answer. We believe we can do a lot in this area. Finally, in general, we're simplifying the field sales motion. We want to empower our sellers with a story that is simpler in a way, and just to give an example, operating on pricing complexity and making sure that we are more, you know, that's easier for sellers to execute. Finally, this is last point, but probably strategically could be the first point.
Strategically, we are working very, very, very hard at surrounding ourselves with an environment of strategic partners that we are doing incredible business with. I'm talking not only strategic OEMs, which continue to be a huge effort for us, and we're loving what we're seeing in the pipeline, but I'm talking about industry-leading strategic, system integrators that do live inside the Fortune 1000, and that now we're friendly with, and we go and do business with. These are some of the things that we execute on every day. There's more, but I hope that helps.
Alessio and Nina is helping a lot in this journey. I mean, she bring a lot of knowledge, and we are learning a lot from her, and we are trying to implement at the speed of light all the changes that will improve the Docebo up-market strategy.
That's well said, Claudio, and
That's Nina.
Yes. Yes. Nina Simosko, our CSO, she's bringing that expertise from the likes of the SAP and other great companies she's operated at, and we're really relying on her expertise to execute a lot of what I just said.
Okay. That's great. Super helpful. Thanks for all that color. My second question's a little bit tied to that one. When it comes to the new wins, I'm guessing most of them are competitive displacements. I'm wondering if you can sort of give us a sense of, you know, who you may be displacing the most. That might be sort of a difficult question to answer.
No, it's a very good and not difficult question because there are three things that we beat in this environment. We beat complacency and non-decision, which for sure in environment in which once again, CFOs are the new CLOs, and I say this with a smile, non-decision can be a factor, entropy. How do you do that? You do that with the likes of showing value and showing optimization, as I mentioned previously. We beat and, you know, defeat single-point solutions who may have a very good depth in solving one specific problem. But when looking at that solution on a two, three, four year horizon, it appears clearly that their benefits may fall short as opposed to the strategy of the company, and we really focus on that.
Finally, we beat legacy vendors. On the basis of the fact that, look, I don't personally love to talk about legacy vendors because everybody runs their business in the way they deem appropriate. We're not financially focused in terms of, you know, building a company that's financially engineered. We're focused on building great products that are incredibly well-integrated, that flow very well in the market, that are not in overlap. We focus our product management efforts on one technology and we feel very good about that. We sell that concept very hard, and our customers hear it.
That's great. That's been super helpful. Thank you very much.
Your next question comes from Suthan Sukumar with Stifel. Please go ahead.
Good morning, gents. Wanted to touch on the strong expansion and activity you guys described in the opening remarks. Can you touch on what use cases are seeing more traction now with the new broader product suite? And how is net new customer behavior evolving? I mean, ACV growth was fairly healthy on a constant currency basis. Just wondering, is there more interest in some of these additional use cases right out of the gate with an initial sale?
Suthan, we are excited to get logos from every opportunity. There are areas that strategically in the future will be more important than others, and I want to reiterate what we have highlighted in the past earnings call about the total addressable market. I mean, multi-department training is where the real value is because training people from department or from external is providing a direct ROI to the business. I mean, training your customer, training your sales organization is giving a direct return of the training investment, and that's what we love because it's measurable. On top of that, external total addressable market is bigger. Training your customer and your partner is a thing of the future, and the greenfield there is great as the known, the already covered part of the market which use or inbuilt in-house technologies or very basic solution.
You know, especially in a downturn moment, but not only, training your customer and keep your partner close is way more important. What, strategically speaking, external training is an area of interest we love, but external training blended with other department, doesn't matter if internal or external, is the real final goal. Because the more departments we train inside an organization, the more our business KPI goes up.
Claudio, in addition, one element that without question, Suthan, is also that learning monetization. You were looking for specific use cases. Learning monetization becomes within the external realm. We're seeing more of a pattern. Companies are learning how to monetize from learning. They may do that with the Docebo alone or integrate with external monetization solution and e-commerce solutions. We're seeing that trend continue, and that trend continuing has a response in our plans and roadmaps to strengthen our position and that capability.
Anecdotally, I was speaking with someone that as a job does monetization, and they say that monetization is not the first step when you start training your customer externally. You start training them for free.
Right.
You have your experience, and you understand that you can get value from customer or partners, and it's an interesting segment.
Great. Thank you for the color, guys. Want to touch on the partner channel next. Could you just provide an update on the partner ecosystem, particularly the OEM channel, in terms of what was the impact contribution this past quarter, you know, how has that channel been progressing and how has the pipeline of new potential partners been evolving over time?
Yes, Suthan. First of all, I take the opportunity to say that this is also an area in which our CSO, Nina Simosko, myself, as well as our leadership in partnership, Karen and Aaron, are very, very focused on. We look at the partner world really in a few different buckets, and not one is more important than another. In fact, one taps into one another, and we see it very realistically. Historically, in the earnings call, we receive more questions and more focus on the OEM business. That is now owned entirely in strategy and execution by our leader, Aaron Pratt.
What I'm seeing in that world is a renewed interest and a strengthening of our pipeline with companies across the sectors like HCM and rewards and others that are in need of finding ways to adding top line with minimum cost and high CAC metrics, another embedding strategy for Docebo. We're really loving the pipeline in that regard and working very actively on, you know, what I think I don't wanna use the word material, but I would say opportunities that we are very proud of about that. Like I said, partnerships are not only about OEM. We worked a ton on developing, growing, finding partners in regions like in EMEA and the Nordics. We've mentioned our deep appreciation of businesses like TikTok.
I can mention also Omniplex, Bluewater and others across the world, and these partnerships are only growing, increasing, and we're investing in it, and they're yielding a lot of results. Finally, the one area in which Nina and the leadership team are very focused on is, like I mentioned before, to a question from Stephanie, is really getting deep in the business of system integrators. We believe that there is a tremendous amount of opportunity and we're very focused on getting, you know, pretty strategic partnerships going with such companies. We believe you will appreciate the outcomes of those relationships in the quarters to come.
Ale, it's Tic Tac, not TikTok.
It's funny because we are in the building where TikTok's offices are, so I think I mixed that. Our dear friends and partners at Tic Tac, not TikTok.
All right, great. Thanks for the clarification. Appreciate it guys. Thanks for taking my questions. I'll pass along.
Your next question comes from.
Thank you.
Oh, your next question comes from Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for the question. I see that you're continuing to add an impressive number of customers quarter over quarter. I was hoping you could provide a little context there. What are you seeing as far as churn versus growth adds, and where are these new customers coming from, just from a geographical or use case perspective? Any color would be appreciated. Thanks.
Morning, Josh. Sukaran here. I'll take on the part about retaining and retention, and then Alessio can give you color on net new adds. We talked about the fact that, you know, the company—what we solve for from a customer perspective is multiple use cases. If you think about it, you know, the more you are solving for mission-critical operations, and you are in multiple departments of an organization plugged into their various ecosystems that drive their productivity in terms of retaining customers, increasing revenue, et cetera, you can imagine that that has a direct correlation on driving best-in-class gross retention, which is what we're seeing.
That is driving net retention which is consistent with what we would see last year as an example. If you think about that, hopefully it gives you a sense that we are integral to our customer base in this environment and that has a direct impact on maintaining those gross retention, net retention numbers. Alessio, I'm sure you wanna touch on net new logos.
We believe in the concept of net dollar retention, and so our ability to continue to grow our base in a healthy way, Josh. That, you know, we're always very critical of ourselves and in the sense that we believe we want to always do more and better. We should acknowledge that our retention and the NDR metrics remain very, very strong. We're very happy with it. From a strategic standpoint, Josh, you're right. We add an impressive amount of logos. To be clear, as you very well know, we cannot even share most times some of the names that we're partnering with. Some of these names that we're not even in a position to share are very large companies that we can grow into.
The question becomes: How are we going to address that? What we're going to do a little bit differently in the future, it's just an evolution. We're going to be focusing our teams to really methodically account plan and extend these companies, and spend their energies more on the farming side in terms of growth with a supporting element behind them of customer success. We have, for the past quarters, focused more on a blended approach, where account managers undertook also a lot of customer success management efforts. We believe that by focusing account management in what they do best, which is develop relationship, map the account 360 view, and really get deep across departments, subsidiaries, parent, and the various companies held, we will accelerate NDR in the quarters and years to come.
That is an objective, and we're very focused on that outcome.
Great, thanks for the color. Thanks.
Thanks, Josh.
Thanks, Josh.
Your next question comes from Daniel Chan with TD Securities. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. Maybe related to the NDR. ACV continued to grow nicely year-over-year, but was steady quarter-over-quarter after many quarters of sequential expansion. How do we reconcile the quarter-over-quarter ACV coming in flat against comments of upsell doing well, as well as your focus on NDR?
Sorry. Dan, I guess the question, just to understand the question, you're saying is the add-on ACV was quarter-over-quarter flat, and how does that work into net retention?
No. How does that work, you guys talking about upsell doing well? You know, usually we'd see that, we see that get represented in the ACV value. If we look back since you've been public, ACV has been growing sequentially, pretty much every quarter. Just wonder if there's anything to read through into that.
Yeah. Yeah, and I think, Dan, the way you wanna think about ACV is if you look at the enterprise segment, the more that contributes to a quarter, that will also drive that higher. In Q3 there was that segment was the one that was, you know, slightly weaker, and slower. As you move into the cycle, it can fluctuate the ACV because of what contribution you have from a certain segment. In terms of what you don't see in the ACV number, but what you will see in net retention is the upsell part and of course that includes down and churn in it. That kinda number can be, you know, you'll see that number as we print it in Q4.
You know, the ACV also has an impact from a currency headwind perspective, which you may not be factoring in as well.
Sorry, from an execution standpoint in the field, Dan, when we think of upsell deals, we think of deals that we, for lack of better words, go into a company where we're already in, and we're growing and expanding that business. The ACV of that transaction doesn't necessarily mean that we are a massive deal again. We're continuing to add modules or capabilities. The impact of that sales motion of upsell wouldn't necessarily correlate to a high increase in ACV, whereas it would contribute to an improvement in our NDR metrics.
Okay, that's helpful. I was just wondering if there was anything to read into that as it relates to whether your customers or your sales team is de-scoping some deals to get them over the line, whether it's macro-related, and budgets are coming down, anything like that?
No, no. None of that. As we kinda think about Docebo moving forward, the simple way to think about this is as we move into Q3 into Q4, you should see that as long as the enterprise segment will contribute, you should see that tick up. That's it. Nothing else.
Great. Thank you.
Your next question comes from Christian Sgro with Eight Capital. Please go ahead.
Hi, good morning. I'll continue on the topic of seasonality for my first question. Maybe a two-parter. First, I'm wondering, you know, the Q3 quarter can be light in the summer. I'm wondering if any deals slipped or if there's anything to call it either way. I think earlier you mentioned that Q4 and Q1 can both be strong on the enterprise side. You know, and I thought that was the case for Q4, but it sounds like Q1 as well. Maybe those two questions to start.
Christian, I appreciate the attention that you have in listening to prior responses, and jokes aside, the answer is yes to everything you just said. For sure, when we say the deal cycles elongate, we're also implying that in some instances, deals slipped onto other quarters. Now, in our experience, in our data tracking, this is not uncommon in quarter three, because the seasonality of holidays, the post-COVID era, people seem to have gotten a little bit more time off than in the prior years, and they finally got out of the house. I would say, yeah, we've had some slips.
You know, with regards to your reference to quarter four and quarter one, while we certainly don't disclose numbers, we work very hard to deliver good numbers and we like the type of deals that we have in the pipeline for those. I don't know if Sukaran wants to add any color there.
Yeah, Chris, I think that the you know, as we said, generally we've said in the past, we have a you know, a couple of quarter view on where the pipe is. Q4 is seasonally a strong quarter. Some of the comments that Alessio is making is in light of you know, what we see for the next two quarters ahead of us. I think you know, as you said you know, Q3, just a quick point, yes, it's slower, but from a win rate and pipe perspective, we still see strength in our win rates, and our pipe is still strong as far as we can see in the next couple of quarters.
Okay. Great. One follow on, Alessio made reference earlier to investment in the company's brand and marketing strategy, and I know it sounds like it's evolving. Wondering if there's any early thoughts you can share on how you might, you know, think about positioning Docebo. I don't know if maybe part of that is, you know, rebranding to focus more on enterprise-
Yeah.
If that's part of the focus. Yeah, any color you could share, that would be awesome.
Sure thing. A couple thoughts on this. Also a project that we'll proceed in phases, but two things that we're very sure about is we want to evolve the way we show up from a branding standpoint in two ways primarily. One, today, if you look at the way we show publicly, the messaging is very much lead with products, features, and capabilities. This is very evident even in our website, and I would say generally comms. We believe our natural evolution is to move and transition to focus more on solving real business problems for customers and being eloquent in the way we do that, thanks to technical capabilities. It's a little bit, you know, branding is not a black and white science.
There are varying colors, and the way we're gonna execute that is to strike a good balance between innovation that the company has in its DNA, but maintaining a focus on the buyers and what problems we solve for them and how. We believe there's a lot of work to do there, and we're already on it now as we speak, and we have been for months. Number two, a more overall overhaul of our posture towards enterprises. You know, we should be showing up more at in places where the CIOs of the Fortune 500 meet and debate. We have a lot of opportunity to strengthen our brand in the decision-making tables of the best companies in the world because we already do business with them.
They look at us, and we are just having a missing link of showing up according to the category that we are effectively already in. It's only a matter of execution, and we're executing.
Perfect. Thank you for all the color, Alessio, and thanks for taking my question this morning.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from Kevin Krishnaratne with Scotiabank. Please go ahead.
Hey there. Good morning. I'm not sure if this was disclosed, but could you remind us, what the ACV from new customers was in the quarter?
I'm gonna double-check that, Kevin. I think not off the top of my head. Let me come back to you on that.
Okay. I guess where I'm going with this is, as we think about going forward, you know, should we expect to see that go up quarter-over-quarter given, you know, that the mix of adds will likely skew better to enterprise in Q4, you know, number one? Number two, the 139 that you added in Q3, seasonally light quarter, you know, reasonable to assume that goes up? I'm just trying to, you know, understand from modeling purposes if we get kind of the double, you know, positive there as we think about Q4.
Yeah. Kevin, sorry, it took me a second to just double-check. It's a number, this quarter, new ACV was $42K. You're right. When you think about the mix there generally can shift 'cause if you think about large enterprise deals can move that up or down. As you move into Q4 and you see a larger subset coming from enterprise segment, you will see that number move up. You know, as we think about moving into the next quarter too, you should expect that to go up.
You're right. Yeah, just so the 42 is one of the, you know, it is one of the weaker net new ACV, you know, numbers. I think per your disclosures, you were in the 50 range, 45 range last quarter, and that was mainly due to the skewing down to SMB and mid-market and the related ARPU there, right?
The strength on the commercial mid-market segment is basically what you're seeing that number driving that in Q3. As you move into Q4 and enterprise kicks in more as a proper proportion of your ARR, that number will tick up.
Got it. I'm wondering just on the commentary, just to be very clear here on the sales cycle being elongated, is it relative to Q2 and Q3? Is it? Did you see it getting even longer? How do you think about that going into Q4? You know, is that popping up in both the net adds being pushed out or and/or perhaps the starting point of ACV at a new win being a little bit slower, with expansion opportunities to come, you know, down the road?
Hi, Kevin. Alessio speaking. It's primarily where a new more material spend for the company needs to be made, there is more scrutiny, there are new processes. Buyers themselves don't even know most times what process is in place and who is the approver. We go and chase down various individuals because processes are in flux at companies. The resulting effects in many companies is slippage because the buyer themselves have a difficult time pinning down within their own organization when they can approve. That is what we're seeing.
Okay. Understood. Thank you. Appreciate the color.
Thanks, Kevin.
Your next question comes from Nick Agostino with Laurentian Bank. Please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, everybody. You talked earlier about increasing spend on the sales and marketing side earlier this year, and I think on prior calls you put a greater emphasis on outbound sales. Can you just talk about where you are today as far as the size of the team and maybe the contributions that you saw in the quarter from your outbound activity and maybe what you need to do further on the outbound side to improve that side of the business to where you want it to be?
Sure. Hi, Nick, and thank you for the question. With regards to outbound, it is part of my commentary on our sales and marketing expenditures and focus. Outbound continues to perform on average about depending on segments, and so the math becomes very segment-based, anywhere between 20%-30% of our pipeline contribution. We believe that by getting outbound closer to the sales machine, we can reap even more benefits in the future. We believe that by strengthening our position and brand, we are going to have an even stronger story to tell. The comments that I've made before around our positioning, around our demand generation efforts are part of a holistic picture in which outbound is one piece of a much bigger demand gen puzzle.
Remains an area of focus, remains an area of investment, and we like it because frankly, it allows us to yield the larger sized deals. Karan. Nick, also just to give you a general context, when you think about our contribution, you've got inbound, outbound, self-source, and partners. You think about outbound, you also have to layer on how a lot of our enterprise sellers work, similar to other great companies, is self-sourcing deals as well as working with great partners, some that Alessio mentioned in his remarks earlier, that will also bring us
Deals on the enterprise segment.
Okay, great. Just one follow-up. With regards to the MHR expansion partnership, can you just remind us where that OEM is in context? Like, how far along are you with that OEM when you compare that against Ceridian at the same point in time? In other words, are you guys getting more and more traction with MHR at the same point in time, on par with where you would have been with the Ceridian at the same point in time? Just a relative. Just to understand how quickly you're bringing up all these other OEMs for future growth. Thank you.
Yeah. Look, I think the way to think about it, Nick, is that we obviously Ceridian was our first, and as we've learned through this journey, MHR has grown at a faster rate. They're still, you know, in terms of relative size, they're still so smaller, so there's a long way to go with them and an opportunity to penetrate more. The other interesting thing is that the integrations that we build as we move forward also is enabling us to layer on more products that we have built into our ecosystem with MHR and with Ceridian in the future. And so that also helps expand that not only to new customer base within MHR but within the current customer base of MHR.
As well as there is certainly, as Claudio alluded to earlier, there is certainly. As you know, MHR has almost 40% of market share in the U.K. and serves a lot of the public sector. It also is seeing some increased demand from a public sector perspective.
Okay, great. Thank you.
I would now like to turn the call back to Mr. Erba for any closing comments.
Yeah. Thanks for attending this earnings call. Let's meet in one quarter. Thanks everyone, and thanks, team.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines. Have a great day.