BlackLine, Inc. (BL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

My name is Chis Quintero. I'm an analyst here on the U.S. research software team. And I'm very pleased to have with us today BlackLine's Co-CEOs, Owen Ryan, Therese Tucker as well as the CFO, Mark Partin. Thank you all for being here.

Thank you.

Before we get started into the interesting stuff. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.

And with that out the way, I think I'd like to start the conversation with you, Owen, and Therese, both of you kind of back in the CEO role, Co-CEO role, I think it was maybe this time last year, a day before or before the announcement that came out. So it would be great to kind of hear kind of a reflection on that year. Where have been some of the key changes you all have made and what have been some of the kind of key takeaways from those changes.

Do you want to start?

[indiscernible] because the 90 days [indiscernible].

Okay, yes. So I think just sort of -- if you were to go back a year ago today, we had already been given some -- had some conversations with our Board where they had challenged Therese, myself, Mark and some of the other leaders, just to take a fresh look at the company from the inside, which is what we did for, I guess, through March through May of last year, then gave a report to the Board, so we really liked what we saw in the company, but there were some things we thought needed to be dealt with. And really, that started then with from May through August, another 90-day sprint to really create a refreshed strategy. And so we took a whole look at from a playing to win framework where we wanted to play, which included things like customer segmentation, industries, geographies, products, ERP systems that we wanted to be associated with, went through all of that and then thought about how we would be successful in each of those places where we wanted to play. The things we would do, the things we wouldn't do, things we would stop doing. And then next, really looked at the capabilities that the organization and the team had and tried to figure out the gap for what we needed to fill from a capability perspective and then we just worked through what we needed to measure and make sure we stayed focused on the right thing. So after we finish that with no rest for the weary, we then had to sort of think about. So now that we now understood what the strategy was that we wanted, we had very positive feedback from our employees and from our Board was then how do we begin to operate it? Because one of the things that when you step back, BlackLine had really moved from being the dominant player in financial close space but then began to add other parts to the suite to move more towards a platform. And we probably were just a little bit behind from where we should have been and sort of thinking how to bring that suite to market. And so we revised our operating model and probably the most important change that we came through from there was the name, what we call pillar leaders, people that would own each of the 4 principal products that really are the ones that drive the success in the marketplace. And that's been a very impactful change so far. And then as part of that, there were some other things we needed to do. BlackLine is a much more global company today than it was 10 years ago. We needed to sort of being -- moved from being an American company with international operations to truly beginning to operate like a global company. So we made changes around things of that nature. And we took that operating model that we proposed to the Board in November, got it approved, kind of like a restaurant or a hotel. We did a soft launch in November through January 1, and then we officially went live January 1, and we're now up and running with that new model. Do you want to add to that?

No, I take [indiscernible].

So of all the changes you've made over the past year, I guess, what are some of the key ones that maybe have outperformed those expectations? Which ones are you looking forward to kind of continue to make those changes on a go-forward basis?

I think the pillar leaders has been probably the most important change. And sometimes when a company grows a bit too rapidly, you end up with silos. And the goal of the pillar leaders is to really tied together the voice of the customer from a go-to-market perspective with what's being developed in product and technology, and just provide that seamless sort of view to the world. so that we make sure that we are building products that our customers can actually get great value from. So having them be sort of deep subject matter experts that can go into a customer presentation for any CEO in the world, and also sit down with the dev teams and tell them exactly what the market is looking for, that filled a critical gap for us.

I would add 2 things to that. It's not as much organizational, but one of the things that Mark, Therese and I all care deeply about is being very customer focused. And I think we've really raised our game around getting back and spending much more time with our customers getting more intently. And then the other thing that I don't know how to put this sort of little [indiscernible] that Therese brings a wonderful spirit of innovation that maybe kind of lost its way in the organization. And so that is back in big ways. People are thinking about how to innovate all the time of the company.

Yes. That customer-centric focus, I think, really came through at the beyond the back conference definitely got our focus there. And then just in terms of like the timing around all these changes, I guess, like what inning are we in? How many more changes do you have to do on a go-forward basis?

I'd say fifth, but what would you say.

I don't know what sport are we playing? It's cricket? No, cricket or baseball. Yes, I don't know. I think the days when companies would go through and create a strategy, hire a McKinsey or the way and put something on the shelf for 10 years is long over, right? So you've got to constantly be on our game around strategy all the time being much more aware of competitive changes in the landscape. So while I feel I think we all feel pretty good about that we've come far down the path. I don't know that this is a 9-inning game, would probably be the best way for me to put it. And I think that there is things we're going to continue to learn as we go through our operating model, our business shifts, as competitive landscape shifts. We've all just come back from our world tours on our sales kick off or BlackLine Kikos. We're seeing different opportunities in markets around the world, which I think will also impact how we move operate going forward.

Mark, I want to bring you in on this conversation. You recently reported solid Q4 earnings, but I think the fiscal year '24 revenue guide was a little bit below where consensus was. So can you help unpack kind of what the assumptions you're making in that guidance, maybe around retention rates? And then I think the year before, you had kind of embedded some type of expectation around the second half demand improvement? Are you continuing to include that in your guidance? Like what are some of the puts and takes there?

Yes. Well, we -- thank you. Q4 did have some green shoots for us. We started to see some progress in some of the changes we've made and -- but that's just what they were. They were early, they were green shoots, and we tried not to incorporate too much of that into our guide. Our guidance philosophy is that we want to have high confidence that we can execute within that range, give our businesses some elbow -- business leaders, some elbow room to operate the business, to make the changes necessary because we're really in the long-term game. And so for the short term, needing to be practical and even to some degree, conservative. So I think like many tech executives and companies were trying to wake up to the new reality and look at our market first as it's still really very early in the office of the CFO. It still exists as a very large market. Bringing that buyer to the table, digital transformation as the catalyst for growth. These are things that we believe will continue to drive this market but for -- just for this year, for our guidance philosophy, we wanted to be conservative, make sure that we could operate the business. And so that's why we did guide to the range that we did.

Yes. And then I wanted to double-click on kind of the retention piece. You reported solid stable gross retention and actually a slight uptick on net retention. So can you help unpack kind of where that kind of improvement stability you're seeing maybe kind of between mid-market versus enterprise?

Sure. Yes. So we have a land-and-expand model. And we think the right balance has been for us in a healthy macro is about 110% to 111% on a net retention rate. And that gives us the opportunity to land with the customer. They see value realization and then they continue to deploy, buy and expand. Our retention rate dropped to 105%, 106% over the past year, largely due to some macro influences, headwinds coming from optimization inside the account for vendor and cost efficiencies in our customer base. And our real goal to keep those customers continue to show value. And over time, they will come back to expanding when they're ready. So on the net dollar retention rate at 105%, 106%, we believe the future for that to drive it is in product-led growth inside our existing base. There's a very large embedded TAM in our customers for the products that we sell, that we've either brought to market or acquired. And so we put a lot of effort in this new sort of retooled operating model to put the right information, the right enablement at the fingertips of the salespeople in front of the customers.

Okay. I want to switch gears a little bit, talk about the macro. We had our recent CIO survey. It shows that IT budgets are going to see a slight acceleration this year, but it's still kind of below that pre-COVID level. You all clearly have very high level of conversations with CFOs, CIOs. It would be great to kind of hear what your customers are saying as it relates to their budgets, but then also how are they viewing the prioritization of BlackLine within that broader IT budget?

Yes. I can start just based on sort of the green shoots that we saw in Q4. So our market has very large global digital transformation projects at the largest enterprise in the world. And then we also serve the mid-market. So in the mid-market, it's velocity, awareness and education and in the enterprise, it's digital transformation. That's a real catalyst for growth. So the macro environment for us in Q4 started to unlock or unfreeze a little at the high end. We saw a few of our larger deals start to move through the pipeline. Again, very conservative around whether that was an anomaly or something that's the new norm. And then secondarily on the IT buying. We do think that the conversations we're having around technology and technology spending with our customers is starting to be a little more vibrant. Our salespeople are more engaged. Part of that's our own operating model structure, but we also think from a macro that's starting to slightly improve on that regard.

Yes. No, that's definitely something that we're working across our software coverage. Starting to see some green shoots budgets start to open up. I know that kind of the ERP refresh cycle is kind of a secular tailwind that kind of impacts BlackLine as companies move on-prem over to the cloud, that kind of gave them an opportunity to kind of look across their entire kind of financial systems. How much of a tailwind is that for you? Are you seeing that in the conversations that increasingly show up? How does that kind of play into the BlackLine story here?

I'm not sure it's a real tailwind because if somebody starts on a large ERP conversion project that can suck up all resources. Depending on the ERP, certainly, when we have a SOLEX partnership with SAP. And oftentimes, we will be brought in as part of the beginning of the process, right, to help clear open items and do other things, retain history. But -- so it can be either ahead or a tailwind, either way.

Yes. Yes. No, that makes sense. And kind of going back to your Q4 earnings, you noted that there is kind of -- you're seeing a higher volume of churn from smaller customers. And so can you remind us kind of what revenue segment these customers are and how that's kind of embedded into your guidance for the full year?

Yes. I'll start that. So we've got 4,000-plus customers, half of those are large enterprise and half of them are mid-market. We traditionally operate at 98%, 99% in the enterprise gross renewal rate and somewhere in the low 90s on the mid-market. Now we think those are great. We would love to keep everybody. But on the churn side of this, in the macro environment, remember what's happening inside the enterprise as the CFO is demanding, along with the CIO for vendor consolidation, save our costs and optimize. We believe that the stickiness of our product will -- we work with our customers to optimize number of users, number of share of wallet, but keep the customer. And so we work really hard at that during these times, help your customer move them through and then this has happened to us during COVID, during other times where we've provided this, in some cases, relief and in other cases, just work -- on helping them work through this. So where we are today on the retention rate or the renewal rate is that we're in the mid-90s on the enterprise, and we're in the high 80s on the mid-market. And our drive is to really push that back towards what we think is more sort of in line with our historical trend.

Yes. And sorry, bringing it back to the previous point, you mentioned kind of vendor consolidation and you've called out that being kind of a headwind to your growth overall. Just like where are those customers going off to -- how do you think about better managing that type of dynamic?

Sure. I think. There's a couple of places that we sort of run into this. So one is if we have customers that are not as well adopted from what all that BlackLine brings to the table. We'll sometimes run up against an Oracle who will be offering fair version of a financial solution for free, vis-a-vis what BlackLine offers. And so a poorly adopted BlackLine customer is probably not going to see much difference between what we're offering and what Oracle might offering. So one of the things we're trying to do is make sure where we now have a much clearer line of sight over this last year of which of our customers are really using our products the right way and working more closely with them to begin to optimize them through kind of in terms of Tiger teams to go out and help our customers to get better adopted. So that's an example. Every once in a while now, we're running a little bit more into one stream where they've now begun to offer financial close product, which they'll tie with their financial planning and consolidation tool. Still not a ton of it, but we see it. And so one of the things that many of you don't know about me is I'm constantly paranoid about the competitive landscape. So I worry about everything all the time. So we're just trying to keep an eye on what might be coming down the path there. But I think really the biggest challenge for us sometimes is just when we have customers that are not as well adopted as we need, and they just decided to go back to doing spreadsheets or something that just doesn't make a ton of sense.

Yes. I think that also kind of ties into what you're doing around the partner strategy and kind of first kind of like tightening the number of partners that you have and having deeper relationships with that smaller group of partners, and I think you're starting to see some green shoots come out of that. Like what are you seeing from that kind of change around the partner network today?

We've gone through a massive shift in our partner strategy. We've eliminated almost half of the ones that were just underperforming sort of a distraction for us and really begun to focus. Apparently, they've been called now the CEO 12. I don't know if I talked about that. So somehow they gave it a nickname. So we have 12 really large ones that were are working with. And they are the blue chips that you would expect. And they are all in for what we're trying to do with them. And it's not -- they're there to help us improve our access in the office of the CFO because they live at these client sites all day long for year after year after year. They are the ones that whisper in the ear, the CEO and the CFO and the CIO about digital finance transformation. They're the ones that have massive partnerships with the big ERP players. And so we're much more closely tethered to them for that. The second thing that we're trying to do with them is when we have these situations, where we have customers that we know are not as well adopted as we would like, we're having conversations with them how to approach that customer together to go and try to improve, again, the customer use of the BlackLine experience. The third thing that they're helping us with is as we move more towards taking advantage of all the institutional knowledge we have around our industries working with us in specific industries to, again, advance what we're trying to do. They're also helping us with sort of the product road map. And here's what you might need in a certain industry. And I know Therese spent a lot of time with some of the guys to talk about financial services not too long ago. So there's things that we're trying to do with them. And I think they're enjoying it. I think it's become a much deeper partnership and we certainly want to matter to them, and they certainly matter to us.

Yes. That verticalization point, I think, is really interesting. So I'm curious to hear kind of what are some of the key use cases on some of the verticals that you're seeing today and customer interest around those?

Yes. It's interesting, right? And I'll use oil and gas because it's the one that I just was looking at with the team recently. So BlackLine has a who's who list from the oil majors around the world that we support and serve. But when you start to go layer down, you realize that if you're sort of creating a grid of our products across the top and the companies down the left, and then what do they use? There's like missing bubbles, if you will, on the chart. And then if you sort of take some of our products and you blow them out with even more detail, for example, all the things we do in the financial close space. Again, you see even more sort of what I'll call white space of things. And then even in areas where they might use our rec tool or general [indiscernible] entry tool or something like that, how they use it in the areas they use it are different. And so again, we're blowing that out to another level to see what are the opportunities where we can take our experiences and lessons learned to back into the marketplace with our partners to the customers to help them enhance their experience with BlackLine. I think that was one of the sort of the aha moments for us last year and doing a lot of the strategy work was we have this wealth of information and knowledge that's really great to go share. And that's with our existing customers, but then you go out and you start to talk to companies that are in the same space that we don't get served. And we have a much more compelling story. Our teams around the world are now beginning to connect. So our oil and gas teams that are in Europe versus the Americas as an example, are spending more time or automotive teams from Japan to Germany, to France, to North America, we're also connecting more. So that's really where we're taking advantage of what we have to offer.

Yes.

This is the early innings, so on that one.

Got it. Got it. I want to shift gears a little bit, focus on sort of the product portfolio. First, kind of starting out with intercompany. I think there's a lot of interest and buzz around that product family at the conference. What -- how is that product kind of different in terms of like maybe the sales cycle? Are you selling to the same person? Kind of what are you seeing with like early interest around that product family?

One of the parts of our strategy was really to focus on the office of the CFO rather than the controllership. And the reason for that is intercompany definitely covers the entire office of the CFO. In order to complete a sizable intercompany deal, we typically will work with not just accounting, but risk and tax and legal and treasury and internal audit. And most of them will want to have a part in that. So that product alone is really representative of the breadth of offerings across the different areas. We're also very excited about this market. We have seen a number of white papers out there that speak to the difficulties around intercompany and the incredibly large numbers that companies are paying in tax penalties that are 10 figures -- 11 figures at times, enormous amounts. And so even though it's a fairly long sales cycle and it does take sort of convincing the world, we believe that the value that it ultimately can deliver is -- will be saved many times over by not having to be double taxed or penalized by various taxing authorities. It's a great area. We -- a couple of years ago, acquired 4Q. We've now brought both of our -- both our internal and that external product together into a single platform. And it's pretty exciting, I think, going forward with that.

Yes. No, I think it really is interesting, you all are kind of evangelizing this space within in our company, which brings me to my next question. Like what do you see in terms of like the competitive landscape within the IFM?

Very little. There is some work that SAP has done in the past to build a custom version of intercompany. It's a very small percentage. In fact, SAP resells our IFM product on their paper. I'd say, Oracle has something very old, called Ages. I don't think they meant that ironically either. But that's, again, most of the products that are out there typically work on a single ERP. And as we know, the financial landscape for ERPs within especially larger companies is very diverse. Nobody has a single ERP.

Got it. I want to touch on pricing and packaging. It seems like you all are making some changes there. You rebrand the accounts receivable to invoice the cash. You made the acquisition of Data Interconnect to bring that into that portfolio. And you've spoken about how products like financial reporting analytics are maybe a little underpriced versus the value that they're actually giving to customers. So how do you think about the strategy behind the pricing and packaging of your strategic products on a go-forward basis?

Well, let me just refresh what we currently do, because we actually have a really elegant and dynamic pricing model. We are a per user on the financial close. But we also have the strategic portfolio of high automation, high efficiency, strategic products. Those are being sold not on a user basis, but on a subscription plus consumption, right? It's a hybrid model, the more complex you are the handshake with the customer is better, the value you're deriving from it, the complexity of the number of subsidiaries, the transactions. These things allow us to price with enough value or fair hand shape with the customer. So we have some certainty. The customer gets budget certainty and then we have opportunity for consumption, for growth, for resell, for touch points with our customers. So the portfolio is already around optimizing and helping the customer in this dynamic model. We also think a lot of tech companies today as they work with their customers over time, I think, 3 to 5 years. Over time, to migrate the per user model. In the office of the CFO, this is important. This is how they buy, can't be underestimated. We think there's growth expansion on per seats in every customer that we have. So there's still a lot of runway for that. However, in the digital age of AI or in the age of customers who are constantly now seeking to manage their software costs, right? We have to find the right way that we don't optimize ourselves out of existence inside that account. So I think that's how we would describe it. And we're getting questions from investors because I think other tech companies are talking about pricing and packaging. And we've got some of the best strategic mines in our company that are working on consulting projects that are looking at how to help make our equation over time, better.

Yes. And I'm glad you brought up AI. It wouldn't be a conference in 2024 without discussing that. You all have laid out a two-pronged strategy here, kind of embedding AI within the existing products as well as launching stand-alone SKUs that you can monetize. Can you double-click on kind of the monetization efforts like how are you thinking about monetizing and maybe the timing around when to monetize?

It's not -- the two-pronged strategy, I think, is really important. The ability to embed AI in the current products, makes the software stickier, make sure customers love it and not want to switch off if somebody offers something for free. While that is not a direct monetization, it certainly adds to the bottom line. So I think that, that one is important especially given that we have returned to being a very customer-centric organization and having our customers love what we do is kind of at the heart of what we believe will make us successful. Now I also have a lot of optimism about where we're going with AI-based products as stand-alone products because Unlike other sort of technology waves that have come and gone over the years, people thought blockchain was going to end our life. They thought RPA was going to end our lives. I actually think AI has the potential to fundamentally shift the entire market and frankly, the entire field of finance and accounting. And it also has the opportunity. We have been a pure SaaS company since 2007. So we have 14 years of data across thousands of companies on which to augment some of these large language models, okay, which is pretty exciting. The very first product that I will be demonstrating at or beyond the Black in Europe in 2 weeks will be the Journal's Risk Analyzer. And that really allows not just BlackLine journals, but a big swath of journals to be analyzed for anomalies. You can see a series of dashboards that show you information about who's making an odd journal on a Sunday somewhere, right? Or what large journals were one-off? Where are the anomalies in the system? This is particularly important because your journals are at the heart of all your transactions. And this is particularly important because the size of those data sets is so large now that they can't really be manually monitored. So the ability to introduce AI there is probably the first product that we will start to completely AI-based that we will start to monetize. I view sort of subsequent products will probably be focused around mitigating other risks by really checking the integrity of the datasets as a whole and highlighting anomalies that need to be addressed. So I think it's a very exciting area to be working in right now.

Yes, absolutely. I totally agree with you there. Kind of bringing all these kind of product questions together, it seems like there's a lot of interesting product cycles that you have going on this year. You've got the AI initiatives, you've got accounting studio, invoice to cash, intercompany I guess, when you look at all of those thinking about growth for this year and into next year, where do you think -- which products do you think could really move the needle for you from a growth perspective? Which ones are you telling your sales force to really focus on?

I would love to say that any and all would move the needle, but I have looked -- I have worked in accounting and finance for the last 14, 15, 16 years more. And the reality is accountants are slow to buy, slow to change and slow to adopt. So I don't believe that any of these products have much needle moving for this year, to be quite honest. Now I do think some of the other AI products that we're doing, like the creditworthiness and the invoice to cash or predictive failures in the IFM or the accounting studio, which is an orchestration layer that basically allows you to map out all of your processes within your financial system landscape. I believe that those are all game changers in the industry and really kind of highlight BlackLine's ability to be the market leader in terms of innovation. So -- but in terms of the numbers, it always shows up there last, right?

Yes. No, that's helpful to level set kind of expectations around those products.

Can I defend the accounting provision?

Yes, of course.

We're not quite that low Resistant to change, but okay.

You are...

I know. I admit it. I resemble those remarks.

You're recovering accountant.

Okay. I wanted to switch over to margins and profitability. You all showed some really impressive expansion last year, going from 6% in fiscal year '22 to 17%. What have been the key drivers there where have you been able to find the most kind of cost efficiencies within the model? And on a go-forward basis, how should investors think about margin expansion here?

Sure. Just looking back, '22 for a lot of companies are included, it was risk on. We were coming out of a snapback in '21 and '22, demand was accelerating coming out of COVID, remote hybrid environments for really difficult environments for CFOs to figure out, I need to digitize my core accounting systems so that I can operate globally. So they came out and then we accelerated our investment in that year to the 6% that you mentioned. Now we have a high recurring, high gross margin subscription revenue business. It is a very beautiful business model. And what we were able to do is meet the demand where we saw it in '23. So as we started the year, we really looked at our demand investment, the sales and marketing, go-to-market and that's a high at a target modeled, that the high 30s, low 40s percent of revenue. We're running that today between low to mid-30s at the demand level that we see. Even today coming into '24, we think that level of investment can absorb more demand if and when we see it in this macro environment. So that's the key for sort of where efficiencies came from. 80% gross margin, relatively consistent many, many, many years in a row. And then the other area is in our product innovation, R&D road map is that maintains 15% right around plus or minus a point. And if you just, for a moment, listen to the number of products and initiatives in AI and talent expansion, we've had to get really smart about how we build innovative talent inside our company efficiently. And I think Therese has done an amazing job with that over the last 6 to 9 months. So not only have we held that rate constant and will, but we're getting more production out of that in the way that she's organized it. So if you look at our guidance for this year, going into the sort of mid- to high teens, we're able to accomplish that in a demand investment environment, where the return on what we're acquiring is more efficient.

Yes. Got it. Got it. Before I open it up to questions, I just wanted to ask one more. You've got these kind of medium-term, long-term targets out there. On the margin front, you all are clearly getting very close to those. On the top line piece, how do we think about that 20% to 25% target in the context of that 9% guide for this year? And what's the path to get there?

Sure. So midterm target guide for us put out was about 20%. And we felt that was very indicative or representative of our market. We are in 3 very large distinct markets, intercompany financial management that we're pioneering, I2C or the AR management, where debt, interest rates, cash management is more important than ever, another very large market in the financial close. So the combination of those $30 billion-plus market as the leader in every one of those spaces. Soon to be in AR, I hope one day in the future. But as the leader in sort of the financial close market, we think the 20% is the right aspirational goal for the midterm target model. Again, like a lot of tech companies, when the headwinds hit, we dropped from our sort of high teens, low 20s down to where we are today and the way we get back is exactly what we've described here, a strategic model that is going after the embedded TAM in our existing customers for additional strategic products driven or catalyzed by digital transformation. CFOs and CIOs that are looking around who's our best, most strategic vendor that we trust with AI that we trust with moving into this process control environment like AR or IFM. It's not just the story we're telling. It's the fact that they're ready as we move through in these very early innings of our market, that can move us back to the 20%. And then there are about 1,000 more things like little things that we're doing on the execution side to also move that back to where we think is optimized in this growth environment for financial close.

Excellent. Any questions from the audience. Must be asking all the right questions here.

It's early.

And it's early. I guess sticking with you, Mark, I'm -- I've always been a little bit surprised around kind of the sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue for BlackLine kind of screens a little bit high across the rest of software. Is there anything structural here that makes you kind of have that high level? Or is that something that you can flex longer term?

Well, first, percent of revenue is the best way for a lot of investors to look at it. But inside the company, we look at it as a lifetime value to customer acquisition cost, right? How much does it cost us to buy sales, to buy bookings, to buy new growth. And we look at that on a consolidated basis, the way you would with a magic number or some other metric, but we also look at it in new markets, either geographically that will be higher. We look at it in the core markets where we are getting more efficiency. And we look at it with new products where we have to flood the plane or accelerate our investment. So we want to keep forward investment, future sales investment, and that will keep it slightly higher. Second thing about our market is once you get a customer -- you should expect to keep them forever. At 98%, 99% pro forma renewal rates on the enterprise, once we acquire a customer, we need to serve them for a very, very long time. And so relationship, it's an emotional buy, it's mission-critical. So that feet on the street, the educated partner, the experience upfront, all of that really matters. Remember, this is mission-critical financial information that closes every month, and you've got to serve that customer. So when you get them, you keep them. And those kinds of models for land and expand have long-term sales efficiency, right? But in the short term, when you're acquiring them, you've got to spend some extra money to get it. Again, I think we're actually right in market with our sales and marketing in the low 30s to acquire the kind of revenue growth we're getting and that we will invest further as the demand picks up and the growth accelerates.

Excellent. Well, I think we can end it there. Thank you all for joining us.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's good to see you again.

Yes, like great to say well. Okay. Thanks for the time.