Docebo Inc. (DCBO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great. You've got John Hutcheson from Citi here. I'm joined by Alessio Artuffo, Interim CEO and President, and COO, of Docebo; and Sukaran Mehta, Chief Financial Officer. And maybe we'll just start with a few level-set topics for the audience and maybe a little bit of an overview from Alessio. Can you give a little bit of context on what Docebo is, what the product is, who your customer base is, et cetera?

Sure thing. Docebo is a learning management platform for enterprises. SaaS organization. We currently serve about 3,900 customers around the world. The company just crossed $200 million in ARR and has a nice 16% free cash flow. The business essentially focuses on solving learning, knowledge problems for mid- to large-sized organizations. So what we do is help companies address learning needs for -- I feel like I need to slow down so folks can start -- can slowly walk in. We address the learning needs for organizations that need to train their employees and their customers. See, one particular thing about Docebo is that despite us being in the category of learning management system, John, our strength has always been to elevate the learning experience beyond employee experience, and serve a broader audience. So it's in a summary what we do.

And on the competition side, who are your key competitors? And how has the competitive landscape evolved over the past number of years?

So competition is, in the LMS space, is very fragmented. It's a fragmented space. But as we focus on the enterprise side of the market, and specifically at addressing the needs of companies that train both employees and customers, we have designed a niche for ourselves where the competition is essentially our own execution. There are some legacy players, meaning companies that were more traditional LMSs for compliance, that we compete with. More frequently, for internal use cases, such as Cornerstone, SuccessFactors and Oracle. But I would say we are very unique in the sense that addressing both internal and external use cases has been a differentiating factor for us. When we think about the market, SMB and mid-market, competition is a lot more prevalent and price sensitive and which is also one of the reasons why we like to focus more on the mid and large enterprise size.

Great. And then from the macro perspective, we've had looming threat of recession for a couple of years now. What are you seeing across general procurement trends with your customers? What are you seeing underlying behavior today?

So SMB remains cautious. I would say our enterprise signals are more positive. While they're not necessarily improving, they're very stable. And our enterprise pipeline, as a matter of fact, has been growing consistently, which is going to have, we believe, meaningful impact in the 2025 fiscal given that our average sales cycle for enterprises is 9 to 12 months time frame on average. In terms of macro, what we're seeing additionally is there's -- of course, AI is the name of the game, in terms of the demand that we're seeing is very influenced by AI capabilities. So we have a road map that is very focused on it. And additionally, I would say our distinguishing capability of addressing the needs of large corporations, like Amazon AWS or Google. They don't come to Docebo necessarily for our capabilities about addressing their employee training, but more for their external training. If you take AWS, they have a program called Skill Builder, which effectively targets every single professional in the AWS world and trains them on how to use AWS, whether you're a customer or not of their technology. And it's a massive program with millions and millions of users. I think they mentioned in a public talk that they reach about 30 million users, that's their target. And so they do that, and this sits on top of Docebo. So it's kind of our focus right now.

And I think, John, I'll add to that, is that in terms of segments and what we're seeing, I kind of spoke about it in the earnings call, but a bit of an update, is that our enterprise business, which is, simplifying, 5,000 above employee companies, and then mid-market is 1,000 to 5,000 employee companies, in terms of target size, and then SMB is anything below that. What we're seeing in the market is actually a story of segments where enterprise and mid-market customers are actually growing at a faster rate to even the -- on the high end of the range, I guided 19% growth this year. So let's assume at a 20% growth around the mid-market space, the actual enterprise customer, large end, is growing at 30-plus percent. And the SMB customer is more, give or take, flattish. So what you're seeing in this market is that pipeline and investments for productivity gains, whether it's AI or just general need of -- like the themes that are playing out in our space, whether it's customer education, on-shoring, near-shoring from a manufacturing perspective, government is a big segment for us, where there's systemic investments being made to move the adoption from a SaaS perspective relative to on-prem solutions they've had 20 years ago, means that, in the government and large enterprise segment, to Alessio's point, our pipeline is actually growing or has had a reasonably good uptick in the past couple of months or even prior to that. And I think what will be interesting to see is, as we move into the '25 cycle, we should show strength not only in the mid-market, large enterprise, and of course, government will be a big part of it. But I think there's a probability that, to the extent the economy normalizes, because SMB is more macro sensitive, I think the other segments are more specific to productivity gains and ROI, you may also see some SMB improvements come through in '25. But irrespective, we've guided that we should show some strength in '24 from the pipeline we're generating. And that's why I lifted my revenue guidance in Q2.

And it's helpful color on segments sliced by size of customer, your horizontal SaaS business. What about the verticals, are there certain verticals that you're seeing strength in currently?

I'll get started. So historically, the business has done really well in the software and technology sector in general. Over time we have implemented strategies to hedge against hyper-concentration in a single vertical. And currently, our business, about 80% of the business, develops across 5 top verticals where software, manufacturing, financial services, retail and health care are the more important ones for us. From an execution perspective, we are developing actually verticalization playbooks so that, as we continue to scale, we continue to become more efficient in these verticals. And our goal is to win increasingly at a higher rate in very select markets where we can specialize our workforce and sales organization and GTM and become more efficient. That exercise of playbook development actually started with the government sector. The government sector is a very important initiative for us, that has a 3-year horizon of measurement of return. But we're already seeing -- we're already seeing the benefits of it. We are targeting the SLED, State, Local and Education, and FED, federal markets. The company before starting a government division at about 5% of the revenue in government alone. And that came very organically without a whole lot of focus. As we now invest in it, we develop the right partnerships and system integrators. We just announced a very meaningful partnership with Deloitte, that is going to deepen our focus in government, thanks to their extensive reach. And this partnership is called Certified to Sell. So essentially Deloitte will bring to market Docebo in the verticals where they have presence, and government is a big one for them. So yes, we want to become stronger and more targeted in our go-to-market efforts and government is going to be a very meaningful story for us.

And that's a good segue to FedRAMP certification, I know that's been in process for some time. Any update on that process and timing and implications for the business?

Yes. So we have done an excellent job, I think, at executing against the things that we are fully in control of and we've gone through the so-called controls management at IT level. We are now ready to be sponsored. We have developed over time a pipeline of agencies that have showed different degrees of interest. It's hard to put a hard date to it because of the complexities of the federal market as well as the dynamics of FedRAMP being articulated. But we have a reasonable to high degree of confidence that this is going to happen sooner than later. And once it does, what it does, it unlocks opportunities that, just for the past 3 years, to give context, across new logo acquisition of LMS technologies in the federal space, there have been more than $200 million spent in new projects. This does not include renewals of existing contracts that are upcoming for renewal, maybe with legacy vendors that we substitute in the commercial market. So we believe the opportunity is enormous. And as soon as we reach ATO, or authorized to operate, stage, which we should and we hope, relatively soon, our pipeline is going to open up to these federal opportunities and it's going to be a meaningful contributor to our growth.

And there's no surprise. I mean government segment, we've spoken before, is the biggest buyer -- the numbers that Alessio spoke to that's important to separate, it's only federal spend. That does not include state and local spend, which is a massive market on its own. And so getting to FedRAMP also gives one other aspect, which also exempts us from StateRAMP, which means we can also participate in larger SLED opportunities, not just federal. I think the point we're trying to make is that this is going to be a meaningful part or pillar of our growth strategy, government combined with external audiences and large enterprise, as well as our new products and capabilities that are coming out next week, I'm just self-promoting, at Docebo Inspire, give us significant pillars to execute on. But government is going to be one of the most meaningful pillars to compound at a healthy CAGR going forward.

The other growth lever you all have utilized has been partnerships, historically. You mentioned relatively new partnership with Deloitte and how that's been going. What's the strategy around that partnership? How do you view that and its impact on your business going forward?

The partnerships are integral and critical in support of a more bigger-picture effort to become a much more equipped company in the enterprise space. We have mentioned Deloitte. We've gone public about describing the type of partnership. But beyond Deloitte, there's other companies that we're partnering with, both from the system integration standpoint, Accenture is another one, as well as from a technology partnership -- technology integration standpoint. On the system integrator side, I would say they're not as fast to develop as you would in a normal commercial relationship. They take time, different SIs depending on their size and positioning, different playbooks of partnering, so that's not one size fits all. But we're very excited about the partnerships that we have ongoing with Deloitte, with Accenture, and a few others that are maybe smaller but more specialized. And on the technology integration side, there's a tremendous opportunity at complementing our offering with technologies that we may not own but we may decide to partner with for the meantime, and extend our offering horizontally, we refer to these as product extension, in fact, to cover a wider need. Enterprises have systemic-wide learning needs. And LMSs historically have had, by design, glitch of addressing a very narrow portion of those needs. Our goal is to become, over time, a broader partner and go in these enterprises with an idea that, if we partner with the right vendors, we can provide a broader solution that addresses bigger needs. And with bigger needs comes bigger scope, bigger tickets and bigger revenue.

And I think what's important just from a finance or just profitability perspective, that's important, people have asked this question about our sales and marketing spend has been relatively, on an absolute dollar basis, I mean has been, give or take, flat. And there's dynamics that are worth pointing to, which is that, as you move up market, a good portion of that demand is also being driven through SIs and these channel partners. And so you're kind of offsetting in the cycle the heavy investments a lot of companies make on inbound, which is lead gen, through SIs. So the more and more portion of my pipeline not only comes through system integrators, I'm not paying upfront for it, I'm paying it in form of services revenue for the most part. So now from a sales and marketing spend point of view, it's actually much more efficient. But the other part that I personally watch for quite closely in terms of our KPIs is, not only how much pipeline we're generating from these system integrators, but actually they land in the cycle of the journey at a much advanced stage relative to outbound, which is cold-calling or inbound, because someone like Deloitte is going to bring an opportunity to you which they have already confirmed is in play, and they are not nurturing it. So what that means is that when you're selling -- when you're using them as a channel partner, you're also reducing the deal cycle because it comes at an advanced solution building stage relative to nurturing a customer for 3 to 6 months by the time they are ready to make a decision. That is also an important factor, not only of not paying it upfront, but also entering the pipeline at a more advanced stage relative to outbound.

I'd say 2 more things. Yes, I mean, to the process of these SIs, their cost of acquisition of a new logo is such that it goes with their organizational model by which they don't go every deal. And the level of scrutiny that they apply to going in a new bid is pretty deep. And what that helps us with is not wasting energies and efforts on opportunities that are not likely to be successful. And that's really huge, because in government in particular, it's pretty easy to go and chase a potentially big opportunity, but that has so much history in it that may be hard to convert. So that's one. The other thing is we don't just think about the opportunity that these SIs bring to us on a new logo basis. They are already very established in states and cities and organizations. And to be able to tap into those and actually learn the history of how they're being served, what's working, what's not, and be able to present ourselves at the right time under the SI umbrella name is just a very powerful thing.

Yes. That's great. Let's pivot to the product, the technology road map. Sukaran, you mentioned Inspired that's coming up next week.

Inspire.

Inspire. Coming up next week. Any thoughts on what conference attendees will take away from that? Any product announcements or other things that...

Well, we can't say it all. Let's not exploit it all, otherwise somebody is going to listen to this and know the whole story. Jokes aside, I would say a couple of things on Inspire. Inspire today has grown institutionally at Docebo as our customers' conference. Over time our vision for Inspire is to become a place where learning professionals meet and learn everything about Docebo but goes also beyond that and get more educated on the industry. A point of reference. Our growth in terms of attendees this year is very significant, and we believe we have room to grow into that. Now I don't necessarily measure the success of an event in how many people sit in a room. I also like to look at what type of companies sit in the room and the level of the people that are involved. And this year, I really appreciate the healthy mix of medium-sized organizations, enterprise organizations, and the amount of executives that we also will have in the room, in addition to practitioners, which is very healthy. Yes. So we will be making some announcements. We're actually -- we have already announced to the market that our product called Communities, which is effectively a module that plays in the customer experience side of the house of Docebo, will be released actually. It hit market on August 15. But additionally, in the next few months, we're going to have the release of our first true AI content creation technology, as well as a module of learning analytics that we call Insights, that will resolve the problems around learning analytics, data analytics and sophisticated reporting, which today in Docebo is not an area of strength, and we've been working at it to become much more strong in that area. So we are very focused on those launches. There is more to come, particularly on the AI front. I will be teasing the audience during the keynote with some very significant, and not so far from now, evolution about how to transform a learning platform in a fully autonomous system that understands who is logging in and without the need of going through manual content processes. The platform autonomously determines the need of an individual via conversation and creates content and service content in the back end according to the user profile. This is something that we don't believe it's ready now, but will be ready sometime in the coming months and 2025, and belongs to a sphere that is more knowledge management related, which we are paying a lot of attention to and we'll be invested in.

And I think just a finance view on this is that, we'll speak more about it next week, but what was important from our perspective is there's -- AI is -- there's a hype and all that jazz aside, AI authoring, for example, that product has been in the market for 3 years. We didn't come up with this in the last 9 months. What the major relaunch will show is that our capabilities are going to be significantly superior. So the way I think about it is that there's a number of modules that -- a couple of modules that will be clearly monetizable as separate SKUs, versus there's incremental capabilities alongside that that we're going to showcase next week that are going to more increase my ability to win that business and deal velocity. So I think that's also what's playing out at least -- and I know a lot of investors that are here and listening to the recording, is that the question really is, in the base of the customers that I serve today and the ones that we win, how much of the new capabilities can be clearly monetized and sold whether through licenses and so on and so forth, versus what does it actually move the needle on win rates and deal velocity? And that's really the big question that we'll try and answer next week. I will leave that for next week a bit more. But I think that's really what we've been focused on is to say, well -- and especially in our world, I think AI is real, it's practical. It's very straightforward. Content automation is the simplest problem -- simple is the wrong word, but is the most applicable use case of why would you pay externally millions of dollars to create content through agencies where you could automate 90% of that and bring that cost down to 1/10? It's not a -- it's an ROI question. And you would still control your destiny and you can still build the datasets. But AI is automating 80%, 90% of that workflow. So that's a big productivity gain, which customers are willing to pay as a separate SKU. That's how we think about it. And so we'll say more on that, but I think in general, I like -- I know there's a hype around it, but we've been in this market for a long time to demonstrate that for the last 3 years.

The other thing that we -- I want customers to take away, John, is there's a general tendency, we try to spend a ton of time, this is something that I firmly believe in, that I'm trying to instill in the company more and more, we spend a ton of time analyzing customer feedback. This is really important. I was just reviewing some starts a few days ago. And over the past 12 months, we have weeded through more than 12,000 points of feedback from customers, from various sources, whether it's our Ideas portal, which is a community portal, whether it's our Net Promoter Score channel for new logos, our Net Promoter Score channel for existing customers and our net promoters channel for customers that consider being a customer of Docebo but we didn't win the business. And so we study all this data and we put it in this very sophisticated product management patterns. And we try to learn what we're doing well and what we need to do better. And of the feedback, what we agree with, what we don't agree with, what we should agree with. It's a very articulated metrics of decision-making. But I want the customers to really walk away understanding that we're not only all about AI, which is what a lot of companies are trying to hype up. We're focusing a lot on -- also on the now technology, on getting it better, on our core technology. We don't forget about it. It is a priority, is the priority. And developing AI on top of our core technology is incredibly important, but does not substitute the importance of elevating our products that they already have.

Very clear. Maybe pivoting to Sukaran and some financially oriented topics, starting with pricing. You made some changes to your pricing strategy back in May. Can you articulate what tweaks you made? And what are the benefits you're expecting or have been seeing from some of those changes?

Yes. So just a bit background, Docebo historically prior to April 1 when we changed our pricing methodology this year, was more of an a la carte pricing. And part of this is just maturity of the company. We're still growing at a fast pace, $200 million-plus ARR. And so as we looked at -- the work we did was, in the last 12 to 18 months, we looked at all the customers we served, how we sold, what we sold, what the specific use cases were. Went out and did a bunch of work and looked at our competitors, so on and so forth. The answer was this, that our ability to provide value, especially when we sell to customers where they are using us to monetize their intellectual property for customer education, partner education, so on and so forth, our ability to extract -- sorry, ability to solve that problem and drive the conversation based on value is important. So our new pricing methodology reflects that, which is effectively moving from a la carte to what we call core pack, which solves the core problem of the customer, which is a bundle. But the incremental capabilities on the use case are also part of the core bundle plus more. Meaning if I have a customer which needs to do e-commerce capabilities, that is a separate capability that they can monetize or buy from us to be able to monetize that for their end-user. Long story short, what it means is that you've gone from an a la carte model of selling to core bundle and incremental value based on more use cases that they have with us, which has simplified 2 things. One, we're not discussing with the customer individual a la carte items. We're actually discussing the value and the problem we need to solve for the customer, because it's a core bundle that they incorporate with us. And second, our ability to talk the value increases deal velocity and objection handling. And what you should see as a result of this exercise is that it should improve our -- we're certainly already -- the one thing that I was very encouraged, I've said this in my -- I think in the Q&A after the last earnings call, was even from my -- the quotes -- because when we launched this, what I watched for was like what's the benefit immediately can I see. Almost 25% of the quotes that have already gone out on the legacy pricing, which was prior to April 1, were converted within a few weeks into the new pricing, because the sellers are indicating to us that it's much easier to position and sell on value that we provide to the customer relative to being a la carte menu. And so in a nutshell, I will say that we have seen positive impact from the change. It will definitely -- it's already changing the way we position and go to market. You should expect that there is a -- we expect, and we'll monitor this over the next few quarters, but it is not unreasonable that our ACV, our average contract value, should go up as a result of the pricing change just because you're packaging in a problem-solving statement rather than a la carte individual items. We'll see how much that will be. But roughly historically, companies have been able to position better through these bundling and increase the ACV by 5% to 10%. But we'll monitor that and see how our progress is.

Okay. Great. Then switching to capital allocation. You have a good problem, the company generates a lot of cash flow. You've had a share repurchase in place for some time. How are you thinking about capital allocation going forward?

Yes, I'll let Alessio come in. I'll just kind of set it up from an M&A point of view. But I will say, yes, the business is 81% gross margin, generating 17% free cash flow right now as we exit the year. I've kind of spoken about my EBITDA margin. My free cash flow is 1% or 2% higher than my EBITDA margin just generally as a rule of town. And so yes, we will be in a good position, continue to generate free cash flow healthily in '24 and 2025. I think -- I'll just address the buyback and I'll pass it to Alessio from an M&A perspective. I think, generally, the way to think about us is that our Board is very focused on ensuring that any dilution that happens to investors from a share-based comp perspective, which is still low for my business, is 3% of my total revenue, we've neutralized that from a buyback perspective. But that's just more of a mentality of ensuring that there's no impact from a dilution to shareholders. But majority of the cash that's sitting on the balance sheet and the incremental cash that we'll generate, I'm sure Alessio can jump in now from an M&A point of view, but that's kind of primary focus beyond -- buybacks is secondary in my opinion. So if you want to speak to M&A, sorry.

Our historical approach to M&A has been conservative. We have not been aggressive in the M&A space for varying reasons. And the last deal that we did, we bought -- it was a tech acquire. We bought a company called Edugo, which effectively is our know-how and leadership for AI technology. And that happened, gosh, about 1.5 years ago, a year ago? As we think about Docebo in 3 and 5 years, of course, there are opportunities that we are prepared to catch in order to accelerate our vision of building a bigger, better Docebo. And so with the hat of the CEO, I like revenue-accretive M&A opportunities, at the right price, with the right financial profile, with the right operating discipline. What we are not, I would say, so focused to do is, similarly to some of our competitors in the legacy space, going after an overlap buy or assets that are very similar to us and buying customer portfolio or buying overlapping technologies. In our space, that strategy is poorly received by customers. We've seen the outcomes of that strategy on the receiving end as competitors and we have been benefiting from it because we have customers that come to us and say, "I am with Company A. They bought 3 other products that are the same as theirs. It's really chaotic. I want out." And so we know that that doesn't quite work. Where we are going to be focusing on is how can we make Docebo a technology that solves more highly integrated problems. Whether it via modules or whether via separate products, that will be -- will have to be seen. And so we're very active in this regard. We brought onboard a new leader for corp dev, corp M&A and partnerships, that is working very closely with me and Sukaran on identifying those opportunities. And that's one of our priorities for the next 12, 24 months.

And I think, John, the way -- just to just maybe take that further, spin on M&As. Last year, just to give some reference point, we reinvested close to 3% to 4% of our EBITDA free cash flow in FedRAMP certification. We think about growth levers on a long-term basis, and to the extent that we are getting closer and closer to the FedRAMP certification, that is a big unlock for the company from a growth point of view. So we think about deploying our capital effectively to drive those long-term levers of growth, and it doesn't just have to be M&A. What's interesting about our space, I forgot to say this earlier, is that if you look -- if you even look at what the last 6, 7 quarters we printed, 70% of what we generate in business net new ARR is coming from net new customers, which is telling you something, which is telling you that there is a secular structural demand across multiple horizontals and government segments. And what we don't want to do is to burden that growth organic pillar by inorganic roll-up story that some of our competitors have done. The secular demand is first and foremost important to us, and we were going to focus on that before. And I think the opportunity here is to ensure that any adjacent players -- capabilities that we incorporate through organically or inorganically expand the wallet share of the customers that we serve today and serve in the future.

And I would add one thing to Sukaran. Folks that are not as educated about our space tend to think about the LMS as a highly -- what's the word I'm looking for? A replacement market. While that is true for companies that look to replace their internal LMS, that is absolutely not true for companies that try to implement a monetization strategy over their knowledge. We have about 55 -- let's call it more than 50% of our customers are implementing a customer education or external training strategy. More than 50% of our pipeline is in that segment, in that -- sorry, with those use cases. And what's interesting is that, in that market, the majority of deals are greenfield, meaning that the companies have not had that experience before. And so I think that's really meaningful because it gives us the opportunity to further our capabilities in that area, to differentiate ourselves even further, and effectively to make us even more the company that can address the space better than anybody else and really increase that barrier to entrance in that space and keep away the competition and remain in a very solid position competitively.

Clear. Let's wrap on guidance, favorite topic. Sukaran, you recently raised the bottom and top end of your guide. What have you seen in the business that gave you the confidence to do that this past quarter?

Yes. Like I said, I think it's similar. So what we saw as we thought through our guide for the remaining part of the -- when we guided in Q2, which was 3 weeks ago, I mean, were, certainly, should show some strength in our enterprise and government business as we look through the year. And like I said before, I will generally -- I'm more conservative, and Alessio and I agree on this, is that we have some large, marquee deals in the pipeline. We don't forecast them until we have absolute visibility of actual dates of signing and where we are fully comfortable guiding for it. So that was not necessarily factored in. But irrespective of that, I will say that we saw our enterprise pipeline, mid-market and gov pipeline improve, which I spoke to earlier, which is reflected in the beat-and-raise that we did this quarter. At the high end of the range, I'm at 19%. So we feel good about that. And then on the EBITDA number, which is 15%, which we raised by 0.5%, 15.5%, listen, it's just at the high end of the range. It's just pure math at this point for Docebo. If you look at our business, and I think I didn't say this earlier, which is important, our investments in sales and marketing and R&D will remain our top priority to drive growth. The operating leverage that you're getting is just simple math today. On 81% gross margin business, if I just continue to show my discipline in G&A, for the last 7 quarters, G&A costs have been held flat to lower, revenue continues to accelerate at 20-plus percent, 20%, let's just call it, it's just math, of operating leverage. And so we will -- if I'm at a 15.5% full year EBITDA margin, you can expect that I'm getting closer and closer to 20% in my -- at the end of this year, to be at 15.5% full year, meaning I will exit Q4 quarter EBITDA closer and closer to -- getting closer and closer to 20%. And so it's a good place to be at. But like I said, our priority will remain, as we even look into 2025, there are investments we are making, including FedRAMP, new products that came out. We will continue to drive R&D investments and sales and marketing going forward. Operating leverage is just pure math from G&A for now.

Great. Well, we'll wrap it there. Thank you both for joining us today, and look forward to continued progress.

Thanks, John.

Thank you for having us. Thank you, John.