Walkme Ltd (WKME) 2021 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and welcome to the WalkMe Second Quarter Earnings Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to [Ms. Nicole Bosch], Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Great. Thank you. Hello, everybody. Welcome to WalkMe's Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. On the call with me today are Dan Adika, CEO and Co-Founder of WalkMe; Rafi Sweary, President and Co-Founder of WalkMe; and Andrew Casey, the company's Chief Financial Officer.

Certain statements we make today may constitute forward-looking statements and information within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Exchange Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 that relate to our current expectations and views of future events. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions, some of which are beyond our control.

In addition, these forward-looking statements reflect our current views with respect to future events and are not a guarantee of future performance. Actual outcomes may differ materially from the information contained in forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those set forth in the section titled Risk Factors in our prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 16, 2021, and other documents filed or furnished with the SEC.

These statements reflect management's current expectations regarding future events and operating performance and speak only as of the date of this press release. You should not put undue reliance on any forward-looking statements.

Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee that future results, levels of activity, performance and events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or will occur. Except as required by applicable law, we undertake no obligation to update or revise publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, after the date of which these statements are made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. See our press release dated August 11, 2021, for additional information.

In addition, certain metrics we will discuss today are non-GAAP metrics. The presentation of this financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for or superior to the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operational decision-making and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons.

We believe that these measures provide useful information about operating results, enhance our overall understanding of past financial performance and future prospects and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used in management in its financial and operational decision-making. For more information on the non-GAAP financial measures, please see the reconciliation tables provided in our press release dated August 11, 2021.

With that, I'll hand the call over to Dan.

Thanks, Nicole, and thanks, everyone, for joining us on our call today to discuss our second quarter results. I'm excited to be here today on our first call as a public company.

Before I get started, I would like to thank our employees, customers, partners and investors for their support over the years as we work towards a significant milestone. I speak for the rest of the team when I say we are looking forward to this next stage of our growth as a public company.

We had a very strong quarter, and we're very pleased with the results we achieved. Our sales organization has continued to execute very well, driving strong momentum in revenue, ARR and customer metrics.

Andrew will cover the financial in details in a few minutes, but on the high level, total revenue grew 28% year-over-year to $46.8 million, with subscription revenue growing 31% year-over-year to $42.2 million, an acceleration over our growth in Q1. ARR at the end of the quarter totaled $191 million, up 31% year-over-year, and non-GAAP operating loss was $11.7 million, a margin of negative 25%.

Since this is our first earnings call, I would like to provide some background on WalkMe and the opportunity ahead of us. Much has been said in technology industry and in enterprises across the globe about digital transformation. It can be a complex topic with far-reaching implications. But at its basic level, the common element in every digital transformation is buying and customizing software to create compelling user interfaces and experiences that improve business processes. Sometimes it's simple as a website or a mobile application.

Straightforward as it sounds, there is a compounding problem that is hindering the digital transformation efforts of even the largest enterprises. You've probably heard the phrase there is an app for that. Organizations are proving that to be true, and they buy and develop new cloud-based application at a record-breaking rate, each with the aim to improving any one of an uncountable number of business processes, along with the related experiences of employees and customers.

So what's the problem? There are actually two. First, when I talk to CIOs, the biggest challenge they have is figuring out how their multimillion dollar IT budgets are driving improvement across their businesses. They tell me that they lack visibility and insight into digital assets and business processes which make it very hard for them to extract value from applications, including those that they may not control or even know about.

Clicking through log after log in app after app to find the data they need to even understand what is happening break down quickly. Each time someone in the organization has a new app, it's just become that much harder to have visibility to the whole. This is why it's important to recognize the compounding nature of the problem. CIOs can't outrun it.

Second is the risk of creating poor user experiences for both employees and customers. As I noted earlier, one of the basic elements of digital transformation is to create compelling user experiences. This turned out to be extremely difficult when there are no UI standards for application. And software with a single use case doesn't, by its nature, consider the user experience across all of the applications required to complete business processes.

How does management even know if the experience is working for the users as intended? At WalkMe, we recognize that the key to successful digital transformation is not about the software you buy or the experiences you accept, it's about user adoption. To achieve user adoption, organizations need 2 critical things. One, deep visibility and insight into their tech stack, who is and who isn't using each application, where are users getting stuck and abandoning processes, where assistant and user errors are happening, where integrations are breaking. The permutation across all of the applications in the enterprise are endless. It is a compounding problem.

Second is an efficient and agile way to action this insight, a GPS-like experience using no-code constructs and automation that put the employee and customers at the center. For every change, directly improve their experience and, in turn, drive adoption. Being data first is the most important thing when designing a digital transformation strategy. Without the visibility to the data and the ability to declare and measure the KPIs, there is no way to improve applications, deliver the experience employees and customers expect and fully realize the value of digital transformation.

The WalkMe Digital Adoption Platform, or DAP, analyze and understand any application with a simple no-code implementation. CIOs and CDOs are provided with immediate insight to find the gaps between the user experience with technology and an organization business goal. With actionable insight, organizations can create, deliver elegant experience that enable users to access the full functionality and value of their application, ensuring the adoption and ultimately, fulfilling the promise of digital transformation. This is why WalkMe has become not only a category leader, but a category creator.

In Q2, we have continued to make huge investments in innovation, and I'm excited to share with you the following [insights]. We completed the acquisitions and integration of the enterprise search built with for digital adoption. Now users of workstation, our unified employee solution, can search what they need at the moment they need it and get personalized AI-driven results. For example, imagine the productivity increase in sales when they no longer need to remember which application haystack to search in to find the latest version of presentation, order form or contract.

I'm also proud to share that we've completed another milestone in the development of our machine learning capabilities we call Deep UI. With Deep UI, WalkMe analyzes how humans interact with software and proactively recommend ways to improve the user experience with actions that can be taken immediately right from the WalkMe platform. For example, organizations using Salesforce Lightning can turn on WalkMe UI intelligence and expose, in full detail, data-driven insights for all forms. The professional can now see which fields are redundant and the server users waste a lot of time or make form field error and chart the optimal path to form completion. Imagine how powerful it is for a CIO to deliver a radically better user experience across applications and align to business processes without any configuration changes or human interaction from your team. Everything is done automatically, powered by AI and machine learning, to extract data. Better user experience equals better digital adoption and more value from digital transformation.

The best way to understand WalkMe is through our customer success stories and hearing about how they use data first approach to close the gap between user interactions with technology and their business goals. We had a very strong Q2 in terms of both new logos and expansion with enterprise customers. As of the end of Q2, we service more than 2,000 customers globally. Given our enterprise-focused approach, we continue to see outsized growth in that market. To that end, we added 50 new enterprise-wide DAP customers in that quarter, which is growth of 110% year-over-year. The growth we are seeing in these enterprise-wide deployments demonstrate how our platform become a really strategic part of our customers' digital transformation strategy once they are reaping the benefits of data visibility and better employee and customer experiences delivered by WalkMe.

I'd like to share how a bank in Southeast Asia [expanded] with WalkMe to support its hybrid workforce strategy. The bank formally launched its hybrid work program 14 months ago with the goal to increase support from 700 to 45,000 employees across 8 markets. Today, nearly 37,000 employees has a flexible working arrangement. The hybrid work program is powered by 4 applications, ServiceNow, an e-learning platform, Talent Marketplace and SuccessFactors. WalkMe connects business processes across these 4 applications, so managers have the data and visibility they need and employees have the right user experiences. Each can now optimize the use of all 4 applications to push the bank's future of work initiatives forward in an efficient and smooth way. With WalkMe, bank employees intuitively adopt new platform, improving productivity and task completion rates. Engagement trends are high. 99.9% of employees have interacted with WalkMe to complete business processes on ServiceNow and 93.9% of the bank's e-learning platform.

Let's look at another expansion deal. Here is an example of a large multinational tech company that first became a customer in 2016. Like organizations around the globe, the company embraced a remote workforce model as a result of COVID, and today is one of the most successful hybrid workforce success stories. Not to be derailed by the new normal while moving forward with their planned IT initiative, they started off with the WalkMe pilot primarily for its customer experience transformation. Their goal was to onboard 7,000 customer service manager on new processes in Salesforce.com to better support their new software [products] as they move away from their hardware-focused strategy.

With the data and visibility they gained with WalkMe, the company provided new user experiences to reduce the average handle time for critical business processes in Salesforce by more than 50% while improving process completion rate.

The success of the pilot got the attention of the sales organization who ultimately decided to onboard WalkMe to facilitate their global sales transformation. Since we first started working with them, we expanded from 1 application to 4 applications, 7,000 users to 30,000 users, and we closed a 2-year [optical] and renewal in Q2. We're now in talks to extend their use of WalkMe's app so they can realize even more value from their transformation initiatives. These are 2 perfect examples of companies that look to WalkMe to drive their hybrid work strategies, by gaining better visibility to their data and using insights to create better user experiences. They connect the data and action on the WalkMe platform to deliver outstanding business outcomes.

Customers are at the center of everything we do. Now let's widen the line and look at our category and its ecosystem. While we have directly seen the positive impact in ROI of DAP across our customer base, major industry analysts at Gartner and Forrester have increasingly been featuring WalkMe as an enabler of digital transformation and have recognized the category of digital adoption platform, which we have helped define and shape. In 2019, Gartner classified digital adoption solution as an emerging category across software landscape, alongside the likes of HCM and CRM software, recognizing that WalkMe couldn't be put into a narrow category that underappreciates the value of what our platform can deliver.

Gartner stated that by 2025, 70% of organizations will use digital adoption solutions. They believe that the number is only somewhere between 5% to 20% today. Most recently, Gartner featured WalkMe and digital adoption solution in 2 high cycles where digital adoption solution has advanced the stage in the maturity phase.

In addition, Forrester has done extensive research on the economic impact of WalkMe for enterprises. Forrester found that WalkMe drove an ROI of over 368% based on cost saving across employee-facing applications and customer-facing services. This translates to a payback period of less than 3 months and over $20 million in savings to the company over a 3-year period for the composite company studies in the report.

Strong ecosystems are important. The most valuable companies in the world have them. WalkMe has made important strides in this area. Our ecosystem, WalkMe Beyond, is about expanding beyond WalkMe's core platform by bringing together 2 key elements, talent and technology, to drive new opportunities. This ecosystem is built around our Digital Adoption Institute, which empowers our customers, partners and users to become skilled working professionals. Through our self-study courses and certification program an ecosystem of WalkMe users and collaborators is growing rapidly. Over 2,000 individuals actively engage in the institute to grow their skill set in Q2 and over 15,000 have joined to develop the skills of the future since its launch last fall.

Experienced professionals are championing WalkMe in their professional and industry network, which increases mind share and awareness and redefines industry best practices around digital adoption to realize more value from digital transformation. More than 3,500 professionals features digital adoption platforms and WalkMe skills on their LinkedIn profile, and there are more than 30 companies with open job requisition for these skill sets.

The ecosystem also provides another layer of resources to increase the strategic value of WalkMe for our customers, including access to community, service marketplace, market research, integration, apps and solutions. This is the power of our ecosystem, which enable our customers to maximize the value of our platform.

As we look ahead, we're excited about what the future has in store for WalkMe. In particular, we look forward to the launch of new products that leverage the power of AI to enhance the intuitive nature of our platform. The expansion of our ecosystem to amplify the power of our network effect and the investment in our sales and marketing organization to drive increasing brand awareness and further recognition of our leadership as the leader in digital adoption platform. While we have made great progress, become a category leader and achieved scale to date, we strongly believe that we are still in the very early stage of our journey. We look forward to discussing our progress with you in the quarters ahead.

With that, I will turn the call over to Andrew to walk us through our financial results.

Thanks, Dan, and thanks to everyone for joining us.

Before I get into the results for the quarter, I want to provide a quick overview of our business model and the key metrics that we look to measure our business.

We deliver our digital adoption platform through a subscription SaaS offering in the cloud, which represents our subscription revenue. Our services revenue includes professional services and training. In terms of key metrics, we focus on remaining performance, or RPO, as well as annual recurring revenue, or ARR, which we believe provide a better view of our current business momentum relative to revenue growth.

RPO represents all the contracted revenue not yet recognized, including both deferred revenue and noncancelable contract amounts that will be invoiced and recognized as revenue in future periods.

Moving on to the second quarter results. As Dan discussed, we had a very strong second quarter with great customer momentum. The strength that you're seeing is reflective of the strong value proposition of our platform, the horizontal application of our solutions, strong operational focus and sales execution. In the second quarter, total revenue was $46.8 million, an increase of 28% year-over-year. Subscription revenue grew 31% year-over-year to $42.2 million. Remaining performance obligation, or RPO, ended the quarter at $260.5 million, representing growth of 48% year-over-year. And current RPO, which is contracted subscription revenue expected to be recognized over the next 12 months, grew 36% year-over-year to $151 million. ARR at the end of Q2 was $191 million, representing growth of 31% year-over-year, an acceleration from Q1.

These strong top line metrics are reflective of the growing importance of digital adoption within the world's largest organizations. As Dan mentioned, we have seen continued strong momentum with larger enterprises, which we measure as organizations with more than 500 employees. Looking at ARR from customers with more than 500 employees, this grew 38% year-over-year in Q2 to $165.2 million, representing 87% of our total ARR, up from 86% in Q1 '21 and 82% in Q2 of 2020.

In addition, we look at enterprise-wide digital adoption platform customers, or DAP customers, and the additions is a sign of the growing strategic nature of our platform across our customer base. We added 15 new DAP customers in the second quarter, which represents a growth of 110% year-over-year. ARR from these DAP customers grew 129% year-over-year and represented 34% of our total ARR, up from 19% in Q2 last year.

Taking a look at dollar-based net retention, the natural land and expand motion of our platform translates into a strong net retention rate. We look at dollar-based retention with our enterprise customers who are notably stickier through the disruption that COVID caused with smaller businesses last year. Our enterprise dollar-based net retention, which includes customers with more than 500 employees, was 117% as of the end of Q2 on a trailing 4-quarter basis. This was down slightly from the prior quarter due in part to the continued impact of COVID on customers and the specific industries we serve. If we look at the quarterly view of dollar-based net retention, it was 121% in Q2, up from 118% in the first quarter.

Before turning to gross margin, expenses and profitability, I would like to note that I will be discussing non-GAAP results going forward. Gross margin was 76.8%, up 120 basis points year-over-year. Gross profit was $35.9 million, up 30% year-over-year. We expect our overall gross margins will increase over time as we continue to optimize our hosting operations and improve our services engagement model, leveraging partners where feasible.

Turning now to operating expenses. We remain focused on investing for growth to capture share in the large market opportunity that Dan described. Sales and marketing expenses for Q2 was $28.1 million compared to $19.3 million in Q2 last year. This represents 60% of total revenue compared to 53% in the second quarter last year. The year-over-year increase in sales and marketing expenses is a direct result of the hiring freeze we put in place at the onset of the global pandemic last year, followed by an acceleration in hiring as the business activity returned to more normalized levels in subsequent quarters.

We're also investing aggressively in our go-to-market teams to address the increasing opportunities we see in U.S. federal market, partner expansion and broader coverage across all geographies.

R&D expenses in Q2 was $10.7 million, compared to $6.7 million in Q2 last year. This represents 22% of total revenue versus 18% in the same period last year. We've been making investments in our platform and plan to continue to invest in R&D as we build out our product and invest in our ecosystem in the quarters ahead.

G&A expense was $8.8 million for the second quarter compared to $4.5 million in the second quarter last year. G&A was 19% of revenue versus 12% of revenue last year. We are investing in the infrastructure of our business to continue to drive long-term scale in our business. And going forward, the primary areas of investment for us will be R&D, sales and marketing as we look to capitalize on our large market opportunity.

Operating loss in the quarter was $11.7 million compared to a loss of $2.9 million last year. Operating margin of negative 25% was down 17 points compared to the same period last year.

We held back on spending and investing meaningfully last year during the pandemic as we chose to preserve cash. As discussed, we've reaccelerated our investment plans as we look to capitalize on our opportunity. Longer term, we expect to see ongoing improvements in operating leverage as we scale and are structuring our investments in sales and marketing and R&D accordingly.

Net loss per share in Q2 was $0.16 using 75 million weighted average shares outstanding. Free cash flow was negative $7.4 million in Q2 compared to a negative $0.1 million in Q2 last year. Free cash flow margin was negative 15.9%, down from negative 0.3% in Q2 last year.

In the near term, we expect to see fluctuations in cash flow. Longer term, we expect that increasing operating leverage will result in positive free cash flow. Though margins will fluctuate on a quarterly basis in the near term, an improvement will not be linear. Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with $371.7 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term deposits.

Turning now to guidance. For the third quarter of 2021, we expect revenue in the range of $48.5 million to $50 million, representing growth of 25% to 29% year-over-year; non-GAAP operating loss in the range of $17 million to $15.5 million. For the full year 2021, we expect revenue in the range of $189.5 million to $191.5 million, representing growth of 28% to 29% year-over-year, non-GAAP operating loss in the range of $59 million to $57 million.

With that, Dan, Rafi and I will take your questions.

(Operator Instructions) And we will go first to Josh Baer of Morgan Stanley.

Congrats on your first quarter. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about your -- the competitive landscape and your moat. Like how much of a lead do you think you have from a technology standpoint, how would you characterize your differentiation? And how important is scale and analyzing large amounts of that interaction data as part of your competitive moat?

Thanks for the question, Josh. This is Dan. So regarding the moat and the technology, what's important to understand is how DAP is actually built. And in order to really provide digital adoption platform, you need both things: one is deep data into the system, as I described briefly before, and the ability to action on that data. So what we have and actually provide is what we call DeepUI, which is our UI intelligence. And for what we know, we are the only one that can actually understand human behavior and UI elements in such a precision that give us the ability to create that value to our customers. The second piece is connecting that data to our engagement layer and actually provide actionable analytics and actionable insights and guidance to those customers. So I would say today, we're not seeing anything like that. There is point solutions that we're seeing around that, or in the product analytics space or in the training space and so on, but we're not seeing a real DAP solution like WalkMe plays.

That's helpful. And if I could sneak another in. Wondering when you think about the sales cycle and the education component of that, given the nascency of the market opportunity. Just wondering like thinking over the last couple of years or even since IPO, if the educational component of the sale is getting any easier as you're building out the ecosystem and the market develops.

Yes. That is a great question as well. So absolutely, we're seeing a huge progress there, especially when we're getting more coverage by Gartner and Forrester and other analysts, digital adoption platform becoming a true category. Still, when we're going to customers, the biggest challenge that we have is the status quo and customers usually start with WalkMe with 1 or 2 applications and then slowly going into digital adoption platform. What we're seeing in the past, I would say year, especially with the tailwinds of COVID, is that more and more and more CIOs understand that they need to adopt a data-first approach. And this is where we have a huge opportunity to actually go and sell the entire platform from the get go. And this is why we're seeing such a strong growth number in our DAP customers and our expansion as well.

So I would say we are still not 100% there and the market is evolving, but we're seeing very strong indication that it's going there. And one of the quotes that I gave just a few minutes ago is that Gartner believes that by 2025, 70% of organizations will use the digital adoption platform. So this is what we are basically building on and pushing on, because there is no way to run a successful digital transformation strategy and be successful without digital adoption platform.

And we'll go next to Tyler Radke of Citi.

This is [Boo Yon Kim] on for Tyler. I want to hear about the divergence in billings and ARR growth rates. What's driving that divergence? And when should we expect to see them converge?

So Kim, this is Andrew Casey. So what I would tell you is that billings isn't a primary metric that we focus on. We really focus investors on our remaining performance obligations. And one of the things that we talked a lot about was really focusing our energies, our sales motions on customers with greater than 500 employees. It's that enterprise, large enterprise space. And what you're seeing there is that, that's where we're seeing the largest growth rate. And a result of that is those customers are the ones who really want those longer strategic relationships with us, such that they're treating us as a platform supplier to enable their strategic objectives. So you see -- that's why you see the RPO number growing so rapidly.

And we expect that, that is certainly going to be our focus going forward and where we're making those investments. But I would gear investors and analysts more towards RPO and ARR, rather than a billings metric because billing metrics can often be influenced by periodicity associated with it and a lot of other things, which is more difficult to translate back into future growth. RPO is the best indicator for us on the stability and understanding of our future revenue growth.

And we will go next to Michael Turrin of Wells Fargo Securities.

Congrats to the team on the first set of quarterly results. Looking -- the large customer metrics look especially strong, but maybe the total ARR improvements here were a bit more modest sequentially versus last quarter. Can you walk through some of the dynamics of what's driving the difference between the large customer ARR and the combined? And if there's a point where you'd expect some of the headwinds from smaller customers, assuming that's the case, to maybe subside here.

Thanks, Michael. Thanks for the question. I think what I'd say is remember that we were accelerating investments in our sales and marketing, and then we're ramping up new sales reps at the end of last year as we were coming out of COVID. And for us, we have a typical sales cycle of 9 to 12 months and such that you need those sales reps to slowly but surely ramp up before they're really overall productive. But we are seeing that the motions and the levers we're pulling are showing up in that greater than 500 employee area. And I'd tell you, typically, you see in that group of customers, somewhere between 20 to 50 that are being added in any given quarter, and we're seeing equally the expansions that are happening within those clients.

Recall also that we talked about, there was a group of clients we have that have less than 500 employees, and that's been the most challenging area for us as far as customer adds because it includes small and medium-sized business customers who have been the hardest impacted from COVID through Q4 and Q3 '20 of last year.

So you see that dynamic going on in our business. It's one that we were pretty upfront that we were making the changes in our coverage model, and we are investing in sales and marketing coverage to drive increasing ARR from that customer class.

It's certainly a transition we've seen, but I'll point right back to our ARR for the period and the percentage that greater than 500 employee accounts were presented, and it's been steadily increasing now to 87% of our total ARR, which is an increase from last year and a dramatic increase over the last few years.

That's extremely helpful detail. There's also a useful split here on just the retention stats. I think you have the trailing 12 months and then a quarterly snapshot as well. Looking at that, it looks like while the trailing 12 is still maybe modestly declining, Q4 represents the trough on a quarterly basis. So maybe you can just discuss the dynamic there and maybe if there are target levels or a level you'd expect retention rate to trend towards, that's also useful.

Yes. So thanks for pointing that out because it's really a great metric that reflects the fact that we had some real churn in that customer base in Q3, Q4. And that was -- by the way, there were a lot of companies who were very much struggling during the COVID period and not just small and medium-sized business. There was plenty of customers who've had to cut back on spending or put their employees first. And so that was a low point in our dollar-based net retention. So that's why it's so important that we give to Street and to investors an understanding of that trailing 4 quarters, the tick down from prior quarter is really reflective of the past.

And that's why we took great pains to make sure you understood the quarterly dynamic that's happened, that Q4 drop of about $1.12 has now jumped up to $1.21, which is reflecting the fact that we are seeing those customers greater than 500 employees start to expand with us. We are gaining more and more customers in that category. And as we're generating value for those clients, they're expanding with us across multiple, multiple departments, applications and in some cases, enterprise-wide. So over time, we certainly think that we can drive our dollar-based net retention well above 125% for that customer class.

Now it's going to take some time, and it's going to take concerted efforts in our coverage and continued focus and success with our DAP customers, but that's our strategy, right? And so -- it was important for -- thanks for pointing it out. It's very important for investors to understand the trailing 4-quarter dynamic versus the quarterly dynamic and the quarterly dynamic really reflects the reacceleration we're seeing in the dollar-based net retention figures.

And we will hear next from Keith Bachman of Bank of Montreal.

Yes, and echo the congratulations on your first public company quarter. I had to -- the first is on your large enterprise agreements. Could you talk a little bit about what your upsell cadence is with those customers after they signed such a large agreement? And what are the drivers? Is it seats? Is it usage? How do you expand that? And how does it compare to, say, the balance of your customer relationships?

This is Dan. Thanks Keith. This is Dan, probably it was Siri who pops up there. So a great question. So when we're looking at expansion, it goes 2 ways. One is more application. So companies that are ongoing digital transformation, they're basically implementing more and more and more platforms, right? It can be an HCM, a CRM an ERP and so on and so on. And usually, they will go to WalkMe and they will start adding WalkMe to help them with those business processes. What we will see that soon enough, they will start to add WalkMe in more and more and more applications, internal and external as well.

And the way we price, we price per seat per app, and we have an enterprise license agreement when it's just per seat.

So there is a certain point where it makes sense to just move into an enterprise license agreement. And that's what we're seeing with our large customers. This is how they're expanding.

As I mentioned earlier, we are hoping to see in the near future that we're able to land enterprise license agreements because we're pushing really hard on the data first approach. But currently, the way it works is, we call it 1 2 3 DAP. They're starting with 1 app, 2, 3 and then they go full DAP. So that's usually how the dynamic works. I hope this answers the question.

Yes. Great. And then my follow-up would be, could you give us an update on the sales force progress? Where are you in terms of the hiring plans, quota-carrying reps, training, just -- if you can give us a sense about how, say, the next 12 months might unfold in terms of sales capacity from where you are in the recent quarter or so?

So thanks. This is Andrew, Keith. I'd tell you, we're executing on the plans we kind of set out for ourselves in hiring. And by the way, it's not just sales reps. It's also the support infrastructure around reps. It's sales engineers, it's our customer success reps. It's our inside sales or BDRs. So it's -- for us, it's about creating the infrastructure to make the sales team very, very productive. And so far, we've been executing pretty well on our plans for the year.

Now typically, what happens in any cycle for an enterprise software company like us is they do a lot of hiring early on in the year. And that's -- because you want the sales reps to ramp as quickly as possible to be able to affect your Q4 period. I'd say we did that very well in Q1, and we're continuing to go higher into core areas in our sales team because we see continued interest from those enterprise (inaudible) clients. In fact, I think you've probably seen in our release where we're starting to invest into our U.S. federal market.

We've hired a leader there, and they're starting to build out a team. And it's because we see enormous opportunity over the long term, especially as the government cycles actually take place over 2022 that those are going to be very, very lucrative investments for us, and we can take advantage of them.

We also hired leaders in EMEA and in APJ, Simon Blunn and Sandie Overtveld, they're driving a structure and a focus on enterprise software coverage in each one of those geographies, which is also big areas of growth for us.

So long-winded way of saying, we're executing on our plans that we set out for ourselves. And as we continue to see opportunities, we will invest aggressively into them and advance with them. In fact, that's what you see in our financials and our guidance is that -- we are not shying away from opportunities to invest in our sales and marketing organization to take advantage of long-term growth opportunities.

I would just add to that -- this is Dan, that on top of the organic growth that we have with increasing our sales force, we are increasing our effort with the partners, the SIs and the global SIs, of course. So we more than doubled our alliances and partnership teams in the last 6 months. So that's, we believe, going to be another strong revenue growth driver for us in the future.

And so we will take our next question from (inaudible) with Barclays.

Congrats on the quarter. Just to touch on that last one, looking at ARR sourced from direct sales versus partners. It looks like it's mostly direct sales today. But how much can you see partners contributing over time?

This is Rafi. So right now, the contribution of our channel partners is still marginal. We are working very hard. And here, what is more important is the direction over speed. We want to make sure that we're not just inking contracts. We want to make sure that the partners are the right partners, and they're putting just the investment required to be successful with our platform. So actually, there is a lot of very good things in the hopper. So I suggest for everybody to stay tuned. But as of right now, it's still a marginal contribution.

Okay. And I know you had mentioned that some of your smaller customers, still very much being affected by COVID. But a lot of these customers may still want to try your platform. Are you incentivizing some of these smaller customers in any way to come on, try that platform right now, try to remove some of the friction from the buying process?

Sure. This is Dan. This is -- we serve any company and size. So WalkMe actually have 4, I would say, brackets, from SMB to commercial to enterprise to named accounts. Our product fits them all. And yes, we have, I would say, very beneficial pricing even to small companies that want to try our products. So that's absolutely something that we always -- we're focusing on.

Yes, maybe just to add on to that. Let me just add on to that. I think what Dan was referring to earlier about how customers typically start with us and our pricing structure and it's a price per user per app. Oftentimes, when a smaller customer starts with a specific use case, they'll be relatively lower cost because they're really focusing on that specific use case. And so -- and maybe even a subset of users for a single application.

So if you think about how customers are getting value through the use of the WalkMe platform, increases in users and increases in application or process coverage is really how the pricing escalates. So it's -- there's no barrier to entry on pricing and structure for the smaller customers. In fact, I think we've done a pretty good job of structuring it such that as value accrues to customers over time through usage, that's how WalkMe captures more value, too.

And we'll go to our next question from Pat Walravens of JMP Securities.

Great. Let me add my congratulations. So if I just Google digital adoption, the ones that come up are WalkMe, Whatfix and Pendo. Dan, I would love to hear just sort of the quick version for how you tell customers that you differentiate from those competitors?

Sure. Great question.

So if I would talk about the first one that you mentioned, Pendo, they are mainly focused on products analytics, and we're not seeing them in the digital adoption transformation space at all. As regards to Whatfix, we're seeing them currently as a small competitor. They don't come near to our ability to execute for, I would say, mid-sized companies to large companies, both on data analytics, deep analytics, AI and machine learning. And at the end of the day, what we're trying to sold to our customers is to get them real ROI from the digital transformation effort. And in order to do so, there is a lot of moving parts that need to be in the platform. And currently, we're the only one that actually has it. We are seeing that the entire, I would say, ecosystem grows. So that's good to us, and we welcome every competition. But overall, we think we're 3, 4 years ahead.

Yes. Pat, if I may add, you will also look at WalkMe, we define DAP customers, and we clearly give a number for our DAP customers. In our eyes, DAP customers are companies that really change the way they do their business regarding technology. So they're not looking per system. They look at the business, that problem that they're trying to solve, which might be 4 or 5 different systems. So when you look at DAP solution, a true digital adoption solution that changes the way companies do their business, we're probably the only game in town that can do it.

Awesome. And then Andrew, if I could ask you a quick one. I mean, so RPO, the exploration's awesome, right? 17, 36, 48, I think. How much of that is duration? And should you guys be giving a CRPO metric? Would that be helpful?

We do actually disclose the current RPO metric as well, Pat and that's growing 36% year-over-year. Yes, we did get after it .

Look, I think there's a big portion that is us focusing on driving those longer-term strategic relationships with clients. That sets us up for the broader discussions of not worrying so much about trying to prove value on a single use case, but rather proving value across multiple and have those broader road map discussions with CIOs. So it was definitely a focus for us to go drive that. I think it has multi-purpose benefits. It will help drive better sales productivity. It will help drive better focus on our expansions with our enterprise, large enterprise G2K customers. So all those then show up, as you know, in a longer-term derisk in revenue. Because they're committed contracts.

All right. And then forgive me for not having it at my fingertips, but what was CRPO last quarter?

CRPO last quarter was -- not right in front of me, sorry. Sorry, it was -- last quarter was certainly March '20 was $237 million in total, and that broke down between current of $142.95 of the $237 million. And for this quarter, it's $260 million. And that breaks down between $151 million in short term and $109 million in long term.

And we'll go next to Michael Turits of KeyBanc.

Congrats on the first quarter . Dan and Andrew, I totally agree that the full RPO numbers is important for showing that, that long-term commitment and it isn't just a single use case. But what are you doing, Dan, to help make sure that people do expand on that platform? Is it go to market? Is it customer success? Are you bundling? What are you doing actively to help drive additional use cases, not just a project-based approach?

Thanks, Mike. Great question. So I would say first and foremost is innovation and living by your product. So we're adding a lot of capabilities every quarter. We have a major release that actually answers more and more and more, I would say, difficulties that we're seeing with enterprises. So with that, every release and every product is with the mind to actually touch the entire organization and not just helping them with 1 legal use case.

Another thing is market education and what we call WalkMe Beyond. We just had our Elevate, the Elevate event, which is the biggest DAP professional event in the world, and we're helping people understand what is digital transformation, what is digital adoption manager and so on. Today, we have over 3,000 people in LinkedIn that has WalkMe or WalkMe-related in their job skill. So we're creating a huge ecosystem around it. So it's not just the technology. It's the ecosystem that comes with it. Another thing that we launched is a premade solution. So they will have faster value. So let's say, they have a big HCM rollout. They can immediately get the knowledge of other customers in premade solutions, so they can actually see the value faster. When they see the value faster, usually, typically what happened with those customers, is that they're like, oh, we have WalkMe on our HCM, why we don't have it on our CRM, why we don't have it on our financial system and so on. So this is how we're helping them get more value.

When we're actually making our customers hero, other departments are joining very fastly and they want to use WalkMe as well.

Another big thing that we're doing, we're helping them shape a center of excellence around WalkMe so they can actually think about WalkMe strategically when they're actually aligning their goals in digital transformation with the capabilities of WalkMe. So we're doing all of it together, the innovation, the education, of course, customer success and our services team are helping them.

But again, the ecosystem and the know-how that we're bringing to the table.

I would tell you that in the past 6 months, I'm talking with so many CIOs around the world that have the exact same experiences. And today, they're coming to us and they're asking us how other companies are doing? What are the benchmarks? How should we approach hybrid workforce? So they're not just coming to us for our technology. Now they're coming to us for the benchmarks and the know-how. And then, we're showing them how to leverage our technology to get their goals. So all of it together is what we're doing in order together.

That's great, Dan. And then Andrew, what about the -- obviously, it was great to see the large customer net retention pick up sequentially. Obviously, another indicator for what we were just talking about with Dan. But what about the gross retention/interest, that churn? How is that sequentially?

So I would say you see a similar pattern on the total, in the total customers including the less than 500 employee accounts, you see that similar quarterly bounce, from Q4 and increasing. And so overall, I think that what you're going to get when you break it down, is, sequentially that 3-point increase quarter-over-quarter, in total. And I would say it's reflective of the fact that we had a good renewal quarter. We had low amount of -- a decreasing amount of overall churn, which is good because we're starting to see more stabilization in the overall customer base. But like I said, the most important thing for us is to continue to focus and drive that growth in the greater than 500 employee base. I expect that, that as a percentage of our total ARR, that will continue to increase over 90% and that's where we're focusing our attention.

Just to clarify, your total -- your net retention rate with total customers, not just customers over 500, also went up 3 points sequentially?

Yes.

And I guess my question, was -- which is great. My question is did gross churn, did gross retention, in other words, your churn stay stable or improve sequentially?

Yes. So that's not a metric which we're going to focus on. We're going to focus on the dollar-based net retention. We're giving you both the trailing 4 and the quarterly. So look, it -- by its very nature, you can deduce that it improved, right, because of some of the other anecdotes I gave you, but the -- and that's the point, is that as we continue to focus on driving value for our clients, we're -- as Dan shows, we're showcasing value across multiple, multiple departments and applications that the gross retention rate improves as well.

And we'll go to our next question from Scott Berg of Needham & Company.

Hi Dan and Rafi and Andrew. I will go with one [in the interest of time] look like we're going to (inaudible). I wanted to see if you can give a sales update or I guess, how should we think of sales between kind of the 2 main product areas, WalkMe for customers and WalkMe for employees. Does that sales mix differ than maybe what you've seen in the last couple of quarters? Just trying to understand if you're seeing something incremental in one area or the other.

So Scott, thanks for the question, Scott. This is one of those areas where it's -- I would say we've had a pretty consistent pattern on demand. Some quarters, it fluctuates a little bit. But it's typically that we see customer -- WalkMe for employees is 70% or more and then WalkMe for customers is around that 30% area. Now what's hard to nail down a lot of times, as you know, or maybe I'll just remind people is that many of our customers actually have both.

And when you go through a contracting process where it's an adept customer, you have a broad usage parameter around it, it's hard to try and assess relative value to the components within the larger agreement. So it's one of those areas where I think it's more reflective of how we used to go to market and how we used to really talk about our solution with CIOs. It's not that the product set is not relevant, it's just that so many of our customers, they either start in one place and then migrate to the other or they quickly move to an understanding that WalkMe is really their complete solution for driving digital adoption for both their employees and their customers.

If I may add, this can really explain the difference between a point solution and a real change of doing how you do business. So let's say, the business problem that you're trying to solve is reducing customer care, you would use WalkMe first on your external facing app to deflect calls and second, on your customer care team, to shorten their handling time.

So it's really looking at the business problem and not the specific system or a few systems that a customer care agent is using and not looking on 1 website, but also looking at the apps and the different ways that a customer can reach out and deflecting the calls there. And that's the strategic nature of DAP versus a point solution where you put guidance on top of 1 application or 2 applications, or on a website or on an app. Now what we will give you, the insights on top of everything, to really see how you're improving your business KPI. Makes sense?

And so at this time, with no other questions in the queue, I will turn the call back over to Dan Adika for closing comments.

Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for being with us on the call today. We really look forward to keeping you posted in our progress in the quarter ahead. And again, thank you for joining us.

And so that does conclude this call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.