Ashley Fieglein Johnson
Analyst · this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Eric. Please go ahead
Thanks, Eric, and thanks to each of you for joining us on the call today. During these last couple months as acting CEO, I have spent a tremendous amount of time visiting with our customers and employees around the globe. After hearing how strategic our partnerships are with our customers and seeing the commitment and drive of our employees globally, I am more convinced than ever that ServiceSource is a company with a bright future. Our core value proposition, providing a complete solution for recurring revenue management, remains a critical part of our customers' strategic operating plan. And we continue to expand the reach and scope of these relationships. We have been shifting rapidly to align our people, processes and technologies more centrally around our customers in order to better serve their needs and to execute and extend our core value proposition. We expect these activities to result in improved business performance and to deliver long-term shareholder value. Today, I'll update you on the progress we've been making. For Q3, we reported revenue of $65 million, down 2% compared to the same period last year, a gross margin of 27% and an EBITDA loss of $7.4 million, all key metrics above the guidance we provided on our July earnings call. While a positive indicator, these results are still reflective of the challenges we are facing in the business. In Q3, we added 6 new logos and signed 3 expansions, but saw a higher level of churn than we have seen in recent quarters. Simon will address this in greater depth when he reviews the financial results. In our last call, we discussed our strategy to drive improved performance, aligning the company by business unit and restructuring our cost base. Over the last 90 days, we made progress executing our plan and made adjustments in order to ensure that we are, first and foremost, centering our business around our customers and adapting quickly to market opportunities. While we recognize that it will take multiple quarters to see the benefits of the changes we are making, we are confident in the strategic direction of the business and the market opportunity ahead. I'll shift now to walk through the major initiatives we are undertaking to turn around the company in 5 principal areas: one, aligning our operations around our customers; two, investing to improve our Managed Services execution; three, moving to a more rapid deployment model for our Cloud & Business Intelligence solutions; four, filling key leadership roles; and five, restructuring our cost base. Starting first with the initiative to align our operations around our customers. We've been out talking to our customers proactively about what they want and expect from ServiceSource, and that is fundamentally what's informing our changes. We are evolving our account management strategy to establish the right engagement model for managed services customers, for which we typically have broad and quite strategic relationships, often spanning both technology and services. This engagement model is distinct from that for our customers who have solely purchased our cloud solutions where implementation, training and adoption are the most critical stages for the success of the relationship. For sales. While for the most part, we have kept our sales management organized regionally, we have also aligned the teams to the business units, with clear and distinct value propositions and sales methodologies for approaching prospects and customers. Our sales team assign territory based on prospect size, region and industry, and the centralized management ensures that the sales motions and coverage models are most appropriate to the prospect's solution orientation. With clear sales processes and distinct value propositions, we are mitigating the confusion we suffered over the prior year and seeing greater engagement around new sales opportunities. Our new cloud sales team, which we established following the acquisition of Scout, has been rapidly gaining traction, accelerated earlier this month with the introduction of our Customer Success management application. Similarly, we are building service offerings around these new solutions to extend our Managed Services solutions at beyond renewals management and deeper into new areas, such as customer life cycle management and cross-sell and up-sell services, which are enhanced by our technology solutions. Our second initiative is to invest to improve our Managed Services execution. Over the next 12 to 18 months, we will be undertaking a number of new initiatives across 3 parallel work streams: people, processes and technology, in order to drive consistent, best-in-class execution across our global managed services workforce. In the short term, this translates to a relentless focus on process improvement and standardization across our engagements globally. We are reviewing our hiring, training and management processes to ensure that best practices are implemented consistently across sales centers and then supplementing these efforts with a review of systems, tools and documentation initiatives. We expect the current assessment process to be complete by the end of Q4 enabling us to plan for any changes or investments that need to be made in 2015 to increase performance quality and improve efficiency. We have also completed a detailed account-by-account review to identify any contractual sources of our current margin pressure. Our goal is to ensure that all of our engagements drive substantial value to our customers and commensurate margins to ServiceSource. To do this, we examined the margin profile for each managed services engagement and identified clear opportunities to automate, reconfigure or otherwise improve our operations and increase our margin. Through this process, we identified very few engagements that we consider to be structured contractually such that we cannot ultimately achieve our target margins. However, it will require significant effort and some investment to realize this margin improvements over the coming quarters. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, we are expanding and standardizing several new strategic offerings around customer life cycle management, including adoption services, cross-sell and up-sell and customer help assessment to continue to evolve the depth and breadth of our solution -- depth and breadth of value our solutions can drive for our customers. This is an exciting growth opportunity for our overall business. Our third initiative is to move to a more rapid deployment model for our Cloud & Business Intelligence solution. We've built a differentiated analytic platform for installed base data with our Renew OnDemand product, and we acquired a similarly powerful analytic engine for usage of data with Scout. Now we are beginning to build and release applications which leverage but are separate from our analytic engine. Our first release with this new development approach the ServiceSource Customer Success application launched earlier this month. This application shares the user experience we developed for our Renew OnDemand application and leverages our Scout analytic engine. ServiceSource Customer Success is a native Force.com application that was built using the Salesforce One platform. It helps cloud and subscription-based companies ensure their customer relationships are successful across the entire customer journey, including on-boarding, adoption, retention, renewal, cross-sell, up-sell and advocacy. ServiceSource Customer Success gave us strong momentum going into the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, which focused heavily on the theme of customer success. In 2015, we plan to release additional applications that leverage our Renew OnDemand analytic engine that will help our customers accelerate renewals performance, both direct and through their channels. These new applications enable our customers to harness their installed base data to better understand their customers and maximize recurring revenue performance. Fourth, we are moving to stabilize our organizational structure and fill open leadership roles. A few weeks ago, we added Simon Biddiscombe to our team as our Interim CFO who joins us with extensive public company experience as both an executive and board member. We also recently promoted Jim Dunham, previously SVP of Product Management to President of Cloud & Business Intelligence. Jim has been a group Vice President at SAP and a GM at Siebel where he had P&L responsibility and has a strong track record of driving his teams to execute compelling technology roadmaps and support customer implementation. And we have an active search underway for the President of Managed Services. The search is going very well as we have engagement with several candidates, and we're confident we will add someone to the team with a strong background and track record in turning around and operating high-value BPO businesses. Finally, we recognize the importance of having a profitable operating model and focusing on -- and we are focusing on reducing our cost base to reflect our decline in revenue. To better align our cost with revenues, we've taken a first step to reduce cost. As mentioned last quarter, we examined ways we could remove costs without hurting efficiency or customer-facing activities, and we were able to take steps to remove approximately $20 million of annual run rate costs. Simon will cover this in greater detail in a moment. In closing, I am increasingly confident in our ability to improve our operations at ServiceSource and, in time, resume both profitability and growth. By actively engaging with our customers and our employees, we have made strong progress in focusing and executing against our strategic plan to turn the business around. We have work to do in improving the execution of our Managed Services operations, and we are stabilizing this area of our business through process and technology improvements and continued evolution of our solution set. We will continue to innovate on our cloud and business intelligence offerings, leaving our core IP and installed base and usage -- leveraging our core IP and installed base in usage analytics and rapidly developing compelling applications to meet key use cases for the fastest-growing segments of the market. We've made changes in our go-to-market strategy, aligning our sales organization and focusing our sales methodologies to effectively communicate our value proposition and ensure it reflects the needs of our prospects and customers. And we're aligning the entire business around our customers to ensure our operations and investments are directed to serving the needs of our installed base and capturing the market opportunity ahead of us. We're on a long journey but making meaningful strides, and we have a compelling strategic plan to return this business to growth. ServiceSource helps companies increase their recurring revenue stream, and we've evolved our solutions over the past few years to also help customers better understand their installed base and proactively engage with and manage their customers. As we innovate across our business, we are enabling both our Managed Services teams and our customers to make this strategic move from renewing service contracts to growing and expanding customer relationships. It's both a critical and an exciting time for us. We are focused diligently on delivering value to our customers and driving efficiency throughout the business, which we are confident will in turn drive significant long-term shareholder value. And with that, I'll turn it over to Simon.