Docusign Inc. (DOCU) Q4 2019 Earnings Conference Call Transcript

DocuSign, Inc. (DOCU -1.76%)
Q4 2018 Earnings Conference Call
March 14, 2019, 4:30 p.m. ET

Contents:

• Prepared Remarks
• Questions and Answers
• Call Participants

See all our earnings call transcripts.

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining today's DocuSign Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2019 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and will be available for replay from the investor relations section of the website following this call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press *0 on your telephone keypad. I will now pass the call over to Annie Leschin, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Annie Leschin -- Vice President of Investor Relations

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to DocuSign's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2019 Earnings Conference Call. On the call today we have DocuSign's CEO Dan Springer and CFO Mike Sheridan. The press release announcing our fourth quarter and fiscal year result was issued earlier today and is posted on our investor relations website.

Before we get started, I'd like to let everyone know that we will be participating in the JP Morgan Technology, Media, and Communications Conference the week of May 14. As other events come up we will make additional announcements.

Now let me remind everyone that the statements made on this call include forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions we believe to be reasonable as of this date and on information currently available to management, including estimates and other statistical data made by independent parties and by us relating to market size and growth and other data about our industry.

Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results, performance, or achievement to be materially different from any other result, performance, or achievement expressed or implied by the forward-looking statement. Further information of these risks and uncertainties is included in our prospectus previously filed with SEC and additional information in our October 31 quarterly report on Form 10q and other filings with the SEC. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update these forward-looking statements or to update the reason actual results differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statement.

Now I'd like to turn the call over to Dan. Dan?

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Annie, and good afternoon to everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our Q4 earnings call. I wanted to start by acknowledging the end of our first fiscal year as a public company. It has been an exciting journey. We have seen our team align around an expanded vision and in turn deliver consistent innovation that is bringing that vision to life. We have continued to drive widespread penetration and adoption at hundreds of thousands of customers around the world, making a significant impact on their businesses. And after spending the last two days with about 1,500 of our employees at our global kickoff here in San Francisco, I couldn't be more excited about what's to come.

Against that backdrop, I want to cover three key areas in my remarks today, starting with a summary of our performance in Q4 and fiscal '19, moving on to our priorities for fiscal '20, and ending with some important factors that elevate our brand and drive customer success. I'll then hand it over to Mike to address our financials in detail.

So let's start with our performance. Overall DocuSign had a strong Q4, which in turn contributed to a very solid fiscal year. Total fourth quarter revenue came in at $200 million, representing 34% growth versus Q4 a year ago. We were again profitable on a non-GAAP basis, with an operating profit of $7 million for the quarter, and we generated $23 million in free cash flow. This means we are exiting our first year as a public company with annual revenue of $701 million, reflecting 35% growth and a positive non-GAAP operating margin of 2%.

Our growth continues to be driven by three primary factors: acquiring new customers, expanding volume and use cases within existing customers, all while bringing new and innovative solutions to market. As a result of this, the end of Q4 we had 477,000 paying customers, an increase of 22,000 since Q3 and more than 100,000 since this time last year.

Now consistent with previous quarters, this growth is not limited to the US. Earlier today we announced our expansion in Toronto with the opening of our new Canadian headquarters, and we're looking forward to building a larger team to drive growth in this attractive market. In total, our international business contributed 17% to the overall revenue for the fourth quarter as well as fiscal '19, and it remains an area of keen focus for us going forward.

Now let's turn to our priorities for fiscal '20. When we think about the opportunity the year presents, it falls into two main buckets: the innovation we are bringing to market and the ways we're helping our customers succeed on our platform. Speaking to innovation, this year will see DocuSign continue our journey to simplify life and accelerate the process of doing business. We pioneered the technology and the category of e-signature, and we built an incredibly strong business as a result. Yet we're still only scratching the surface of the $25 billion TAM. As the world leader in this category, we remain 100% committed to it and to consistently innovating in e-signature in the years to come.

At our IPL last year, we outlined our broader vision to build on our strength in e-signature and help companies modernize their entire systems of agreement, that is, the way they prepare, sign, act on, and manage the agreements that are fundamental to their business. To help deliver on that vision we acquired contract life cycle management leader Spring CM in September last year. Given that a technology's automated processes before and after the signature, it was a perfect match, validated by the fact that our products were already integrated at more than 100 joint customers.

Since completing the acquisition, our "better together" value proposition has been very well-received by the DocuSign customer base. We have closed deals that Spring CM alone would not likely have accessed, for example, with one of the world's largest telephone companies. The presence of Spring CM in our portfolio is also helping to further differentiate the DocuSign e-signature offering. In some cases, we've been able to sell Spring CM along with e-signature to brand new customers. In other cases, we have achieved a competitive advantage by winning e-signature-only deals because the customer sees the desirability of adding Spring CM later. All of these outcomes have validated our thinking on the attractiveness of acquiring Spring CM.

Next I'd like to highlight some positive developments with one of our most important partners, Salesforce. Just last week, we announced DocuSign for Salesforce Essentials. It's a version of our e-signature technology designed specifically for use with Salesforce's product for small businesses. When you consider there are 125 small businesses in the world and most of them are still scanning, faxing, and printing documents for signature, you can see our excitement to collaborate with sales force to provide an alternative that's faster, more cost-efficient, and better for the environment.

Because DocuSign for Salesforce Essentials is for SMB, we focused on ease of setup, administration, and document sending, all done from within the Salesforce user interface. In creating this product, we were excited to use Salesforce's latest platform technology, Lightning, which makes the user experience particularly seamless and modern.

In a similar vein, we will soon be announcing the general availability of a product I mentioned during our Q2 call when it was in beta, DocuSign Gen for Salesforce. This allows sales reps to automatically generate signature-ready contracts with a few clicks, driven by data from a salesforce opportunity. It's a great example of how we're expanding into other stages of the agreement process, in this case preparing agreements. It's also a great example of the leverage we're beginning to see from Spring CM, which brought technology and people to the Gen for Salesforce opportunity. We expect Gen for Salesforce to provide a great new way for customers to use DocuSign and Salesforce together to accelerate the preparation of their agreements.

So to summarize my update on innovation, Spring CM value proposition is proving out. Two, with DocuSign for Salesforce Essentials and DocuSign Gen for Salesforce, we have two great new opportunities to accelerate sales process in partnership with Salesforce. Three, we are hard at work on other innovations, both for our core e-signature business and for delivering on our broader system of agreement vision. And lastly four, we continue to look at opportunities both internally and externally to build out on that vision.

The next area I want to cover today is our relentless commitment to customer success. As you know, our strategy is to land customers with an initial use case or two and build up from there. Integral to that process is our customer success organization. That group was initially small and focused primarily on helping our largest customers to streamline processes and drive increased ROI. They have been highly effective assets, growing the number of customers we have with ACVs over $300,000 by 50% in fiscal '19. With just over 300 customers above that threshold now, plenty of opportunity remains.

Today customer success is also one of the fastest growing internal teams, and now we're expanding the function across our entire customer base. This includes dedicated customer success managers working with our largest customers to those driving adoption in the midmarket through to the development of automated programs that help our SMB customers. We are also adding new rapid adoption and on-boarding program so that all of our customers are getting the access and assistance they need to be successful.

Now before I hand over to Mike, I wanna spend a moment talking about two more areas that are not only important to me personally but also to our employees, and they help to make DocuSign a special company to be a part of. The first is DocuSign's impact. This is our commitment to harnessing the power of our people, products, and profit for good. Our goal is to make a difference in the global communities where our employees and customers live and work. As part of this effort, we recently unveiled a DocuSign for Forests initiative, where we will commit $1.5 million this year to supporting organizations doing critical work to preserve the world's forests.

The first grant was matched by me personally to total $1 million will be going to the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation. I had the privilege of spending time with Jane, a hero of mine, at the World Economic Forum in January this year, where we together outlined our overall commitment to fighting for the world's forests by reducing the global demand for paper. It's an initiative I'm very proud of, and it builds on something every DocuSign customer already does simply by using our product: consume less paper, which means fewer trees need to be cut down, which clearly translates into a more sustainable environment.

The second area I wanted to address is that of culture, which is the bedrock of success for any company, especially one that's growing as rapidly as ours. We want to create a place where people can do the best work of their lives. Now while I do love our Glassdoor rating, where we were the 17th best place to work out of over 700,000 this past year, it's about more than that. We track an employee success index, which is a composite rating of our attrition compared to benchmarks, employee referral rate, manager ratings, et cetera. We also measure our employee engagement via short surveys twice a year, and I personally read every single comment that's offered by every employee, which is a time investment for sure, but it fosters an open culture and it helps us all to stay connected to each other.

With that, I'm incredibly proud of what this team has accomplished in our just-completed fiscal year. Our finance and legal teams have been a huge part of that success as we completed an IPL, a secondary, a convertible debt offering, and an acquisition in six months. I can't thank them enough. I wanted to also mention that after over four years at DocuSign, Reggie Davis, our general counsel, has decided to take some much-deserved time off to spend with his family beginning later this month. Reggie played a key role in our IPL and indeed at the company overall, so I wanted to personally thank him for his contribution.

With that, I think the entire Team DocuSign should be proud of an incredible freshman year as a public company. We've beat our financial goals while aggressively investing in the future and never, ever losing our focus on ensuring the success of our customers. I feel so incredibly fortunate to call this group my colleagues and to call this place home.

And now I'd like to hand over to Mike to walk through our financials, and we'll take Q&A after that. Mike?

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Dan, and good afternoon, everyone. First, let me remind you that all of our financial results reflect the adoption of the 606 accounting standard for current historical periods. The non-GAAP results I will discuss on this call exclude stock-based compensation, amortization of intangibles, amortization of debt discount, and acquisition-related costs.

Fiscal 2019 was a milestone year for DocuSign. In addition to the list of accomplishments Dan laid out, we delivered a year of outstanding financial performance from top to bottom, including continued strong global growth, a full year of profitability, and increased positive cash flow. We ended the year with a strong fourth quarter with significant contributions to growth from all of our global regions.

Fourth quarter revenue reached $200 million, a 34% year-over-year increase, bringing total revenue for the year to $701 million, an increase of 35%. Subscription revenue grew 37% year-over-year in the fourth quarter to $188 million or 94% of total revenue. For the full year, subscription revenue totaled $664 million, an increase of 37%.

Fourth quarter billings rose 31% year-over-year to a record $262 million dollars. For the full year billings increased 34% to $801 million. We added 23,000 new customers to our install base in the fourth quarter, growing 28% year-over-year to 477,000 customers. The number of our enterprise and commercial customers grew to 56,000 in Q4, an increase of 32% year-over-year. Net dollar retention was 112% in Q4 and remained within our historical range of 112-119%.

Customers with ACBs greater than $300,000 grew 50% year-over-year to 310 customers at yearend. This was driven primarily by existing customers continuing to increase their volumes and expand their use cases.

Our international regions continued to generate strong growth in Q4, with revenues from DocuSign core products growing over 40% year-over-year. Total international revenues grew at 26% year-over-year. This lower percentage growth for total international revenues relates to the sunsetting of legacy acquired products.

Gross margin for the fourth quarter was 78% compared with 80% in last year's fourth quarter, primarily due to the impact of Spring CM's lower margins. For the full year, gross margin was 80% compared with 79% last year. Fourth quarter subscription gross margin was 85%, consistent with the prior Q4. For the full year, subscription gross margin rose to 86%, compared with 84% last year.

Operating leverage improved in Q4 as sales and marketing had a seasonal decrease as a percentage of revenue and GNA expenses returned to more normalized level after our equity and debt transactions. In total, operating expenses totaled $149 million or 75% of revenue in Q4, compared with $117 million or 79% of revenue in the prior year. For the full year, operating expenses totaled $554 million or 78% of revenue, compared with $421 million or 81% of revenue in fiscal '18. This resulted in fourth quarter operating margin of 4% versus 2% in Q4 of last year. For the full year we generated 2% operating margin, up from a 2% operating loss in fiscal '18.

We ended the year with 3,023 employees, an increase of 33%.

Fourth quarter net income was $10 million, or $0.06 per share, compared with $500,000 or $0.01 per share in last year's Q4. Net income for the full year was $18 million, or $0.09 per share, compared with a net loss of $12 million, or $0.43 per share, in fiscal '18.

Turning to cash flow, we generated record operating cash flow of $34 million in the fourth quarter, compared with $32 million in the same quarter last year. This includes the impact of a one-time payment of $14 million in Q4 for employer payroll taxes related to our RSU settlement. Excluding the impact of this payment, operating cash flows in Q4 were $48 million, a 50% increase year-over-year.

Free cash flow was $23 million in the fourth quarter, compared with $29 million in Q4 of last year. Excluding the impact of the one-time tax payment, our Q4 free cash flow was a record $37 million, or 19% of total revenue.

Turning to our guidance for the first quarter and full year of fiscal '20, we estimate that revenue will range between $205 and $210 million in Q1 and $910-915 million for fiscal '20, and billings will range from $210-220 million in Q1 and $1.1-1.3 billion for fiscal '20. We expect gross margin to be 78-80% for Q1 and the fiscal year. For our operating expenses, we expect sales and marketing in the range of 48-50% of revenues in Q1 and for fiscal '20. We expect R&D in the range of 15-17% for Q1 and fiscal '20 and GNA in the range of 10-12% for Q1 and fiscal '20.

For the first quarter, we expect $3-4 million of interest and other non-operating income, including interest income and expense associated with the convertible debt, and for the fiscal year we expect interest and other non-operating income of $12-16 million. We expect a tax revision of $2.3 million for the first quarter and $8-10 million for the fiscal year. We expect fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding of 185-190 million shares for Q1 and 190-195 million shares for fiscal '20.

Finally I'd like to provide some information regarding anticipated capital expenditures in fiscal '20. We expect to spend $60-70 million on capital investments in fiscal '20, compared to the $30 million spent in fiscal '19. This increased level of investment relates primarily to the continued facility and other infrastructure expansions in our international regions, particularly Dublin, and our expansion of strategic data centers, including a dedicated data center for the federal government vertical. While we don't expect to continue at these levels every year, we do foresee an impact on free cash flow growth rates in fiscal '20 as we make these investments, and $15-20 million of that investment will occur in the first quarter.

In closing, I'm very pleased with our execution this year, our first year as a public company. We are excited to enter fiscal '20 with strong momentum in our global markets. Thanks again for joining us today, and we can now go to Q&A.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

Thank you. At this time we'll be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press *1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press *2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the * key. One moment please while we pull for questions.

Our first question comes from the line of Sterling Auty with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question.

Sterling Auty -- JP Morgan -- Analyst

Yeah, thanks. Hi, guys. I wanted to touch upon one of the last elements you mentioned, the dedicated data center for federal. Given the passage of the legislation, it looks like you're ramping up for that opportunity. Any insight you can give us in terms of what we should expect in terms of the uptake from that vertical in this fiscal year?

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

Sure. I mean, I think the perspective we have, Sterling, is this is, as we've always said, a huge long-term opportunity for us, and when we looked at the opportunity getting fed-ramp certified, our perspective was this was an increase to our TAM. This gave us an opportunity to have just simply a bigger opportunity. One of the challenges with the federal government, as I'm sure you'll understand, is the cycle time for getting things done can sometimes be slower than we see with some of our commercial segments. So we have a lot of enthusiasm with this opportunity and the idea that it's gonna create even more. And I would argue some more urgency in that the agencies have six months to put together their plan, but it is to put together a plan. And we're not gonna assume any significant change to our fiscal year '20 revenues from this, but we are looking at this again as a further opportunity to be more bullish about the TAM in the long term.

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

Then, Sterling, I would add, as we've talked about in the past, one thing we were always gonna prioritize is growth, and even if in fiscal '20 we don't see this having enough runway to be a huge contributor in fiscal '20, we absolutely think that it represents that longer-term opportunity, and we're going to invest accordingly.

Sterling Auty -- JP Morgan -- Analyst

Okay. And then one follow-up question. In the enterprise and commercial customers, the growth rate through the year, you know, kinda mimicked what you saw in terms of your revenue growth. How should we think about that next year? Do we start to get more leverage out of that existing base? So perhaps, you know, maybe the growth rate in customers is not spot-on with revenue growth, but we get more contribution per customer?

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

Well, I would say this, Sterling. I think the relevance of the new customer growth isn't so much in terms of near-term revenue trends just because as they come on board they generally start as just the land-level of their total account size, and that grows over time. And then on a subscription model, in the near-term, they don't contribute as much of a percentage of revenue as the expansion of the install-base does. But with that said, it is an important statistic in terms of planting the seeds for those continued expansions going forward, and so a correlation of that growth rate percent to a revenue growth rate probably isn't extremely connected just because of what I just described. But generally speaking, yeah, it should be a good indication of how we continue to penetrate the market.

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. The only other thing I would add is don't forget, son, we are very early innings of this game, so the construct of thinking that we're coming to sort of a turning point or some sort of plateau is just not right. If you look at the TAM just on e-signature, the one we understand much more clearly, at about $25 billion and growing, and you compare that to where we are in a total revenue standpoint, we're only a few percent of the way there. So I don't think you'll see any sort of plateauing again of any of those factors.

Sterling Auty -- JP Morgan -- Analyst

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Stan Zlotsky with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Stan Zlotsky -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

All right. Perfect. Let me start off with Spring CM. So sounds like that acquisition is doing very well under the DocuSign umbrella. Dan, how are you thinking about Spring CM and the selling motion and the go-to-market there for fiscal '20? And then, Mike, did you -- maybe I missed it -- did you give us a contribution from Spring CM in the quarter? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

I'll start, and then you can talk about your views. Yeah, so the way we're thinking about it, our goal, Stan, was by the time we got to the field kickoff that I just referred to, our GKO that occurred this week, was we wanted to have the Springers, as I particularly affectionately call them given my name, fully integrated into DocuSign by kickoff, and we accomplished that. And so we have integrated the sales plans and the sales organization. We even have a seasoned sales leader from DocuSign that we've had move to Chicago, which is where Spring headquarters is located, and an opportunity to work closely and really bring the two businesses together. So going forward we're thinking about it as one integrated business, and we're really bullish that that's gonna set us up for a fantastic 2020.

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, and in terms of contribution from Spring, Stan, we're not breaking that out in our guidance going forward, and for Q4 it was right in line with what we had guided last quarter.

Stan Zlotsky -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Okay, got it. Thank you. And then a quick follow-up for Mike. When you look at Q4 billings, was there anything unusual in the quarter? The numbers came in ahead of consensus, but was there some deals flowing in and out? Maybe some effects or anything else? Payment term changes? Anything like that?

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

No, all very standard, Stan. The one thing that I point out each quarter is that that particular statistic is gonna be affected by timing of renewals and orders coming in and so forth, so overall the meaningful percentage increase, I think, is when we look at the fiscal year. If you look at Q3, it was spiked up a little bit higher. In Q4 it was a little bit lower, and so that broader average, I think, is important to look at. In terms of the underlying fundamental strength of the orders that we received and the payment terms and all of that was very consistent with prior quarters.

Stan Zlotsky -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Got it. All right. Thank you, guys.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Walter Pritchard with Citi. Please proceed with your question.

Walter Pritchard -- Citigroup -- Analyst

Hi, thanks. Two questions. First, maybe on Spring, you talked about benefits to core signing as well as selling Spring stand-alone. How do you think that will play out next year as you go to market kind of more deliberately with strategy that you set at sales kickoff and so forth in terms of selling the add-on versus the core as the benefit there? And then I did have a follow-up.

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Well, I think there's a couple different motions. Look, as we talked about before, this construct of a system of agreement, every company has one, again whether they think about it that way or not. Many do. Many don't. We have the ability and we have now trained up our sales team to go and talk about our broader solution set for that overall system of agreement that they have, and we will lead with that messaging and positioning.

At the same time, we realize we're still gonna have plenty of customers that in the marketplace come out and say e-signature is a huge opportunity for us to digitally transform our company. And they wanna buy an e-signature solution. They know that DocuSign is the clear and strong leader in that space, and that's what they're gonna ask for. And in that situation we will smile and sell them an e-signature solution, right? That's the logical thing to do. But we will have the opportunity in that process to say, "We're excited to get you started with e-signature. Here's our overall vision for how you should think in the long-term about that system of agreement." And Spring will be a key part to showing them some of the other components of that overall system.

So I think you're gonna see us have both of those sales motions, and I think the answer is we're gonna be dictated by the individual customer and how they wanna buy. But the key is, whether we're selling them a broader solution up front or not, we're positioning them for the broader opportunity going forward.

Walter Pritchard -- Citigroup -- Analyst

And then, Dan, a follow-up, or just on international, how are you thinking about 2020 relative to countries that may be inflecting especially in Europe and any countries that we should be watching?

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So a couple of things, and we did note the investment with the Toronto office, which we're super excited about. We think Canada is a great opportunity for us within international in North America, and then I think you're spot on. Europe is the biggest growth opportunity for us outside of North America, from a scale standpoint. It is the biggest theater we have today. But I would tell you, I'm also very excited about what we see in Latin America, and I also think that the overall APAC opportunity, you know, we've been very sort of Australia-centric as most software companies are when they head into Asia Pac. But we've seen some great successes moving further north, and I think you're gonna see us investing pretty aggressively across the board. But you're absolutely right that Europe will be the single largest contributor to that international growth.

Walter Pritchard -- Citigroup -- Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Zukin with Piper Jaffray. Please proceed with your question.

Alex Zukin -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I apologize for any background noise. Maybe first just one more time on Sterling's question about just the magnitude of the TAM expansion from the federal vertical that you see potentially and maybe how does the average deal size in that vertical that you are looking at in your pipeline compare to kind of the more traditional commercial enterprise deal? And then I've got a quick follow-up.

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Well, I think the answer to deal size is a very important differentiator. And I made the comment before that, hey, we expect some of those federal government sort of processes to still take a little bit longer and the cycles to be longer, but the visibility to a much larger opportunity in those accounts is very clear. And so when we think about a typical commercial deal in maybe like our largest vertical financial services, we talk about this concept. It's a pretty small land, right? We might just get a couple use cases. It could be a very low MER start, and we see that being an opportunity to become one of our more than $300,000 ACV customers that we talk about. But when you look at the federal and you just think about some of the individual groups there, we look at those as being able to eclipse that $300,000 ACV on initial signing, sometimes by a multiple factor of that. So we do see the opportunity for some much bigger win, but I still think we're gonna see the overall cycle time being a little bit slower.

Alex Zukin -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst

Perfect. That's helpful. And maybe just one on dollar base net expansion. I don't know. I might have missed if you called out what it was in the quarter, but maybe just given the success of Spring CM and the cross-selling and the just larger land, how do you see or how should we be thinking about that metric fiscal '20?

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

The metric -- I lost you. Which metric?

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, so it is kind of in fiscal '20 staying the same range we've seen historically, which is anywhere from 112 to 119%. My expectation is in that mid zone is where we'll continue to sustain the business.

Alex Zukin -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst

Perfect.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Justin Furby with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.

Justin Furby -- William Blair -- Analyst

Thanks, guys. Just I guess to start out, I was wanting to ask on just rep productivity, what you saw sort of pre- and post-IPO, any noticeable change there. And then when you look out to your sales plans, your hiring plans for fiscal '20, should we be thinking about it sort of at a similar rate as sort of sales and marketing op-ex growth or any kind of commentary on fiscal '20 and your plans there would be helpful? And I've got just a quick follow-up.

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

Sure. Let me talk a little about the rep side, and then you can talk more on the impact that will have financially. So we didn't have any significant change either way. I think our productivity was relatively consistent from a rep standpoint. There were a couple things that we did last year which I think turned out to do very well for us is we hired a little bit ahead of the curve. We used to have a model where we sort of got through a year, and then we did a whole bunch of hiring at the beginning of the year in our field salesforce. And then sometimes when you do that there's a little bit of a productivity hit until you get them all up to speed, and now what we're trying to do is do that hiring a little more evenly throughout the year.

So what that let us do last year was pull forward some hiring, and we pulled forward some cost. And we talked about that throughout the year. That did lead to some very strong revenue growth, particularly in later parts of the year, but also I think set us up to be very confident about our fiscal '20 because we have more folks in seats that have already had several months with us and are up to speed. So I think we feel really good about that, and I think going forward you'll see us moving to that model of more consistent adds so you won't see kind of the big step changes in that aspect of the business. So maybe a smoother increase in that spending. And then Mike can talk about the percentages. We don't see that percentage of sales and marketing changing dramatically through the year.

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

Well, a couple things, Justin. One, you mentioned the IPO specifically. I don't know that we could generate any specific data on that, but qualitatively I have heard from our enterprise teams in particular that the IPO has been helpful in terms of their customers understanding the scale and strength of our company. And that was something that as a private company wasn't always as evident. So in that regard there is some qualitative benefit that we've gotten from being public.

In terms of our hiring plans for fiscal '20, I think Dan's correct. They largely are -- I went through in the guidance the leverage improvements that we're going to see, so overall we'll be more leveraged and productive in that sense. But, you know, some of the aspirations we have with Spring and other new products over time, driving up those productivity statistics, those are certainly part of our vision. I think in fiscal '20 they're going to be relatively stable because we're still in the early innings of rolling some of that stuff out.

Justin Furby -- William Blair -- Analyst

Okay. Got it. That's helpful. And then just Salesforce, just given some of the new announcements, can you just remind us, Dan, what the overlap is today if you look at Salesforce's base? Like how much opportunity is there to just go after their existing install base and this, on the Essential side, any sense for what the opportunity there is in terms of if the TAM is $25 billion, is that a subset of it? Or how do you think about opportunity there? Thanks.

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So Salesforce, you know, you've heard us talk a lot about Salesforce. We have made a dramatic investment in the relationship overall, and it's everything from the product pieces you just alluded to to the alignment of our go-to-market efforts really quite frankly to the connections of the company. And we talked about our sort of actions we took on the environmental front. A lot of that had to do with Marc Benioff asking us to come with them effectively to Davos, the World Economic Forum, and try to play a role in having a big impact on the environment. So we're really kind of connecting at multiple levels with what I think is a fantastic software company.

From your specific question around the size of the opportunity, we believe that, while Salesforce has a large number of customers and we do have a lot of overlap and a significant driver, it's still a small piece of the overall TAM. We think that there are so many small businesses that they don't have in Essentials or other relationships with, and so many right up through the stats from a midmarket all the way through to enterprise, which is why we sell so aggressively directly. But I believe Salesforce is one of our most important go-to-market partners, but any one of them is still a very small percentage of the total TAM market opportunity. So we wouldn't be in any way reliant on them, but it sure is a nice turbo charge boost to have that kind of a strong partnership.

Justin Furby -- William Blair -- Analyst

Yeah, that's helpful. And then, Mike, if I could sneak one more in, when do the headwinds on the international side sort of anniversary if you will?

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, I mean, I think if you -- the further away you move from when the acquisitions took place and the revenues were more material to our prior periods, you'll just see sheer. Like we just completed fiscal '19. Obviously the percentage that those legacy products made up of our business was smaller, and next year it will be smaller again. But I think that overall you'll continue to see international now start to turn into a growing percentage of our business, and this year it was about $120 million business, which over the relatively short period of time we've been focused on it we're really satisfied with it.

Justin Furby -- William Blair -- Analyst

Great. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Our next questions comes from the line of Ted Lin with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.

Ted Lin -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst

Great. Good afternoon, and thank you very much for taking the question. Digging a little bit into your FY '20 guidance, which I think is for roughly 30% growth, can you maybe help us break that down maybe qualitatively by the three factors called out by Dan, which I think were acquiring new customers, expanding volumes, and bringing kind of new solutions to market?

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

You wanna start?

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I'll start on the qualitative side. I mean, for us, if you do the simple sort of math of it, Ted, the biggest driver in any year is always gonna be that second bucket, which is sort of the expansion, because when we bring in new customers in our land model, even if some of them are those larger federal government cases we talked about earlier, it's gonna be a small portion of our overall revenue growth because we do tend to have that land with a small number of use cases. So by far the biggest driver is gonna be that middle bucket. I do think we have some nice opportunity with new product introductions. We talked about a couple of those today, and we've got important new ones coming up in the next few weeks. We're excited. We want you to stay tuned. We're gonna have additional fantastic system of agreement extension that we wanna talk about. And at the same time, I still think even those will be overwhelmed by that second bucket of the core growth with that increasingly strong customer base of 477,000 customers that we think can be a huge growth opportunity for us.

So that's kind of my view on it. Do you have anything quantitative you'd add?

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. I think that that's spot on. I think for that middle category that number of customers that is exceeding the 300k threshold, as that continues to grow, I think that's a good way to just measure and see what's happening in that existing install base of our business. If you think of it from an investment standpoint, while new customers don't make up a large percentage of the guided revenue growth for all the reasons Dan just summarized, if you look at our investments, we're investing aggressively in continuing to expand the number of reps that are out there driving new customer growth because for our overall long-term growth obviously those, as I mentioned before, are the seeds that we have to keep planting. And we're having great success with that. Investing in that install base, our customer success organization on top of our sales organization, really focused on consumption, driving upsells, mitigating churn, we're gonna continue to invest aggressively in that, and then in new product, obviously, the movements you've seen around Seal, the significant percentage of our revenues that we're investing in R&D, all targeted at that growth driver.

So as a business, we're focused on all three. In terms of the guidance, that middle category is the biggest contributor.

Ted Lin -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst

Great. Thanks. That's super helpful. And then on the competitive environment, are you seeing kind of Hello Sign anymore these days after the acquisition by Dropbox? And is there any kind of competitive update with respect to Adobe and how much you're seeing that solution? Thanks.

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

The simple answer to the first question is no, and remember when we have seen the past Hello Sign it's sort of to see in the standpoint that it's the very small customers. We don't see them in a lot competitive direct deals but rather in the web and mobile. We don't get as much intelligence about those transactions because we're not dealing with an individual here, rather just with our e-commerce solution. But we haven't seen any change in what was a smallish impact to begin with. And I don't think there's anything else that I've seen different, noteworthy at all from a competitive standpoint in this last quarter really across the year. I think it's pretty consistent with what we shared on the road show around the IPO, which was unchanged really when we got to the secondary. I don't know if you have anything else that you picked up on, Mike, but I think it's pretty consistent.

Ted Lin -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst

Great to hear. Thanks for taking my questions.

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

Yep. Thank you.

Operator

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press *1 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press *1 on your telephone keypad. One moment please as we pull for more questions.

Our next question comes from line of Karl Keirstead with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.

Karl Keirstead -- Deutsche Bank -- Analyst

Thank you. I've got two billings questions for Mike. So, Mike, in the four quarters that DocuSign has been public, as you know, there's been some big variation in the degree of billings outperformance. Q1 and Q3 were huge billing beats, and 2Q and the quarter just reported were more modest. I know it's super tough, obviously, to predict billings, but what are the bigger swing factors driving that? You mentioned in an answer to a prior question maybe renewal activity, but it'd be nice to hear you elaborate on the variation we've seen.

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, I think two things about it, Karl. First of all, you know, as we've talked about, a lot of fast businesses actually don't guide billings because of the variability of the factors that can create some of the effects you're talking about, and I think about two of them being pretty key. One is that obviously a big portion of billings is the timing of a renewal order. If a renewal order comes in on the last day of a quarter, it goes into that quarter, and if it comes in the first day of the new quarter it goes into that quarter. So exact timing of when our renewable book of business comes in can cause one quarter to the next some variability.

I think also those variables that affect the prior year quarter that you're comparing to, you might have a double effect where in the prior quarter you have a tough comp because you had a really high billings percent. For example, Q3 of fiscal '19, I believe, and I don't have it in front of me, but I think it grew something like 40%. Well, clearly that's a little bit higher than what the underlying growth rate of the business is. In this quarter, it was a little bit lower than that, a little bit lower. So next Q3, we're gonna be comparing against a 40% growth rate because of some of these timing differences that affected Q3.

So I continue to try to remind everybody, I wanna guide the billings, because I think it's a good transparent way of giving an indication in terms of how we see our future developing, but on a quarter-to-quarter basis it is a statistic that's subject to some of that variability.

Karl Keirstead -- Deutsche Bank -- Analyst

Yep, that makes sense. And then maybe my second related question is -- I'm just looking at your billings guide for fiscal '20. $1.03 billion, up 29% at the high end, seems pretty strong to me. Mike, when we go back to when you went public, you initially guided to fiscal '19 billings of $680-700 million, and you just finished the fiscal year $801 million, so quite a bit of upside. I don't think anyone's expecting that degree of upside to your new guidance, but what I wanted to ask you is whether A) generally your guidance philosophy has changed at all and secondly whether the key factors that drove that upside in fiscal '19, whether it's renewal activity or other things, are they general in place to roughly the same degree in fiscal '20?

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, I would say two things, Karl. First, any time, I think, a business goes public, it's always gonna be a bit more prudent at the beginning of that new environment than as we mature into that environment. So that's always something to keep in mind, and I think the underlying drivers of our billings growth are the same ones that we're referring to in our overall revenue growth. And obviously I think the guidance that we're providing for this upcoming fiscal year indicates that we continue to have really strong confidence in what's gonna drive that growth.

Karl Keirstead -- Deutsche Bank -- Analyst

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, great. Congrats on the strong guidance for this fiscal year.

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

Thanks.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of the question and answer session, and I would like to turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

Thank you again for joining us and your support over our first year as a public company. We look forward to seeing many of you out on the road in the coming months and hope we'll have the opportunity to see you all soon. Thank you.

Operator

That concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.

Duration: 52 minutes

Call participants:

Annie Leschin -- Vice President of Investor Relations

Dan Springer -- Chief Executive Officer

Mike Sheridan -- Chief Financial Officer

Sterling Auty -- JP Morgan -- Analyst

Stan Zlotsky -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst

Walter Pritchard -- Citigroup -- Analyst

Alex Zukin -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst

Justin Furby -- William Blair -- Analyst

Ted Lin -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst

Karl Keirstead -- Deutsche Bank -- Analyst

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