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Perficient Inc (PRFT 2.66%)
Q1Â 2019 Earnings Call
May. 02, 2019, 11:00 a.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Perficient First Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, there will be a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to Chairman and CEO, Jeff Davis. Sir, you may begin.
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. With me on the call today is Paul Martin our CFO. I want to thank you all for your time. As is typical, we've got about 10 to 15 minutes of prepared comments, after which we'll open the call for questions. Before we proceed, Paul, will you please read the safe harbor statement?
Paul Martin -- Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Jeff, and good morning, everyone. Some of the things we will discuss in today's call concerning future company performance will be forward-looking statements within the meanings of the securities laws. Actual results may materially differ from those discussed in these forward-looking statements, and we encourage you to refer to the additional information contained in our SEC filings concerning factors that could cause those results to be different than contemplated in today's discussion.
At times during this call, we will refer to adjusted EPS, our earnings press release, including a reconciliation of certain non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, is posted on our website at www.perficient.com. We have also posted a slide deck, which includes a reconciliation of certain non-GAAP goals to the most directly comparable financial measures prepared in accordance with GAAP on our website under Investor Relations. Jeff?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Thanks, Paul. Well, once again, thanks everyone for joining. We're pleased to be with you this morning to reflect on the strong first quarter and share an updated outlook for the rest of 2019. The year is off to a great start, as you can refer from our revised earnings and revenue guidance. We expect that momentum to continue and potentially in accelerate as we progress through the year. Paul will speak this specifics shortly, but we are increasingly confident that the unique and compelling business we're building at Perficient is beginning to really get its stride.
As we cross the threshold of $500 million of revenue and set our sights on $1 billion and beyond, we've reached an inflection point with Fortune 1,000 and the Fortune 100 are recently willing to partner with us on multi-year, multi phase, and multifaceted digital transformation initiatives that impact and improve the most poor and critical aspects of their business.
We're doing big important work for many of the world's largest enterprises. For example, one of our largest healthcare customers has been partnering with us on numerous digital transformation projects over the last past decade. They're a long-standing relationship. We helped them transform how they create personalized, empowered and seamless customer experiences for their more than 10 million members. Most recently, we engaged in a multi-year multi workflow program upgrading their analytics foundation.
Our team is bringing an array of technical and industry resources with expertise and Big Data, data visualisation, VI and analytics. This is on top of another key cloud migration multi-year road map project that's under way with that client. We've worked closely with one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world for over a decade helping them with a wide range of digital transformation (technical difficulty). We delivered solutions at this point leveraging a broad set of technologies, including Adobe Marketing Cloud, WebSphere, Magento, Azure, Oracle Hyperion and Pivotal Cloud Foundry (inaudible) recently engaged us to redesign and replatform as enterprise dealer portal to improve the user experience. Collectively, this work has provided the client greater flexibility, faster speed to market, grew customer satisfaction and application development efficiencies.
The client has such confidence in our team as they've come to us -- come to see us not just as an implementation partner, but as a trusted advisor that has earned a seat at the executive table. Many of our financial services clients are focused on improving operational efficiency, dealing with complex regulatory reform and meeting ever increasing customer experience demands. We partner with a leading international bank for a number of years in each of these areas, delivering solutions for ensuring data security and forcing sales practices compliance, workflow automation and more.
We recently implemented Appian and an Appian center of excellence and are helping to build applications to streamline operations, deliver consistent customer experiences and enforce regulatory compliance controls. One last example of a mission critical work we're delivering is that a Fortune 100 heavy equipment manufacturing company. We've worked with this client for over a decade on more than one 175 engagements, including digital transformation work focused on modernizing customer facing systems in order to keep up with market demand, generate leads and remain competitive.
Most recently, we helped the client improve its rental business with the transformation of its rental website, which is used to provide equipment and tool rentals to customers ranging from contractors and fleet managers to private individuals. And the client was so impressed with this work which by the way is increasing lead volume 35% since its launch. That administered the new -- most recent earnings call. Of course, I'm proud of all that work and I'm equally impressed with the fiscal discipline our leadership team is bringing to the business, focused intently on growing both our top and bottom lines and striving for best in class results. Everyone managing this business understands our commitment to excellence to excellence extends not only to our customers and colleagues, but to our investor community as well.
We talked last quarter about the market's growing awareness of our attraction at high growth areas like cloud and digital. Just last month Perficient Digital, received three interactive marketing awards, including Search Agency of the year, Large Interactive Marketing Agency of the Year and Best Interactive Marketing Campaign. Additionally, industry analyst like Arthur continue to include Perficient in various reports recommending consulting providers. Recently, Forrester signed Perficient as a key service provider around application modernization and migration and also named this is a strong performer and their API strategy and delivery service providers wave report. In the wave report Arthur's or Perficient is having a stronger current offering than firms like (inaudible) and Emphasis and stated that Perficient is a good shortlist vendor provides -- partnered with well-rounded API strategy and delivery capabilities. So really great external validation of our work coming from a lot of places, customers as well as influential industry voices.
The world's largest enterprises are asking us for more assistance in providing us more opportunity to help their businesses thrive, because the end-to-end capabilities we bring are indispensable in a competitive environment where technology and customer inexorably connected. And all of that is materializing in additional market share for Perficient. Strong and top line results as you can see for the quarter and what we're providing for the outlook for the rest of the year.
With that, I'm going to turn the call over to Paul to cover the financial results before I touch on a few additional items of note in our outlook for the second quarter and our updated earnings and revenue guidance for the rest of the year.
Paul Martin -- Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Jeff. Services revenues were $132.9 million for the first quarter of 2019, an 11% increase over the comparable prior year period. Services gross margins for the three months ended March 31, 2019, excluding reimbursable expenses and stock compensation increased 130 basis points to 37.6%. SG&A expense excluding stock compensation increased to $29.8 million in the first quarter of 2019 from $26.4 million in the comparable prior year period.
SG&A expense excluding stock compensation as a percentage of revenue, increased to 22.8% from 21.8% in the first quarter of 2018. EBITDAS for the first quarter of 2019 was $19.7 million or 14.7% of revenues, compared to $16.9 million or 14% of revenues for the first quarter of 2018. The first quarter included amortization expense of $4.1 million, compared to $3.9 million last year. Interest expense for the first quarter 2019 increased to $1.8 from four $400,000 in the comparable prior period, primarily due to non-cash amortization of debt discount and issuance cost related to the company's convertible senior notes, which were issued in September of 2018.
Our effective tax rate for the first quarter of 2018 was 19.9%, compared to 23.2% in the first quarter of 2018. The decrease in the effective tax rate was primarily due to the increase in tax benefits recognized related to share-based compensation deductions during the first quarter of 2019, compared to the prior year quarter.
Net income increased 43% to $7 million for the first quarter 2019 from $4.9 million in the first quarter of 2018. Diluted earnings per share increased to $0.22 a share from $0.15 a share in the prior year quarter. Adjusted earnings per share increased to $0.43 a share for the part of 2019 from $0.35 in the prior year quarter.
See the press release for a full reconciliation to GAAP earnings. Adjusted EPS, as a reminder, is defined as GAAP earnings per share plus amortization expense, non-cash stock compensation, acquisition costs, amortization of debt discount and issuance cost and fair value adjustments taken in to consideration and the impact of other infrequent or unusual transactions not related to taxes divided by average fully diluted shares outstanding for the period.
Our ending billable headcount at March 31, 2019 was 2,956 including 2,667 billable consultants and 289 subcontractors. Ending SG&A headcount at March 31 was 525. Our outstanding debt net of unamortized debt discount and deferred issuance costs of March 31 was $121.2 million compared to $120.1 million at year end. We also had $27.7 million in cash and cash equivalents as of March 31. Our balance sheet continues to leave us very well positioned to execute on our strategic plans.
Finally, our day sales outstanding on accounts receivable 70 days at the end of the first quarter compared to 75 at the end of the first quarter 2018.
I'll now turn the call back over to Jeff. Jeff?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Thanks, Paul. We got 70 deals over a $0.5 million during the quarter, compared to 49 in the fourth quarter of '18 and 54 in the first quarter of '18. So I am going to repeat that 70 deals north of $0.5 million, compared to 49 in the fourth quarter last year and 54 in the first quarter of last year, so obviously, material increase in large deal science both sequentially and annually.
During the quarter, the health sciences, financial services, retail consumer goods, automotive and manufacturing verticals combined to represent 75% of revenue. Health Sciences was 30%, financial services 17%, automotive at 10% and retail consumer goods and manufacturing each representing 9%. We saw a strong year-over-year bookings growth in several verticals during the quarter as well, with health sciences, financial services, automotive and telecom particularly strong.
Bookings in each of those verticals grow were substantially over the prior year period. There are several factors behind that bookings growth. The excellent job of our delivery teams day-to-day to deliver value and grow our reputation and mind share within accounts is key, obviously. A solid economy growing brand awareness and increased marketing investments are absolutely creating more conversations and more that (inaudible). But one thing that can be overstated is the ongoing expansion and maturation of our sales organization. We've invested in management infrastructure, develop new compensation plans and onboarding tools and processes that have laid the foundation for us to scale the sales organization and expand capacity more rapidly and effectively. So while we continue to benefit from the production of our most senior sellers, professionals selling $10 million , $20 million, $30 million even $40 million a year in business. We're constantly growing and grooming the next class of professionals colleagues for example, who may have about $3 million last year on pace for $6 million this year and are destinated to keep building their books a business as Perficient scales and our -- their relationships grow.
One final note before we open the call for questions. The midpoint of the revised guidance I'll speak to momentarily implies 7% organic growth. And of course, we continue to look to supplement that with strategic and accretive M&A. No guarantees on that front, but we are in advanced stages with a couple of terms (ph) and remains a key component of our strategy.
So again, things are going very well and I'm excited to share our outlook for the second quarter and an update to our full year 2019 guidance. Perficient expects second quarter 2019 revenues to be in the range of $132 million to $138 million. Second quarter GAAP earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $0.22 to $0.25 and adjusted earnings per share is expected to be in the range of $0.46 to $0.49.
Perficient is raising our previously provided full year 2019 revenue guidance range from $515 million to $545 million to a range of $535 million to $560 million, raising our previously provided 2019 GAAP earnings per share guidance range of $0.74 to $0.86 to $0.90 to a $1.02, and raising our previously provided 2019 adjusted earnings per share guidance range of a $1.65 to a $1.77 to a new range of a $1.80 to $1.92.
So with that, operator, we can open the call up for questions.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Surinder Thind with Jefferies. Your line is open.
Surinder Thind -- Jefferies Financial Group -- Analyst
Good afternoon, gentlemen. I just wanted to touch based on a couple of different items here. Let's start with the change in the revenue guide. Can you walk us through -- I'm seeing a lot of operating leverage there. Can you walk us through that in terms of what's driving that, is that just expectations of sustained higher utilization? Is there may be increased expectations of more work being done offshore, any color would be helpful?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Yes. I would say, it's a little bit of improved utilization year-over-year. I think we're up a point or so, but now mostly it's related to the bookings. We had very, very strong bookings. In the fourth quarter, we spoke about that. And what we weren't sure of, obviously, only a month or so into the year was whether that would continue. And in fact, we've seen that continue. So we've got a very nice backlog right now. So most of the growth that we're seeing was really coming from our sales team, i mentioned that in the prepared statements that we've really got an expanded sales team is continuing to come online and help accelerate that growth. i should note that, that Q1 this year had one less billable day than the prior year. So I kind of on a normalized basis or growth for Q1 would have been about 5.5%. And of course, the guide for the rest of the year at the midpoint 7% (ph), but I'm optimistic that we can top that.
Surinder Thind -- Jefferies Financial Group -- Analyst
Understood. And then in terms of the record number of large projects that you've won this quarter, did everything sort of just kind of come together at the same time. And then maybe within that figure, was there just a lot of follow on work that was one at existing clients? Or were there a lot of or a number of new clients in that mix as well.
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Yes, the lion share of our business thus tend to come from existing clients, probably 90%-plus repeat business. However, we've also added new logos and new strategic accounts. Those tend to start a little smaller and build over time, although we've had some nice wins here in this first quarter of new logos as well.
So, yes, I would say, kind of hitting on all cylinders if you want to use that analogy is a good way to say it. But I can't under emphasize as I mentioned before, again, the effectiveness of the sales team, and once they're beginning to put up I would say just beginning to hit their stride as well with the a lot of dry powder there.
Surinder Thind -- Jefferies Financial Group -- Analyst
Understood. And then one final follow on related to that, given that you guys do seem to be hitting on all cylinders, any colour that you can provide on the business environment itself in the sense of maybe the sentiment at the clients, is it a little bit more positive, are they willing to maybe increase their investment spend on consulting services at this point relative to maybe what you were seeing in the back half of last year?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
That's interesting. I would say, we haven't seen a significantly notable change. But again, recall that when others in the industry last year were talking about maybe some softness, we didn't see it. So I would say, it's more of the same the pipeline continues to build even as we land and close major deals. We immediately rebuild the pipeline, again, a testament to I think the attractiveness capacity of the sales team. But from a macro standpoint, I would say, the economy from our perspective is healthy or at least the macro environment that we see is healthy, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily accelerated notably. It's just us honestly penetrating or getting more facts and taking more share.
Surinder Thind -- Jefferies Financial Group -- Analyst
Thank you. I'll get back in the queue for additional questions.
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Thanks.
Operator
Our next question comes from Mayank Tandon with Needham and Company. Your line is open.
Mayank Tandon -- Needham and Company -- Analyst
Thank you. Good morning, Jeff and Paul. Jeff, just to drill on the revenue side a little bit further. Obviously, good bookings and I can see why you're raising guidance, but you're raising the guidance by significantly more than the beat. So just want to get a little bit a better handle on the visibility you have toward the new range. Is it higher than historical levels is, it pretty much in line with what you see typically at the end of the first quarter? Just some clarity on that would be helpful.
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
The backlog is definitely higher than historical. Better -- the best I can remember or actually better. And in terms of the raise is really just an extrapolation. And I would tell you fairly conservative extrapolation offer kind of where we ended Q1 and where we know Q2 is going to be. Obviously, we've got April under our belt and we got great visibility clearly into Q3. So I would tell you that, that our guide update is reflective of even just modest growth in the second half of the year, which again I'm optimistic we can get to the top end of that and possibly even have upside.
Mayank Tandon -- Needham and Company -- Analyst
Okay. Got it. And then, you mentioned 7% of the midpoint for the organic growth going forward. What is the range? I think the previous range was 1% to 7%, so you clearly are running at the high end in terms of your guide, but what is the new range, Just to be clear?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
It's 5% to 10%. Yes, maybe standing with the midpoint like 7.5%.
Mayank Tandon -- Needham and Company -- Analyst
Right. Okay. And then how are you thinking about pricing as being a potential tailor. I know in the past you've made the point that there's a lot of headroom for you on the AVR side. What are the trend line you're seeing in terms of improving pricing over time to drive that revenue growth?
Paul Martin -- Chief Financial Officer
I think we're going to begin to see some improvement there. We continue to be very focused on gaining share and remain extremely competitive on all fronts, including pricing. However, we did see -- I think about a 1% or so increase sequentially Q1 over Q4. And I do think that's going to continue. We've got a renewed focus on gross margins and just assuring that we're gradually moving those rates up sort of along with the wage inflation. So I'm optimistic, we'll see some improvement there. It's not going to be wildly high increases 5% to 8%. I think that's -- that'll be a setback in volume. So 2% to 3% over the course of the year would be I think perfect.
Mayank Tandon -- Needham and Company -- Analyst
Okay. So I'm hearing you right. It's obviously headcount growth, and then you get a little bit of uptick from both the AVR and from utilization for the rest of the year to drive that call it 7.5% midpoint organic growth. Is that fair?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Yes.
Mayank Tandon -- Needham and Company -- Analyst
Okay. One final question on margins. I just want to get clarity in terms of your expectations for margin expansion in fiscal '19 in terms of how does that break down between gross margin and EBITDA margin improvement?
Paul Martin -- Chief Financial Officer
Yes. And kind of at the midpoint of our model and I mentioned this I think on the last call. I still think it's going to 100 bps to 150 bps improvement year-over-year. I think that's the right range. I don't think it will be below 100 bps could be above 150 bps, but that's where I think will be.
Mayank Tandon -- Needham and Company -- Analyst
Excellent. Great job guys. Thank you.
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Thanks, Mayank.
Operator
Our next question comes from Brian Kinstlinger with Alliance Global Partners. Your line is open.
Brian Kinstlinger -- Alliance Global Partners -- Analyst
Hi, Great, thanks. Some of the best quarters I've seen in a decade covering the stock.
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Thanks, Brian.
Brian Kinstlinger -- Alliance Global Partners -- Analyst
Yes, Billable headcount sequentially was the strongest increase I've seen in many years with no acquisition made. You've kind of talked about why, obviously, and utilization was so high in the first quarter. Can you talk about how these new resources how quickly they can be deployed and are they generally experience higher with skills already driving growth? Or do they need be trained on some of the driving factors of your growth?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
We are making some investments as we've discussed in the past, things like Pivotal Cloud Foundry where we are hiring people basically into training. But that's a very small portion of what you see here. The vast majority more than 90% of the resources that went pretty much straight into their billable roles, built like immediately. Most of them are experienced, and then as I said went straight into projects.
Brian Kinstlinger -- Alliance Global Partners -- Analyst
The gross margin has been pretty solid, but when you're making all those hires, I take it you got a pay for some of those experienced hires, how do you manage that with the gross margin and pricing?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Well, again, we do have a little bit of improvement coming in rates, we saw that in the first quarter. I think it's going to continue at least modestly. Utilization helps offset that to your point earlier, but the other factor that we've managed to achieve in last year is a great example. The average base salary for our employee in spite of that employees in spite of using a kind of an industry standard merit increase for 3.5%. The average base comp for our billable employees actually when down a half a point. And the reason for that is that on these larger longer term engagements we're able to hire more to the base of the pyramid and less experienced resources. So as people leave through attrition or we're just growing. We're adding more junior resources as we pretty much have that management infrastructure and the more senior people in ways. So It's actually some economies on the billable side of the business.
Brian Kinstlinger -- Alliance Global Partners -- Analyst
Great. Last question I've got, for a couple of quarters now you've been talking about Pivotal and Marketo. And if you look at the data sheet it's finally really playing out in terms of meaningful solid numbers to your revenue. How hard is it there to attract talent in these highly coveted platforms?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
You can't, so those are -- Marketo is different. I think we can do that, that's mostly grow your own, and certainly in the Pivotal Cloud Foundry, but the most part is grow your own. They just don't exist in the market. So as you might recall, we started that investment beginning of last year, where we actually license the certification curriculum from Pivotal and are running our own sessions to train people and have been certified. So that's the approach really kind of on both of those. It's very difficult to find experienced resources, but we do have a great plan in place this we've already been executing a scalable to grow our own (inaudible).
Paul Martin -- Chief Financial Officer
One thing I'd add with that Brian is, with the Elixiter acquisition that we did in the fourth quarter, we picked up some additional skills in the Marketo area and that's really going to be (inaudible) and help us grow that platform and work with Adobe as they work that out.
Brian Kinstlinger -- Alliance Global Partners -- Analyst
But on the Pivotal side, sorry, I have one more. On the Pivotal site taking utilizations close to 100% in net, therefore those are some of the hires that you need to train like you're talking about, is that right?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Yes. I think we're going to continue to see that. I mean like I say it's a sort of a perfect equation for us. We're able to find the people that have base skills around Java Spring (ph) that they need to do adapt in Pivotal and train them pretty quickly.
Brian Kinstlinger -- Alliance Global Partners -- Analyst
Great. Thanks so much.
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Thanks Brian.
Operator
Our next question comes from Vincent Colicchio with Barrington Research. Your line is open.
Vincent Colicchio -- Barrington Research -- Analyst
Yes, nice quarter Jeff. What portion of revenue was related to digital transformation? Do you have that breakdown?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
It's easily, I wouldn't say this is definitively precise, but it's easily 70%, 75% now. I mean everything -- even if you look at "The more traditional side of the business" it's all cloud now anyway, but easily 75% fits perfectly in this math definition.
Vincent Colicchio -- Barrington Research -- Analyst
And core cut off when you were talking about the number of $0.05 million project here in the quarter. What was the year ago number and sequential number? I missed that.
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Yes, it was 70% this quarter, and then a year ago, it was 54%, and last quarter was 49%.
Vincent Colicchio -- Barrington Research -- Analyst
Okay. And then on the bill rate increase embedded in your expectations for the year. Is that -- can you break that down in terms of where it's coming from existing clients. We have -- you're making up for low rates in the past, but a little (technical difficulty)?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
It's a combination actually. Certainly, you have kind of a clean slate with new clients, with the success with existing clients just getting them to agree to even something as simple as sort of cost of living increases, and/or we rotate more senior people out as they've got more experience or maybe gotten promoted and again back-fill them with the more junior experienced person that's appropriate for that role. But I would say, it's coming from all fronts. Obviously, we've got some major clients that are more or less locked in where it's difficult to raise rates. But we've had great success pretty much everywhere else gradually.
Vincent Colicchio -- Barrington Research -- Analyst
Okay. That's it for me. My other questions were asked. Thanks.
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Thanks, Vince.
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from Allen Klee with Maxim Group. Your line is open.
Allen Klee -- Maxim Group -- Analyst
Yes, hi. Can you talk about how you think about the growth of your offshore consultants versus onshore will be?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Yes, historically, offshore has grown certainly organically outpacing onshore. I think that it does somewhat ebb and flow as we tend to engage offshore in some of our very large engagements. But for the most part that washes and there's overall organic growth that's outpacing onshore. We've seen periods where it's double-digit and we've seen other periods where it's maybe mid-single digits, but always ahead of onshore. And I think that's going to continue. We're actually continuing to scale and train some pretty unique skills in those centers, including things that we've talked about that are really high like Pivotal as an example. I think we're going to be pretty early in the game with some of those skills and capabilities offshore. And of course, offshore is always and still is widely recognized as a good value. We've had great success there, we're seeing that high-level product certify. So our quality is impeccable and clients are recognizing that given us more and more opportunity. And of course I don't have to remind you that our gross margins offshore about 75%.
Allen Klee -- Maxim Group -- Analyst
Thank you. And then as analytics has grown as a percentage of your total sales, could you maybe give us an example or two of the type of business that you're doing there?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Yes, I mean, I mentioned an example in healthcare payer, (inaudible) payer and provider, but we're doing analytics almost everywhere. On the retail side, of course, it's customer 360 and customer analytics and how do you profile all the customers that you're trying to attract. So it's everything from that. And then using that information by the way imagine Perficient Digital to target digital marketing and I can target solutions that we're developing.
It all kind of goes hand in. But I would say, probably the biggest surge that we've seen recently has been in healthcare, both payer and provider. But then I'd say payers particularly or particular are keen to get better information for themselves in terms of managing the case load and managing outcomes, but also many of those same payers are setting up data as a service provider back to the providers in their network. So they're actually setting up a profit center around some of this data disclaims (ph) they have access to. So we're seeing a ton of that in that industry, but analytics as part of everything we do.
Allen Klee -- Maxim Group -- Analyst
Okay. And lastly, you talked about one of the reasons of raising guidance was the improved efficiency of your sales team. Could you maybe point to kind of what actions you've taken that have -- that you believe have gotten you that improved effectiveness?
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Yes absolutely. We've been talked with this for a couple of years and beginning really probably three years ago, I'll try to keep this brief. We really started revamping the organizational structure and put me in a bit of a structure in place to make those investments. We also revised the compensation plan. The outcome of all that was intended to, one, have a sales organization that was scalable that we knew we could add capacity to and getting the results from, but also a much more prescriptive and strategic model.
Three years ago, we allowed everybody to be pretty much just opportunistic. Again, now it's a much more prescriptive model. We are signing the accounts, we tell the folks what we wanted to sell, where we wanted to sell it, based obviously on our judgment of the best odds of success. And that's really beginning to produce results. One thing I'll point out that I mentioned to investors over the last several months is that we've got about 100 sales people now. We had 65 or so two years ago.
And I think the intent there is just to accelerate growth. And I think we're really starting to see that. But I still believe it's early stages. I would describe it to you this way that about a third of our sales people have been with us a long time and they're out there, but not big numbers, often double digits etc. Kind of the next third is in the maybe two year experience level with us or 10 year level with us. And the average sales there $3 million a year, something like that. So we are getting about 60% of our sales from the top third, probably another 30% or so from second third, and only about 10% from that last third. But that's great news. It's essentially a soft (ph) cost. We are seeing these people come online. We are working with them and mentoring them and bringing them on, of course they don't cut it, we replace them with somebody else. But that is where we are beginning to see some of the increased sales here. And the good news is that should continue, because we have got a lot of dry powder there.
Allen Klee -- Maxim Group -- Analyst
Great. Thank you so much.
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to Jeff Davis for closing remarks.
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
All right. Well, thank you all for your time today. Appreciate it. And look forward to speaking to you in about a quarter. Thank you.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thanks for your participation. Have a wonderful day.
Duration: 35 minutes
Call participants:
Jeffrey Davis -- Chairman, President and Chief Executive Offier
Paul Martin -- Chief Financial Officer
Surinder Thind -- Jefferies Financial Group -- Analyst
Mayank Tandon -- Needham and Company -- Analyst
Brian Kinstlinger -- Alliance Global Partners -- Analyst
Vincent Colicchio -- Barrington Research -- Analyst
Allen Klee -- Maxim Group -- Analyst
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