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Pluralsight, Inc. (PS)
Q1Â 2020 Earnings Call
Apr 30, 2020, 10:30 p.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. And welcome to the Q1 2020 Pluralsight Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions].
I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker for today, Mark McReynolds, Director of Investor Relations. You may begin.
Mark McReynolds -- Director of Investor Relations
Thanks, Towanda. Good afternoon. And welcome to Pluralsight's first quarter 2020 earnings conference call. Joining me remotely are Aaron Skonnard, Co-Founder and CEO and James Budge, CFO. Please forgive any challenges in audio quality as we're all in our respective homes.
Some of our remarks will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause these results to differ materially are included in today's press release and in our SEC filings.
For example, we are providing guidance based on the information available to us today, after taking into account the impact of COVID-19. However, as you know, the crisis that this pandemic has created is fluid and the situation is constantly evolving. As such, our actual results may differ from our guidance based on a variety of factors, including our ability to execute our business during this crisis, the impact of the crisis on our customers and partners and government action taken in response to COVID-19 among other factors.
Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on information and assumptions as of today, and we assume no obligation to update these statements. During this call, we may present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Except for revenue, balance sheet amounts, cash flow from operations and billings, all financial amounts discussed are non-GAAP and growth rates are compared to the prior year comparable period unless otherwise stated. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. The press release is available on our website at investors.pluralsight.com.
Before we hear from Aaron, I'd like to note that Aaron and James will be participating in several virtual investor conferences in May and June. For details, please refer to the calendar on our IR site.
And with that, I'll turn the call over to Aaron.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Mark. And thanks to everyone for joining our Q1 earnings call. The first quarter handed the world unparalleled challenges and required us to focus on what we as a company could do to help our customers in need. We are seeing an impact to our business from the global pandemic in the short term. And James and I will provide color on our quarterly financial results shortly.
But first, I'd like to discuss what we're doing to take care of our team members, to assist our customers and to help those who are most impacted by COVID-19. We do this not only because it's the right thing to do, but we also believe that in the long-term these measures will benefit all stakeholders.
Our top priority is protecting the safety and welfare of our people, while continuing to be a strong global partner for all customers around the world during this unprecedented time. We acted quickly to transition our over 1700 employees around the world to work remotely in a matter of days. And I'm proud of how our teams have risen to the challenge to maintain continuity in our business operations, while continuing to support our customers.
As a company, we serve many different types of organizations and the impact of COVID-19 is manifesting in different ways across our customer base. During times of uncertainty, we found that companies that invest in technology skills development give themselves the opportunity that come out stronger, we expect the same to be true as we emerge from this pandemic.
We're seeing many cases in which our customers are using our platform to quickly mobilize upskilling opportunities for newly remote employees to ensure their productivity. Companies like Broadcom, Cox Automotive, Caterpillar, Fiat Chrysler, Home Depot and Verizon all increased their seat counts and pushed tech learning programs out to their employees through our platform. These expansions are creating opportunities for us to build stronger and more strategic relationships with some of our largest customers.
Leaders are looking for better ways to gain insights into their software development process and bottleneck, while managing newly remote distributed teams. Many of our customers see this moment as a time to invest in technology that improves efficiency and innovation. Companies that do this are more likely to remain competitive and exit this crisis in a stronger position. Remote work and restricted travel, means that companies can no longer rely on traditional in-person training methods. In-person conferences and traditional instructor led training are two of our biggest competitors.
Remote work and restricted travel mean close to zero current investment in those areas. Our platform provides personalized skill development, available anytime, anywhere and it helps team skill up faster and become more productive.
To help the record numbers of people working remotely, as well as those who are currently unemployed, we opened our tech conference content making it available to anyone and we published courses and guides on working and managing remotely and because we know that building tech skills keeps people productive and will accelerate their work -- their return to work and help businesses get back up and running, we made our library of over 7000 courses available to anyone globally, free of charge for the month of April.
We've seen a tremendous response to our Free April campaign, encouraging people to stay home and skill up. We've had over 1 million new users sign up across the globe. For context, we had 1.3 total paying B2B users as of March 31. For our new users from Free April, 88% of the initial engagement came through a mobile device. This demonstrates the power of our product to meet learners where they are in their moment of need on any device.
Free April has made one thing clear, individuals are hungry for tech skills and a better future. Our efforts are creating a positive impact for our paying users where we've seen significant increases in engagement and usage on our platform. Since the COVID-19 crisis started impacting us about six weeks ago, the average time spent in our platform and the number of skill assessments taken were about three times the norm. We expect these trends to create improved retention metrics over time.
Additionally, during these times of increased remote work, developer productivity is top of mind for engineering leaders. Our flow product is well positioned to help these leaders and their teams stay on track and productive, while away from the office. We are seeing an impact to our business from COVID-19 in the short term, but we remain committed to strong execution in order to capture our long-term market opportunity.
At this point, I'd like to turn the call over to James and then I'll come back with some final thought. James?
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, Aaron. For the first two months of the first quarter of 2020 our performance was trending at the higher end of our expectations, meaning, linearity of billings across the quarter and our forecast were looking better than they have over the last several quarters. However, during March a great deal of uncertainty was created in terms of how long the COVID-19 disruption will impact the economy, our market and our company. We have acted quickly to preserve our strong balance sheet, with a focus on protecting our people, continuing to support our customers and providing long-term value to our shareholders. We remain confident in the financial strength of the business and had over $556 million in cash and investments as of March 31.
In addition, we don't have any principal payments required on our convertible bonds until 2024 and the annual interest payments are only $2.2 million. By mid-March we had already taken several steps to provide additional near-term liquidity and financial flexibility. These actions included a temporary freeze on hiring and restricting all employee travel and other non-essential operating costs. To date, we have already removed over $100 million in annualized costs from our 2020 plan and we are prepared for further actions if the business environment takes a material turn for the worse.
Turning now to the numbers. Q1 revenue grew by 33% to $92.6. B2B Billings grew 20% to $80.5 million and total billings grew by 16% to $90.3 million. B2B customers now represent 89% of our total billings. Despite the challenges near the end of Q1, our net revenue retention remains strong at 120% on a trailing four quarter average. Our Q1 gross margin increased to 81%, up from 77% last year. Our gross margin continues to over perform and gives us even more confidence that we will quickly trend toward sustainable earnings and cash flow profitability as we exit this near-term challenge.
Net loss per share in Q1 was $0.09 compared to $0.07. Cash provided by operations was $18.3 million compared to $5.5 million last year and free cash flow even with $10 million spent toward our new campus was $2.7 million for Q1 compared to $2.5 million last year. We are pleased with our cash flow in Q1 and want to remind you that in Q2 and Q3 we are in the completion phase for our new headquarters. As a result, we do not expect to be cash flow positive in Q2.
Before we discuss our guidance, I'd like to provide some background into our process of attempting to quantify the impact of COVID-19 on our business. Given we are a SaaS company with highly visible near-term revenue, we are still providing Q2 and full year guidance, albeit with wider ranges.
Like most organizations, our operations have been -- have already been impacted by the slowdown in global economic activity. The current and rapidly evolving global reality led us to update our forecast. Our current assumption is that, the disruption caused by COVID-19 will impact Q2 revenues by approximately $6 million to $7 million and 2020 revenues by approximately $15 million to $25 million due to weaker than expected -- previously expected billings in the first half of the year. We expect the headwinds will abate somewhat in the second half of the year. Obviously, the situation regarding COVID-19 is changing rapidly and we will continue to evaluate its impact on our business and provide updates in future quarterly calls.
With respect to Q2, we expect revenue to be in the range of $87.5 million to $89 million, an increase of 16% at the midpoint of the range. Our core subscription revenue has been growing and we expect ARR will continue to grow sequentially in Q2. But due to onetime items, primarily related to our Free April campaign, we expect there will be an impact on our ability to grow total revenues sequentially from Q1 to Q2.
We expect Q2 net loss per share to be in the range of $0.11 to $0.13, assuming weighted average shares outstanding of approximately $142 million. For the full year 2020, we are widening our expected revenue range to between $365 million and $390 million, an increase of 19% at the midpoint of the range. We expect full year 2020 net loss per share to be in the range of $0.31 to $0.44, assuming weighted average shares outstanding of approximately $143 million.
Worth noting here that with the operating cost reductions we've already actioned, we expect our 2020 operating costs to be roughly equivalent to our reduced expectations in 2020 billings-based gross profit, which should put us in a profitable cash position heading into 2021 and on a solid path toward our long term operating margin objectives.
To close, we entered this crisis in a position of strength and we remain well capitalized with total cash and investment resources of over $556 million. We remain resilient and are well positioned to support our customers, partners and employees through this tough period.
And with that, I'd like to turn the call back over to Aaron. Aaron?
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, James. While we cannot predict how long this current situation will last, we remain deeply committed to supporting our customers and team members, while ensuring the long term success of the company for all our stakeholders.
Our balance sheet gives us a lot of optionality and we have chosen to move aggressively with our cost structure to preserve that flexibility. We have products that the world needs now more than ever and we are using this time to accelerate innovation to make the products and experiences we deliver to our customers even more compelling.
Working from home and adapting to change is a market we are well positioned for. We will make it through this unprecedented situation and are poised for long term success coming out the other side.
With that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A.
Questions and Answers:
Operator
Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Saket Kalia with Barclays. Your line is open.
Saket Kalia -- Barclays -- Analyst
Okay. Great. Thanks, guys. Hey, guys. How are you? Thanks for taking my questions here.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
You bet.
Saket Kalia -- Barclays -- Analyst
Hey, Aaron, maybe first for you, and I think you touched on this a little bit in your prepared remarks, but just to go a little deeper, now that most enterprises have to wait to get into a physical classroom. Do you feel like usage around the product could potentially make prospective customers maybe think about shifting away from the -- from classroom-based training even faster after this pandemic? Meaning, could this actually help accelerate adoption of online tech learning after COVID?
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Absolutely. Saket, I think this is a moment that could dramatically and permanently shift the way most large enterprises think about classroom training investments in the future, because they're being forced to move so aggressively into this digital work from home environment. We are seeing the increase in engagement, the three times factor I mentioned in my remarks and we're seeing a lot of interest from those customers to explore new ways of accomplishing those same objectives digitally in the cloud. I mean, I'd remind you that ILT, the spend on ILT represents nearly 70% of our overall TAM today, so it does create for a very strong tailwind as we come out of this crisis onto the other side.
Saket Kalia -- Barclays -- Analyst
Got it. That makes sense. Maybe for my follow-up for you James. You spoke about it in the prepared remarks. The team decided to make access to the platform free for the month of April. I guess just thinking about it more broadly. Can you just talk about how that can potentially help the B2B pipeline? And maybe what you've seen historically in terms of B2B leads that have come from your B2C user base? Does that make sense?
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, makes perfect sense. And frankly that's probably the thing we're most excited about here, out of the million new users that have -- for folks that have-subscribers that have come on to the platform in April, 200,000 of those have a business email attached to them. So the B2C2B motion that we've been talking about for at least two years since back to our IPO, we're learning a lot more about that now, we're learning how to do it on a cost effective way. The cost that it's taken us to acquire these leads and new subscribers in April is maybe about 10% to 15% of what they historically have been. And really giving us a lot of good capability and learnings on how we can move even more aggressively in converting some of our B2C customers into B2C2B kind of motions.
Maybe a final point on that is, even beyond B2B, I think this is why we're getting a lot of good B2B motion here as well is that, the brand awareness that has come from Free April has been tremendous. Whether you look at press impressions, social media impressions, whatever metric you want to look at for brand awareness, it's roughly up about 7 times to 10 times more than the norm for us. So pretty much every metric that we were hoping for has been wildly out produced in what we achieved with Free April.
Saket Kalia -- Barclays -- Analyst
Got it. Makes sense. Thanks very much guys.
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. You bet.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Terry Tillman with SunTrust. Your line is open.
Terry Tillman -- SunTrust -- Analyst
Hey, Aaron, James and Mark, thanks for taking my questions and appreciate the color and I appreciate you guys giving it your best in terms of full year guidance and it's going to be -- planning assumptions are all difficult for all of us, but I appreciate you trying that. My first question relates to -- with two major products you have with different value props. I wanted to focus on developer productivity with Flow. And I definitely could see how more light would be shed on, what that product can do in this kind of new world of work we have with developers.
So, I know originally you all had guidance on Flow and what you thought it could do for the year, how well is that holding up? What will the resiliency of demand and how has it been so far versus your traditional, just skills learning product?
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks for the question Terry. Look, you're hitting the nail on the head here with Flow and what it provides in a moment like this. In this new space of developer productivity and engineering management, leaders need a tool like Flow to understand what's happening in the daily work of their team. Are they making progress? Are they having impact? Do we see productivity levels improving, decreasing, etc. And that -- those are the answers that Flow provides. So we are very happy to see the interest and how we can fill that specific need inflow right now during this time.
To your specific question about how Flow is doing? It's doing quite well. We had another strong quarter. It's well on its way to achieve the targets and expectations that we have for Flow for the year. And so we're very encouraged by what we're seeing there across the board and we see strong pipeline for Flow in future quarters.
Terry Tillman -- SunTrust -- Analyst
Got it. And maybe my follow-up is for James. In the Q we got an update on business customers in the quarter. It looks like the net -- so it was actually down 112. As we're going through the rest of the year and again, I know it's a challenge to try to figure this out exactly. But how should we be thinking about customer additions in different parts of your business, whether it's enterprise, mid-market or small business? And how to think about this trend throughout the year? Thank you.
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. Thanks, Terry. Look we love all of our customers and hope to keep them over time and we've definitely shifted a lot of our focus in our business over to retaining those customers. And as you noted at the low end of the market we have lost some of those customers as we moved through Q1. One of the things that we're doing to stem that a little bit, as I mentioned is put a lot of resources over into the retention side. But I think important to remember that the lion share of our billings and revenue come -- well over 50% come from our enterprise customers. Those are holding steady the retention rates, whether it's logo or users are similar to what they've been in the past. And we have lost a few at the lower end.
But feel really good about where our retention is overall. And I think an important measure like we shared here in the prepared remarks is, our overall user counts are up to a 1.3 million at this point, which is pretty good uptick from where they were three to six months ago and that's probably even the more important measure right now is how many users do we have as compared to the business customers that we have.
Terry Tillman -- SunTrust -- Analyst
Got it. That's helpful. Thank you.
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yes.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Scott Berg with Needham. Your line is open.
Scott Berg -- Needham -- Analyst
[Multiple Speech] I guess lots to talk about. Why don't we start with the linearity of last quarter. James, I think you made the comment that [Indecipherable] or do you see any continued pressure from the macro environment that might make it even maybe more back-end weighted than what we're simply used to?
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, I think I got -- you're breaking up a little bit, Scott, but I think I got the question, let me take a stab at it and if I didn't hit the mark please come back again. So I believe the question was around linearity, we -- and to the point you raised we were seeing very strong linearity in the first couple of months of the first quarter, January and February, probably as good a linearity as we've seen in the last six quarters. And then obviously COVID hit in March and things went a little bit awry.
April actually surprised -- a little bit surprising to me anyway even with Free April and access that a lot of people now have on a free basis in the month of April we actually had a good business, happened in the first month. Probably as to your point, I think you said in there, should we expect a little bit more back end loadedness in the second quarter. Yes, I would say yes to that, but I don't think it will be meaningfully worse. A little bit -- a little bit more loaded in June than we might have normally expected in the past, but still fairly well spread out across the quarter. Did that cover the question Scott or did I miss something in there?
Scott Berg -- Needham -- Analyst
James, it's helpful. Thank you. And I guess from a follow-up perspective, you took $100 million worth of annualized cost out of the model. How should we think about your ability to react to an improving environment in the second half, without knowing exactly where those cost cuts came into play, whether it was sales and marketing, G&A, etc? How do you feel positioned for what -- I think a lot of hope to be at least a recovering economy here, maybe Q3 or Q4?
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. Look the majority of the cost came from really tamping down on the hiring, like two thirds of it came from the hiring freeze and not hiring hundreds of people that we otherwise would have hired over the next nine months. And that's just reflecting the reality of where we believe our billings will shake out for the year on the sales and marketing end, and then everything else adjusting down from there.
So we feel with 1700 employees we have a really great base of employees to achieve the expectations that we have. We have plenty of capacity in the system, with our sales reps we actually have more capacity relative to our lowered expectations than we had pre-COVID when we were thinking of a different plan. I think it gives us plenty of capacity even as we roll into 2021, as we think about kind of getting through the first, even second quarter of '21, we have really great capacity right now.
And one of the things we've been able to avoid so far because of the strong balance sheet we have and the good pipeline and prospects and some of the good momentum we're seeing from Free April, we have not had to exercise any layoffs in our company at this point. And that to your point about how can we come out of this quickly? I think keeping our employees that are really productive and as we split out the -- they'll be still with us. So we're not letting productive employees go and then having to rehire them three months from now. I think being in that kind of a position with the strength that we have in the business will enable us to accelerate even faster as we come out the other end.
Scott Berg -- Needham -- Analyst
Very helpful. Thanks, guys. Good luck.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
You bet.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Your line is open.
Brian Peterson -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Thanks, gentlemen. And I hope you and your families are safe. I know these are these are crazy times for all of us here. But James maybe I wanted to start with you. Obviously, the Free April promotion, it sounds like the engagement there has gone pretty well. This may be an unfair question, so apologies on this. But how are you thinking about potentially monetizing that base in 2020? Is there a significant contribution in the guidance there or would that potentially be upside to the numbers?
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, great question. Just probably more upside than baked in. We are assuming that there will be some conversions of those Free April users, probably as you might expect a little bit less than our normal conversion, but still really strong conversion rates as we could be proud of. And I think if we manage to get that conversion rate up even a little bit closer to what our normal historical conversion rate has been, there's even more upside in the models. So some of it baked in, a little bit of upside that we've left ourselves. I'll probably just leave it at that.
Brian Peterson -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Got it. Thanks, James. Aaron, maybe a follow-up for you. When we talked to some customers or IT leaders, they're clearly seeing that they obviously can't do in classroom training now. I think when I talked to them they still had specific programs and things they want to complete for their employees. Does that offer an opportunity for you to have more of a consultative or proserv role with some of these enterprise customers down the road. Just curious your thoughts on that?
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
That's right. That's exactly right. This offers us the opportunity to go in and develop deeper partnerships around how we can take those very specific programs and map them to a digital solution, powered by our platform, our content and all of our digital learning experiences.
So we're doing that with several of our large enterprise customers today and see ample opportunity for more of that down the road. And that's ultimately that tailwind I spoke of earlier. I think we'll see even more of that as we continue to move through this crisis and come out on the other side.
Brian Peterson -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Great. Thanks, guys.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
You bet.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Sterling Auty with JP Morgan. Your line is open.
Sterling Auty -- JP Morgan -- Analyst
Yeah, thanks. Hi, guys. James in one of the earlier questions you gave some qualitative commentary to the gross renewal rates at the high end, low end. Can you just give us a kind of a summary? What -- when you look across all of your business customers. How did the gross renewal rate actually fare versus the last couple of quarters and what did you bake in in terms of the outlook?
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. Let me -- first to speak to the aggregate and I'll break down a couple of components to your question. So we're -- start from your basis of 120% where we were at the end of Q1, that probably trends throughout the year and our implied assumptions in the kind of mid to high teens and then starts to tick back up as we roll into 2021, so that's at the macro level.
And as you might expect at the gross retention -- that a net retention number, at the gross retention level on the enterprise side you would expect -- we expect that our gross retention is a fair bit higher than the commercial side of our business, specifically the low end of the commercial business for us.
So, historically that's been in the high 80s low 90s gross retention for enterprise customers and sort of low 80s for our commercial business. And just if you take the -- tick down on the net retention, apply that to gross retention, you can probably knock off about three to five percentage points, so more in the mid to high 80s for enterprise and in the high 70s to low 80s for the commercial side. That's about what we expect on the retention side going forward, a little bit of deterioration, but still fairly strong moving forward.
Sterling Auty -- JP Morgan -- Analyst
And in terms of that net retention that you gave, obviously one of the questions I get frequently from investors is, you are driven by the headcount of your customers and in light of the current situation unemployment rates, how should we think about, how much of that is factored in versus anything that might just be pricing adjustments as customers come up for renewal?
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. I mean, look we took a fairly good whack from our billings expectations. That's implied in that -- in that growth, where the reduction in growth on the revenue side. So we'd like to believe that it's factored in. And we actually have done some pretty interesting things to help our customers during this interim time.
I think as you noted, we do have -- many of our customers that are furloughing some of their tech employees or letting them go. But maybe with an expectation when they come out of this that they hire them right back and we want to help enable those customers. So we're giving some innovative pricing on a temporary basis to many of our customers or some of our customers that are facing those kind of challenges, so that when they bring those furloughed employees or even some that they like go back into the fold then that increases our user count even higher and we can bring them right back up to the higher price points.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
And Sterling, I would just add, remember that with our large Fortune 500 customers on average we're only penetrated right now at about 8% or 9% of their tech organizations and they typically give the Pluralsight licenses to their most valuable players within those organizations. So I think we're somewhat shielded from some of those headcount reductions that those customers might be facing.
Sterling Auty -- JP Morgan -- Analyst
Understood. Thank you.
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Sterling.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brad Sills with Bank of America Securities. Your line is open.
Brad Sills -- Bank of America Securities -- Analyst
Great, thank you. Hey, guys. I wanted to ask about maybe just a follow on question there, in the Fortune 500, what are you seeing there. I think you're seeing an acceleration in the back of billings. Is there any color you can provide on some of the bigger accounts, maybe you've had conversations when they say, well, maybe this expansion deal, we'll still keep in the pipeline, but we'll come back later, right now we're just focusing on stabilizing the business. Or how the conversation has gone particularly in that enterprise sector with some of your larger Fortune 500 accounts?
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. With those Fortune 500 accounts, Brad, we are being more creative around how we can partner with these large customers to deploy even more licenses in the near term to solve some of their immediate needs, aiming for longer term deals in Q3, Q4.
So exactly what you're pointing to is, what's playing out, we're being super creative. True sense of partners -- that were partners in these customer relationships and it's really working to our advantage. I would say, many of those large customers have increased the number of licenses in the thousands or even tens of thousands.
To learn more about how they can use our platform again to solve some of those ILT specific use cases and to reach more people to drive improved engagement and productivity across their tech works, especially in the work from home scenario. So, we're seeing some very interesting things play out and are excited by it.
Sterling Auty -- JP Morgan -- Analyst
That's great, thanks. And then and then one more if I may. Any noticeable change in technologies that you're seeing more active on the platform, given the COVID situation, I guess since mid-April, anything you'd call out in terms of technologies that are getting more interest and more usage on training versus others? Thank you so much.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
You bet. Yeah, it's a little early to tell on that right now, but we are seeing some increase in the cloud space, specifically. I think we'll see cloud adoption speed up not slow down. Infrastructure related topics, like VPNs and how companies work remotely and more effectively to still get access to the applications and data that they need. That's also had a big uptick.
And I think there's a set of technologies that could decrease in popularity, but it's still early to tell what those trends will play out to be at this point. But I do think we'll see some changes. And so, in another month or two or three we'll have more to share on that.
Brad Sills -- Bank of America Securities -- Analyst
Great. Thanks, Aaron.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
You bet.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Stephen Sheldon with William Blair. Your line is open.
Stephen Sheldon -- William Blair -- Analyst
Hi. Thanks. In the first two months of the year, it sounds like things were trending at the high end of what you were originally expecting. So can you talk some about how sales execution maybe trended or improved in the earlier parts of the quarter? And specifically, did some of the changes that you put in place in the second half of 2019, did that seem to have a bigger impact in the go-to-market efficiency, at least earlier in the quarter?
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, thanks. Absolutely I think for those that have been with us, so it's probably everybody here. We moved all in this year into a hunter/farmer model or new acquisition, account manager type model. Ross was super helpful in architecting that and then has been really impactful in driving that motion for us, as well as all the training and enablement activities to get our sales teams even more focused in their respective areas.
So yeah, what we are seeing in January and February was really great signs of life in all areas of our business. I think as you might expect, as we moved into March some of those areas in the new acquisitions were becoming a little more challenged, quite a bit easier to go back to customers that have been delighted with our service in the past and asked them to renew and maybe even up sell and add more licenses into the account.
But we do still see really good activity in our new acquisitions motion and expect goodness out of that this year. And as we jump out of COVID, hopefully toward the end of this year, maybe early next year, we think the structure and model we have will be really beneficial for us long term.
Stephen Sheldon -- William Blair -- Analyst
Got it. And then as a follow up, just I guess an update on how conversations are progressing with systems integrators in terms of go-to-market partnerships. Does the current environment maybe push out expectations to see some SI partnerships announced? I guess just any detail on the potential there looking at the remainder of 2020 and then 2021?
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. Great question. We are making a lot of progress with the systems integrators and are encouraged by what's happening with each of them. But as you can imagine with the impact of the last six weeks, we have pushed out the priority of some of those conversations, both because they need it, and we need it in this moment of time.
But there's still strong interest and we're very focused on building out strong long term channels with a few of the biggest ones. And some more to come on that, but nothing has changed in terms of the nature of those relationships. The interest level, it's really just a slight pause as we digest COVID-19.
Stephen Sheldon -- William Blair -- Analyst
Great. Thank you.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
You bet.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Brett Knoblauch with Berenberg Capital. Your line is open.
Brett Knoblauch -- Berenberg Capital -- Analyst
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. The first one is on the new literacy product that you guys launched in the quarter. I don't know if you spent much time talking about that already. But maybe just initial thoughts on how that launch went and maybe early adoption indications.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. We launched the digital literacy SKU right as the crisis hit during our Pluralsight LIVE EMEA event. And so we're not being very aggressive with that at the moment, given the impact on new acquisition, new billings at the time. And it's really too early to tell or speak to the impact that product's going to have.
So I'd say look, we're having conversations with customers around that and there's a lot of interest in it, but most of the conversations are really focused on how do we help the customer through this crisis in the most effective way. How do we ensure the renewals of what's already in place and then how do we bring things like digital literacy into the picture for the future quarters in Q3, Q4 and into 2021. So that's where the conversations are right now. Lots of conversations happening, but still too early to tell what the impact will look like.
Brett Knoblauch -- Berenberg Capital -- Analyst
Great. And then just one more on the $100 million in annualized cost savings. Could you break out, I guess, where that's coming from? And I guess, what are those actual initiatives in place?
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. The biggest by far, and I want to emphasize -- I know you just said it, but I just want to emphasize, that's $100 million annualized. So not all that will be realized in 2020, but it does lower the base for sure going forward in the 2021. The biggest impact by far is from not hiring. We will probably -- the current plan right now is to exit the year with about as many headcount as we have right now. So there's hundreds of additional positions in the company than we would have hired under our original plan that we're now not planning to hire.
So that's probably at least 60%, two thirds of the cost, the balance comes from reductions of non-essential services with many of our vendors we're scaling those back or cutting them out completely. Travel and entertainment massively down as you might expect and cutting out several of the amenities that we had planned to put into our new campus. Those are the four big ones that I would highlight.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
And I'll just add on this point that, one of the reasons we were able to do that and execute that type of plan was because we entered the year ahead of plan on sales capacity and we had made significant improvements on overall sales execution entering the year. So that gave us a lot more flexibility and optionality to absorb some of the COVID impact in the way that James just described.
Brett Knoblauch -- Berenberg Capital -- Analyst
Great. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
You bet.
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Thank you.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Josh Baer -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Thanks for the question and hope you guys are well. Aaron, I'm wondering if you're having conversations with customers or seeing increased demand from customers who are looking to rescale or upscale their existing personnel in an effort to reduce spend on like external IT consultants or outsourcing?
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
That's a fairly common scenario for us Josh. I mean that's something that happens most quarters where large enterprises are looking to make significant digital transformation initiatives come to be. And the way they do that is through tech skills transformation investments.
And so, I would say in general that's one of the underlying themes behind our business, in the Fortune 500 is our ability to help them accomplish that. I think in COVID we have seen -- we have seen some increase in the interest around those things, but that's also tempered by the company's ability to spend more. And deal with the impact hitting that.
Josh Baer -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
That's helpful. And one for James, I'm just wondering if there's any framework for thinking about how margins or these cost savings could trend if the state of the world gets materially better or worse than the current environment. Like would we expect to see the opex expense flex up if things got much better or could we see additional cost savings in the reverse scenario? Thanks.
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. Good. Well, I mean on the reverse scenario definitely that we still have a few arrows to fire there if you will, if things materially turn for the worse, so really -- that we've planned really well around that. On the other end of that spectrum, yeah, look if things start to move in a more positive direction, we're always looking for opportunities to increase the amount of top line that we have. And if that means adding some more capabilities to create more product or more skews, more capabilities for our customers, more sales reps that might be able to go drive more billings and we'd be interested in that.
But one of those -- I don't know if there's too many silver linings in this COVID world we're in right now, but one of the silver linings from a financial modeling perspective is when we've taken a fresh look at our planning as we go through the year and move into 2021, it demonstrated a clear picture for us and how we're going to move to our long longer term profit margins.
And we feel really good about even with the reduced expectations we have in billings and revenue with what we've done on the cost side that I actually think on the bottom line where we might be in a better position going into 2021 now than we would have been in our previous plan.
Josh Baer -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
That's helpful. Thanks.
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Alex Paris with Barrington Research. Your line is open.
Chris Howe -- Barrington Research -- Analyst
Good afternoon, everyone. This is Chris Howe sitting in for Alex. Thanks for taking my questions. Can you compare and contrast kind of what you're seeing in this environment when it comes to existing accounts versus new accounts. Has there been any material shift due to the current optics that's out there.
And as we look at some of the comments that you made in regard to Free April and the growth prospects that's out there, it would seem once we get back into a more normalized environment and on our path to recovery that this could lead to a long runway for growth within your existing account base longer term once we get to this environment?
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah. Great question. Aaron did we pick you back up again or.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, I'm back in, apologies.
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Did you hear the question or you were muted.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
I did not hear the question.
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Okay. Let me take a stab. I think the question was around, if there's some near-term impact and share with me if you don't think I've captured this right, but if this is to near near-term impact on the new areas of our business as opposed to the renewals and existing customers, do that -- with some of the things Aaron's already mentioned around are penetration of the Fortune 500 are still only 9%. Does that suggest that when we come out the other end whenever that is that there's some longer term or even mid-term upsides in the model and the expectations that we would have.
So hopefully I characterize that somewhat accurately, but tell me if wrong. And I'll just give a short answer and Aaron can jump in with whatever he'd like to share. But I'd say the short answer is yes, absolutely we do still see lots of runway in our -- particularly our largest enterprise customers with new -- lots of new users still available to us. And maybe some temporary setbacks and some new logos and new accounts that we might have out and otherwise without kind of it. But certainly we expect that to spin up and we have all the capacity we need to go chase that down as the world kind of turns back to the positive again.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, that's right James. I agree 100% with all of that and I do believe that we have upside as we work through this. There's still a tremendous amount of uncertainty and we are managing to that uncertainty as best we possibly can. And so, depending on what happens with COVID and some of the industries that are most impacted that we sell into, and how quickly those things recover. I think there is upside here between now and the end of the year depending on multiple factors and multiple assumptions. I would say we've been fairly conservative in most of our assumptions. And so, time will tell. It's really hard -- it's really hard to predict. But I think we're in good shape.
Chris Howe -- Barrington Research -- Analyst
That's very helpful. And one follow up if I may. You had mentioned the exposure and if we look at that in consideration of the conservatism that's been placed on guidance in this COVID-19 environment, is there perhaps an additional way to think about this as particular to certain industries or a certain size of account that's most at risk during this time or has already been at risk during the first half of this year?
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. I think that the industry exposure is the most significant factor of all. Obviously in the travel industry and food and entertainment some of those areas, there is a clear impact and we did a big pipeline analysis to see how much of our current open pipeline was exposed to those industries and it wasn't very significant. So overall we're feeling pretty optimistic about being shielded from the most impacted industry at a global level.
But things are changing every day and so we're having to redo those calculations pretty frequently. And things can change. So I just want to caveat it with that. But at a high level I would say we're feeling pretty optimistic that we're not overly exposed to the most impacted industry.
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, maybe just to put a finer point on that. The industries that Aaron mentioned are probably less than 5% to 7% of our overall billings stream. And if you extended it out to our smallest customers just as a broad bucket about 10% to 12% of our entire business is in that SMB kind of space, the vast majority of our business is in the enterprise segment for us and high end commercial segment and very small portion of that is in the industries that have been most heavily impacted during this time.
Chris Howe -- Barrington Research -- Analyst
Okay. Thanks for the clarity and the additional color, appreciate it as always and I'll hop back in queue. Thanks, everyone.
Operator
Thank you. I'm not showing any further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call over to Aaron Skonnard, CEO for closing remarks.
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
All right. Thank you. Nothing further to add at this point. Thanks for joining our call. Thanks for the great questions and we'll talk to you again next quarter. Thanks everyone.
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Thanks, everyone
Operator
[Operator Closing Remarks]
Duration: 52 minutes
Call participants:
Mark McReynolds -- Director of Investor Relations
Aaron B. Skonnard -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
James W. Budge -- Chief Financial Officer
Saket Kalia -- Barclays -- Analyst
Terry Tillman -- SunTrust -- Analyst
Scott Berg -- Needham -- Analyst
Brian Peterson -- Raymond James -- Analyst
Sterling Auty -- JP Morgan -- Analyst
Brad Sills -- Bank of America Securities -- Analyst
Stephen Sheldon -- William Blair -- Analyst
Brett Knoblauch -- Berenberg Capital -- Analyst
Josh Baer -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst
Chris Howe -- Barrington Research -- Analyst
