BlackLine, Inc. (NASDAQ:BL) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

BlackLine, Inc. (NASDAQ:BL) Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript November 7, 2025

Operator: Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Third Quarter 2025 BlackLine Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Matt Humphries, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Sir, please begin.

Matt Humphries: Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. With me on the call are Owen Ryan, Chief Executive Officer of BlackLine as well as Patrick Villanova, Chief Financial Officer. For the Q&A portion of today’s call, we’ll also have Jeremy Ung, BlackLine’s Chief Technology Officer joining us. Before we get started, I’d like to note that certain statements made during this conference call that are not historical facts, including those regarding our future plans, objectives and expected performance, in particular, our guidance for Q4 and full year 2025, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements represent our outlook only as of the date of this call.

While we believe any forward-looking statements made during the call are reasonable, actual results could differ materially, as these statements are based on our current expectations as of today and are subject to risks and uncertainties, including those stated in our periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in particular, our Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. We do not undertake and expressly disclaim any obligation to update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law. All comparisons we make on the call today relate to the corresponding period of last year, unless otherwise noted. Finally, unless otherwise stated, our financial measures disclosed on this call will be non-GAAP.

A discussion of these non-GAAP financial measures and information regarding reconciliations of our historical GAAP versus non-GAAP results is available in our earnings release and presentation, which may be found on our Investor Relations website at investors.blackline.com or on our Form 8-K filed with the SEC today. Now I’ll turn the call over to BlackLine’s Chief Executive Officer, Owen Ryan. Owen?

Owen Ryan: Thank you, Matt. Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I will detail the changes we have made across our business that are beginning to deliver tangible results. Over the past 2-plus years, we have methodically rearchitected our leadership team, our go-to-market engine and our technology and operational structures. That foundational work is now largely complete. These changes give us greater confidence that we can deliver accelerating revenue growth and margin expansion as we exit this year and move into 2026. But first, let’s start with this quarter’s performance. We delivered another solid quarter of improving execution. Revenue growth increased to 7.5%. We achieved a non-GAAP operating margin of 21.4% and a free cash flow margin of 32%.

Patrick will provide a more detailed discussion on the financials shortly. The strength this quarter was from new customer acquisition. New customer bookings were up 45% and the quality of these wins is evident with the average new deal size more than doubling by 111% and the median new deal size up by approximately 50%. New customer bookings mix accounted for 41% of overall bookings. This is not just about closing more deals, is about winning larger, more strategic platform deals often against our biggest competitors. Let me put this into perspective with some examples. Through our direct sales efforts, we secured our largest ever total contract value deal with a leading global commercial real estate services company. This deal took 2 years to close and was multifaceted, with intercompany serving as an entry point and includes a multiyear expansion across our financial close suite, leveraging Studio360 and our new platform pricing.

We directly landed another new logo with a Fortune 20 company who chose our entire financial close suite, Studio360 and our platform pricing model, replacing existing tools and solutions. This was a great example of perseverance and leveraging past success as the CFO’s previous experience with BlackLine translated into a meaningful new win. And in the insurance industry, we won a multi-solution deal with Accelerate, a leading middle-market specialty insurance exchange, looking for a scalable platform across both invoice-to-cash and financial close, the customer move forward with BlackLine recognizing that a platform approach with Studio360 was the optimal solution to support their future revenue growth versus remaining with multiple legacy vendors.

On the partner side, our SolEx channel performance is improving. We closed mega company deals this quarter with Coca-Cola Europe Pacific Partners and with Boots U.K. Limited, proving the strength of our golden architecture with SAP. A key driver in many of these wins was our new platform-based pricing model, which accounted for nearly 3/4 of new customer bookings and is seeing solid international adoption after only 2 quarters. Our strategy is not just about winning in established markets, it is also important to unlock new growth opportunities. We have continued to make progress within the public sector. Despite the federal government shutdown, our pipeline continues to grow and we successfully delivered the production instance for our sponsoring agency in October.

We anticipate completing final testing by mid-December and are on track to receive final FedRAMP approval in early 2026. Now turning to our existing account base. The interest in our Studio360 platform, new pricing model and our Verity AI offerings created some noise this quarter. We are seeing 2 dynamics play out as we see more customers evaluate or adopt platform pricing. First, as we succeed in delivering higher levels of automation, customers can achieve their outcomes with the need for fewer licenses, which is leading to user attrition. Second, we saw several large customers pause user ads to instead engage in deeper, more strategic discussions about moving to Studio360, platform-based pricing and our Verity AI offerings. Our platform pricing model is designed to decouple our growth from a simple seat count and align our revenue directly with the value we deliver.

While this strategic transition will take time to work through our installed base, we believe the outcome is clear and more committed customer base providing more predictable value-aligned revenue. Although these dynamics created a slight headwind to net revenue retention, we view it as a leading indicator of a positive transition. In fact, the most telling indicator of long-term customer confidence came for our renewal activity, along with our solid platform pricing adoption. Importantly, the mix of multiyear renewals has increased to represent over half of all renewal bookings this quarter, demonstrating that customers are buying into our long-term vision and locking in their partnership, which increases the predictability and durability of our revenue.

Finally, the planned churn from our strategic deemphasis of the lower end of the market is nearing its conclusion. We expect this headwind to be largely complete in the first half of next year. These outcomes are not an accident, they are the direct output of the foundational transformation I mentioned earlier. With much of this foundational work now complete, I want to detail the 3 pillars driving these outcomes. First is our go-to-market engine. Much of our success this quarter comes directly from the methodical work we have done to re-architect our go-to-market engine for scalable, efficient growth, focusing on 3 key areas. We have invested heavily in the tools and the processes our teams need to win. Our entire sales motion is now powered by modern billing, prospecting, contracting and CRM systems that remove friction and provide better insight.

For example, our experience with a new AI-powered prospecting tool has shown that a BDR can nearly triple their pipeline generation. All of our BDRs will now use this tool to more quickly create and qualify opportunities. We’ve also transformed our marketing efficiency. Our teams are leveraging new digital campaigns and tools to drive a significantly higher ROI on our spend. In fact, despite a decrease in aggregate marketing spend since 2023, we have seen strong growth in pipeline generation through the end of Q3, which is up approximately 50%. And while it’s important to leverage new technologies and reengineered processes, it comes down to people. With new leadership has now established across the globe, we’ve actioned a more rigorous performance management program, elevating the bar and adding seasoned sales professionals.

This focus is already paying off. Rep productivity is improving. And by the end of 2025, we expect it to improve by nearly 30% versus last year. These coordinated efforts are delivering clear results. As I mentioned, rep productivity is up and importantly, our competitive win rates, especially in takeaways approved again in Q3. We believe this is direct evidence that our Studio360, platform pricing and improving go-to-market execution are enabling us to win more in the market. The ultimate outcome is clear. We are building a more productive growth engine that costs less to operate. We expect these changes will drive a 10% improvement in our customer acquisition costs in 2025 and even greater improvements next year. Second is our progress in product and technology.

We have modernized our technology stack to support a future scale, efficiency and AI-powered innovation. It starts with infrastructure. A critical milestone is the near completion of our multiyear GCP migration. I’m pleased to report we only have a few customers remaining before we can fully decommission our private data centers. Finishing this project will unlock significant operating leverage and provides a modern, scalable foundation for our future innovation. This serves as the foundation for our Studio360 platform, as the central nervous system for modern finance, its power begins with a unified data layer. Powered by our partnership with Snowflake, this layer is now leveraged by 90% of our customer base for advanced reporting in less than 1 year.

This helped us achieve an approximately 80% cost reduction in data storage. The real game changer for Studio360 is our progress in open connectivity. Our platform was architected from the ground up to be ERP-agnostic and our Studio 360 integrated capability extends this vision far beyond ERPs to third-party financial systems. This ability to rapidly connect to any data source can allow customers to realize financial transformation much more quickly. We’re also seeing good momentum with our ERP connectors. Our Oracle Fusion Connector is already live with over 50 customers and our Workday and D365 connectors are already being used by paying early adopter clients. This success is now unlocking the full potential of Studio360 for our large portfolio of Oracle, Workday and Microsoft customers.

This powerful platform infrastructure is enhancing our entire solution portfolio from our newest technology for our most established products. The performance improvements are dramatic. For example, our new big data matching solution built on this modern stack delivers a 98% reduction in match times and handles nearly 30x the data volume our previous solution, which we see as tangible proof of our ability to deliver at any scale. We are also accelerating the delivery of new innovation. Our high-frequency reconciliation solution was adopted by 10 customers shortly after its general availability in Q3 and is already helping build a multimillion-dollar pipeline. And this just isn’t about new products, we are also driving product-led growth within our core.

For established solutions like Journals, we’ve introduced new self-service capabilities for several common use cases, allowing customers to realize value faster and at a lower cost. And importantly, this unified trusted data ecosystem is the essential fuel for our Agentic AI capabilities named Verity. Now I want to spend a moment on this because in a world of intense AI hype and uncertainty, it is critical to understand why we see AI as a significant opportunity that deepens our competitive advantage. Our moat is not built on a single attribute on a powerful combination of our proprietary data and our deep expertise in delivering trusted, auditable solutions to the office of the CFO. First is our expertise and trust and auditability. In the office of the CFO, Black Box AI is a nonstarter, trust, transparency and auditability are paramount.

Our entire platform was built from the ground up to be a system of record with a complete unbroken audit trial. Our approach is validated by our recent ISO 42001 certification for responsible AI which formalizes our commitment to governance, risk management and human oversight. In a world of increasing regulation, we view our deep, culturally ingrained expertise in building auditable enterprise-grade systems that finance leaders and their auditors trust is a massive competitive advantage. And second is data, AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on, and we believe our data is unique. It is not just that we have data from over 4,000 customers of all sizes across all industries and all geographies, is that we have the historical financial and operational data set for our customers going back to the day they started with BlackLine.

This proprietary data set represents the accumulated knowledge of what thousands of companies have done to close their books and manage their financial operations. We believe we are sitting on a wealth of process-specific data, which we are only at the early stages of utilizing. This can allow us to deliver unparalleled value. We can provide industry-specific benchmarking that shows the customer how their processes compare to their peers and where they can improve. We are able to train our AI models on the most intricate cases by industry in a secure, auditable way because we have the real world historical data to do so. This combination of proprietary data and our leadership in trusted auditable systems is precisely why we believe we are positioned to win with AI in the office of the CFO.

And this is just not a theoretical advantage. We are translating this directly into product reality. We began deploying Vera, our conversational AI to our customer base in October, just one month after its debut at BeyondTheBlack. With Vera as the supervisor of our agentic workforce, we are launching a suite of powerful agents to execute high-value tasks. For example, we already prepare our agent for account reconciliations has shown they can deliver even higher levels of automation for customers in a trusted and auditable manner. Soon, we will deploy Verity Collect to deliver agentic capabilities to our invoice to cash customers, automating customer outreach and accelerated cash collection cycles. These initial agents are the first step in our broader strategy to address the full spectrum of financial operations.

Future releases will target other complex areas across record-to-report and invoice-to-cash, including agents focused on high-volume transaction matching, variance analysis, remittance automation and on-demand financial analysis. In parallel, we are executing a proof of concept with SAP to ensure the seamless technical and commercial integration of our AI-powered solutions into their ecosystem. This is a critical step in aligning our platforms and preparing to monetize our joint offering to our shared customer base. And finally, our focus on innovation and AI also extends to the implementation process. Our efforts to reinvent the implementation process are already delivering significant results. In Q3, the number of customer go lives increased by nearly 70% year-over-year and 17% sequentially.

This is a powerful proof point of our team’s improved execution and directly contributed to our services revenue this quarter. More importantly, it means our customers are realizing the value of their investments faster. We are also applying our AI strategy to go to the next level. We are preparing to launch implementation agents designed to automate and standardize the most common phases of deployment. We will begin piloting these agents with customers later this month before scaling them globally in the first quarter of 2026. Our focus on efficiency extends across the entire business and is organized around 2 key initiatives, creating a more efficient operational structure and leveraging AI to drive internal productivity. We have further adjusted our cost base for greater operating leverage.

We have aggressively optimized our global footprint by moving headcount from high-cost to lower-cost locations. When I joined as co-CEO, our workforce was overly concentrated in high-cost locations. As we exit this year, approximately 25% of our BlackLine professionals are delivering for customers in lower-cost geographies. This strategic shift provides a significant and durable structural advantage on margin as we move forward. In parallel, we closed offices in high-cost areas while opening or expanding talent hubs in lower cost centers like India, Poland, Romania and Mexico. Our confidence in AI comes from firsthand experience, we are not just selling this transformation, we are living it. Internally, we have aggressively created and deployed AI tools to become a more efficient and innovative company.

Today, BlackLiners are leveraging our internal AI platform or third-party AI tools in their daily work. The results in our product organization are promising. Nearly all of our engineers are leveraging AI tools today and our most active developers are completing over 100% more poll requests than less active users. This is not just about coding faster. It is about delivering value to customers faster. Our innovation cycle time, the time from an initial idea to that feature being in a customer’s hands, has improved by 23% year-over-year, with over 160 features and products being released this year. We have also created our own AI tools to drive efficiency, reduce costs and better serve our customers globally. Our recent example is our own internal AI translation services for our solutions that can rapidly create and provide documentation and training for customers in multiple languages, allowing us to not only reduce costs but ensure we provide consistent and high-quality experiences for our customers.

This internal adoption is a powerful efficiency engine. We view it as an opportunity to bend the curve on future costs and accelerate revenue growth through innovation. In summary, while operational improvements are never done, we have made real strides in how we run the business. Our strategy is clear and our execution is showing tangible results. While I am pleased with this progress, our team remains intensely focused on the execution that lies ahead. The leading indicators we have seen this year all point to a business that is accelerating. These factors give us great confidence in our ability to deliver sustained profitable growth consistent with what we have previously shared at our past 2 Investor Days. With that, I will turn the call over to Patrick to provide more detail on the financials and our outlook.

Patrick Villanova: Thank you, Owen. Our third quarter financial results reflect the execution Owen has laid out. Disciplined operational management, combined with steady progress across key indicators that point to continued acceleration through the end of this year and into next. I’ll walk through the details of the quarter and our guidance for the remainder of this year as well as a preliminary view into 2026. Total revenue grew to over $178 million, up 7.5%. Subscription revenue grew 7%, with services revenue growth of 13% due to accelerated project delivery in the quarter. Annual recurring revenue, or ARR, was $685 million, up 7.3%. We continue to see tangible evidence of deepening customer commitment in our forward-looking metrics.

Total RPO growth was 12.4% and current RPO was up 8%. For reference, our average contract length was 27 months this quarter, up versus last year and sequentially. And more importantly, new customer contract length was up nearly 10 months versus the prior year. Calculated billings grew 4% in the quarter. This figure has an embedded 4-point headwind, which is largely timing related. As we continue to win larger, more complex enterprise deals, we have seen some customers move forward with quarterly versus annual billing terms. Our trailing 12-month billings growth, which helps normalize for these effects was 7%. Our customer count of 4,424 this quarter reflects our strategic resegmentation of the market moving away from lower-end customers. We project this transition to be substantially complete in the first half of next year.

Our revenue renewal rate in the third quarter was 93%, up versus the prior year and the prior quarter driven by healthy enterprise performance in the upper 90s with middle market in the mid-80s. Net retention rate for the quarter was 103%, which includes a full point of headwind from FX. On NRR, we also saw net user adds slow in advance of customers adopting our platform pricing model and evaluating our AI road map. We continue to see a positive shift in our sales mix towards higher-value solutions. Our strategic products accounted for 36% of sales this quarter, up from 32% last year. This growth is a direct result of our go-to-market teams leveraging our unified platform to drive larger multi-solution deals. Demand was particularly strong for our market-leading intercompany and invoice to cash solutions.

SolEx was seasonally steady in Q3, accounting for 26% of total revenue. Looking ahead, our Q4 SolEx pipeline is solid, and we are executing against it with several deals already closed in October, positioning us for a solid finish to the year. Turning to margin. Our non-GAAP subscription gross margin remained strong at 82%. Our aggregate non-GAAP gross margin was approximately 79%, reflecting a higher mix of services revenue this quarter due to the strong performance at accelerated project delivery from our teams. Non-GAAP operating margin was 21.4%, driven by better productivity across our GTN teams this quarter and reflects costs from our BeyondTheBlack event, which took place in September. Non-GAAP net income attributable to BlackLine was $38 million, representing a 21% non-GAAP net income margin.

We delivered a record quarter for cash flow. Operating cash flow was $64 million and free cash flow was $57 million. This performance was driven by the combination of strong collections execution from our team and the timing of certain payments within the quarter. Regarding our balance sheet and capital allocation, we have approximately $804 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities versus $895 million in debt. Finally, we continue to execute on our capital allocation strategy this quarter. We returned approximately $113 million to shareholders through the repurchase of 2.1 million shares. This brings our year-to-date total to over $200 million and underscores our confidence in the long-term value of our business. Now turning to guidance for the fourth quarter of 2025.

We expect total GAAP revenue to be in the range of $182 million to $184 million, representing approximately 7.4% to 8.6% growth. We expect non-GAAP operating margin to be in the range of 24% to 25%. And we expect non-GAAP net income attributable to BlackLine to be in a range of $42 million to $44 million or $0.58 to $0.61 on a per share basis. Our share count is expected to be about 75.1 million diluted weighted average shares. And for the full year 2025, our updated guidance is as follows: We expect total GAAP revenue to be in the range of $699 million to $701 million, representing approximately 7% to 7.3% growth. We expect non-GAAP operating margin to be in the range of 22% to 22.5%. And finally, we expect our non-GAAP net income attributable to BlackLine to be $153 million to $157 million or $2.08 to $2.13 on a per share basis.

Our share count is expected to be about 76.6 million diluted weighted average shares. While we still have 2 months left in the year, the trends we see across the business give us increasing confidence in our preliminary outlook for 2026. Based on our strong pipeline, the adoption of our platform pricing model and operational improvements, we expect to deliver a combination of accelerating revenue growth and continued margin expansion next year, assuming a stable macro environment. The balanced approach to growth and profitability gives us increasing confidence on our path to achieving the Rule of 40 targets we outlined at our Investor session recently. Owen?

Owen Ryan: Thank you, Patrick. And before we go to Q&A, let me just say that we are obviously aware of the recent market commentary about BlackLine. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on market rumors or speculation. The Board and management team engaged with shareholders routinely as well as constructively, and we will continue to do so, and that is all we intend to say on this topic. Operator, could you please now open up the line for questions. Operator?

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Patrick O’Neill from Wolfe Research.

Q&A Session

John O’Neill: Just kind of wanted to touch on the commentary around some large customers pausing user adds as they weigh options around Studio360 platform pricing in some of your AI offerings, is sort of the right way to read that? Is that maybe some fields or some net new ARR slipped in the quarter as a result? And maybe — can you just help us quantify in terms of net new ARR, the impact on these dynamics? And is that something you expect to continue into 4Q? Or is that just sort of idiosyncratic to the quarter?

Patrick Walravens: Yes. No. So I think it’s a good question. And we did see some deals slip at the end of the quarter. Obviously, with the Verity announcement, in particular, a lot of interest in AI. And so — and we have seen that continuing uptick in conversations right through today. And so a lot of, as you can imagine, interested in what BlackLine has to offer, did cost us probably a couple of million dollars of delayed deals at the end of the third quarter that are now in the fourth quarter. Some of them have closed during the month of October, others will close, we think over the balance of the next couple of quarters. I do think that what we’re seeing in the pipeline certainly is showing a real increase on the larger end of deals for mega enterprise and the enterprise space.

Those deals tend to take a bit longer but they are much more important for what we’re trying to do as an organization as we move customers onto our platform and take a full advantage of all of the capabilities that underline the Studio360 platform.

Operator: [Operator Instructions]

Owen Ryan: Operator, do you have more questions? Operator?

Operator: Just a second, sir.

Matt Humphries: For all the listeners, apologies, it seems the operator is having some technical difficulties that he’s trying to get sorted out, so please just bear with us again, apologies.

Operator: We have Patrick O’Neill from Wolfe Research in the queue.

Owen Ryan: Operator, we just completed that one. The next person in the queue should be Rob Oliver from Baird. Can you please let him then to ask his question. Thank you.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Rob Oliver from Baird.

Robert Oliver: Can you guys hear me okay?

Patrick Walravens: Yes. And I’m very sorry about what’s going on here.

Robert Oliver: Awesome. No problem, as well. So I guess I wanted to go back to flesh out the previous question just a little bit. So as you guys — I guess something this quarter took you guys by surprise. And as you move through this transition, I just wanted to ask philosophically about this issue of automation and customers and seat versus platform? Because what it seems to me is what you guys laid out last year was a strategic shift, which enables customers to capture value without necessarily needing to commit on the seat side. So is it a logo churn that you guys are seeing of size as well as seat count internally around the model transition and the new platform? And then I had a quick follow-up for Patrick. Just wanted to better understand that.

Owen Ryan: Yes. Thanks, Rob. I think that here’s what we’re seeing in the business and what gives the team and me confidence that makes us really increasingly confident that we can deliver on the commitments that we said we would do for the business. We have laid out, as you know, guidance to return to our growth rates to the mid-teens as well as improve operating margin and return capital through share repurchases. When you think about all of this together, right, there’s obviously 4 pieces. There’s gross bookings, there’s churn, there’s what we’re doing on the expense side and then obviously, attrition management. From a gross bookings perspective, what you should understand is our performance this year is showing the ability to land larger, more transformational deals with customers.

New customer bookings, as we said, were up over 40% this quarter, and our net average deal sizes have doubled since last year. The pipeline has continued to grow, and it is really beginning to ripen, a continuation of the trend that we see. Now obviously, the bigger deals we do, particularly the mega enterprise, the enterprise space, take 10, 12 months to happen. For us, what we’re seeing now is on a year-to-date basis through the third quarter, our gross bookings growth was about 15%, and we expect to go through the fourth quarter with growth in gross bookings at about approximately 20%. And we expect that growth rate to continue throughout next year on the gross bookings side. So what that is showing and improving is that we can win in the market.

We’re taking market share. We know all about that. The second piece of this then you talked about is churn. On churn, the headwind for us has been and will be for a couple more quarters, is that strategic deemphasis of the lower-end customer base that is really beginning to near its conclusion. We expect the abatement to take place by the midyear of next year. And what’s really driving that is the rigorous qualification and customer selection processes that we put in place in the middle of ’23 when Therese and I stepped into the role. So remember, most of our deals are 3 years back then, they are now sort of rolling off the books. The other key thing besides the change in customer selection is we have radically revamped how we do implementations with our partners and our own team, focusing much more on just go lives.

We’re really focused on the outcomes for our customers and all indications of all new customers that have now come in, in the last couple of years, they’re very well adopted as we move forward. We talked a little bit in message about expenses as well. So we’ve made a lot of changes to the organization to strengthen the foundation. This work really focused on operational efficiency. I know I get a lot of questions about effectiveness of go-to-market. But what this now allows us to do is scale very efficiently with a very modern platform stack of things that we’re trying to do to optimize the cost base and importantly, we’ve been able — beginning to be able to decouple revenue growth from operating costs. So we expect that to drive further expansion — margin expansion and greater levels of free cash flow next year.

That’s what’s sort of giving us confidence on the margin side. Now let me turn to the last piece, which was part of your question, Rob, and that relates to attrition. This is an area of intense focus for us around the leadership team, something we expect to work through this year and into next. And we really are experiencing 2 types of attrition that we’re working our way through. The first, for lack of a better term, is success-based attrition, where customers have really been achieving very high levels of efficiency and effectiveness with BlackLine that are actually requiring fewer user licenses. It’s what the core value of the proposition is the value proposition what BlackLine delivers, but it’s suboptimal for us for long term. It’s the reason we’ve been trying to drive towards platform pricing because we recognize we have to decouple our growth from seat count and align that with the values and outcomes we’re driving on behalf of our customers.

With the release of Verity AI, along with the accelerated innovation across our core product and Studio360 platform, it allows us to go deeper and broader with customers leveraging the trust and brand permission that we’ve built. So we view that as a positive trade-off for the medium to long term, even if it’s impacted us a little bit on attrition this year. Now the other piece that’s really critical is attrition that relates to underadoption of our solutions. We have been dealing with that really through 2 parts of what we’re trying to accomplish. One is we’ve been aggressively leveraging the data that we now have to better understand our customers’ usage and engage with these less adopted customers to get them back on a path via our Studio360 platform and the underlying solutions.

We’re using this information in a way that allows us to have very meaningful and candidly, sometimes very difficult conversations amongst and between our customers, the ERP providers, the implementation partners and BlackLiners. The second piece of this really relates to our multiyear renewal efforts, which have been coupled also with the changes we’ve made around implementations to the processes, what we’re doing with our partners, with our customers as well as the optimization of what work we’re doing. This combination has really allowed us to reengage with customers and deepen and broaden the relationships that we have with them. If you remember when Therese and I stepped into the roles, we talked about elevating in the office of the CFO.

That is happening now. And the positive of that, again, is it allows us to have these deeper, broader conversations. But in the short term, we’ve still been dealing with some attrition. But as I mentioned before, we expect to see gross bookings grow about 20% next year. And we expect to see based on the actions we’re taking on churn and attrition, at least a reduction of 10%, if not 15% in C&A for 2026. So when you put all that together, as we think about where we’re going, the increase the stronger gross bookings growth, the declining churn, the greater expense management and a very clear plan on reducing attrition is giving us the confidence that we’re sort of communicating to deliver the top line and the bottom line results we have committed at Investor Day, and we expect to deliver that in 2027 compared to the range where we gave you from 2027 through 2029 in the long-range plan.

So I know, Rob, that was a long question. I think you — or a long answer, you said you had a follow-up question, so what’s the next part of your question, please?

Robert Oliver: Yes. I appreciate it. It was going to be for Patrick. Patrick, just on I guess, catching up with you guys kind of over the last couple of quarters, there’s been some positive indications around customers that do adopt the new pricing model and kind of what the kind of like-for-like pricing is. So I know that you guys have had — you broke out some nice numbers on the bookings side of customers taking the new platform? And any early indications there of kind of on the pricing side, if you’re still seeing — I mean, obviously, notwithstanding the fact that you’re seeing some seat-based churn, are there customers where you’re still seeing the kind of uplifts you expected to see?

Patrick Villanova: Thanks, Rob. Yes, we are. So when we started I guess, introducing this platform pricing, which we started domestically here in the United States in Q1 and then internationally in Q2, we had a plan. And we continue to be ahead of that plan in terms of the amount of bookings or conversions what we’ve had to that. We are well ahead of that plan from a new logo standpoint. As you heard in the prepared remarks, we landed a large deal, our largest deal ever in terms of TCV, and that was on platform pricing. So from a new logo perspective, we are well ahead of our plan. We have seen an uptick in Q3 in our installed base, our existing customers adopting this. And in combination, we still continue to be ahead of our plan that we laid out earlier this year from a platform pricing perspective.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And I see our next question comes from the line of Chris Quintero from Morgan Stanley.

Christopher Quintero: Really great to hear about the expected acceleration into next year. I guess as you kind of just mentioned bookings growth of about 20% expected next year. If you would kind of distill that into maybe the top 3 factors, what’s really driving that booking strength and improvement here as you go into next year?

Owen Ryan: Yes. Thanks, Chris. I would say the biggest thing, again, has been us changing the conversations and having them at higher levels in organizations, and seeing and being able to talk to our customers truly about digital finance transformation. So we’ve been sort of working our way through being viewed as a point solution to more of a platform. Those conversations, the capabilities, the innovation that we’ve been able to bring to the market in the last 2 years is resonating very well. One of the things that Jeremy and the team have done has listened very closely to our customers. And so you look at the amount of new product and innovation we rolled out last year, that same thing this year, and then the road map we have, our customers are really starting to see us in a way that says we are going to be a true partner for them as they go through digital finance transformation.

I think the other thing is the work we do with our partners. If you remember, one of the strategic choices we made a couple of years ago was to call out a lot of partners, and we have deepened the relationships with the blue chip firms that are out there in the world. And they also are part of those conversations we’re having with customers about digital financial transformation. Many of those folks are working with CFOs and Chief Accounting Officers, Corporate Controllers every day. And so that is certainly a piece of it. It’s the access and the conversations at a higher level. Our guys have really raised their game in the conversations when they’re out there talking with customers. And then candidly, so much of it is about the product-led growth that we’ve been trying to drive.

I mean, again, one of the things that we’ve gotten back to doing really well is listening to the voice of our customer and building solutions that work for what they’re trying to accomplish, but now doing that through the lens of a platform versus just a point solution. So those are the things, Chris, that are showing up. And again, when you look at our pipeline and how it’s maturing, so much of that is on the higher end of the market, which is really where we see we can deliver a lot of value for our customers.

Christopher Quintero: Awesome. And then I wanted to follow up on the competition angle. It seems like on this call in your prepared remarks, you were talking more about kind of competitive takeaways than you have in the past. Is that kind of the right takeaway here? And I guess, like what’s really working well for you to take some deals away from the competitors here?

Owen Ryan: Yes. Yes. So we are seeing a nice uptick in competitive wins. I think, again, a lot of this talks about — I think at one level, BlackLine is viewed as a very safe choice in the office CFO. We’ve got a proven track record. The quality of our implementations continues to get better with our partners, the optimization, the trust and brand that we built, the products that we’re bringing to bear, the scale with which we can operate. It was talked about some of the new things we can do in the marketplace. And so all of that is sort of just giving our customers that much more confidence that we can deliver on our promises. I think one of the things that I like to tell our team all the time, we’re not necessarily in the business of selling software or in the business of delivering outcomes for our customers and doing that with our partners and our clients, that’s really starting to show very, very nicely, and that’s helping us in our win rates and obviously being able to rely on existing customers to serve as references to other customers.

It’s very compelling. And then the last piece of that, that we are seeing is we are really deep in a lot of different industries and the ability to sort of connect those experiences. So when we’re going in, we’re not just talking about accounting and finance. We’re talking about accounting and finance specific to that industry. And then, by the way, when we can show where we’ve done it elsewhere for a peer set, it gives our customer base, which tends to be a little bit risk-averse, that much more confident on what we can deliver because we’ve proven we can do it elsewhere already.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Alex Sklar from Raymond James.

Alexander Sklar: Owen, maybe for you on SAP, a lot of optimism on building pipeline throughout the year with some of the changes there. I think the comments where you’ve got a good start to the Q4 selling season, but what else from the BlackLine side, are you still focused on to really inflect that opportunity?

Owen Ryan: Yes. Look, I think the health of the SAP relationship overall is really solid. And I think we mentioned in the prepared remarks, the joint proof of concept that we’re working with them from an AI perspective, we continue to put the innovation that we’re creating here through their PQ process. Obviously, having Stuart Van Houten and a number of other people that have joined from SAP be part of the go-to-market framework, has all worked very, very well. I think we mentioned in one of the earlier calls, the point that we were now sharing customer success or customer usage between BlackLine and SAP, which was something brand new. We now have sort of dedicated customer success people on both sides of the SAP BlackLine relationship that will really help us to reduce some of the attrition we sometimes see in that partnership because now we’re focusing in a way that, quite frankly, we hadn’t been able to do in the past and again, gives us that confidence we’re going to see the attrition rate drop in 2026 and beyond.

So those are all the things that are going on. There’s lots of activity taking place in each of the markets. I just came back from a couple of weeks in Asia Pac. Some of my other colleagues also went over to Asia Pac, where we met with the leaders in the different countries over there. So obviously, it’s nice to hear things coming out of L.A. and Waldorf, but what’s more important is what’s the boots on the ground, I think those are where the relationships are getting better and deeper. And so we’re seeing nice progress there across the board.

Alexander Sklar: Okay. Great. And maybe a follow-up for Patrick. Just in terms of kind of the 2026 outlook. You think you said kind of factoring consistent macro. I know it’s something that’s been tougher to project this year. How would you kind of — how are you characterizing the macro? So we’ve talked about some of the things your customers are facing with kind of platform pricing and Studio360 adoption. But from a macro standpoint, like how has that progressed since Q1 when we kind of started talking about the different scenarios through third quarter November here? And what are you exactly factoring for next year?

Patrick Villanova: Yes. Thank you. So with regard to the macro environment that would lead to the 20% growth rate that Owen indicated, it would be the environment that we’re in today. So when we were thinking about back in April and evaluating the potential impact of tariffs, we found that, that largely did not have an impact on the business this year. So when we talk about a macro environment going forward, if we maintain the current state that we’re in today, that is the basis for the projection that we were casting upon 2026.

Owen Ryan: Look, I think the one thing that we’re all trying to work with our customers on here is you’ve probably seen there’s about 1 million corporate job layoffs, I think, over the last couple of months. A lot of that necessarily — or not necessarily, but it’s in the back office, and that’s certainly creating some opportunities for us to talk with our customers about how they can use BlackLine because of the efficiency that we’re driving for our customers and you power that with what the — what we’re demonstrating to them around AI, and so it could become a little bit of a tailwind versus a headwind depending on how these companies choose to move forward. Fascinating to me in my trips around the world in the last month, and I’ve spent a lot of time on the road in markets that I would have thought would have been slower or more resistant to adopting the kinds of change that you sort of sometimes see in North America, that is accelerating throughout the rest of the world.

And so I think again, that sort of is a bit of a positive tailwind from where I sit today.

Operator: And I show our next question comes from the line of Patrick Walravens from Citizens.

Patrick Walravens: Great. And it’s nice to see that the — you’re starting to see the signs of what you’ve been working on for so long, Owen.

Owen Ryan: Yes, I’m right, Patrick.

Patrick Walravens: We’re well impatient over here. I’m sure you are, too.

Owen Ryan: I hadn’t noticed.

Patrick Walravens: My question for you is, you made an interesting comment. You said that the conversations between the ERP providers, the customers and the implementation partners can be very difficult, why is that?

Owen Ryan: Well, because you wind up with customers sort of have sometimes these views of how quick their transformation is going to go, how easy it’s going to be. You replaced an ERP system. That’s a complicated project. People change, priorities change, things get emphasized, deemphasized and everybody wants to think it’s, well, just slam in the technology, and it will be nirvana. And it’s not — that’s not the answer. It’s about not only changing the technology, it’s making sure you change all the processes that go with that and then also helping people through the change management of what all this takes. And so it’s very easy for somebody to say, well, it’s only because of X, but it often is because of X, Y, Z and A, B, C.

And so what we’re trying to do more of now is engage and lean into those conversations. And what we’re seeing is positive, it’s showing up in the multiyear renewals because we’re forcing things that maybe we had in the past wouldn’t have done is getting these customers back on that journey and showing them what the art of the possible is. It’s so critical from my vantage point around Studio360 to have the blueprints that are part of that. It’s so critical that we can now talk about the ability to integrate, the ability to sort of orchestrate what they’re doing to visualize it and then have the control and compliance that’s on top of all that, those are things that we’re forcing into a conversation that, candidly, it isn’t always the easiest thing to do, but sitting there are not engaging doesn’t do anybody any good.

And again, where we’re seeing, I think, the uptick is our customers signing up for multiple years because they know they got to get back on this journey. And I think the other thing that’s interesting about this a little bit, Patrick, I’m not sure it’s scientific, I also think now that people are getting back in offices, face-to-face conversations are a good thing to have and are sort of driving some of the changes in how things are beginning to unfold.

Patrick Walravens: Yes. I agree with that. Okay. And then Patrick, 2 quick ones for you. So first of all, I mean, why does — you’re in line on EPS this quarter. So you took the EPS for the year down by $0.05 to $0.11 bottom top of the range, so for Q4. Why is that?

Patrick Villanova: There’s 2 factors there, Patrick. The first one is you’re talking about non-GAAP net income is the interest that we earn on our cash balance. And as we indicated earlier, we have purchased $200 million plus in stock this year as part of our share buyback program, which is driving down the interest that we earn on that. The second driver is the big beautiful bill. While that has provided an infusion of cash flow for us and many other businesses, it does not change our non-GAAP tax expense. So the expense remains constant from a provision standpoint, but we do have a cash flow benefit from that bill.

Patrick Walravens: Okay. And then the second question is just so we understand clearly what you guys are saying about the — about next year. So at your financial analyst session, you presented 2 slides. One was the target model framework. I’m sure you know it by heart, right, which starts with total revenue growth of 13% to 16%, and goes all the way down to your operating margin. And then you had another slide which showed your commitment to the Rule of 40, which had you at 38% in ’27 and 40% in ’28. So what exactly is it that we’re going to see in ’26 now?

Patrick Villanova: In 2026, you will see at least a Rule of 33 as we committed to in Las Vegas.

Patrick Walravens: Okay. So is there any acceleration of this framework?

Owen Ryan: For 2027, yes, Patrick. That’s where, again, we talked about what we’re seeing from a gross bookings perspective, what we’re doing on the churn and what we’re seeing on the expense side. So as we think about the revenue growth, that’s really when we get to that teen growth number in ’27, we’ll see an acceleration of revenue throughout the year. We think we’ll see an acceleration on the bottom line. But the real impact of that will work its way throughout the financial statements throughout the course of the year and again, then show up pretty clearly starting in 2027.

Patrick Walravens: Okay. So target model framework slide now, that’s now through ’27?

Owen Ryan: Yes. Yes.

Operator: And I show our next question comes from the line of Steve Enders from Citi.

Steven Enders: Okay. Great. I guess I want to go back to just the 20% kind of bookings commentary and I guess the view of that kind of accelerating from where we’re at today. Just I guess, what is it that you’re seeing like gives the confidence around that picking up going into Q4 and then going into next year? And then I guess, on the other side of that, also the commentary around this kind of transition going from the headcount impacts to kind of driving that platform model? I’m just trying to understand, I guess, the kind of like puts and takes to kind of make that 20% happen there?

Owen Ryan: Yes. So on the gross bookings side, if you remember, starting in September of last year, we started to communicate that the pipeline was starting to grow. And that has grown even right through the month of October. Every month, we continue to see progress on the size of the opportunities and the brands that we want to be doing business with. That’s what’s driving that growth is the conversations that our people are engaging within customers as well as a great work that our marketing team is doing in the marketplace. So you watch that and you can see how it’s progressing through the stages of sales. And so that’s what gives us the confidence of what we expect to see in the fourth quarter and then what we’re seeing heading into next year.

Remember, it takes a good 10, 12 months for stuff in the mega enterprise space, the enterprise space to make its way to what we do in the pipeline compared to the mid-markets, maybe 4 to 6 months. And so everything we would have expected — or we’re trying to drive, excuse me, not expected, from the quality of that pipeline, from the customers we’re engaging with, the partners that we’re pursuing those opportunities with and the level of engagement from those customers all give us a much higher degree of confidence as we work our way through, and we’ve seen the acceleration of gross bookings throughout the course of the year and now beginning to really see that pick up in the fourth quarter. And when you start to then look at the beginning, or into next year, you can see the pipeline that started in January, working its way right up through the end of October continuing to mature its way through.

And so that is what gives us confidence because we have enough pipeline to deliver what we’ve just said around an increase in the gross bookings. So that’s the first piece. And hopefully, that’s responsive to your question. The second piece is there was a lot of work that we had to do to reposition BlackLine to get to become a $1 billion company. I would say that when I look back with where the infrastructure was, it was probably better suited for a $250 million company than somebody trying to get to $1 billion. And so all the things that have taken place in go-to-market in the G&A part of the business and the product and tech, that has been being worked on through multiple angles, really culminating for where we are today and the ability to move forward with much more operating leverage in the business going forward.

And so it’s just the investments you would make that accelerate, make it easier for our people to conduct their jobs and we are seeing the increases in productivity. I’m thrilled to see a 30% increase in productivity from a quota-carrying rep. And I think Stuart and his team are just getting started on that as we move forward. The things that Jeremy Ung and his team are doing about productivity from our engineers is phenomenal. And so we’re seeing us taking advantage of revamping our processes, using technology as well as the change management we need to drive in the organization. So we feel pretty comfortable that we’re going to be able to decouple revenue growth by adding heads all the time to drive that revenue. If we don’t need to do that as we scale out the business.

It doesn’t mean we won’t add quota-carrying wraps, doesn’t mean that we won’t add product and tech professionals as appropriate, but it’s not going to be that high correlation that you would have seen from BlackLine previously. And I think that’s where we see, again, the opportunity to both accelerate top line growth as well as accelerate bottom line performance.

Steven Enders: Okay. That’s great to hear. And then maybe to follow up on Pat’s question on just the next year kind of view. I guess appreciate saying that 33% number. I guess maybe asked a little bit differently, like if I’m looking at where consensus numbers are for next year, I think it’s at high 8%, almost 9% growth. Is that the right ballpark in terms of how you’re thinking about now? Or how should we maybe think about the mix of growth and margin to get to that 33% number?

Owen Ryan: I think you’re largely thinking about it correctly. But obviously, we’re — our target of a Rule of 33 for 2026 is our minimum expectation in terms of what we’re going to achieve next year. So yes, we’re aware that the consensus number is 8.8%. We do have confidence in our growth profile for next year and our ability to achieve at least the Rule of 33.

Operator: And I show our next question comes from the line of Jake Roberge from William Blair.

Jacob Roberge: Great to hear about the pipeline strength, but can you give us some more color on what you’re seeing with close rates and win rates, just given the divergence between pipeline, gross bookings and then also ARR growth would just be helpful to understand what you’re seeing on that front.

Owen Ryan: Yes. Look, I think our win rate is probably up about 10 percentage points from where it was. So if — and I’m just going to use a number, if it was 20%, now you could look at it maybe 22%, right? Those are lower than they actually are, but just using it that way. So we see that uptick and close in win rates and we can tell we’re taking share from somebody out in the marketplace. And so that has been very encouraging. And we expect that, that is going to continue, if not accelerate even a little bit more, just again, given all the things that the responsiveness we’re getting from our customers around the platform pricing, understanding better what Studio360 really is all about and then all the work that the team has done around Verity AI.

It’s sometimes hard for me to process the amount of change that we’ve driven into the company last year and this year, just on the product and tech side. It’s one thing to sell that into the marketplace, deliver to the marketplace, a whole other thing to get your own people enabled on it, to understand it, buy into it, get comfortable with it and go out and tell that story. And again, we’re seeing that our team is getting better and better at articulating that value proposition and engaging in conversations at a higher level in a broader as well as deeper way. And so that’s what we’re seeing. I don’t know, Patrick, anything you want to add on particular numbers, but that’s what’s going on in the business right now.

Operator: And I show our next question comes from the line of Koji Ikeda from Bank of America.

Koji Ikeda: Sorry about that, I was on mute. So I totally appreciate right before the Q&A that you don’t comment on media speculation. And I really do appreciate that level setting. And so — but I do think it’s important to ask, and I wanted to ask about how you’re thinking about driving shareholder value from here. Whatever you can talk about from that lens would be really helpful, because I look at the third quarter growth, I look at the profitability, but balance against the duration adjusted billings growth of 7%. But then really, it sounds like bookings is having some good momentum, too. So whatever you could share on how you’re thinking about driving shareholder value would be really helpful.

Owen Ryan: Look, Koji, I think we’re all fixated and focused on that every day, and I appreciate that you’re not going to ask me about the market rumors. I think we meet with the Board on a regular basis. The Board is well aware of our responsibilities, fiduciary responsibilities to drive shareholder value and that’s what we’re trying to do by reaccelerating growth the way we’ve talked about it, driving bottom line performance, returning cash to shareholders. Those are the things that are within our control that we are executing every day and we feel really good about that. And no one’s asked me yet about AI, so hopefully, somebody will and why that’s — we don’t view that as a threat to our business because I think that’s the other thing that’s held the share price down a little bit.

I know certainly, when I talk to investors and analysts, they’re always saying, “Well, isn’t AI going to put you out of business?” And so Koji, as I answer, so I’m going to try to do it in 2 parts. I think we’re doing everything we can. We’re doing it even quicker now because things are finally converged on getting the bookings machine going, really dealing with the C&A challenge and managing expenses. On the AI side, where we seem to have been lumped in with everybody else and taking our lumps from that, we said in the prepared remarks, we believe we have 2 strong parts that reinforce and widen the moat as we operate around AI. First, we are viewed by our customers, but also by the world’s leading accounting and auditing firms as well as the implementation partners as a very safe, reliable, trustworthy pair of hands.

As Patrick says all the time, 95% right in accounting is 100% wrong. So we understand that responsibility clearly and has been in our DNA since the founding of the company. Actually, even earlier today, I had a meeting with the leadership of one of the most critical bodies that works with companies, auditing firms and regulators, and the topic was about the role of AI in accounting and auditing because we want to make sure we’re staying very closely aligned with the latest thinking and even shaping the thinking of what policies and guidance will be as AI makes its way forward. The second piece that we talked about was the data that we have. And we are sitting on a trove of information that we are really just beginning to use and our customers are beginning to see the power of that information.

Interestingly, as we talk with finance teams and IT teams, 2 things are generally cropping up: First is these companies seem to be interested in buying proven solutions rather than taking a chance on less established brands as it relates to the financial close and consolidation; and second, and this is important is the IT team and their initiatives — AI initiatives seem focused more on their bigger business opportunities that could have an impact for their companies, and it is not centered on financial close and reporting as a priority. In fact, we’re aware of a paper that’s going to come out next week that’s sort of just going to emphasize that, and it wasn’t a paper, by the way, created by us. So the key for us as we move forward with AI is going to be able to provide AI solutions that remain reliable, transparent, auditable as well as cost effective for our customers.

Now one other data point that I would just share with you that is worth noting. Our roster of customers includes the world’s leading technology companies. We have a who’s who, it’s incredible. And these companies are engaging with us on what we can do for them with AI. Even though they’re selling AI out in the marketplace, the place they are not — they don’t seem to be interested in selling AI is in financial close and reporting. And so while there’s no guarantee that they’re going to use BlackLine AI, it does seem to support the statements I made above that their priorities are elsewhere, and they have an interest in what we’re doing. And I think if we can convince the market that there is different pockets of who are going to be the winners and losers in the AI war, then we feel like we’re going to be a winner in that.

And hopefully, we’ll get some pop out of that for our share price. And again, on these conversations that I’m having with the various bodies that oversee public companies, auditors and the like, the regulation is going to take a really long time to get going. And so if anybody thinks that publicly traded companies and no matter what market they’re operating in, are going to go do something really crazy around the financial close and consolidation and what they’re willing to sign off on for a rep letter and everything else and in what they’re communicating to the capital markets, we just don’t see it happening anytime soon. And we see that we are really well positioned for the conversations that the customers who trust us and understand what we’re doing.

And so I think for us, we look at this as a real positive, but we have to obviously show that to the market.

Operator: And I show our next question comes from the line of Terry Tillman with Truist Securities.

Dominique Manansala: This is Dominique Manansala on for Terry. So just considering the federal motion of early and FedRAMP unlocks future opportunity, how does adoption typically sequence here? Do you expect it to expand horizontally into additional agencies or more so vertically within a single agency into workloads like intercompany or invoiced to cash? And then on top of that, are there specific things that shorten time to live once FedRAMP has achieved like maybe a shared service model or preexisting SAP footprint?

Owen Ryan: Yes. It’s a really good question, Dominique. And I think the answer to the first part of the question is both. What we’re seeing is, like, for example, with the DOJ win that we had, I mean, that is now available to multiple agencies where they can — within the DOJ, I forgot how many there are, but there are quite a few that have access and a number of them are now looking at what we have to offer. But I think the other thing that’s been interesting is being able now to have more conversations across different federal agencies where there’s a keen interest in what a BlackLine can offer. And I think some of the very interesting conversations earlier on for what I would have argued were sort of our more traditional financial close capabilities around REX and matching and journals but I never think of the federal government as an intercompany opportunity.

But interestingly, it has proven to be an intercompany opportunity because of all the interagency billing and activity that goes on. So we’re seeing plenty of opportunities very quickly across the federal space and even picking up now in the state space as well. So I think we sit here we’re very confident that based on the feedback, BlackLine is a really terrific fit for the federal government space. The ability for to deliver automation, control, auditability for these agencies is really incredibly important to them. And given the pressure on the federal workforce, the opportunity for what BlackLine can do seems to be resonating very, very well as we’re pursuing that marketplace.

Dominique Manansala: Great. That’s helpful. And then just as a follow-up, in building an elite partner group and then being selective in where you invest or invest enablement dollars, how do you determine which partners get priority here? Is it — does it influence on transformational deal formation, industry specialization or maybe contribution to source pipeline?

Owen Ryan: It’s a couple of different things. So obviously, if you think about many of the partners that we work with, they often have dedicated teams that are almost sitting in the office of the CFO and Controller. So we try to work with those that have the strongest brand permission in those customers. We try not to sole source things. We tend to — if a customer asks us for recommendation, we try to provide them at least 3 names, typically 3 names of partners that we work with, and we try to match that up with the organization’s preference for their own customers. But again, we work with a sort of a who’s who list, but it’s their permission in the space, it’s their industry capabilities. If they’ve made the investments to really deepen their capabilities around certain products within BlackLine.

So we’ve seen a real uptick in our critical partners trying to learn and understand even more about intercompany, our invoice to cash solution. And so the better equipped they are for those, the higher the likelihood that we are to make a recommendation of them as at least one potential player in any opportunity. So that’s sort of how it’s worked so far. I will say it’s a lot easier with a smaller list of partners to navigate than the dog’s breakfast of partners we had previously. And I think that those deeper relationships are certainly opening up where those partners are that much more confident to recommend BlackLine. I think we have seen a real breaking apart of the partners sort of saying, well, you could pick this provider or you could pick that one with a more firm BlackLine is the best at this and here’s why we would recommend you go with them versus someone else?

Operator: And I’m sure our last question in the queue comes from the line of Adam Hotchkiss from Goldman Sachs.

Adam Hotchkiss: I’ll keep it to one quick one. I just wanted to ask on the 10- to 12-month sales cycles you mentioned, Owen. Obviously, that makes sense given the size of some of these opportunities. But what are you doing from the perspective of trying to automate some of the implementation work in order to lower sales cycles? And do you have any sense for how quickly and by what magnitude do you think you can reduce time and cost of implementation for customers would be really helpful to get some context.

Owen Ryan: Yes. Adam, that’s a great question because, look, the CFO has a project and he’s got 2 that can deliver 20% return just making it up, and one is in the office of CFO and one’s on sales, they’re going to pick sales all the time. So we have to find ways to deliver greater value even more quickly. So over the last sort of — when Therese and I stepped into the role, we changed out pretty much all of the leadership team of — on our professional services side. We’ve changed a lot of our customer success leadership, all with the idea of trying to drive greater implementation, greater optimization, and that was sort of just revamping the way we do things, right? Just being crisper, cleaner of how you go about it. In the last 6, 8 months, 9 months, whatever it is at this point in time.

The next phase of that was then how do you take all the lessons and experiences from all these implementations we’ve done, all these optimizations we’ve done by industry, by size of company, by workflow to then say, “Hey, here is a quicker, better way we can help you do this.” We will be making that available to our partners to use. We’ll be making that available to our customers to use because, again, what we want to do is drive that value for our customers that much faster. So you heard us talk about how many more go-lives we’ve had sequentially as well as just year-over-year, but critically, the time to get those implementations is continuing to drop. And I’ll have a better answer for you in February by how much we think that’s going to drop, but it will not be an insignificant cutoff of time that goes from sort of when the customer signs the contract to when they go live, so they begin to really optimize what we’re doing with them.

Operator: That concludes our Q&A session. At this time, I’d like to turn the call back over to Owen Ryan, CEO, for closing remarks.

Owen Ryan: So thank you all for joining the call tonight. Sorry about the little bit of technology glitches at the beginning, but we really do appreciate your interest in following BlackLine. Look forward to continuing to talk with you, share more about our journey and how we’re going to make the plans that we’ve committed to you. Everybody, have a great night. Take care.

Operator: Thank you. Thank you for attending today’s conference call. This concludes the program. You may all disconnect.