The story was one of revenue growing faster than expenses. Blackbaud experienced a one-percentage point improvement in gross margin, which went to 55.5 percent from 54.5 percent while expenses dropped to 46.3 percent of revenue from 47.1 percent.

Operating income rose to $90.5 million, an increase of 5 percent over the $86.2 million in last year's corresponding period.

In a recent earnings webcast, CEO Mike Gianoni said the company is building a world-class sales team but gave no figures on the number of sales reps or how much hiring has occurred. He noted the nonprofit software company has developed a customer care organization "to shift account management off sales people to allow them to concentrate 100 percent of the time on closing quota", but did not discuss the size of the new organization.