Jeffery Yabuki
Analyst · any time. Now I will turn the call over to Stephanie Gregor, Vice President of Investor Relations at Fiserv
Yes, that's a great question. And believe me, we talk about that on a very regular basis. It is -- the big factors in that are, we're selling larger deals that take larger -- they longer time to implement. They are more complicated. And so -- and these transactions, which are on the basis of total contract value, are multiple years of contract value. And frankly, there are times when things, as we talked about in the call earlier today, a couple of implementations will slip from year-to-year. You've got those risks. So you have long implementation horizons and then things can slip. There's too much regulatory, so we're going to push this. We can't implement it. So you've got things like that going on. But probably the biggest factor is, and this has been interesting for me and my time here to learn is that, as much as we would like to have it differently, high-quality recurring revenue moves on your books slowly. And it builds slowly. And it comes off slowly, unless you have some kind of an exogenous event. So as difficult as it can be at times for us to understand why we have to have -- or I'm sorry, why our sales growth is so high and it does lead to acceleration in recurring revenue, but probably not at the pace we would certainly like it to be is, that is one of the costs of having a business that has high-quality revenue, high-quality margins and frankly, very, very strong client relationships. So that is something that we are dealing with in terms of, frankly, increasing our expectations. Each year, when we talk about sales quota, that quota goes up every year. And so we are asking our sales forces to sell more. But again, you need this multiple years of strong sales to turn into that escalating growth. One of the reasons, frankly, why we can say -- we can make a statement like we have a high degree of confidence that we'll be able to see acceleration once again in our internal revenue growth is, we see the pipeline. We see what is pending implementation or pending go live, and therefore, because of how that revenue comes on, we have comfort that we would expect to see that happening again in '14.