Obviously, the customer count growth is impressive and you're making a lot of good progress in the enterprise.But I guess, when you speak to large customers that want to adopt Cloudflare, but haven't yet for whatever reason, I guess, what are like the top one or two asks that they have? And it’s driven, I think a little by COVID has been that customers that traditionally have been slow to adopt the cloud from regions of the world like Europe, which has been a little bit more conservative from areas like manufacturing and industrial, which have been a little bit slower traditionally, that we are hearing more and more of them say, okay, we get it.
I think that we see the same mix of products that kind of fall across three categories for us, so security, performance, and then reliability. I was saddened to hear of his passing a few weeks ago.
So we've begun building out our field sales efforts around the world, hiring seasoned leaders to run those efforts in markets like New York, London, Munich, Sydney, Australia, those are places where we see that effort continuing to expand.We're working with great partners that help bring us to market in various areas.So IBM has been a terrific partner to us for a little over two years now, and we're excited to continue those relationships. You can unsubscribe to any of the investor alerts you've chosen to receive by visiting the “Unsubscribe” section below.
We’re worried sales productivity made slow as our team adapted to working remotely. What has been a positive surprise for us is that we've talked in the past about what our average sales cycle is, and it is less than a quarter, but even as we have continued to go upmarket and even as we've seen such growth among our large customers, our sales cycle is trending toward a faster pace, not toward a slower pace. And we're seeing real customer traction.And what's powerful about that is we're seeing that customer attraction from a lot of customers that were already Cloudflare customers.
This was a very strong quarter for us in the sales side, especially also from a quota carrying rep perspective. Founded in 1993 by brothers Tom and David Gardner, The Motley Fool helps millions of people attain financial freedom through our website, podcasts, books, newspaper column, radio show, and premium investing services.Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Cloudflare Q4 2019 earnings conference call. I’m trying to get a sense with respect to guidance, just directionally.
You must click the activation link in order to complete your subscription. And I think that actually, as you distribute, we think that the distributed nature of building this into the network is good because it makes it faster by reducing network latency. When 18 months from now you hear about some incredible new feature or a big customer win know that the investment in the people who made that happen came during this time, when we stepped on the gas, while others were pumping the brakes. The decline was primarily driven by non-strategic accounts in Asia Pacific that turned off our platform. So I think that the reality is that both of those things are true. And then one follow-up. In terms of headcount and geographies, it's pretty even spread across the geographies we serve. Fourth-quarter gross margin was 78.7%, down 20 basis points sequentially and up 180 basis points year over year. A division within the company had signed up for one of Cloudflare pay-as-you-go services by coming to our website and entering a credit card. All right. Cloudflare Access is the equivalent of a modern-day VPN, providing fast and granular access control for internal and external applications.We've already seen terrific adoption with organizations like Ericsson, Ziff Davis and 23andMe adopting Cloudflare Access and migrating away from their legacy hardware-based VPNs to a modern Cloudflare-powered zero trust model.