Q4 2022 Forrester Research Inc Earnings Call
Speaker 2: The conference will begin shortly. To raise and lower your hand during Q&A, you can dial star 1 1.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Foresters Fort Quarter and full year 2022 conference call. At this time, all participants are on the listen only mode. After the speakers presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.
Speaker 4: I would not like to turn the conference over to Vice President of Investor Relations, Tyson Ceeley. Please go ahead.
Speaker 5: Thank you and hello everyone. Thanks for joining today's call. Earlier this afternoon. We issued our press release for the 4th quarter and full year 2022. If you need a copy, you can find 1 on our website and investors section.
Speaker 6: Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this call will contain four looking statements within the meaning of the Private Security's Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as expects, believes, anticipates, intends, plans, estimates.
Speaker 7: course similar expressions are intended to identify these four looking statements.
Speaker 8: These statements are based on the company's current plans and expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause future activities and results of operations to be materially different from those set forth in the forward looking statements.
Speaker 9: Factors that could cause actual results to differ are discussed in our reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward looking statements. Whether as a result of new information, further events, or otherwise.
Speaker 10: Lastly, consistent with our previous calls, today we will be discussing our performance on an adjusted basis.
Speaker 11: which excludes items affecting comparability. While reporting on an adjusted basis is not in accordance with GAP, we believe that reporting numbers on this adjusted basis provides a meaningful comparison and an appropriate basis for our discussion.
Speaker 12: You can find a detailed list of items excluded from these adjusted results in our press release.
Speaker 13: And with that, I'll hand it over to George Colony, Forrests for CEO and German. George?
Speaker 14: Thanks Tyson and welcome to Forrester's fourth quarter and full year 2022 investor call.
Speaker 15: Following my update, Chris Finn, Forrester CFO , will give a financial review of the quarter in full year.
Speaker 16: At the end of the call, I'll ask Nate Swan, Forsher's new Chief Sales Officer to give a few remarks. We will then move on to the Q&A portion of the call joined by Carrie Johnson, our Chief Product Officer.
Speaker 17: In the fourth quarter of 2022, forages revenue increased 2% with adjusted operating margin at 9.4% and EPS at 45 cents.
Speaker 18: Total CV increased 3% in the fourth quarter, down 4 points from Q3.
Speaker 19: Waller retention was 94%.
Speaker 20: For the full year, revenue increased 9%, adjusted operating margin was 13%, and EPS grew 18%.
Speaker 21: These results were driven by healthy bookings in the first half of 2022, as well as continued close management of our cost structure in the second half of the year.
Speaker 22: 2022 with a tale of two cities.
Speaker 23: In the first half of the year, the company was focused on hiring employees as we look to expand contract-valuant rates aligned with our fast 2021 pace.
Speaker 24: In mid-year, we recognize that three factors were impacting our progress. One, funding and budget pressure on our smaller technology clients.
Speaker 25: 2. The impact of inflation, geopolitical uncertainty, and the turbulent economy, and 3. The complexity of transitioning our clients out of legacy research products and into our new platform forster decisions.
Speaker 26: While we had hired aggressively and built new systems to enable the company to sustain double-digit CV growth, these moves were not enough to enable us to outrun the three intervening factors.
Speaker 27: Subsequently, we did not achieve our bookings plans in the second half of the year, and this impacted CV growth, deferred revenue, wallet retention, and ultimately revenue growth.
Speaker 28: That said, we did make progress in parts of the business that will be important drivers of growth beyond 2022, specifically for us to decisions.
Speaker 29: As you all know, Forrester Decisions was launched in 2021 as our power research platform, integrating Forrester and Sears Decisions research in one offering.
Speaker 30: It delivers vision research, strategy research, and operational research to over a dozen different executive personas across technology, marketing, sales, product, customer experience, and digital.
Speaker 31: To be clear, Forrester Decisions is the future of the company.
Speaker 32: In 2022, we achieved our goal of moving approximately one third of our CV to Forrester decisions.
While our overall research retained at 74%, forestry decisions renewed in 2022 at 89%.
Client engagement is considerably higher with Forrester decisions. On average Forrester decisions users visit our site 50% more than users of our legacy research.
And finally, clients in rich foreshred decisions that significantly higher rates than our legacy products. In Q4, the platform had 101% wallet retention as compared to total wallet retention of 94%.
In our customer experience index, four-sure decisions are the top performing four-sure product. And here are a few client testimonials.
From the Chief Revenue Officer of a Large Tech Company.
Organizations such as ours tend to have a variety of priorities across leadership. The Forster team provides a North Star for everyone and shows us where change is needed.
From an enterprise architect at a large financial services company.
In the face of budget cuts, I chose Forester because I found them more unbiased, more engaging, and able to provide insights I can act on. I doubled down on Forester to better my ROI.
And finally, from the chief enterprise architect at a workforce management services company.
Our SIFTRA company is using for sure decisions for a strategic initiative to enter new industries worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Forrester is definitely a major player in our success by providing market analysis.
Frameworks for organizations, tech recommendations, and helping us avoid the wrong sub-segments.
Forster decisions uniquely aligns technology and business leaders to accelerate growth.
As examples, we closed a number of substantial deals in Q4, including a $760,000 contract with a large European bank, spending both technology and marketing services with Informisher decisions.
We also closed a multi-year $850,000 deal with a personal care company, encompassing our technology executive, technology architecture and delivery, security and risk, and digital business and strategy services.
In addition to for sure decisions,
2022 was a successful year for our events business.
As COVID restrictions were lifted, we hosted 11 events across the course of the year with over 5,300 paid attendees, 850 of those being sea level executives.
All of these events were hosted in person via our digital platform enabling us to reach a wider more global audience.
In the fourth quarter we hosted five events with over 1,500 paid attendees.
Our events business grew 139% in 2022.
Let me turn now to our Outlook and Thoughts on 2023.
As Chris will outline in a few moments, we anticipate that 2023, like 2022, will be a tale of two halves.
We expect pressure on our key metrics in the first half, driving declines on both the top and bottom lines, before returning to growth in the second half of the year.
For the full year, we expect slight declines on our top and bottom lines.
Now, as I have outlined on previous calls, we are engaged in building a contract value growth engine.
This engine expands CV, which grows cash flow, which we then invest in product, sales, and acquisitions.
Through those investments we further increase V and the model propels the company forward at double digit growth rates.
Accordingly, we will pursue three initiatives in 2023, all pointed at driving CV growth.
We will focus on improving and enhancing for sure decisions as the year progresses.
This will include the creation of deeper research on how executives across customer-facing functions like marketing, customer experience, and digital can all align.
Companies that achieve alignment grow revenue 2.4 times faster and profit 2 times faster than non-aligned organizations.
Our second initiative is to increase the effectiveness of our Salesforce.
We are entering 2023 with 436 salespeople, 89% fully ramped, and these are some of the highest levels for both in the history of the company.
Nates WAN, our newly hired chief sales officer, is focused on three priorities.
Selling higher in our client organizations.
Cross-selling for sure decisions into new buying centers.
and expanding our new business team.
We are very happy to have Nate leading sales and he is already executing his plan to create a high performance selling team.
Nate brings decades of sales experience in the research industry with deep knowledge of building data-driven, repeatable, scalable, selling motions.
Now let Nate introduce himself in a few minutes.
The third initiative is to continue to optimize our consulting and events businesses to be more potent drivers of CV.
Much of this work will center in ensuring that our consulting events are augmenting and stimulating new research contracts.
We are laser focused on these three initiatives.
By year end, we anticipate that approximately two-thirds of our CV will be transitioned to the new product.
As we progress through the year, we will provide updates on our client migration.
In summary, well, 2022 was not the year that anyone planned for. We remain resolute in our mission of transitioning our clients to forest or decisions. The platform which will enable a company to consistently grow contract value at double digit rates.
We remain a highly cash-generative company with a healthy balance sheet over 2700 clients, including nearly half of the Fortune 500 and a trusted global brand.
The business world remains highly dynamic. When you overlay technology into that world, smart companies need research to understand, to compete, to grow, and to differentiate.
That is the longstanding and long-term mega trend that fuels our business model and drives demand in our $78 million Tam or total available market.
I will now turn the call over to Chris Finn for our financial update, Chris.
Thanks, George, and thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon.
As George discussed, our fourth quarter results were mixed. We were in line with our guide on the top line while we exceeded our guidance for adjusted operating margins and EPS.
At the same time, we continue to see a few of our key metrics decline compared to the previous quarter.
Before getting into our detailed fourth quarter and full year results for 2022, I'd like to take a step back and discuss a few of the important decisions we made over the course of the past year.
As you've talked about on our recent calls, we, along with the broader market, were faced with a lot of uncertainty.
Global inflation, war in Europe , FX headwinds, lingering impacts from COVID, and the possibility of a recession in the US.
Unfortunately, most of these headwinds have not abated.
Fortunately, though, we have taken actions to weather what's ahead and manage our P&L and drive CV growth as we exit 2023. To this end, there are two specific areas that will highlight our cost management and the accelerated transition to far-stored decisions.
Regarding cost management, as George noted, we began to tightly manage our cost structure going into the second half of the year.
This culminated in a difficult decision in early 2023 to reduce approximately 4% of our workforce.
This, along with ongoing prudent management across our cost base, allows us to remain agile for the year we see ahead.
Further, we made the decision in mid-2022 to accelerate our CV transition to our new research platform, Forrester Decisions.
and announce the sun's heating of our remaining legacy products.
While this has created some churn within a smaller clients, the decision to pivot more quickly on a migration efforts have begun to pay off.
I'm happy to report that we exit the fourth quarter with approximately one-third of our CV on the farthest decisions platform representing over $113 million in contribution.
Further, client and wallet retention within the forest of decision platform were both strong, which I'll highlight later in my comments.
Given the metrics we exited 2022 with, combined with the strong client acceptance of this new platform, we have confidence in our goal of converting approximately two-thirds of CV into far-shaded decisions by year-end 2023.
We still have work to do, but by managing our costs and driving the transition of Florida decisions, we are building a strong base on which we can grow in the years ahead.
Set another way. We continue to manage what is within our control. At the same time, create a foundation in the business that can navigate the uncertainty in the market over the next few quarters.
I will provide additional details when I discuss guidance in a moment, but let me now turn to our results for the fourth quarter in full year 2022.
As you look at the fourth quarter, as anticipated, we continue to see our key metrics decline.
Specifically, CV growth was 3% in the fourth quarter, which was down from 7% growth in the prior quarter. In addition, overall wall retention was 94%, and client retention was 74%, down 3.1 point respectively from the prior quarter.
While we are not happy with these numbers, as we expressed in our third quarter call, they were not unexpected.
The bright spot here though is within the farthest of the decision's platform where these metrics were significantly higher.
Specifically, wallet retention for far-stered decisions in the fourth quarter was 101%. Seven points higher than the total portfolio number and client retention for far-stered decisions in the fourth quarter was 89%, 15 points higher than the total portfolio number.
As we continue to migrate our legacy clients and drive additional cross-sell and upsell opportunities into the farthest of decisions based, along with new acquisition sales on the platform, we expect our metrics to improve as far as the decisions continue to make up a larger percentage of the portfolio.
In terms of sales headcount, through the fourth quarter of 2022, we were up 11% versus the previous year with a record number of quarter carriers going into the calendar year.
As our sales force continues to gain experience selling Forrester decisions, we expect productivity to accelerate in the back half of the year. This, coupled with the success of Forrester decisions since our launch, as evidenced by the strong metrics we reported today, along with new sales leadership, is a large part of what gives us confidence in our ability to drive future growth.
Moving now to the P&L. As previously mentioned, we delivered CV growth of 3% in the fourth quarter. This combined with a decline in consulting growth for the period resulting in overall revenue growth in Q4 of 2%. For the full year, we delivered 9% revenue growth.
which was fueled in part by strong CV growth in 2021 and a rebound during 2022 in our advanced business due to the hybrid model we continue to execute.
Specifically for the total company, we generated 136.9 million dollars of revenue in the fourth quarter compared to 133.7 million dollars in the prior year period.
For the full year, revenue was $537.8 million compared to $494.3 million in 2021. These results include an approximately 1 point headwind from FX in both the fourth quarter and for the full year.
Research revenues increased 3% in the fourth quarter of 2022 and 9% for the full year.
As expected, client retention and wall retention continued to decline quarter quarter-requarter as previously noted.
Regarding these declines, which we continue to expect through the first half of 2023, there are three specific areas to call out.
1. Our sales headcount continues to build. As you mentioned on our last call, we had our highest number of ramping reps in the second half of 2022.
The majority of these reps are now fully ramped, which we expect to drive growth as the year unfolds.
Two, we continue to transition clients to far-as-to-decisions and this creates some churn in our legacy base. As we have discussed before, the clients we transition to the new platform spend more with us.
3. Macroeconomic issues continue to remain ahead when, as they are for many other companies.
Turning now to our consulting business, which posted revenues of $37.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2022, and $152.6 million for the full year, representing declines of 4% and 2% respectively, versus the prior year periods.
As we've stated before, these declines continue to be driven by a combination of our analyst shifting a portion of their focus to delivering on our CV business and the overall effects of the macroeconomic environment.
And finally, our events business grew 43% in the fourth quarter to $7.2 million. For the full year, the segment was up nearly 140% to $30.7 million, driven by strong demand from attendees and sponsors and our continued hybrid approach to in-person events.
As George noted, we held 11 events with over 5,300 paid attendees. We expect to host similar sized events in 2023, but acknowledge there may be some growth challenges based on potential reductions in corporate related travel budgets due to the ongoing macroeconomic environment.
Continuing down our P&L on an adjusted basis.
Operating expenses for the fourth quarter increased by 7% largely driven by higher head count costs.
Specifically on headcount, for the fourth quarter we were up 14% compared to the same period in 2021. On a four-year basis, operating expenses increased 9%, also largely driven by headcount. These headcount increases were materially related to our investments in our go-to-market engine and research, as well as infrastructure projects to drive efficiencies in the business.
These are now largely behind us. Operating income in the fourth quarter decreased by 28% to $12.9 million or 9.4% of revenue in the current quarter compared to $17.8 million or 13.3% of revenue in the fourth quarter of 2021.
On a full year basis, operating income increased by 9% to $69.7 million, or 13% of revenue, compared with $64.2 million, or 13% of revenue, in 2021.
Interest expense for the fourth quarter of 2022 was $0.7 million as compared to $1 million in the same period of 2021. On a full year basis, Interest expense was $2.5 million compared to $4.2 million in 2021. This reduction was driven by a lower outstanding debt.
Finally, net income decrease 25% to 8.5 million dollars in the fourth quarter of 2022 compared to 11.3 million dollars in a previous year's period.
EPS decreased 24% in the fourth quarter to 45 cents compared to 59 cents in the year ago quarter.
On a four-year basis, an income increased 17% to $47.2 million, and an EPS increased 18% to $2.46.
Looking at our capital structure, U2DCASL from operating activities was $39.4 million, and capital expenditures were $5.7 million, resulting in $123.3 million of cash and investments on hand as we executed the fourth quarter.
There were no debt payments or stock buybacks as quarter, leaving us with $50 million about standing debt and approximately $75 million of our stock repurchase authorization intact.
Let me now walk you through how we expect 2023 to unfold.
While the macroeconomic outlook remains challenging, we have incorporated the following assumptions into the guidance we are providing today. Specifically, one, uncertainty in the tech sector will continue to affect us. Well we have a great deal of time and place and new leadership that we're confident in, and believe we can manage through what is ahead, the turnover in the technology industry remains a challenge.
2. We continue to anticipate macro headwinds, including the likelihood of recession in the first half with some improvement in the back half of the year going into 2024.
3. As we continue to transition clients to farce to decisions and some set of legacy products, we expect ongoing churn with smaller clients. This will cause some of our key metrics such as client and wallet attention to remain under pressure over the next quarter or two. But we fully expect these to rebound later this year.
as we continue to grow our Forrester Decisions platform. Putting all this together, we expect our CV growth to continue to decline through the first half of the year and begin to rebound in the second half of the year to mid to high single digits as we progress through our Forrester Decisions transition.
As such, revenue growth should follow a similar trajectory, down in the first half of the year and returning to low single-digit growth in the back half. Finally, as a reminder from our third quarter call, starting this year we will only provide guidance on a full year basis. Where we see appropriate, we will give color around the timing of various metrics over the course of the year.
line for 2023 we expect revenue to be $518 to $538 million or down 4% to flat growth versus 2022. The guidance assumes a low single digit decline to flat growth over the course of the year in our research business with ramping in the back half of the year as well as modest growth and events.
We expect consulting to be down slightly for the year given the reasons I outlined previously.
Given the actions we have taken to control costs, we would expect our operating margins to be in the range of 12 to 13 percent for 2023.
Interest expense is expected to be $2.5 million for the year and we are guiding to a 4-year tax rate of approximately 29%.
Taking all this into account, we would expect EPS to be in the range of $2.25 to $2.45 for the full year.
We have incorporated an appropriate level of caution into our outlook, ensuring we have taken all factors whether external or internal into account. To the extent of the tech environment to rebound from where it is, and where the macro environment plays out less severe than currently forecasted, it could be upside to the skydens.
In summary, we continue to believe that 2023 will be another challenging year, but as we demonstrated in 2022, we have confidence in the team's ability to navigate these challenges. While we anticipate the year to be mixed with a slow start and then growth ramping in the back half, we have the right strategy and team in place to face these challenges.
We continue to be excited about the ongoing migration of our decisions and the value brings to our clients and the growth it will bring to the company in the long term.
With that, let me turn it back to George for some concluding remarks.
To summarize today's comments, the tech slowdown, economic conditions, and the transition to our new research platform dampened our growth in 2022.
But we remain laser focused on rolling out force and decisions which is fast growing, renewing at high rates with high client engagement.
We expect 2023 to start slowly with improving performance in the 2nd, half of the year.
Now, before we head off to Q&A, I wanted to turn the call over to Nate Swan, our new Chief Sales Officer. Nate?
Thanks for the warm welcome George and good afternoon everyone. I'd like to spend a few moments talking about what attracted me to Forrester as well as provide a high level view of my philosophy and approach that I'm bringing to the sales organization.
As both George and Chris have outlined, the launch of Forrester Decisions in 2021 has proven to be a great success.
This platform is still in the early earnings and I look forward to leading the sales force in driving this product to the next level.
But it wasn't just a product portfolio that attracted me to Forrester. It was the people.
Forster has strong leadership team in place, as well as employees across the organization who are motivated and capable of delivering growth.
Regarding my philosophy.
I firmly believe that in order to be a successful growth company, we need to ensure we have high performing sales culture with coaching and collaboration to drive better outcomes for our customers, the business and each other.
Creating a culture of high performance happens by having a clear customer obsessed go-to-market strategy, which includes enablement, coaching, and development plans.
Teaching leaders how to be great coaches with laser focus on developing and helping them win.
Ensuring our sales leaders are focused on controllables, specifically the inputs that are going to make our rep successful with the goal to always achieve and beat plan.
Enabling our Salesforce to call high in organizations and focus on the outcomes of executives and the companies they represent.
and giving opportunities to everyone in the sales organization to grow their careers where they want to go.
driving the biggest impact for themselves and the company.
If they aren't successful, we will be successful.
The team at Forrester has shown that we have a unique value proposition and go-to-market plan that has positive results for our clients.
That unique value proposition has an incredible total addressable market giving us no shortage of opportunity.
As I see it, it's about understanding why we're successful and replicating those best practices around the business until they become standard practices that scale.
In summary, Forrester's value to positively impact our customers is unique.
We have untapped market opportunities to bring in new customers as well as the ability to upsell and cross sell within our current clients.
While there's work to do, the future at Forster is bright. I'm so happy to join all Forster rights on this path forward. Let me now hand it over to the operator for the Q&A portion of this call. Thank you, sir.
As a reminder to ask a question, please first star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced.
To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again.
Please send by while we compile the Q&A roster.
And I show our first question comes from the line of Andrew Nicholas from William Blair. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. First question I wanted to ask was kind of on how 2022 played out. George, I think you mentioned twice the three factors that are impacting progress between funding pressure on smaller tech clients, the economy inflation. Innovation.
and then the transition onto the FD platform. I'm just wondering, you know, relative to where we stood six months ago, which of those three buckets have deteriorated, if any, or if those factors are largely consistent with kind of how you expected them to play out, just trying to get a sense for.
for what all is immediately unfolded over the past couple quarters versus maybe what you expected six months ago.
Well, I think that, look, nobody's paying for anything in 2022. It was a very unexpected year. It's changing as the year goes on, as we get deeper into the fourth quarter, Europe is actually beginning to improve.
So, I think the economic signals remain mixed, but maybe a little more positive as the year ended. I think tech was degrading faster of those three factors in Q3 and Q4. We saw that in the layoffs.
Got it. And then in terms of capital allocation, I apologize if I missed it in the prepared remarks, but just kind of wondering how you're viewing that for 23. It looks like you still have about $50 million of debt. Not sure if you have any plans to pay that down at any point. Thank you.
If you have prioritization of share repurchases or just kind of an update there would be great. Thank you.
Yeah, sure. I'll take that one. So, you know, we generally have over 120 million tax investments on hand. Our priorities for the remain the shame million on forward from our top allocation standpoint. Wanted to reinvesting in the business.
Two, being opportunistic and looking at value creating acquisitions as we move forward. And then the third is paying down debt. We're going to be a little bit more opportunistic about your buybacks, not really in the plan at this juncture, but really our priorities kind of remain the same. And to the end around value creation acquisitions.
We just hired a new head of corporate development, that's an area that we're going to definitely look harder at as we go forward, certainly with values being where they are in the sector. We do have 50 million of debt. The training is noted in approximately 75 million share by back authorization intact as we go forward.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I show our next question. Comes from the line of Andrew Sultastrom from Sedotti. Please go ahead.
Hi, thank you for taking my questions. I'm just curious for
You mentioned a couple of drivers for the year to drive the second half there, but you didn't mention anything about new products or offerings. What can we expect in terms of that? How does that take place to your forecast for the year?
We have a very big product of portion decisions which we are very focused on. And as Carrie, as you are said, and you serve her in the comments, forster decisions is still our big new product offering. We're focusing all forster innovations in that platform, in the research and the product itself, and in the value. And as you are said, we're focusing on the product itself, and in the value.
One key that one of many priorities is enhancing.
You have one of our major priorities that is enhancing that product.
So we expect to put two or three very big new features in that product every year.
Okay, thank you. And I understand that your...
cutting some of your workforce, but how does that play out for your sales team? And are you still hiring and expanding there or are you just taking a step now and focusing on what you have?
Yeah, yeah. So from a Salesforce perspective, we were definitely focused on so hiring the on sale limitation. You know, we were up approximately 11% last year. So a double digit growth in Salesforce has George noted that we've got a record number of quarter carrying reps coming into this year.
and of course I didn't really.
Yeah, under the reduction force really did not impact the port carrying edge out. No, not at all. Yeah.
the production force really did not impact the photo carrying edge of it at all. OK, thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
And I show our next question comes from the line of Vincent Calicchio from Barrington. Please go ahead.
Yes, thanks for taking my questions, George. Could you give us more color on the complexities involved in the transitions? I suppose.
some things that had happened that were unexpected.
any color would help.
Yeah I think.
We decided when we launched forward some decisions that we would continue legacy products on for, I think it's going to end up being three years.
And the complexity of this primary and I could really mention the might of our marks then. The complexity of this was really around the smaller tech vendors.
They were not as...
And that is prone to make the transition that we had predicted and put in our model.
So, it's really, and many of you have, of course, the problems in the tech industry generally. And it's about funding and also venture money, because much tatter is a year push to So that's my answer carries any of you another answer in a second, but that's the primary It's very complex. You didn't saw it in 2022. No answer here.
No, I have the same answer, although the goal and the nine of four statisticians is to go a bit higher in both our target audience and target customer base in terms of places where we would have an opportunity to sell the new product and also cross-el and enrich on that existing product. So we did expect some...
as a result of that, but I think the macroeconomic condition contributed more to some of the complexity than we expected. I think the good news is that many of the large tech vendors are more than 50% migrating to poor citizens. And those are actually very complex conversations.
with the, you can imagine, the Microsofts of the world who have been buying from us, using our research in a certain way, and now with four presentations there's a little bit of a 50 degree pivot there. So, but the good news of that is that those conversations are going well and we're 50% through those.
of the Microsofts of the world who have been buying from us using our research in a certain way and now for some decisions there's a little bit of a 50 degree commitment there. So but the good news of that is those conversations are going well and we're again more 50% of through those Thank you very much.
And when you, I assume you're trying to attract new clients, obviously, with the FD approach.
so to speak, so.
Are you saying, did you hit your expectations in the quarter of signing up new FD clients? What does that look like?
Sure, it's Carrie. We did. I mean, as you suspect, the majority of forced or decisions sales do come from our losing base, sort of by design, but we're very pleased with our new business for those over half of us.
of our new business hookings in the year or to the new platform. Very pleased with that progress as well. So we're happy with both new business and the renewal side of it.
in the year or to the new platforms, very pleased with that progress as well. So we're happy with both new business and the renewal side of it.
And I had one thing that's even to that, you know, remember from the Sunsetting Discussions of the time, you know, this year we are only selling new FD so there's no longer new sales of legacy business.
So we'll have a laser focus on the business acquisition.
Yeah, and Vince, maybe too much information for you, but remember that for your decisions, I'll just look at large tech here for a moment, we are selling new products into those companies, primarily to their CMOs, CIOs, heads of customer experience. So we're attracting...
This is our largest vertical, but in those companies we're tracking a whole set of new executives.
So that's helping your business business there as well. Okay. Thank you.
business business figures well. Okay thank you. Thank you.
I'm Turner for the thank you. I'm sure no further questions in the queue at this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to management for closing remarks.
Thank you everyone for joining us this evening. The IR team, this is Tyson, will be around this evening and tomorrow and the weeks ahead. For any follow-up questions, please feel free to reach out to us. Thank you for joining.
Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
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