Great. Good morning. Hi, my name is David Grossman, and welcome to the Definitive Healthcare presentation. To my left, I have Jason Krantz, the company's founder, Executive Chairman, and Interim CEO for a couple more weeks, probably.
Couple weeks.
Yeah. So, Jason, thank you for coming.
Welcome.
Really great to have you. So, really informal presentation today. I think Jason's gonna do a quick overview, and then we'll just get into the Q&A, and anybody has any questions, feel free to reach out. So-
Great.
Go ahead, Jason.
Thanks for coming, everyone. Appreciate it. So, just a quick overview on Definitive Healthcare. What we do is we help companies commercialize within the complex and large healthcare ecosystem. So, if you think about our product, think about it in three key ways. The first thing we do is our foundation is a deep data set on every key player within the healthcare ecosystem. So physicians, hospitals, clinics, and skilled nursing facilities. We track every scientific and medical expert globally, the people running clinical trials, people doing the publications. We track the consumers that are consuming all of the healthcare.
Then we pull all this together into an analytical platform that allows our clients to analyze their markets, identify targets, both healthcare provider targets as well as consumer targets, and then engage with those targets across all of their different channels, whether it be through their CRM, through our SaaS tools that allow them to access the information and analyze the information, or connected directly into their internal systems. We sell to really anybody wanting to sell into this market. So our key markets are four. The first is biotech and biopharma companies. So these are companies that are developing new therapeutics that want to utilize our data to identify who are the doctors most likely to prescribe their drugs or influence the market. The second is medtech. Medtech, developing medical devices, very similar to the biopharma use case.
As they launch a new device, who do they want to target? How do they sell, and what's their key messaging? Then we sell to the healthcare providers themselves. So these are large health systems and post-acute players that are looking to generate more referrals and build out their physician and facility network. And then finally, we sell to this whole group of companies that we call our diversified companies. These are companies that sell to many different verticals, including healthcare, but they have a big healthcare presence, and they know that they need specific healthcare information in order to target this complex market.
All right, good. Good, good overview. So let me pick up on a couple of things-
Sure
... that you just mentioned. So I think of your business in two dimensions. I think of data acquisition and then and curation, and then the analytics on that data, you know, to do something, or those raw data to provide insights to your customers at a very high level. And to me, if you think about the world we're living in now, it sounds very similar to what's going on with AI and GenAI, right? So with that as a backdrop, maybe you can comment on your observations relative to those dynamics and both the opportunities and risks to your existing model, kind of based on kind of all the things we're seeing in developments, you know, in the AI side.
Sure. So I'll, I'll talk about those two pieces, and then I'll talk about how AI fits into what we've really been doing since I founded the company back in 2011. So first, you talked about data. Data is absolutely critical. We collect our data in four key ways. One of those is first-party collection. So we make several hundred thousand phone calls every single year out to providers to collect information on what they're doing, their executives, their technology infrastructure, their affiliations. We get data from the public domain, so we pull in information from a few hundred thousand different public application sources, websites, payer websites, physician websites, healthcare system websites, so on and so forth. We get data from government agencies, and then we buy some third-party data, which is mostly claims data.
So we have data on about 300 million patients, all of the diagnoses, the procedures, and the prescriptions that those patients are getting prescribed from the different doctors. So that's all the data side. Then you have the platform side, the analytics. So we take this information, and we allow our clients to access it through SaaS tools to analyze their markets, figure out their targets, and engage more successfully with their target provider and physician, and clients. But in the middle of this is a tremendous amount of data science and AI that's becoming more and more sophisticated over time. So this works in two ways. The first is we use AI in order to help us link together information that we're getting from multiple different sources, whether it be our first party, getting data from the public domain.
There's a lot of work to fill in the blanks here, to extrapolate, to make it a fulsome data set that our clients can use to understand the entire healthcare ecosystem. Additionally, we derive a lot of new insights, so we create data using data science and AI. So some examples of this: right now, we are rolling out a new product focused on key influencers within the healthcare universe. So these are doctors, physicians, and investigators who can actually influence the market as a new drug or a therapy comes to market. So we're using all of the data that we have, claims data, publications, clinical trial data, and we're using models in order to pull this all together and help our clients understand exactly the most important people that they need to spend their time with.
So in a universe of 2 million physicians, it's critical to figure out who are those 10 to 15 to 30 that actually matter, where you want to invest all your time and spend your time. The second thing that we do is we use AI in order to pull this all into our platform. So, tying it all together, creating the data science on top of it, and then putting it in a way where our clients are getting actual insights versus just getting raw data. So a big differentiator of ours is great data, proprietary data, but also helping our clients figure out how do they actually solve their end business problems.
So we've heard a lot about specialized data sets and specialized large language models are much smaller, fewer parameters, easier to less costly, you know, to train, among other things. So is there any way to make a connection between all the data that you've accumulated over all these years and the curation of the data to create your own large language models? I mean, it kind of sounds, in some respects, you're already doing that a little bit, but is there another play here that kind of expands the TAM, where you could build a very specialized large language model that could be marketed separately?
Yeah, it's a good question. So we'll continue to focus on deriving new data using more and more sophisticated AI, including large language models. The other thing, though, that we will do over time is we have all of this data, consumer data, expert data, physician provider data. We're pulling this all together into a single place, where we'll be able to layer on sort of GPT type of analytics in order to allow our clients to access any of this information and do some of that work themselves. Now, of course, it's all highly specialized work, so we have data scientists that are able to use this data to derive new data. That will be the primary use, but providing our clients access this to be able to natural language query across all of our data will become increasingly important.
Let's take a minute just to step back, you know, on the volatility in the markets, 'cause it's been post-pandemic, it's been incredibly volatile, not just for you, but for everybody-
Mm-hmm.
You know, in the healthcare and markets. And, what's interesting during periods like this is that it provides opportunity, really, to reformulate the business, right? And to reposition the business, differently when the cyclical dynamics play out, right? And you've made some pretty significant changes here in the last, you know, three or four months since the beginning of the year, particularly in the go-to-market selling motion. So do you wanna highlight just for everybody, what those changes were and actually what you were seeing that led you to make those changes, aside from the cyclical dynamics that we're all familiar with?
Sure. Yeah, it's a great question, and it does offer opportunities. So if you think about the changes that we made through the course of this year already, put them in two different buckets: go-to-market, and then where we're focused from a product standpoint, both of which are incredibly important. On the more short term, our go-to-market changes, we made a major restructuring in January of this year. And that was meant to do a few key things. First, it was a cost restructuring to reflect a different growth environment than 2021 and 2022. So we took out a tremendous amount of overlays that we didn't think were having an impact on our ability to drive sales, as well as some management spans and layers.
The second thing that we did is we refocused more of our resources on our large enterprise clients. So we define enterprise clients as those that have $100,000 or more in contract value with us. We put more resources on these groups in the form of people who can deliver more value to these customers, as well as smaller books so that we could penetrate more deeply across different therapeutic areas and different divisions. So we see these customers as a huge growth driver for us. They renew at a higher rate, et cetera, et cetera. And then we took all of our SMID customers, and we put them into what we call our growth area.
So this is all about heavy, high transaction, high volume type of sale, that is very different than how we approach our enterprise clients, where you do a lot more account planning, you're really thinking about how can we penetrate deeply across this organization. So this is all about how do we set this up to very efficiently bring on these clients and service these clients. So that's all on the go-to-market side. We're seeing some strong performance from that. So as we've talked about on earnings, the year started very slow. When you do a big go-to-market restructuring, there's a lot of work to get people into their new roles and responsibilities. As a result, our pipeline built slower at the beginning of the year, but that has ramped back up to historical levels, so we're excited to see that.
On the product side, what we're focused on is, how do we make our this proprietary data that we have even more accessible to our clients in a self-service, analytical type of capability? Most of the competitors within this market that provide data wrap a tremendous amount of services around this. It's, you know, if you wanna get information on your market, you might buy data from somebody, and then you got to wait two to three months or three weeks to get that data in a way that's actually usable for you. We're creating self-service products that allow you to analyze in real time, iterate on this data, and then engage and get the data that you need in order to successfully message and go target these customers.
Bringing really the strategic all the way to the tactical in product. Those are the two areas that we're focused a lot of attention on right now.
So, on the product side, just to make sure I understand. So, the concept is to empower the user or the customer to take the data and to apply certain self-service tools to get time to benefit much quicker. In other words, the returns are much quicker by virtue of just getting the data, performing the analytics on it that they want, and use it much more quickly than they could.
That's right. So the returns are much quicker, and it also allows people to iterate more. So anybody that's done a good analysis, I'm sure bankers have done a few, but you know that your first analysis is not right. But if you go and you request this from a consultant, you get your analysis, you gotta make modifications to it. You wait another two-three weeks. With the tools that we're developing that came from an acquisition we did last year called Populi, which had great analytical tools for the provider market, we're expanding that to all of our markets. That will allow clients in real time to analyze their TAM, to create target lists, to figure out and iterate on, is there areas where they can maybe expand their market?
Or, you know, how do they wanna think about their targeting in real time, so that they can continue to improve that, as they go to market. So that's a big change for how clients consume claims analytics in general, and when you bring all of that data together with our reference and affiliation data that's highly proprietary and all our expert data, you've got a really powerful solution.
Right. So you mentioned the competitive outlook or competition, and I just wanna, I had some questions on that. So let's hit that, because, you know, Veeva reported last week, as you know, they own a marketing intelligence platform of their own called Crossix, which probably overlaps with close to half your business, right? It's, you know about it, no?
We don't compete with Crossix-
At all?
Very much, actually. Yeah, Crossix is much more about digital marketing and the analytics that go around that, and we are not heavily into that area at this moment.
Okay. So interestingly enough, they saw an uptick in their business. So since you don't really see them competitively, what are the differences? And is some of that uptick a leading indicator for your business in terms of... You know, 'cause they were talking just about fundamentally the demand. They serve large pharma, of course.
Mm-hmm.
Anything to take away from their commentary about that?
Unlike with Crossix. I mean, where we've seen the market go, so the macro environment's been tough the last couple of years. We've seen different end markets go through different cycles. So at the beginning, providers were hit really hard coming out of COVID. Elective surgeries were down. They had major staffing issues that generated expenses that were growing at a much faster pace than revenues for them. So they've started to return to growth, so that's exciting to see, and we've done well within providers. Diversified clients, particularly software and IT on the small end, was hit very hard last year due to the financing environment. That we're starting to see some improvement there. Biotech was hit very hard last year, of course. Q1 showed some improvement in financing.
We'll see how that continues throughout the rest of the year, but that's something that if that continues, could be very positive for the industry overall. Big pharma has been later to the game. They're really cost-conscious right now, is what we've found. So they are trying to deal with, what does the Inflation Reduction Act mean to them? There hasn't been a lot of challenge out of biotechs in the last year or two, so that allows them to get a bit more complacent and look in and figure out, how do they wring some costs out? So that's been an area where we've seen some headwinds over the last six months or so. We expect that will turn around. It's just a question of when that happens.
What are the leading indicators you look at in terms of large pharma and their, you know, kind of willingness to start spending a little bit more?
I mean, the indicators that we look at internally, of course, are things like pipeline, win rate, days in cycle, sales cycle, that type of thing. So that's what we're looking at.
FDA approvals, do those kind of factor into it at all?
A little bit. I think biotech financing is-
Right
... a good leading indicator-
Right
... because they put pressure on big pharma to grow as well. So again, that's early stages, but it's good to see some financing happening.
Right. So I wanna go to retention, because I think retention was obviously an issue, right, for last year. Your, your kind of a subscription-like model-
Mm-hmm
... so that's really the primary determinant of your growth rate. And I think the enterprise client count was down sequentially in March. And your guidance for 2024, I think you've said, you know, publicly, that it's—you're still gonna be under 100% as corporate-wide-
Mm-hmm
... not just on the large client side. So, you know, maybe you could just give us some more insight into what's happening within the base. 'Cause, you know, you could have a dynamic where you've got an enterprise client that's going be spending less, and they become they, they're no longer counted as an enterprise client. And there can be other dynamics in terms of common threads. So anything you can share to give us some better insight into what's going on there, and maybe an update on kinda where we are trending at least, you know, now that we're six months or five-
Yeah
... months into the year, if you will.
Yeah. There's really three reasons why enterprise clients could change. The first is our ability to bring on new enterprise clients is, of course, very important.
Mm-hmm.
As I mentioned, Q1 in particular was pretty slow from a go-to-market perspective due to macro headwinds, but also just all of the internal disruption from the go-to-market restructuring that we did. So you bring in fewer new ones. At the same time, the second way we get enterprise clients is we upsell them into. So we have a land and expand strategy. We might get a company on for $80,000, and if we have the products to upsell to them, we're able to get them over $100,000 that way and count them. Again, a lot of disruption within the marketing at the beginning of this year, that area was slower.
And then on the downsell side, you could have either companies that were above $100,000 and now are below $100,000, or they go away completely. You know, historically, we have not had a tremendous number go away completely. We are seeing merger and acquisitions. You lose companies for that. We lost a fair number of biotech clients over the last year that just spent over $100,000 and just went away.
Mm
... entirely. Either they didn't get more funding, or their clinical trial failed, or whatever it might be. So those are the different reasons that you can end up with enterprise clients, not going up and to the right. You know, as a note, last year, in this particular quarter, in Q1, enterprise clients went down as well.
Mm.
So there is some seasonality to it as well.
Got it. And, you know, it would seem that you know, your upsell, you know, is probably the best sell, at least in some respects, right? Getting more out of the existing base. So do you wanna talk a little bit more of what you're doing on the product side, you know, just to ensure that you've got, you know, the sales engine, once you get that retooled-
Yeah
has a product, if you will, to really go into these customers and sell more basically, and increase ARPU.
This has been a big focus of mine, since the beginning of the year.
Right.
Is how do we get product back on track in order to create those opportunities to upsell and also drive velocity with new logos? So a couple of areas that we're focused on. The first is, as I mentioned briefly, we bought a company called Populi last year, and what Populi has is a visualization and analytical platform that allows provider clients, so big health systems, big hospitals, to analyze all of our claims data and our reference and affiliation data in ways that meet their very specific use cases. So things like, how do you find more physicians to drive referrals within a specific service line? Or how do you reduce leakage when patients are falling outside of your system?
These are the exact type of problems that health systems are thinking about all day, and these analytics allow them to get a very quick time to value and a quick, very quick ROI. So what we're doing is we're taking that platform, and we're applying that to our other verticals. So now, over the course of the year, we'll be rolling this out to both our diversified clients. So if you think about we have a lot of staffing clients, for example. So how do you take the data and create staffing dashboards and analytics that allow people to, much more quickly identify their targets, size their markets, and engage with those clients? So again, how do you reduce that time to value by very specific analytics that meet the client's needs?
And then life sciences, we'll continue to roll out through the rest of the year as well. So we think that that's a very important piece. The second thing that we've done is we've added consumer data into our overall data. So this is really important for our provider clients as well as life sciences clients, some on diversified as well. So life sciences companies are, as we all see on the advertisements every single day, are more and more directly targeting consumers. We're enabling that through all the consumer data that we have now. Whether that be through more digital marketing, direct to consumer, or just sizing markets and figuring out where do they wanna be, where do they wanna advertise, what are the most important growing markets for them.
So the Populi acquisition, it sounds like you're able now to leverage that well beyond their existing base, and that gets back to your self-service commentary about-
Mm-hmm
... yeah, self-service tools to manipulate the data themselves, right?
That's right.
Right. Got it. Okay. So, you talked a little bit about, you know, kind of the dynamics, I think on your, your last conference call. I think you were saying that March got better. Is there anything you can talk about the KPIs for April and May that give us a sense of kinda how you're trending so far in the second quarter?
Yeah, so what we talked about in March is really about pipeline adds.
Right.
So as I mentioned, January and February were extremely slow, compared to historical standards, just due to all that disruption, the roles and responsibilities, you know, all the things that happen when you do a large-scale restructuring.
Mm-hmm.
And that took longer to normalize than I would've expected, certainly. March was up about 80% on our new logo pipeline adds versus January, and close to kind of what we would see historically. We're seeing that trend continue, where we're getting back to what we would expect from a pipeline add standpoint. Now, obviously, of course, this is all early-stage, new pipeline adds-
Mm-hmm
... so it takes time to work through the system, but it's very encouraging to see.
So the guidance does imply, you know, some sequential growth, I think, in the back half of the year, and so maybe you can share, do you have visibility in that ramp currently based on the pipeline, or is there still a fair amount of go get, if you will, to hit those sequential growth targets for the back half of the year?
I mean, in general, we have a highly visible... well, a lot of visibility into our future revenue, just by the nature of we bring in revenue into a big contract, we defer that over 12 months. So we have a tremendous amount of visibility overall. But there's work to do, always.
Yeah.
So we gotta go out, and we gotta execute, and we've gotta continue to get the pipeline adds that we've been getting over the last few months. We need to continue to execute on that. And we need to keep working on the new product launches and make sure that they're successful.
All right, so just the second dimension, you know, just walking through the earnings piece here, you know, your business is highly scalable, right? Like, incredibly-
Extremely
... scalable and incredibly profitable for before going public, you know, north of 40% EBITDA margins. Yeah, I think post-IPO, we were talking mid-30s. I think you guided to, you know, low 30s for the year, correct? You know, how should we think about margins going forward? You know, now, you know, you've a lot's changed, right, since we last-
Mm-hmm
... laid out those targets. So how are you thinking about profitability going forward, you know, on not just this year, but I'm saying just on a longer-term basis?
Yeah
... how should we think about it?
Yeah, I mean, it is an extraordinary business.
Mm-hmm.
It scales amazingly well. As we reengage growth and reignite growth, I think the best way to think about it is that we will always have a focus on balance of growth and profitability. And the way to think about that is some of the additional growth that we have, we will give back to shareholders in the form of margin, and some we will reinvest in the business... where that split goes in any given year is really about the opportunity set in front of us. So is there an acquisition that we do that maybe is hurts us a little bit on margin short term, but we think can drive long-term growth? Or is there a new product that we wanna lean into?
Overall, we're gonna be up about 500 basis points, we were in Q1 versus Q1 of last year on an EBITDA margin standpoint. As you've talked about, we're guiding to 32%-33%. That's up 200-300 basis points over last year on a full year basis. So that gives you a sense that even in a difficult growth year, we're able to expand margins, which is exciting. We get our cost structure in a good place. As we start to grow, we can really inflect our ability to generate more and more cash flow and again, give some of that back to shareholders and reinvest some of that in growth.
So, let's talk just about, you know, because not only are you a high margin business, but you generate a ton of cash, you know-
We do
... relative to your base, right? And so that gives you the flexibility to do a lot of different things. And, and you've done some M&A-
Mm-hmm
... you know, and you've talked about, you know, Populi, you've done a couple of other deals. You know, can you share any metrics in terms of how those acquisitions have impacted the business, you know, over the last couple of years? And maybe some insight into this buy versus build decision, 'cause you have made some decisions to buy versus build, and curious kind of what your thoughts are, just particularly given how much cash you generate.
Yeah, our acquisition strategy to date has been all about tuck-ins. So you talk about buy versus build, that's really the question that we're looking at with acquisitions, is can we innovate more quickly by tucking in a smaller company, integrating that quickly into our platform, and then using our strong commercial team to help grow that? If you look at, you know, our most recent one, Populi is a good example. So Populi almost immediately helped us within our provider market by reducing attrition and increasing our ability to expand within that market. We expect to see similar impact as we use that to productize our claims data and our reference and affiliation data in different markets as well. But that's kind of the thesis overall, is you take these tuck-ins, and you use that to drive innovation more quickly.
So we don't split it out in terms of how we think about size because it becomes so quickly integrated in our overall business.
Right. Right. So another, you know, dimension of generating a lot of cash is the ability to buy back stock, right? And, you know, I think we could agree, the stock price is trading-
Pretty good value!
... very depressed levels here. So, you know, any updated thoughts on, you know, an ASR or just a willingness to get more aggressive?
Yeah
... you know, from a repurchase perspective?
So we announced a buyback.
Right.
A $20 million buyback, so reasonably modest overall-
Mm
... in Q1. And as you think about the reason for that, first of all, we think it's a great investment.
Mm.
So we like buying stock at this price. Obviously, it's a good signal to the market of our confidence, but it also leaves a significant amount of cash on our balance sheet for what we raised the money for in the first place, is to drive growth. And that's about, we think there will be some interesting buying opportunities over the next couple of years, and we wanna make sure that we maintain that flexibility, both from our very, very strong balance sheet, as well as our, the fact that we keep generating more cash-
Mm
... and adding to that balance sheet over time.
Right. I mean, you do generate $60 million a year.
Yeah.
You've got, I think, net cash of $45, so-
Yeah
... yeah.
We're in a very strong position.
Right. Got it. So, as I mentioned when I introduced you, you're going back from, you know, interim, you know, to just executive chairman very soon, and you hired Kevin Coop. Kevin's obviously not with us today, but maybe you could share your thoughts on what you and the board saw in his background that, you know, made you think of him as-
Yeah
... the right person at the right time here.
Kevin's amazing. First of all, he's just a winner.
Yeah.
He's been successful at everything that he's done, and that is an incredibly important trait. But as you think about below that, the things that really we were looking for, that Kevin hits on, on every different cylinder. Customer obsession-
Mm-hmm
... was, we've talked a lot about, really important to us. We need somebody that can go in, work with our customers, understand their needs, and take all of these great assets that we have and figure out how do we position and package these in a way that really drive value as quickly as possible for our clients. He is very, very commercial, very, very customer oriented. He's an operator, so he really is a data-driven person. That's incredibly important to us. We are a metrics-oriented company. We like to measure everything. We like to drive our growth through that measurement. He will follow along with that. And then last thing is he has deep data experience, so Dun & Bradstreet, Verisk, these are companies that are incredibly successful within the data market.
He did a tremendous job turning around a lot of the North American business for Dun & Bradstreet. So figuring out how can you use these data assets in different ways to solve new problems for your clients is right in his DNA. So we believe he's a perfect fit.
If you had to kind of, you know, prioritize, you know, his agenda, you know, I'm sure he'll set his own, but, you know, what would you like to see him working on first?
Yeah. I think what we'll see is a fair amount of continuity for the reasonably near future. So we've put together a good strategy. We've got a good product roadmap going forward. We've got the company, the go-to-market operational rhythm is back where we need it to be. So he's got a lot of good foundation to build on, which is important. And then it's really about, you know, spending time, as we roll out these new products, spending time with customers and figuring out where do we wanna take those? Where should we evolve them? Where are there good tuck-in acquisitions that we can do to expand that? So I think it's, you know, continuity and then evolve that strategy over time.
Perfect timing. I think we're out of time.
There we go.
Thanks very much for coming.
You got it.
Great to have you. Yeah.
Thanks, everyone.