All right, everyone, we're going to go ahead and get started. My name is Brian Peterson. I'm on the application software team at Raymond James. Very happy to have Definitive Healthcare with us today. We're going to make this pretty interactive, so if you have any questions, feel free to raise your hand. Kevin, Rick, thanks for taking the time. Maybe I'll start with you, just kind of a high-level overview of Definitive Healthcare and where you guys are making a difference in the market.
Rick, you want to.
Rick, you want to start with that?
I was going to say...
I think it was...
Just a high-level intro on the company.
Yeah, so Definitive Healthcare, we provide healthcare commercial intelligence, which means any customer who's trying to provide a good or a service into the healthcare delivery system in the U.S. is a potential customer. We spend about a quarter of the U.S. economy on healthcare, so it's roughly a $4 trillion market. We're about $250 million in revenue, and we're trading at a very attractive multiple of EBITDA these days.
Kevin, I know you've been at the helm for a couple of quarters. We'd maybe just love to understand what attracted you to the company and some of the early learnings you have so far, a few quarters in.
Yeah, the space that we're in, it's attractive in the sense that we've got a great team. The people that we have in the company primarily, to a large degree, were attracted because of the mission. You're helping in a pretty mission-critical area where folks were inclined more than just from a commercial perspective. I found the situation that we're in, where the company needs to return to growth and the fundamentals that were underlying it were attractive, but also the fact that it's a challenge and a little bit of a turnaround was something that I was looking for.
Our data is, as expected, differentiated. We've got a great, especially around our physician and affiliation data, is differentiated and has got some real durable competitive advantage. We have our customers, which I found very interesting in my early diligence, were very avid.
We have a very good relationship with our customers. A lot of times when you have companies that may have stalled in growth, you have other challenges of which we aren't manifesting a lot of those. That was a very attractive space.
What are some of the key initiatives that you have in place as you're starting to really put your impression on the company?
We're trying to focus sort of a little bit of a back to the future and being very intentional about the first pillar is differentiated data. You need to continue to maintain your data advantage, especially as it relates to the physician and affiliation data. We have the need for greater integration with our partners and in the ecosystem, which when you look at the foundational underlying data, customers that have integrated the data directly with their platforms renew at a higher rate. That's what we want to do more of. Then really it's around customer intimacy and renewal. Like the biggest challenge for Definitive Healthcare is simply our churn rate and our renewal rate.
We have initiated a lot of things around the front end, go-to-market, and our new sales and new logo generation, which is actually showing pretty good promise, especially over the last several months of the year. That is actually up and looks, it's showing good green shoots. We are not claiming victory. I have only been there for a few months, but a couple of months does not make a trend. I think that area is one that we have been able to see some pretty good, it's pretty good traction on it. The area that we need to really focus on, though, is retaining and the onboarding and the post-sale customer implementation.
A lot of what we're doing with intent is around integrating that post-sales implementation, onboarding, and customer success and value delivery as part of the upfront sales process so that the handoff from sale to customer support is as seamless as possible.
Is there maybe double-click on that a little bit as we're thinking about what was done previously to what you think is done now and how long do you think that may take to drive some of the improved retention that you're hoping to get?
Our front-end go-to-market sales motions have always been segmented by vertical or by segment. We did not have the same infrastructure set up for our value delivery, which was centralized, but it was centralized in a way that you had this sort of handoff that was not directly focused to the customer. We do have, for a relatively small company, a fairly complex set of markets that we compete in. Medical device, biopharma falls under the Life Sciences umbrella. We have also got a provider segment and then a Diversified segment, which is everybody else that sells to hospitals or providers.
Aligning your post-sales resources along that vertical strategy is really important in order to ensure that you not only are delivering on the promise of what you've sold them, but that the compensation structure is set up in a way that there is ongoing incentive for both the seller and the post-sales teams to ensure that that handoff happens as seamless as possible.
Several months ago, that wasn't the case. The sales team was chartered to sell something, move on to the next new logo, and then there was a customer support team that would then pick it up and ensure that the last mile was done. Unfortunately, or fortunately, however you want to look at it, that's the most important part of the process.
What a.
This is very helpful because we've always had verticalized sales and marketing, but now, and that led to the handoff from the initial sales process into value delivery. Now you have an integrated team where you're bringing customer success and pro services in as part of the last mile of the close for a much smoother customer process. It allows us to meet customers in the way in which they'd like to be served.
What about, maybe some of these changes, and you mentioned some of the great, anything you can share on the early feedback in terms of the value delivery or customer stats or NPS scores and anything that you guys can quantify?
I don't think we've actually been reporting on that externally there
but I can tell you that, and it's intuitive, customers that have integrated and have and the more integration, whether it's through an integration with a platform or that have used master data management and done more synthesization of the data, the renewal rates are significantly higher than customers that have simply bought it or are using it through an interface.
Like even if they're using it through our front UI/UX, and it's sort of obvious when you think about it, right? We have a complex set of data. In our most recent earnings call, we gave a number of illustrations of the types of master data and customer implementations that we do that was probably overly complex in some cases, I've heard, but it does have a lot of detail there.
When you look at the way they're using the data, if you don't provide the attached services or the implementation to get that actually as promised into play, you risk not actually having that completed. If it isn't completed, when you expect people to renew, they're going to be less likely to renew. What we're doing is we're doing it with more intention to ensure what we've sold is going to come with the services to ensure that it has been implemented in a way that we're confident that that's going to have a higher satisfaction and it's ultimately going to lead to a higher retention rate.
What about in terms of kind of the overall sales rep productivity picture? Like where do we stand today and where are you hoping to get over time?
That's been a green shoot.
Last year we set about reorganizing the sales force in large part in order to drive new logo productivity. That was very successful. The inadvertent side effect was that we lost some of the continuity across the sales cycle, which we're now addressing. The good news in this is that we see strong demand in this space. Our new logo production has been good.
We've talked about two of the four pillars in terms of the data integration, which we have lots of historical information. The deepening data integration improves our renewal rates. Changing the way in which we engage from a customer service and pro service perspective. It's still early days, so we don't have any external metrics on that, but it's more in line with what we're seeing in the marketplace.
Frankly, it's just good common sense. Thanks to Kevin for coming in and spending two months with the customers and walking end to end through the process in the customer's shoes in order to highlight that for our attention.
What have you seen in terms of trends by various end markets across the customer segment? Anything that you'd call out there in terms of kind of sales cycles or demand?
Yeah, I would say for sure we're seeing elongated decisioning, especially as it relates to biopharma. That's partly because of the macro environment, which isn't helpful. You've also got the stage that we happen to play in in that space, which is around second stage clinical trials, which is a lagging, which will lag obviously the return in stage one.
I do think that competition is heating up in some areas like our med device where there are low-priced, smaller options which are attempting to compete on price, which puts pressure on it. I think we're doing well in competing on those dynamics. I don't think we're, we are not capitulating on that. We don't want to be a low-price leader. I know everybody says that, but I don't think it's a, I don't think it's a good strategy, especially when you have high-quality data.
I don't think we need to be. We are adding services to it, which I think you can compete both. It's possible down the way you can actually offer a price-sensitive option. I think the old adage that you can compete on price, quality, and service, you can pick two, but you can't be all three. I think you can offer all three depending on choice, kind of like an Uber-esque kind of approach, right?
You can pick what you want, but you have to have an appropriate service level that will allow you to offer a lower price over time. Today we have the best quality data. We're going to extend that data quality. That's our first pillar. We want to provide more attached services to that quality. We think that's a winning strategy for us.
You mentioned some data partnerships in the fourth quarter call. Can you talk about the opportunity to, like obviously the data quality is pretty clear, but what is the opportunity to kind of expand the data set that you have today?
We announced one that was a large global data provider that not only has data assets that we now have access to, but there's also components around master data management and MDM, as it's called for short. It really is the way to take our Definitive ID, which is a unique identifier, which we've already linked our Reference and Affiliation and claims data to it. Then you're able to link that identifier to a customer's own first-party data, which would be information that they have in their own data lake or other third-party data. Think of it as a token or a key that allows you to then easily link large data sets together in a very efficient way.
The value there is even if in some cases, like take for example, claims data, which is less differentiated because it's somewhat of a commodity, even if you find a lower-cost provider of that data, it isn't linked. You lose some of that goodness. This partnership that we did not only gave us a lot of the tools, things like called like an identity graph and other things that you need to do more sophisticated master data management. It also provided a lot of consumer data and consumer intelligence data, which gives you a more real-wide view of our existing customer base. There's a lot of complexity there.
In essence, if you think about what Rick and I were talking about this the other day on the earnings call, you can either build it yourself, which could take you years and cost thousands of lines and millions of dollars, or you can possibly do it more quickly, time to market through partnerships in a way that will accelerate and get you better access.
One of the components that I really insisted on coming in was we've got to basically be innovative and we need to build and do that ourselves organically if it's strategic. If there are areas that we think we can go with greater intent or acceleration and it isn't strategic and we can actually get access to those strategic assets, we should do that, which is an example of this.
The third element is this is also an area where we have a little bit of a bidirectional deal. We actually also are selling them components that we have, which help them as well. There is also a revenue component to it as well over time. I think it is a good illustration of the type of partnership that I think, say, very successful, which we will hopefully do more of in the very near term.
I know everyone's always adjusting pricing and packaging. I know you mentioned some pricing dynamics maybe in the lower end of the market. Like what are you seeing in terms of kind of the pricing component out there? Is that an opportunity for you longer term?
Yeah, the way we're thinking about the pricing and packaging or the price elasticity side of the equation is any sort of high-functioning product organization, product marketing organization is going to be looking at it from a segmentation and a vertical perspective. At the same time, the appropriate pricing and packaging and go-to-market motions that would support that segment.
As I mentioned earlier, we're already competing in four segments. We've taken two of them and we've put it into one called Life Sciences. We know that they have different characteristics. The provider customer versus the diversified customer is going to be very different than our Life Sciences customer. It has very different retention rates, insurance rates, and the way we support those customers.
I think there's an opportunity for us here over the coming months to continue to report back to our stakeholders, to expose a little bit more of that data so that people can see how the business is operating. I think we think that's going to be very illuminating for our investors as we start to apply the appropriate approaches to both churn and our go-to-market based on this sort of vertical and segmentation approach.
I do want to hit on, you mentioned pharma before, but I know the regulatory environment comes up quite a bit. I know we have a new administration. What are you hearing out there and what is that, has that influenced customer buying activity at all?
I think it would be hard to argue that it isn't at least in top of mind, right? Everybody is talking about that. I do not believe that it has really shown itself today in our cycle. I wouldn't attribute anything that we're experiencing related to that, but I'm sure that it is increasing the heightened concern around it. I think it would probably be more problematic for the stage one folks than it would be for us at this point.
Yep. Rick, maybe just one for you. I know you guys just reported, but kind of walk us through the 2025 outlook, what you're expecting from growth, and how do you kind of balance the net new versus the NDR side of things in terms of growth?
Yeah, yeah. We just reported our full year 2024 results. As part of that, we reported NDR of 85%, which is a long way from where we want it to be. Our response to that has been to be extremely transparent, fact-based in everything that we're doing and everything that we're reporting. We set the stage by being very open about that renewal challenge, also sharing the expectation that absent improvement we will end at an NDR in the low to mid 80% range.
We are basing our guidance on that. We have been very explicit about the upper end and the lower end of that range. Now, even at those revenue levels, we are going to deliver 26%-28% adjusted EBITDA margins. We are trading at a very attractive right now forward-looking five to six times EBITDA. You do not need to believe in a miraculous turnaround.
The evidence that we will provide as we go through there is step one, we know the dynamics that will drive Q1 very well. There are several that are coming through. One will absorb a full quarter of the cost of the new partnership with only a partial quarter of revenue. We will also absorb the normal beginning of calendar year increase in payroll taxes and benefits. Why does that matter? Even though they sound like details, this will set up Q1 to be a clear low point.
You will see that in our guidance. As we step forward from Q1 to Q2, you will gain the benefit of a full quarter of that partnership revenue plus some of the cost relief, plus we have got additional cost reduction actions, which are well underway in planning. That will be the first visible proof point.
As we continue into the third and fourth quarters, we expect to show continued improvement in our revenue growth rate, which in this case will be lessening the scope of shrinking and improving margins, setting ourselves up for a much more investable 2026. Yes, we're not entering the year where we wanted to. We've kept an eagle eye on both Q4 renewals and what we've seen so far during the year.
We've got four key pillars that we're deploying in order to fix that. The first is data quality. You highlighted the new data partnership. The second is integration and master data management, which makes that data much easier to use. The third is our service approach where we've talked about verticalizing the value delivery.
The fourth is activations in which we actually enable customers to reach out to customers directly from within our platform, still using Google or Facebook or other social media, but actually being able to measure the results within the platform. We think we've got a better than fighting chance with those four actions to improve our trajectory. Given this entry point for a small cap value story, that could be very interesting.
Rick, maybe how should we think about it? You're putting a lot of these plans in place so far in 2025 or started in 2024, working on them in 2025. How would you answer the question in terms of just what do you think the long-term growth and margin profile of the business looks like?
I think I've got to own a bit of a pivot in strategy here. When we went public in 2021, selling into many of these spaces was a lot easier than it is today. We put a lot of emphasis on total addressable market. At that time, we had a $5 billion market cap and we were growing in strong double digits. The good news is as a small cap value play, we don't need a gigantic TAM.
What we're finding is the competitive intensity in biopharma and Life Sciences is greater than it is in our traditional strength in Diversified and provider. We've got 60% of the business in our traditional strengths of diversified and provider. Those businesses are showing a higher renewal rate and there's fewer direct competitors. I feel good about our chances pivoting more into those areas.
That unleashes some cost opportunities because it's much more complex to serve, particularly with a product strategy, some of those life science markets. By freeing ourselves to serve them a bit more with service, that gives us further confidence in our ability to maintain profitability at very satisfactory levels across the full range of our revenue guidance. We have been clear about what we expect at the top end. We have been clear about what we expect at the bottom end. We have clear scenarios in action. Depending on what we see, we can take the appropriate action.
How would maybe, and maybe not this year, but thinking about M&A longer term as part of the playbook, I know historically it's been a big part. Where should we be thinking about M&A going forward?
M&A, we continue to be active in scanning the market, but we're bringing more options to the table. Traditionally, we've had more of a software-centric buy the asset in order to get the capabilities. Some of those acquisitions were done at frankly pretty high multiples back when we were trading at pretty high multiples. One of the things I appreciate about Kevin joining us from a more traditional data environment is the prevalence of partnerships. You know, why buy the cow to get the milk?
For example, this data partnership, which evolved when they approached us based on the quality of the data in order to use our data in targeting their customers, eventually morphed into both sharing data, gaining access to some of their data, and also taking advantage of their already developed tools, allowed us to move faster and did not require any capital off of our balance sheet other than $10 million of CapEx to start it.
We are very active, but the hurdle for doing a full acquisition is much higher now. You have to find someone who is trading at a deeper discount intrinsic value than we are. They have to have a high hurdle on execution because we have enough organic opportunities in front of us right now.
Anything from the audience? Yeah, go ahead.
Yes. I think you talked about this on the call, but despite the data partnership, you guys are showing margin improvement this year. Where do you see leverage in the model? Talk about where you're actually able to scale over some of those line items.
Yeah, so there's a few of those items. One is just optically the nature of the data partnership is that it's a relatively fixed cost model. We're taking an artificial hit in the beginning of the year in Q1. That'll show the ability to expand gross margins as we go through time. We're also looking at some of our other data partnerships that can be made redundant through the use of this data source.
We continue on the motion that we've always had of measuring our operating efficiency and pivoting as we need to. With more of a partnership strategy, you'll see more opportunities to be thoughtful about where we're doing our own product development, our own engineering. We also have fairly powerful pro-service delivery capabilities that have been less than fully monetized because of that product-centric approach that we've been taking.
You'll notice the way that expresses itself financially is a wider revenue range and a narrower EBITDA range.
Where are you guys in terms of using GenAI? We hear a lot about driving internal efficiencies and it's early in a lot of these efforts, but can you talk about the opportunity to maybe use AI internally to generate margin expansion?
Yeah, we already actually do use quite a bit of AI internally related to our internal efficiencies, language modeling. We do it with a lot of our master data today. The part that I think though gets a lot of press is more around agents, the ChatGPT and things like that. For us, especially in some of our traditional businesses like the provider space or with claims data, you start to get into some relatively risky compliance areas about deploying that. I
think at least at this point, and we have by the way done some prototyping with partners internally and we've actually even shared that more broadly with our board, but it's not really readily apparent how we're going to monetize that. I think there's getting a lot of press on it.
Given where we are, I think to deploy a large amount of effort around the agent side would be relatively probably not advisable, but we are actually expanding the use of it as it relates into our use of efficiencies and even in our advanced analytics teams with customers.
Maybe talk about the importance of data in a GenAI world. Maybe it's early in terms of customers doing a lot with this, but I'd love to understand any early use cases and how your data set could really play into some maybe next-gen ideas in terms of GenAI.
That was actually where I was about to go.
Oh, yes.
We started to talk about the ability to combine these disparate data sources around universal identifiers. The Definitive ID is a powerful universal identifier within the healthcare space proper. By partnering with another large outside data providers who's not focused on healthcare, but is focused on businesses in general, you get to index those two together, which means you have deeper, higher quality data for your customers to deploy whatever form of AI works for them.
Internally, we do a lot with machine learning and predictive analytics, less with the large language models and all of that because hallucination would be a big problem for us. On the customer side, quality data is foundational for whatever you're doing. We think that this master data management enabled by the dual indices will be powerful for that. We're more an indirect beneficiary than a direct beneficiary.
Maybe we have time for one more for the audience. Maybe just lastly then for me, as we think about 2025, I know you mentioned kind of the key pillars that you have that are in place. When do you feel like you'll have a good assessment of which ones are successful or which ones aren't? Is it really kind of fair to say on 2026 that that's when a lot of these will be fully impacting the overall results?
You want that one or you want me to take it?
I know I would probably answer it a little bit more. Yeah, it's more guidance for that. I would probably be a little more forthright maybe than Rick's going to be a little more nuanced on that, but you probably should answer it.
I've got lots of experience here. I think one of the themes that we've tried to embrace is to be candid and transparent. These, for example, the new data partnership, it's going to take time for it to reach the full expression financially. We've talked about some of the contractual elements that will come into earnings as early as Q2. I think for that to really reach full expression, it'll be very late in 2025.
You'll see that in stats like ending NDR and in our commentary as we go through. That's why we went into particular detail trying to give people milestones and strategies. We've expressed four pillars of operating strategy, and we've got a clear sequencing in our guidance that will allow you to ask pointed questions around, okay, what are you seeing from the new data partnership?
How did you do on those Q2 cost reduction initiatives, et cetera, et cetera? By tracking those four pillars, again, star expressed guidance and listening for the qualitative feedback, I think you'll get a good sense of that. As Kevin alluded to, over time, we're continuing to deepen our vertical focus within the business, and we'll see that eventually come into shareholder communication.
I like that answer, Rick.
That's not a 2025 commitment.
Understood. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.