Hello, everyone, and welcome. My name's Kyle. I'm on the healthcare technology and distribution team here at J.P. Morgan. Today we're thrilled to be welcoming Definitive Healthcare. I'm joined on stage by CEO, Robert Musslewhite, and CFO, Rick Booth. We're gonna kick it off with a Q&A on my end, and I'm happy to take questions later on. I want to just start and explain, you know, for everyone in the audience, can you explain who your customers are and how your solutions help them?
Sure. Definitive Healthcare, we'd say we're the leading purveyor of healthcare commercial intelligence, and what that means is we help really any kind of company or organization that cares about selling into or marketing into or having any sort of commercial success or growth in the healthcare market. By healthcare, we mean any doctor, physician group, hospital, health system, facility, really any sector of healthcare. If you think about that, who's interested in doing that, we have three main client segments. The first is life sciences, biopharma and medical device. Obviously, they have a real interest in understanding which physicians make sense for them to market to, how they like to consume information, which physician group they're a part of, which health system they're a part of, who makes purchasing decisions, who makes formulary decisions, what payers they're a part of.
That's all stuff that we do, so very valuable to life sciences companies. The second segment is hospitals and health systems, providers. They care a lot about using our data. They think about M&A, they think about market expansion, they think about staffing. There's a lot that they think about understanding how their patients flow through their network or sometimes out of their network. That's really important information. We have all that. Third is what we call diversified, and diversified is made up of a lot of different sub-segments, but if you think about diversified, it's anybody who's not in healthcare that cares a lot about selling into healthcare. So these are software firms, you know, healthcare IT firms, consulting firms, all the way to, like, architects, cleaning firms, coffee shops.
Anybody who has any interest in selling into healthcare and has a devoted sales effort will generally be a customer of our products. We think about, we have probably 100,000 potential customers. We are only in 3,000 today, and that's because mostly of this diversified space. There's just so many types of companies that could take advantage of what we do to help have them succeed in healthcare.
Awesome. That's super helpful. I was wondering if we could just touch more on the client side. You know, what challenges are they facing in the market today, and how is Definitive addressing those?
Yeah. We see the challenges, I'd say, on a per segment basis. Obviously within life sciences, smaller to mid-size biopharma has been a tougher space. The recent just interest rate environment, the funding environment, bank failure, I mean, that's been probably toughest on that sector for us. We have seen, you know, some financial distress pop up in that sector where we hadn't really in the past. A lot of times people can't get funding. If they can't get funding, it's hard to advance their drug. It's hard to make investments in commercialization or pre-commercialization, which is where we tend to do a lot of work with them. That's been a little bit of a greater challenge.
On the flip side, diversified, while certainly the economic challenges have played in, that's been a place where you still see really good economic activity, especially in certain sub-sectors that are a little less impacted. I think it's balanced across our client base. I'd say in general, what we've talked about for us is we have seen the impact of what's going on in the economy, kind of across all type of sales activity. It's not that we haven't had interest. We've had really good, what we call top-of-funnel activity, so a lot of clients interested, continue to be interested in what we do. Where it's been a little troublesome over the past nine months has been getting from that point through to close.
A lot of new purchasing restrictions, a lot of new budgetary requirements, a lot of new decision-makers who pop up late in the process. Things have just taken longer. Sales push a lot more, upsells push a lot more, renewals push a lot more. Still getting great levels of conversation. Client NPS has been consistent, we still feel like there's a great pipeline out there. If things sort of return to where they were before, there's good momentum behind people wanting Definitive services. It's just been a little bit tougher environment, really across all segments on purchasing. I can go into, like, reasons for each segment, but each segment has a little bit of pain from the current environment.
That's super helpful. Maybe just, you know, going into the reasons since you mentioned them, maybe the larger biopharma segment, is there a specific case there that you've seen? Or is that just the general tightness, would you say? Anything specific in that segment?
No, I think within biopharma, it's small to medium where there's been more-
Yeah.
... pressure. Obviously, larger biopharma, those are large companies. They spend a lot of money. Purchasing processes are definitely tighter there. Like, every company has a Rick Booth, as their CFO, who's imposing, you know, a bigger scrutiny on any external spend, just like we are, just like most companies are. Large bio have drugs in market and commercialization, so that's been a place where we still feel like we have good opportunities to get in. While it's still harder, it's less sort of existentially challenged than some companies that are in the smaller space where they really depend on funding from the external market. They're not in commercialization yet. They're looking ahead to it. Those have been the ones that we saw a little more impact from.
That plays out for us where new sales are impacted, upsells are impacted, and in some cases, churn or renewal was impacted as well.
As your clients are looking at their budgets, you know, with these additional constraints in place, is this largely locked in for the year looking at it and then revisit at year-end? Or is there room, you know, you see, you mentioned, you know, if you see stability later on, you could see maybe upside there?
Yeah.
How are they thinking about that as we go throughout the year and to the next?
Yeah, I don't think budgets are fixed. I mean, certainly last year budgets weren't fixed 'cause they contracted.
Yeah.
I think budgets can easily go the other way. In fact, in biopharma and med tech, that is a industry that historically has a lot of Q4 purchases as they find out at the end of the year that they have room. We've seen that pattern in our business. I think others have seen it in their business. That's a place where, you know, I think decisions, especially about what we do, we really help clients grow. We help clients sell more effectively. If you think about that, right now people are tight on, you know, making sales investments 'cause they worry that the market's not as good, so a dollar of sales investment might not return what it did a year ago.
However, the minute they see that being positive, it's an easy spend to turn on, and it's an easy result to inflect. We always say that, like, while we don't love people being tight, as things loosen up, if and when they loosen up, we tend to be some of the first dollars we'd expect people to spend. That's consistent with what the company saw during the pandemic, which is in 2020 everything stopped. Clients really held up on purchasing. You know, sales opportunities got stuck. Once people saw that things were picking back up, the company ended up having a very good year 'cause things picked up again very quickly.
Speaking of things that are picking up and how that applies to Definitive Healthcare model, you know, how fastly can you see that, you know, translate to top-line growth? Is there a dynamic at play there? Is it an immediate switch on, or does it take time for that to progress?
I mean, it'll always take a little time 'cause by the nature of our model, when we make a sale, you know, we accrue that revenue over 12 months. We're a SaaS model, so when someone makes a purchase, we'll spread that revenue forward over 12 months. If it's a three-year contract, it gets spread over 36 months ratably. That always takes... I mean, you saw it last year when sales were being challenged, we still had a great revenue year. This year we have a slow revenue year 'cause sales slowed down last year. If sales picked up this year, you'd see it mostly in next year's revenues. I mean, you see a little bit this year, but mostly in next year's revenues. That's kind of the way our model works.
Also, I'd say that the sales cycle, you know, we tend to have a different, you know, a sales cycle that can depend on the client. A lot of small clients can buy within 30 days or two months, but a lot of larger clients will tend to take four-six months or even eight in this environment. Even if things picked up, I'd and we could tighten those a little bit, there's still some timeline for getting sales through.
That's helpful. You know, speaking of sales, I know you've made some incremental investments in your sales force and worked on that, you know, just in readiness, I think is the word you used before. You know, can you touch more on, you know, what you've been doing in your sales force for that readiness and the investments you've made there?
Yeah. I think there's really three things we've done across sales, some with this environment and some just as part of our strategy. The broadest thing, which we've talked about before and have been doing, but did even more this year, is verticalization. What that means is, as we've thought about more and more, our business being a little bit different across the three verticals, obviously same data platform, same data, but the way we interact with customers and their needs, and their industries differ across those verticals. We have verticalized more. If you think about life sciences, we have, I'd say this year, much more expertise and industry experience in our commercial team in life sciences. Same thing in provider.
That goes through not just sales, but to account management, to customer success, to the product teams. If you think about that, we've really tried to be speaking their language a lot more with the product marketing. That's been a positive development. I think it'll continue to help us be more relevant in each of our segments. The second is, a lot of training around how to be better in this environment. You know, for a salesperson, do you know every single person who might have an influence on this deal? Have you gone through the purchasing process with the client? Do we have an account review? We focus on being sure that we've covered all our bases. Is our marketing material effective? Do we focus heavily on ROI? 'Cause we are a high ROI solution.
If we can inflect just a couple of sales for any client, that tends to pay for their Definitive subscription, you know, many times over, especially for a lot of these expensive therapeutic manufacturers. We tend to focus really on what we can control, being sure that people understand the value of the solution. The third is what I'd call top-of-funnel activity. We do a really nice job of lead gen. You know, we have very efficient marketing. We get people to come to the site. We have free trials. We turn free trials into demos. We get people in the pipeline. If you look at our top-of-funnel, it's as strong as it's ever been. That's resulted in a lot more pipeline. Obviously, it's the bottom of the pipeline where we've had.
Mm-hmm.
...a little bit more slowness. Continuing to focus on that and really looking at the levers we can do to be sure that pipeline is robust and is there. If we get a little bit of inflection on the bottom of the pipeline, you know, it's there and ready to go. Those are really the three things.
That's super helpful. Maybe to touch on the first part of your sales force realignment you did by vertical. You know, we haven't talked about the provider vertical yet. Thinking about kind of industry headwinds turning into maybe tailwinds in terms of the solutions you provide, labor shortages is always brought up in the provider market. I was wondering if you'd touch on how Definitive Healthcare helps in that market, with the provider labor shortages and how you see that progressing.
Yeah. We're really bullish on the provider market. I mean, obviously last year was a tough year for hospitals and health systems, but that's a sector that'll continue to grow, needs a lot of help from data and analytics, and we have a lot of great ways we help that sector. We think it's a really nice growth opportunity for us. In staffing staffing in particular, we help in a number of ways. Number one, we do serve a lot of healthcare staffing and healthcare labor agencies. We help a lot with the organizations that help the providers get access to the right labor when they need it. That's a big way to help. We also help directly where we work with a lot of providers.
We have great data on doctors, on nurses, on a lot of healthcare individuals, we can help them directly understand, for example, if they're looking for a certain kind of doctor or doctors with a certain Medicare share of their payer mix or a payer, a certain, you know, commercial payer in their payer mix, or does these kind of procedures versus those. There's all kinds of ways they can look at which doctors they might wanna recruit into their network or practices they may wanna acquire. We do help a lot with the places of acute shortage, and I'd say the number one acute shortage still is nurses.
Yep.
you know, our models would show that we're running 200,000 nurses behind.
Mm-hmm.
...they're not gonna catch up anytime soon. That's a problem we see across the economy. That's a place where we can really help a lot. The doctor shortage. I don't know if it's a doctor shortage per se, some call it doctor shortage, but there's certainly high demand for certain pockets of doctors, and it feels like there's a shortage in certain areas, and we really help both the agencies that do it and the ultimate providers that hire them.
That's super helpful to think and contextualize. You also talked about ROI in your sales force and measuring that. I was wondering if you'd touch more, you know, maybe through an anecdote or just generally how your customers are measuring the ROI that they use from Definitive Solutions and, you know, how that plays out.
Yeah. I should note that, just 'cause we didn't describe the solution for those of you who might be new to Definitive, is we have a database of healthcare commercial intelligence that essentially collects a ton of information, public, government, proprietary. We have, I think, 4 million interactions every year to continue to build the proprietary part of our database. We run data science and analytics on our own data to create new data elements, which I'll talk about in a second. Then we've also recently started incorporating claims data, not because we wanna be a claims vendor per se, but because when we add the claims vendor to everything else we collect and aggregate it at the physician level, it enables use cases that others can't fulfill and provide a ton of value to clients.
We serve clients through a SaaS platform, so it's very easy when a client comes on board, you turn them on and give them access. They can get value within 20 minutes. I mean, they obviously need some training and some clients will. We make it very easy for clients to download the data, to integrate it in their CRM system, to integrate it into their core systems if they have another place they wanna use it. We want the clients to be using the data. The more they use it, the more it's incorporated into their sales and marketing activity, the better. That's how people use us. It's a very easy platform to use. We sell it on a subscription basis, tend to get multi-year contracts, tend to build in a price increase.
You know, it's very much a great model for multi-year, value creation for clients. The way they use us, I mean, the easiest way to think about it is we help clients sell more and sell more efficiently and more effectively. Take a life science manufacturer. We have a case study on our site for neurofibromatosis, where it's a rare drug manufacturer. Sales weren't going that well. They came to us and said, "Hey, we need help." This is a treatment that can save, and it's like 1 in 3,000 kids get it, but when they get it's serious, and they had a drug that could really help, but it's very hard to find those kids.
Came to us and said, "Hey, can you help us increase the incidence of finding the right places so we can find these patients that'll help our drug?" Through analyzing their typical doctor and their typical set of patients where they tended to find clients, we could run that through our models, and we tripled the number of doctors they could outreach to and had a big inflection in their sales. It's one of those expensive rare drugs. One or two sales dwarfs the cost of the Definitive annual subscription. That's an easy example. There are a lot of other examples. We can improve recruiting physicians for health systems.
For the diversified industry, there's all kinds of case studies, but you think about a software and IT manufacturer who wants to understand which hospitals have which type of IT system so they can prepare their sale. They can identify the right hospitals to go to, the right buyer at the hospital, and the right approach. You know, if you're Epic, for example, and you wanna sell against Cerner, you probably have one way of selling against Cerner. It's very helpful to know which hospitals have Cerner. Who's the buyer there? Did that buyer use Epic in the past, or did that buyer always was with Cerner? We have all this information. It makes for a very effective ROI lift to any sales process.
We hear from a lot of our clients that they'll oftentimes use Definitive, and it saves them a couple of salespeople and increases their sales. That's, you know, in the diversified space. The hospitals, there's all kinds of use cases we can go into too. You covered staffing and scheduling, but you think about a health system right now, especially when they're challenged on growth, one of our best use cases is we help health systems keep patients... understand where their doctors are sending their patients, and if the doctors are referring patients out of network, be able to identify that, talk to the doctor, and get them to refer patients in-network.
This patient flow is a really important use case these days that has a big impact on health system profitability, so that's a place that they use us a lot for as well. All of them have the characteristic of very quick value from using the information, and that's what we really try to be sure clients and prospects are aware of.
Super helpful. You mentioned data science is a key part of enabling all that ROI, and I don't think it would be a tech conference if I didn't ask about AI.
Yeah.
I'm wondering, you know, the use cases of AI ML that Definitive is using now, and then if there's anything on the horizon that could open up opportunities down the line?
Yeah, we do a ton with it. Sometimes it's a little more invisible to our clients than I wish it was because it's really cool. We actually just did announce, we call our dataset Atlas, the Atlas Dataset, and that has several manifestations. It has Atlas All-Payor Claims data. It has Atlas Reference & Affiliations data, which shows all the connection points, you know, which physician is part of which physician network is part of which health system. It's one of our key bread and butter datasets. Atlas Prescription Claims, Atlas medical claims. We recently announced Atlas AI, and what Atlas AI is, it represents the analytics that we do on our own data to create new data elements or to strengthen data elements that are there already. One is an example.
It's prescribing propensity. What we can do is we can look at our data, understand which physicians, if they start prescribing a certain drug, that has a follow-on effect with a broader group of physicians. You kinda find your queen bees, if you will. If you're a drug company and you want to find the right physician to prescribe a drug, we can go out and look and see who has a prescribing propensity score that's higher, a prescribing influence score that's higher, measure that with numbers, and tell you these are the most important physicians, because for whatever reason, when they adopt, it helps adoption in the community. I don't know if they're an expert, or they're the buyer for their health system, or they have a big influence on formulary. Whatever it is, we can tell them that.
Another way we use AI is to really help build out the dataset. No dataset is 100% complete. Ours are very, very good, but every company that plays in the sort of healthcare data space will always have places where they need to fill in gaps to help a client with a certain use case. Most of the time, we're very, very high percentage fill rates, or coverage. You always need to use AI to fill in the rest so that your numbers, for example, if there's a 1,000 doctors in a market, we might have data on 980 of them. For the last 20, you wanna be able to model based on where they practice, what you've seen about the patients there, we can model the 100% completion.
Our 1,000 matches a health system's number of a 1,000, and you can put them together. A drug company's 1,000, so you can fill in their full CRM. That's very helpful. We do a really good job of that. That's something that's not really apparent to clients. It's one of the reasons why we made a big announcement of Atlas AI, because it was a chance to explain all the analytics that goes into our own, the data that they see in the site every day. It helps them trust the fact that we're actually putting a lot of thought and care into the data that they're receiving, 'cause we do have a big data operations team that works hard to be sure the content is good.
The last place I'll talk about is we do have a number of solutions that are analytic solutions. While we have great data and we have this great platform that's easy to use, if a client says, "Hey, we love your data, but we wanna understand the patient journey for our drug and wanna pull your data and some other data together and kinda look at this holistically," we have a team, by virtue of an acquisition we did about a year ago, that can run that analytics, those analytics very easily. In those analytics, a lot of times, we're running data science or using AI to help model things out forward in the market to help that client.
We have a team of data scientists that, I'd say are a little bit more client-facing in that regard, that help with those analytics. Those are still standardized analytics pulled into a really nice, easy-to-use reporting platform, but they can differ by client depending on the client need.
Is there room, you know, to see, you see the headlines on generative AI and ChatGPT. Is there room for some kind of solution on the Definitive platform to say, "Hey, I'm looking at this market. Can you tell me, you know, can you create a list of providers in this market that are using this EMR?" in that specific use case where it kind of uses the Definitive data and comes with an output kind of that you would see from a ChatGPT?
We're looking at a lot of that. I mean, our data is proprietary, so you know.
Mm-hmm.
... it's not open and out there. The nice thing about that is if we find ways to use the technology to make it easier for our clients to access the data and use it like you just said, we'll definitely do that. The other place we're using it is in marketing, where there's all kinds of marketing application, and particularly in our type of marketing, where it's high volume, free trial, generative. There are lots of ways we can use just the functionality of ChatGPT to be more efficient in crafting our messages out and pulling facts together that might appeal to different slices of potential clients. We're definitely using it there. I think longer term, there's some really interesting...
I mean, you look at where it's likely to go, is that some lower level coding can be done by AI.
Mm-hmm.
Certainly a lot of content generation can be done by AI. If it makes it less expensive and easier for us to append more and more information to our physician, each physician on a per physician basis, we'll certainly use it, and I think there'll be some neat opportunities in the future.
Wow, that would be definitely a differentiator. Speaking of differentiators, I was wondering if we could transition more to the competitive environment, you know, who you see out there, both public and private, and you know, how Definitive, you mentioned the dataset and proprietariness, you know, how Definitive has competed in that market.
Yeah. Where the company started over 10 years ago, when it was founded, was really to provide this map of the healthcare ecosystem, which we call our Atlas Reference and Affiliations data. If you think about it, we're sort of the definitive, no pun intended, source for being sure we understand all the connections throughout the industry. If you're a doctor, and you practice some of the time at your office and some of the time at a hospital, we're able to identify that, which days, which procedures, which actual claims or which facility. No one else can do that with their claims because they don't have the reference and affiliation data.
We can also say, if we take data on a per physician level, we can roll it up to a physician group, to a hospital, to a health system. That's really useful for someone who has an aspiration to sell to a health system, because you can roll up accurately all the physicians affiliated with that health system, owned, affiliated, who are practicing inside it, and you get to a very accurate both volume, procedure, physician count type data. When you walk in and you sell to these entities, you have a very accurate sense of who you're talking about that's within that entity. It's particularly useful among physician groups, where doctors tend to change quite a bit and so, that's really important for clients.
I say all that to say that that is a place that we've always differentiated, and even as we've added claims data to our database and all this other data, the use cases where we really differentiate, leverage that connection, that information on connections. For example, in life sciences, we'll compete with the larger data vendors, so IQVIA, Symphony, DRG. You know, they're all out there, and Veeva to some extent, although Veeva's primarily CRM, and I see our relationship as more symbiotic, because a lot of times we are taking our data with clients and having them load it into Veeva so they can be more effective in their sales.
Really, the larger data vendors, they have a strong entrenched legacy position, so in general, most of our clients, when they come on board with us, they won't totally get rid of IQVIA or get rid of someone else, but our use case will be unique. We have unique use cases, and that's why they come to us. Over time, we think we can, you know, capture a little more and more of that space, and we certainly have a lot of very large clients where we've been able to do that. We don't need to fully displace them to make a sale, I guess, is the best way to look at that, which is great. That's our competitive set primarily in life sciences.
If you go all the way to the other side on diversified, if someone has a dedicated sales force to healthcare, they generally will buy Definitive. I mean, just it's such a valuable solution. There's no one else who goes deep in healthcare like that. If someone is not as focused on healthcare, at times they'll just buy a list, like a list of executives. Give me all the CFOs out there in the country, and, you know, 20% of those happen to be health system CFOs. That's good enough for some people. It's these list vendors, it's ZoomInfo, it's sort of, anybody who sells thin across the whole industry. Sometimes that's an investment that clients will make if they don't care about going that deep in healthcare.
In general, if they have anybody dedicated to healthcare, we'll tend to have a great shot to make that sale. In provider market, there's a lot of different ways that health systems are looking at getting data today. There's no sort of large entrenched competitor. I'd say it's a lot of smaller niche solutions, and we have a lot of use cases we serve in provider anyway, so it's almost different by different use case. In general, we tend to be really unique because we've spent 12 years building up this really accurate reference and affiliations data and then appending everything else onto it. That's why we tend to be unique wherever we go. Yes, by the moat, that's definitely our moat.
Super helpful. You know, you mentioned Veeva before.
Mm-hmm.
How they work on the commercialization a lot on the CRM front. This is more of a specific question about the introduction of, and, you know, I guess increased prevalence of data and analytics in the commercialization of biopharmaceuticals. Do you see a higher win rate in newer drugs coming to market as the marketing plans are, you know, built around, you know, potentially using more than, you know, maybe a legacy marketing plan that had been in the market for over 5 years? Is there a higher win rate on that? You know, to that extent, do you look at the clinical trials pipeline and, you know, FDA approvals and kind of target your sales force there with, you know, drugs that are coming to market?
I'd say we do really well with both. That's the good news. We have specific use cases that serve both. With a drug that's headed towards market, we can obviously do a great job of market sizing, market planning, things like that. We also have the best data out there on expert data or key opinion leader data. It's a company we acquired a couple of years ago called Monocl. It's now built into our data set, so we have the leading, what we call expert reference data out there. What that lets clients do is, you know, if they want to find a set of experts to help them with their clinical trial, or once they're through clinical trials, be thinking about their medical affairs strategy, that's really valuable.
These are all kind of pre-launch, sort of looking ahead to commercialization type activities where we have great relationships to be able to serve that. Once a drug is in commercialization, we're super helpful. When you say someone 5 years in, you know, what's interesting is 5 years in, most drugs are looking for new sales points.
Mm-hmm.
actually relying even more on data to try to find ways to have a lift or to find new applications or work with medical affairs teams to understand new ways in. We tend to be really, really helpful to them through all the ways I've talked about before. I like both. As long as, you know, we continue to have manufacturers looking to bring drugs to market, that's a great opportunity for us.
That's awesome. Rick, I wanna get you involved. I was wondering if you could spend some time on margins, you know, what are the key areas of leverage in the business and how you're thinking about it this year and beyond, about driving leverage in the model?
It's a great question, and one of my favorite topics. We're in the early days of this $10 billion market opportunity, but one thing that we really focus on is our customer lifetime economics. You know, when we acquire a customer, we have the ability to land and expand with them. We have a very efficient sales motion. I start at the top of the P&L. I look at our gross margins, and our gross margins are consistently in the mid-to-high 80s%. The underlying economics of that are, Robert's talked a lot about our competitive differentiation with the Atlas Dataset. One of the wonderful things about that is it's a buy one, sell many model.
You've got largely fixed costs in your cost of goods sold. You can dial that up and dial it down in terms of competitive differentiation. We have a bias towards growth. Like right now, you'll see we just went live with significant extensions to the Atlas Dataset. We did that knowing and communicating almost a year in advance that that would involve a short-term step down in gross margin. We've proven year-over-year that we grow through that and the gross margin expands. There's such a large opportunity here that we will continue that motion because we're very much focused on building a large and highly profitable business in the long run. The competitive moat that we reference shows up in our gross margin, and our leading gross margin is one of the most important things that we manage.
As you go below that, you get into the most important source of long-term leverage over time, which is sales and marketing. Right now we're running over 30% sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue. That's a factor of the current market environment. As the market environment normalizes and as we get better at differentiating ourselves, that will be the most important source of leverage as we go forward. There's lots of ways that you can do that. I won't go into too much detail here. You know, product development, we're just about at our target spend on product development. I would see that, if anything, going up a little, but certainly not being a source of leverage going forward. Finally on G&A, that's a place where we've consistently shown that we can deliver leverage.
We deploy technology to make that as much of a fixed cost as possible. That's been a successful contributor to leverage. We're still very small for a public company.
Mm-hmm.
It's higher than we want it to be right now, but we're very confident that we'll grow through it. When we think about the nature of this business over time, it should be a fast grower in the 20% organic range with upside from tuck-in acquisitions. With the profitability expanding over time, and in the long term, getting to the mid-to-low 40s%. Really a powerful business model, I like to say, that is built to compound over time. And that's what we focus on.
That's super helpful. You know, we're a little under five minutes left. I wanted to open up to questions, see if anyone had any. Looks like we have one in the front row.
Hey, good morning again, Robert and Rick. The market is kind of a slow right now. Could you talk to us about how you take advantage of the market slowness to deepen your R&D effort and further distance yourself from your competitors. When the market recovers eventually, you guys are in a even better position. Which area you guys are spending time and money on? Thank you.
Yeah. I think, through Rick's answer, you probably have some sense of this. We still have a reasonably heavy level of sales and marketing investment right now. We believe that maintaining these pipelines and being ready for when the market turns will position us really well. Like I said, we've verticalized, which I think is an important place to be when for credibility with clients, so that we've improved the level of dialogue we have. We've gotten in much larger deals, and I think we have, you know, we're positioned for when things improve to be able to turn quickly. The product side, we always make a lot of product and data investments. To Rick's point, you know, I'd say we probably are invested a little bit ahead on the data side.
That's probably where we lean, which is, you know, it certainly impacts a little bit short-term gross margins, but over the long term, those investments are super powerful and continuing to both build the moat and deliver more and more value to clients over time. Like Rick said, we've shown that. That's a place where all those places are places where we've, I'd say, invested through the downturn, if you will, to be ready for when it turns. The other lever is M&A. And M&A has been a little bit slower over the past 12 months. I've talked about this. I feel like valuations have been tough to get through.
We've shown over time that if we can acquire a small company, with new capability growing very quickly, they're usually not making money when we acquire them, but we think that they have long-term margin potential to be approaching our margins. They can bring us some new capability we can take out to the market quickly in an area that we believe in. Those can create a lot of value. That's another place where we'll stay active and continue to look. Private valuations, I think last year certainly hadn't changed, but I think there's been a little bit of change in that in the market this year, so we're hopeful that, you know, something can come to pass across.
We've always said, and for those of you who don't know Definitive, we would do one to two acquisitions per year generally, and felt like that could fit within our, within everything Rick said, and help us strategically.
All right. Maybe one last question. Is there anything else you wanna leave everyone with? Anything else worth covering? Anything of that nature?
I like where Rick started, you know. $10 billion dollar opportunity. It really is an amazing business. I'm newer to the company, but we just have so much growth potential because what I love about it is I can walk into almost any company out there and we have value to them. There are very few companies that don't touch healthcare in some way, shape, or form. The $10 billion dollar opportunity is real. We're growing a little more slowly this year than we have in prior years, but it's not for lack of opportunity. All three of our markets are growing very well. All three of our markets present a lot of opportunity.
The fact that we pursue this land and expand model means that every time we acquire a new client, there's always the downstream potential to upsell that client, and they tend to stay on board for years and years and years because of our high, high renewal rates and SaaS model. I think we have great potential going forward and, you know, look forward to seeing several of you across the day and continuing to discuss it. I appreciate the opportunity.
Awesome. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, Scott.