for coming to the 2023 UBS Tech Conference. It's great to see all of you, and I'm very excited for this session that we have with Tyler Sloat, who's the CFO of Freshworks. So Tyler, thanks so much for joining.
Tyler, thanks for having us.
Yeah, of course. Before we begin, I just wanna let everyone know, if you have a question, which we'll try to address them at the end, you can submit your questions through the app, and then we'll, like I said, get to some of those at the end. So maybe to start off, Tyler, I'd love to ask you, so this past earnings season, I think you had a lot of software companies with SMB exposure, where you had some that, you know, skated along, like things were fine. You had others that talked about incremental weakness. I think you guys were more in the camp of saying things feel more stable.
But I'd love, maybe for you to elaborate more in terms of what you guys are seeing in the macro environment as it relates to SMBs, and then if there's any, you know, demand tailwinds that you would point to, that might be a reason why, you know, you guys might be weathering the storm.
Sure
... better than others.
Yeah. So I guess I'll back up. SMB for us is 250-employee businesses and below. About 40% of our business now is SMB, so we've kinda shifted a little bit over time. Q3 kind of came through as we expected, so there was no real big surprise. I think the nuances that we had started talking about, you know, quote, unquote, "macro pressures" at the end of Q1 2022, really were our expansion motion was getting hit a little bit. And that's persisted over time, and I think what we did is we just adjusted, right?
We tried to figure out what growth is gonna be without agent expansion in particular, and SMBs did get hit more than others, and figured out, you know, how are we gonna grow with our customer base outside of that. But we didn't see any incremental pressure, and like I said, Q3 kinda came in as we expected.
Yeah, that's helpful. Then maybe, let's dive down into, like, the different product types. So obviously, you have customer service, ITSM, sales, and marketing. So when you look at, like, those three, how would you characterize the, like, the health of, like, each of those businesses...
...individually, right? And to the extent there were any, you know, changes within the macro
Sure
...each of those.
So our CS, or Customer Service, product, it's still our largest product line, but definitely the one that's been impacted the most by from that expansion motion, kind of seeing pressure over the last year and a half. And that market in general is becoming a little bit more fragmented. That being said, we've done a lot to kind of keep up with what the new trends are there, and we've launched, at the end of Q2, our Customer Service Suite. That's already starting to see some good traction there, and we have a lot of other things that we're focused on there, specifically some of our AI initiatives. Freshservice, which is our ITSM solution, has been doing really, really well, and that continues to be the driver of growth for the business.
In that space, we are just positioned really, you know, in a good spot, where you have ServiceNow at the very high end. You've got a lot of legacy players that a lot of it is still on-premises, and then you have kind of Jira Service Management, ManageEngine, these guys servicing really smaller companies. We are kind of regarded as the number one SaaS alternative underneath ServiceNow. Our Freshsales and Freshmarketer products, broadly under our CRM category, is still new, and they're starting to see some good traction, specifically for SMBs and for B2C businesses that we can really serve well and provide a great solution, kind of from lead all the way through to support. But that one still needs to have injection of growth, and that's what we're focused on right now.
Got it. That's really helpful. Then maybe on the, the ITSM side in particular, 'cause I think that's the area that you guys have sounded really upbeat-
Mm-hmm
...on these last few quarters, and I know you've made changes on the go-to-market side to move more upmarket there. But can you maybe talk about the demand tailwinds that you guys are seeing on that side? So are there any, you know, product cycles that are occurring within the incumbent space? You know, why, you know, now, right, might some of these mid-market companies be looking at these solutions?
Mm-hmm
...if they hadn't had an incumbent before? Like, what are some of the tailwinds? Is it more, you know, self-driven, where now you guys are making a bigger go-to-market push there, or is there actually some underlying demand trends, too?
Yeah, I think we're definitely making a better, more go-to-market push. And, you know, we've built out this field presence throughout North America, Europe, and parts of Asia. And over, I'd say over the last year and a half, those individuals have learned how to sell that product really well. But I think it's a chicken and egg. Is it because the demand is there, or because, you know, they actually, you know, like the product and go sell it? I think it serves itself. The thing that's happening is that space has just been kinda underserved.
That space being kinda high end of SMB, which is kind of the employee base that's around 250 to 200, all the way through to low end of enterprise, which is kind of like the 7,000-person company. Traditionally been served by a bunch of legacy products that are kinda old tech, and now moving. Like, they're coming out with cloud versions, and they're forcing their customer base to shift, right? They're saying, "You gotta go migrate to the cloud." And whenever you do that to a customer, they're gonna go look at alternatives. We are a great alternative, priced really to provide value, but also with tech that, you know, is regarded as really, really good. And so I think just because of that, yes, it's positioned really, really well in the market.
Yeah, that's interesting. It makes a lot of sense. Maybe, shifting then to the other side, on the customer service side. So you mentioned you guys are still seeing a lot of pressure on the seat side of things. Now, if we look at your NRR, you know, that fell a point to 106, but it sounds like your messaging is that we could start to see, like, some stabilization in that metric. So on the CS side, you know, what gives you guys comfort in that stabilization? Like, what are you seeing to say, "Hey, you know, this is kind of where we're getting to the bottom?" Is it that you've gotten through, you know, a chunk of the renewals, where you've already seen that optimization activity? Maybe you could just elaborate, a little bit more on that.
Sure. So net dollar retention for the whole company, you know, 106 on a constant currency basis, we said it's actually gonna come to 105 in Q4. Coming into this year, I think we had called 105 for Q2, and we just have done better, specifically on churn. And that's the reason it's actually not hit 105 yet. Based on what we see today, we do think 105 is gonna be kind of the bottom, and, you know, obviously, we'll update that if we see anything different. I don't think it's gonna immediately rebound. I think it might, you know, stay- remain stable there, and then, you know, we're, we're figuring out how to grow.
In customer support in general, yes, that's where agent expansion, which is—agent addition was driving by far the largest part of our expansion motion. And expansion's very, very material for us. That one, it just kinda makes sense, as companies haven't been growing, or if they've been downsizing, they reduce their agent counts. In that space, we've been trying to figure out, okay, how do we grow with our customer base outside of that? So a lot of focus on cross-selling of new products, which is now at 25% of our customer base using more than one product. Moving them up the addition chain, and then new products, like Customer Service Suite, that we've introduced. We'll see. I think it's a journey, right?
We're gonna have to go through this journey and figure out how to grow with our customer base, but I do think we've weathered the storm. Part of what gives us confidence that we've weathered. You, you mentioned we've already been through renewal cycles. We don't sign big multi large-
Yeah
… multi-year contracts, and so we've already renewed, by far, the majority of our customer base across all products. At the same time, downsell is included in churn, and we've been able to get churn to a company best, and in fact, last quarter was the company best that we've ever had, and reduce it from the low 20s when we went public, down to mid-teens now. And that feels good, right? It feels like… And it includes the downsell, so it includes the pressure we've seen. So that, I think, is a testament to, okay, larger customers, annual deals now that customers are signing, but also the technology that we've actually been providing to the customers that is providing real value. So coming into next year, we have a bunch of initiatives that we've been working on.
We've been talking about them now for about a year. We're starting to see some of them actually, you know, kinda take root, and, you know, we're optimistic that we have a, you know, chance to actually accelerate growth once these things actually start playing out.
Yeah. That's actually a follow-up question on that. So when you think about, like, the difference between the growth drivers this year, right, versus next year, so you talked about, like, a lot of these initiatives that you've had in place that hopefully can become more tailwinds as we get into next year. How do we think about that in terms of the context of NRR? So if we start to see, you know, some stability, right, on optimizations and churn and things like that, where... Is it possible that you could start to, you know, see that metric trend up, if some of these initiatives start to materialize? Maybe you can just go in more detail in terms of, like, the timing of when you think some of these initiatives could-
Sure
- could start to-
Our Investor Day in September, first of all, we broke out all the products-
Yeah
and kinda gave some of the revenue numbers around the product lines, which we hadn't done before. And then, you know, outside of those sections, in my section, we talked about, okay, there's six growth initiatives that are incremental to kind of what we said we were gonna be able to do, which is $1 billion by 2026. And that $1 billion, you know, kind of if you, if you run that out, it means you're around 20% growth every year. These initiatives, like, one of the ones I just mentioned, is cross-selling of additional products. So to be able to do that, you have to have prescriptive sales motions and train your field to be able to do that, but also you have to have the new products.
So Freshservice for Business Teams is one of those products that we just launched in Q-
... at the end of Q1, but really just started to kinda, like, get it out there. We now have, it's roughly about, I think, 20%-25% of agents being purchased for Freshservice, includes Freshservice for Business Teams-
I see.
It's 25% of the agents. So we're starting to see traction on this, and these are things that are brand new to our customer base. Taking a little bit of price, which we have never done before, because it's not really inherent in our DNA-
We've actually been the opposite. We did a little bit of that in Freshservice this year. When I say it, we're literally doing, like, CPI increases, which we've never done before, and got zero pushback from customers. And so we'll continue that journey and looking at the other products that we can, you know, that we've been providing, really, a lot of value to customers for years. I like to look at it as kind of reducing discounts as opposed to increasing prices. But not being a vendor who's gonna go to their customers and increase price 50%, something like that, which happens to us-
which is really frustrating. More like, "Hey, here's a 5% increment or 7%," which seems to be what everybody's doing, we just haven't been doing it. Our AI initiatives, I think they're, they're really exciting. Just from a monetary perspective, I think we have to wait. If G or Dennis were up here, I think they'd say something different. I'd like to see that, that come through. The first one we have is Freddy Self-Service, which is gonna be reflected in bot usage, which we already see increased bot usage. And the way we're gonna monetize that is through bot add-ons. As customers use the bots that they are entitled to, they'll have to buy more. And we'll start to see that, I think, starting at the beginning of the year. Freddy Copilot will be launched in Q1.
That'll be $29 per seat, in addition to what they're already paying for the agent. Until we launch it and get it out there, GA, we don't know, but we do have about 2,500 customers that are in beta right now, and getting really good feedback on it. Then Freddy AI Insights, we don't have a launch date for that. I think it's gonna, you know, be later in the year. And we have about 4,000 customers actually in beta in that product. And so I look at these things, they are gonna be incremental to our growth, stuff that we're not necessarily counting on, but things that actually could provide real traction.
Awesome. I was gonna ask some of these AI questions later, but because you mentioned them-
Let's just dive right into those. So I think you've talked about in your outlooks, your FY '26 outlook, that you guys have, that AI isn't a big contributor to that. So when we think about all these individual products that you mentioned, where are you seeing the most interest from customers today? How has feedback been around that? And as you look in the out years, like, which of those products gets you the most excited or where you think can be the most, the biggest opportunities?
... Yeah, I think the Freddy Self-Service and Freddy Copilot are gonna be the two things. So if you think about Freddy Self-Service, it's all about allowing our customers' customers to quickly resolve any problems that they have, right? And in self-service. So it's all gonna be through bots and automation through those bots. The one thing I'm excited about there is that the hurdle to bot adoption historically has been building the bots, which has been really complex. And we've released now, you know, kind of our 2.0 bot builder, which allows our customers to actually, you know, in our investor days, have bots building bots, essentially.
And being able to go out there and allow our customers to actually go use the technology a lot easier, as opposed to hiring services from us or building it themselves, I think is gonna be really exciting. On Freddy Copilot, it's new, but that one, two things. One, it's about allowing our customers to be the agents that they have, be much more efficient in the transactions that actually do not go through self-service. And that one, I think, is gonna be the one that's gonna have the most impact overall to our, to our customer base in how it allows them to service their customers, potentially in a lower cost environment. Whereas previously, they might have had to hire people in North America, if they're North American based, where they could actually outsource that.
But those agents now are gonna have capabilities that they never had before. And I think that actually, not just for us, but for other companies, could be a really a big fundamental change for businesses, in general. Freddy Insights is really about the administration of the entire you know, your business. That one, I think, is a little bit further out, and we'll see how that goes. But the first two are, are really, really exciting.
Yeah. So on the chatbots in particular, so I think there's a really interesting opportunity for companies that serve SMB and mid-market companies, where they might not have the in-house developer or resources in order to build these bots themselves. But I'd be curious how, you know, you guys see that playing out, like, when you look at the fact that you run on GPT, right, OpenAI, is it possible for these SMBs to go and build it themselves? You know, what's the heavy lifting there? Do you guys see that as a risk? I'd love to dive into that a little bit deeper.
Yeah, I mean, the phrase we use internally is, like, how do you deliver AI to the Fortune 5 Million, as opposed to the Fortune 500? That's what we're really focused on. Like, make it really easy for our customers who may not have the capabilities, and you're talking about, some cases, a 50-person business, that really just wanna do their business. But in order to have these, you know, access to all the new technologies, they'd have to hire that technical talent or spend a lot of money on it. To be able to actually inject that in the services that we're already providing them is really, really exciting. The thing is, you have to make it really easy to use, which is what has been in our DNA, from the very beginning.
Like, we build our software focused on the end user, which means that it's truly built for the SMB. It has to have a great UI, it has to have great usability, it has to have really fast go-to-market, or time to value. We're doing that same thing with all the AI stuff we're building, so that's why it's taking a little bit of time, right? You have to learn, you have to let the AI kinda models learn, but then also release it when it's really ready, and that's what we're doing with our customer base right now in all the beta programs we're doing. We'll see, right? That's the goal. We have to go out there, we have to release it, and then we have to actually start selling it.
Yeah.
But it is exciting.
Awesome. And then on the monetization strategy, so you've had, so you announced the $29 Copilot offering, you've had Microsoft do something similar, you've had Salesforce do something similar, but you've had other SMB-focused companies that haven't yet put out their monetization strategy, or if they had, the early stages for some of the companies within my coverage is, okay, you know, we'll first drive adoption, figure out monetization later. Maybe they use it to drive the top of funnel, maybe they put it in the higher premium price SKUs. So is that at all, like, those differences in monetization—like, how do you guys view that? Like, is that a risk at all that, you know, someone could go to a competitor for a similar offering? Do you think it's just a matter of time before other SMBs start monetizing it?
I'd love to get your thoughts there.
I'm not worried about the competitive dynamic there, meaning, like, what we are providing is built into the product. So to have something on the side, it would have to be deeply integrated, which I guess is possible. But it actually, the model has to learn, you know, from the large language models, but also, it's all about the data that we have internally, that we're actually allowing our customers to utilize their own data, right, and enhance it, essentially. And I think that's gonna be the power there.
In terms of the price, we've said $29, and that's based on, you know, I'd say more art than science, on math that we've done internally, on understanding what agent costs are for our customers, understanding what the potential efficiencies that they're gonna gain, and then what we would want to get if there does result in a lower agent count for us. The goal here would be kind of a win-win-win. It's a win for the very end customer. They get resolutions to their problems and a better experience. It's a win for our customers because a reduced agent count at a human capital cost is gonna be much less than the $29 that they're paying us. But also a win for us because that reduced agent count is gonna be supplemented by the $29.
So that is the absolute goal. We will learn as we go, right? We'll have to figure this out. The other thing that we've actually modeled out is costs, right? Because that's, I think, another big unknown, that companies are going into this, and it's all about the compute power. We are using Microsoft as our back end, and then we use Amazon for our hosting. And we've made our estimates. We have great margin structure right now, at 83%-84%. And we don't think this is gonna impact that. It might slightly, but there's a little nuance to the margin structure anyway, and so we will have to learn as we go. And I think there's- I think it's gonna be the same for all these companies, right?
If anybody's coming out and saying they've figured it all out, then, you know, I'd love to talk to them.
Yeah.... Maybe when we think about the adoption ramp of this, I know you mentioned a little bit this earlier. I've mentioned earlier, different products and, you know, when you think that they could start to be bigger, bigger drivers. But in terms of, you know, what we're seeing more near term, like, do you think that this could start to be a material driver of growth, like, within 2024? Or is this probably a few years out? I know you guys-
Typically the AI stuff or all that?
The AI, yeah, stuff. Yeah. So I would imagine, 'cause you guys have had things like chatbots, right, for a while, so this isn't necessarily new.
Yep.
Has a lot of this talk around generative, generative AI been a catalyst for conversations with Freshchat and, you know, maybe your new customer service offering?
Yeah.
Like, could those actually be maybe more material drivers, whereas the other stuff might take a little bit longer?
Yeah. So Freddy Self-Service is the one, first one we put out.
Yeah.
And we actually don't sell Freddy Self Service; it's kind of embedded within chat. We changed the pricing for chat at the end of Q2, so we lowered the entitlements that customers have in terms of how much chat sessions that they have that they're entitled to when they buy the product, and then we increased the price for add-ons. That will take us some time to flow through as usage increases. I would love to be able to update our investor base in the middle of next year on what we're seeing. I don't think anything's gonna happen before that.
Yeah.
and, you know, hopefully we'll have some traction at that point in time that we could give some updates on, even if it's usage as opposed to even monetization, right? Because the monetization will, will come after. But that's my estimate for that one. On Copilot, you know, if it launches in Q1, it, it'll probably be towards the end of the year that we'd be talking about it.
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Maybe shifting gears to another key topic, which is the CY 2026 outlook that you have, so the billion-dollar target. So I think in order to get there, you have to assume a CAGR of around 20%, which is where you guys are growing today. So one key question investors always ask is: What gives you guys comfort? You know, the macro is very uncertain, things could change like that. So what are you seeing that's overpowering some of these macro headwinds that you're seeing, that gives you confidence in that outlook?
Yeah. You kinda asked earlier about just, you know, hey, SMB pressure, have you seen it? Have you weathered it? And I think we've been through a lot of it. That 20%, which kind of gets you to the fiscal 2026 $26 billion, that is what we think is our baseline, and the six levers of growth that we kind of outlined on top of that would be incremental. We clearly have to execute to get there, but the reality is, like, we're playing in three massive TAMs, and have been able to create, you know, three products that could get to scale. And I think we're using reasonable growth rates specifically for our customer support product, as well as our sales and marketing product. If you look at our investor presentation, the growth rates that we're assuming there are not incredible.
Internally, nobody's really happy about 20% growth, right? I don't think that's super exciting. It is what we've been achieving right now, so we have to figure out how to go execute a little bit better. But I think it's more of a execution thing as a market thing, and the products are there.
The products really work and the customers love them. And so it's about bringing, you know, bringing those products to market. We have been seeing great traction at larger businesses, and we've earned the right to go engage with larger customers. Our 50k and above customer number, you know, still growing healthily over 30%. We're starting to see more annual deals, which is helping with churn, which continues to come down. And so these are all great things that we just got to continue to go execute on. And then the levers of growth on top of it, which I think we have opportunities there.
Yeah. And if we break that down a little bit more, so if we look at the CS piece in particular, so the customer service piece, I think the CAGR assumes something in the high single digits versus the low to mid-teens that you guys are growing at today. So I'd love to dig into, like, what the assumptions are within that. Is part of that just, hey, this is a more mature market, right? Is that reflective of the high single digits? I know you don't have, it sounds like AI and some of these other tail ones really embedded into that.
But in terms of, you know, where we stand today and looking at that growth rate, would love to understand the assumptions there. And, if, you know, if there is any assumptions related to generative AI, maybe displacing seats that, you know, you guys are trying to be-
Yep
... conservative about, like, would, would love to unpack that.
We didn't model in the last piece, right?
Okay.
We didn't model in how much would be taken over from, say, Copilot and whatnot. That market has gone through a lot of fragmentation, right? And some of the bigger players and our competitors have been taken out. The growth has been tough. Part of that has been driven by just new technologies that are out there. Whether that new technologies, which we've been talking about, is, like, just purely conversational, moving away from traditional ticketing. And so our Customer Service Suite, the one, the product we launched at the end of Q2, it is a conversational product first, ticketing second, and that's what we kinda did with the rearchitecture of the product.
We do think that that is the future, and, you know, we've been talking about Omni-channel first and, you know, leading with conversational, and we've been trying to stay ahead of what the trends are. At the same time, there's a bunch of point players that kind of popped up, a lot of them just doing bots or a lot of them just focusing on maybe some of the, the social, aspects of, of support. We have now, we feel like we've gotten to a point where we now have all of that stuff and we've put it all together under one platform, and so that's what we're leaning in on. The market's fragmented. I think you're gonna see a bunch of that fragmentation.
I think some of the players that have been purely focused on bots are gonna be in trouble now, 'cause now the, the, the new technologies, through specifically, ChatGPT and everything else, is allowing other customers to participate in that. Things like bot builders, you don't need an army to go build them. And so we'll see how it all plays out. We put out those numbers because that's what we see today, and we don't wanna be super aggressive on assuming things are just gonna come right back. But we do have opportunities to grow on top of that. The other thing that we assumed is that our agent addition, expansion motion is gonna kinda stay where it is, and it's not gonna actually recover. Clearly, if-...
companies start growing again, which I don't see happening in the near term, but I do think that's gonna happen. That's just gonna be on top of all of it.
Yeah, that's, that's really helpful. Then the other growth driver that is key here is that I think you guys are assuming that the greater than 50K in ARR net add is gonna be greater in the future than what we're seeing today. I know we talked earlier, you guys have implemented a lot on the go-to-market motion to push that. But what makes, what gives you guys confidence that you're gonna continue to see that uptick? I think this last 3Q, it might have been a little bit lighter relative to what you saw in 1Q and 2Q, so maybe you can comment on that, if that related to seasonality, a little bit of an anomaly, but would love to hear about the underlying trends there.
Yeah. I'll answer the last part first. I think there is a little bit of seasonality-
Yeah
... but then also FX played a role in that, that the dollar, you know, kinda lost some strength, and then, as a result, that impacts that number a little bit. But we didn't. I didn't see anything that was concerning on the greater than 50K. We also laid out that the majority of our greater than 50K customers are customers that expand into it. So we still have customers that are expanding at a really healthy clip, and growing into that customer base. I think the confidence that we have there is really, you know, across kind of a couple of things. Number one, and it's gonna be driven by Freshservice, and our growth rates are gonna be driven by Freshservice, and we put that out in the numbers.
And that by inherently on the company size that we're dealing with there mean that a true SMB doesn't need the Freshservice product, so we're really dealing in the mid-market. Those deals are gonna tend to be a bit larger, and that product is doing really, really well. Second, ARPA continues to increase across all of our product lines, and I think the other place that we're gonna see our growth is coming from increased ARPA in general. And then third, as you mentioned, just larger deals. And we've actually started to build that muscle internally, which is part of it. It's not about, are the customers there? It's, are you able to go service them and go sell to them? And that is one thing that we're learning over time, right?
As a company that's grown up as almost all inbound to start with an SMB focus, building out that field motion, everything that's needed around it, it's still a journey. We've been hiring a lot of great talent who've been there, done that, and now kind of building out the piece parts to go execute against that. So, yeah, we are confident that that's where the growth is gonna come from. We obviously have to go execute to go get that growth, and we do have the levers on top of what we think is our baseline, to kind of accelerate that. But we have to see this play out quarter-over-quarter.
Yeah. And this is gonna be a two-part question, but you mentioned on the Freshservice side, that being the biggest driver. So when we look at that piece, it looks like the guide assumes that you'll maybe grow at a CAGR in the low 30s versus, I think, closer to the low 40s that you guys are growing at today. So I know some of the pushback there has been, well, it doesn't assume, you know, as big of a decel. So in terms of... It could just be as simple as some of the demand tailwinds that you spoke about earlier as really being the drivers right behind that business, but maybe you can touch on there.
And then the second part of the question is, I think one question that we get a lot is: Is there true cross-sell synergies between the Freshdesk and the Freshservice side? Can you take advantage of the base that you already have today? And, like, are those two truly separate? Are there cost synergies between them? What does that mean for long-term margins? Lots in there, but what are your thoughts there?
No, I get it. It's funny because the Freshservice, yet we do think part of it's a lot of larger numbers, right?
Yeah.
So it's harder to maintain that growth rate. It's funny because I've had investors say, "Well, why wouldn't... You're being way too conservative. It can, should go a lot faster." The market there is huge, right? And we're, we're not, we're not that big of a company, so we should be able to go, achieve those growth rates, and it's not like we have to go steal a lot of market from anybody, and so that- that's why we feel a little bit confident there. On the... What was the second part of the question? I-
I know I threw a lot at you in one question, but the second part was just on the cross-sell-
Oh, cross-sell motions.
Yeah.
The Freshservice to Freshdesk and Freshdesk to Freshservice, there isn't a natural synergy between those products. Meaning that, there are a couple of use cases that, they are in, you know, integrated, and those use cases, specifically, say, for software companies or tech companies, that if something happens to the customer base that comes in and you have to have, like, an ITOM incident management response, and those use cases are easy to sell. But that's not really the reason to buy. I think our opportunity is that Freshservice has been doing so well, it's, you know, loved by our pros, our customers.
That customer is the CIO, and that CIO usually has a lot of influence over the other buying decisions that are being made, and if one of those buying decisions is on a new support solution, we should be in that conversation, specifically if we are already a trusted vendor. When I talk about the field motion that you need to build out, kind of this muscle and this expertise, that's something we've never really had in terms of customer relationships and being able to have executive sponsorship. Something we're working on that we think we can be able to leverage better in the future.
Perfect. And I'll give you one final question just on margins. So as we look at your CY 2026 revenue guide, I guess, how are you thinking about balancing margins and growth? And then to the extent that Freshservice becomes bigger, you may, you might have- there might be more incremental investments that you have to make to push the upmarket motion, how do you think about all of that playing out?
Yeah. On the sales and marketing side, which is the last piece, I feel like we've built out that infrastructure, and we've made a lot of the investments already, and so now it's tweaking those investments. In terms of margin structure on the 26, where, you know, we said $1 billion, the other thing we said was we're gonna hit Rule of 40 by 2025 and be 20% growth, 20% free cash flow margin. And then beyond that, you know, the capability to increase cash flow margins is there, and we'll just have to see where we go. I would prefer that that Rule of 40 actually shifts more to growth, right? And we will spend more if we think we can grow faster. We just need to be able to do it efficiently.
And so we would make the option, like, if we could get it to 25, 15 on growth, we would absolutely do that, and we've been very open with investors on, about that. But in terms of incremental investments, specifically in sales and marketing, it felt like we've already built the infrastructure. We just need to go make it really efficient.
Perfect. Well, that's all the time that we have. Tyler, thanks so much for joining us today.
Thanks for having me.
Really appreciate it.
Great.
Thanks, everyone, in the audience as well, too.