Good afternoon, everyone. Today with me, I have the Chief Financial Officer of ZoomInfo, Cameron Hyzer. Welcome, Cameron.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Fantastic. So I'd just like to start with a really simple question, maybe, for a few new faces in the audience. Could you please provide a brief overview of ZoomInfo?
Sure. So we provide a platform to salespeople and marketing people to help them go to market more effectively and efficiently, and we do that by providing really high-quality data. I kind of think about it as you have company data, so those are who are the companies that you're selling to? You have contact data, who are the people within those companies that make up your buying committee? And then we have signal data, which is: what are the, you know, what are the things out there that are happening that would indicate that that company might be in market for your product or, or service? And so we sell that to sales and marketing teams, help them sell more effectively and efficiently, and we wrap a lot of tools around that to, to help them go to market better.
Great. So when I look back, you've been a publicly traded company for about four years now. So over this time, you've experienced a wide range of growth rates, above 50% to low single digits, where you guys are currently at. So maybe I think that's a good place to start. So are we at a cyclical low at this point? Would you agree with the statement that we're near a bottom, or how do you think about where we are currently?
Yeah, certainly, you know, we have gone through periods where, you know, we had a lot of growth. I think we've recognized that we're probably a higher beta to the economy company than many. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that we are selling to sales folks. So when sales folks see opportunities for them, for their companies to grow more aggressively, they're gonna invest more into sales solutions like ours. I think when there's a lot of uncertainty, you see companies peel back a little.
For us, in particular, our early adopter set of customers were largely in software and technology spaces, which, you know, have certainly been challenged over the last 18 months to two years, in terms of, you know, having to really rationalize their operating models, particularly if you were a growth-at-all-costs type company, getting to a point where you were either cash flow breakeven or a little bit better. So we've seen a lot of downsell pressure from those companies that are reducing headcount, you know, pulling back on their, you know, more aggressive sales strategies. You know, as a result, I think that's, you know, gone from a, you know, big tailwind from folks that had received a lot of money, were investing in those things.
We felt downsell pressure from those same folks that, you know, needed to reduce their cost infrastructure. And so we are starting to see, particularly in the enterprise and mid-market, stabilization in those net retention rates. You know, in many cases lower than we want them to be, but obviously that's a, hopefully, a precursor to being able to improve those as we move forward. We do continue to see weakness and, you know, saw more weakness in Q1 in terms of our small business customers. So I think that needs to stabilize as little as well, and we'll have to, you know, work through that in the current environment.
You know, our goal ultimately is to get our net retention rates back to, you know, 100% or over 100% in order to drive sustainable growth out into the future.
In terms of just the digging a little bit deeper into those trends here, is the headwinds primarily within the software business, it sounds like, these technology clients versus the non-technology clients?
Certainly from a downsell pressure perspective, it is much more pronounced in technology and particularly software, more than other verticals. You know, certainly, I'd say the macroeconomic uncertainty that people feel out there is not unique to software, but but the, you know, downsell pressure that we feel, you know, that makes software even harder. So if you look at on an absolute dollar basis, you know, our revenues from software companies are down, you know, year-over-year at this point, while the other industries that we serve, you know, continue to grow pretty well, and many of those industries are growing, you know, in the teens in terms of in terms of growth rate. So they feel, you know, a little bit more stable, but there are many different layers to that at the end of the day.
And then in terms of... You mentioned that the goal is to, under maybe a more normalized circumstance, get to 100% NRR, maybe a bit better than that. Is there a natural level of churn, given the business that you run or the types of clients that you have?
Yeah, certainly, you know, we have a very wide spectrum of customers, ranging from, you know, very large enterprises. You know, obviously, those customers churn very little. So we have close to kind of 100% gross retention from those customers through to mid-market companies. And then, you know, roughly a third of our business is still small businesses. So, you know, for small businesses with, you know, less than 100 employees, the, you know, life cycle of those companies might be, you know, five years, maybe a little bit longer. So there is, in that segment of the business, a, you know, natural churn rate that, you know, is probably close to 20%, and that's just companies shutting down. And then those companies also have a higher propensity to turn over people.
So if you had a, you know, particular person that really sponsored ZoomInfo as their tool that they were using, if those people leave, you know, those customers are often at risk as well. So, you know, those smaller customers certainly have a much higher churn rate that, you know, ultimately, you know, so long as a third of our business comes from small business, certainly creates a structural level of kind of gross churn. Historically, and, you know, currently, we tend to have a gross retention, so that's kind of one minus the churn rate, you know, around 90%. It's a little lower than that right now. But that's stayed, you know, more or less stable over time, and where net retention has reduced, has been much more about the downsell pressure that we're seeing.
We, in fact, you know, see a net downsell among our existing customers. We have many customers that are growing, but other customers that are shrinking, that ultimately gets us to that 85 level in terms of net retention.
As we look ahead, how do you think about the mix changing in terms of the enterprise versus the SMB versus mid-market at this point?
Yeah. So we've been very intentional in terms of focusing on more growth in the enterprise. We've adjusted our go-to-market motions to focus more on, you know, account management within the enterprise, verticalizing across those teams, and focusing more of our product development on, you know, more sophisticated customers. Things like our Operations OS or Marketing OS are really helping to, you know, drive growth within that customer base. So, you know, over the last four years, I think if you would've talked to me when we were going public, I, you know, told a lot of people that the mix of the business was roughly a third, a third, a third, with enterprise being the smallest third of that.
You know, now enterprise is, you know, close to 40% of our overall business, so we've seen, you know, that mix shift kinda slowly move up. In reality, we still provide a lot of value to other types of customers. So, you know, small business, as an example, has, you know, grown in line with the overall business, but enterprise continues to grow, you know, a little bit faster, and we're gonna continue to invest in that. And I think the products that we're rolling out, whether that's continuing to invest in, you know, AI support through our OperationsOS or Copilot, you know, play really well in the enterprise and I think will enable us to continue that mix shift over time.
Got it. Maybe hold the thought on Copilot, 'cause I've got a couple questions on that. Given where we are today, if we look forward to more normalized circumstances, what does the growth for this firm look like?
Well, you know, certainly if we look back, even, you know, pre-COVID, if we go back into the 2018, 2019 timeframe, the NRR was, you know, well above 100%. I think we wanna get, you know, back into that range where NRR is above 100%. And there's still a huge amount of opportunity in terms of new business out there. We've been selling, you know, in excess of $200 million a year in new business, to various different customers.
So, you know, in a world where we are able to generate, you know, 100+ NRR, plus, you know, $200 million+ of new business on 1.2, 1.3, 1.5, whatever it is, billion-dollar business, you know, that ends up looking like a teens grower, maybe even pushing 20%, depending on where we can take that NRR up over time. And, you know, I think in a world with a little bit more stability and, you know, people focusing on growth, you know, perhaps even that new number could go up as well.
Got it. And then in terms of just being a premium product, can you talk about pricing dynamics? It's also premium priced. How much room is there?
Sure. So, you know, look, I think we focus on providing a really actionable and accurate data set to our customers. I think when we talk to our customers about that, we see that there's real value that they're getting, and I think that, you know, we like to make sure that there's a real ROI there, but align the pricing with the value that we're providing. Yeah, I think historically and going forward, we're gonna focus on really only pushing price when we're delivering significantly more value to the customer. So, you know, we're entering a phase where we believe that we are gonna be delivering that value, and that we'll be able to, you know, increase prices as a result of that.
But that has been our philosophy, and probably where we'll, you know, continue to focus going forward. It's more aligning value with price, more than just pushing price.
Got it. And then, I tend to get a lot of questions around the, the product roadmap and kind of the competitive positioning, so maybe switching to that, can you actually discuss your new, AI Copilot product? Obviously, there seems to be a lot of excitement, and you guys think it's one of your, your most important releases in a long time.
Yeah. So, Copilot is definitely exciting. If you think about all the information that we have within the ZoomInfo platform, there's a lot of it. It can be... You know, I think we have over 50,000 attributes for, you know, particular companies. We have, you know, hundreds of millions of people that work within those companies, and what their roles are, what their contact information is, and then, you know, multitudes of signals about what those companies are doing. And you can think of signals as something like, you know, if you're selling, if you're a health insurance brokerage firm and you're selling your services, you probably really wanna know when there's a new director of HR, when there's a new benefits person, or, you know, even when a new CFO comes along.
Maybe you wanna know when that company gets an investment from a private equity firm or, you know, they're doing research on, you know, HSAs. You know, all of those things are signals that we provide to, you know, our customers and, and based on those, that's a great time to reach out, and we're gonna provide context about that. So just based on our third-party information, if you log into Copilot to start out, you're gonna get a recommended list of the AI basically connecting all of the dots within all the information that we have to say, "Look, this company," maybe you focus on companies that are 100-1,000 employees in the whatever, Newport Beach area. So you're gonna get a list of, okay, this company just hired a new head of benefits. There are 500 people.
They're in Newport Beach, you know, right within your sweet spot. You should reach out to them, and not only should you reach out to them, but it's gonna give you the context and help write an email to say, "You should reach out to them," and say, you know, that particular person who was just hired, "Congratulations on your new job at XYZ company. You know, we provide benefits to companies just like yours," and, you know, "Here are all the value proposition points that you'd wanna make. Would love to talk to you about your initiatives now that you started the company." Then it'll look around at the rest of the buying committee and say, "I see that you just hired, you know, Joe, to run benefits for your company. He's really great, coming from ABC Company.
You know, here are all the things that we're able to do for you in that role." And so from a prospecting use case, that's really interesting, that you're basically cutting out a lot of that research that you'd have to do to come up with what's the context around reaching out to someone, who are gonna be the best companies, et cetera, et cetera. And then from an account perspective, once you sell that company, you're probably gonna hand it off to someone else, or maybe you're gonna have your CEO come in and meet with executives from that company at some point. You know, the AI will basically connect all the things that we know, as well as bring in, you know, CRM data.
It'll bring in your Chorus data, if you're recording calls for them, or connect with your email system so that you can have a real-time, up-to-date account plan or, you know, information about that account. If I'm gonna go meet with an executive, I can just log in and say, "Okay, I'm gonna meet with XYZ person at this company, at Jefferies. Like, what do I need to know?" It'll tell me, "Here's the conversations that we've had to date. Here's what Jefferies' pain points are. Here's how big of a company they are. Here's what they do." All of these things right at your fingertips that you can hand off between people. You can create account plans. You can, you know, give people more context into what they're doing.
So, providing that intelligence to salespeople throughout the cycle, whether it's prospecting new, whether it's closing a deal, whether it's servicing a customer, we feel is something that, you know, really isn't available out there, and we're gonna continue to lean in and make it better over time as we're bringing in more signals, as we're bringing in more integrations, and as we're, you know, really driving the product into the future.
With the product having recently gone GA, how do we think about the implementation or the adoption curve or the timeline for that product?
Yeah. So we've run a few platform migration plays in the past. So when we acquired ZoomInfo as DiscoverOrg, and when we acquired RainKing as DiscoverOrg, we would take... You know, ZoomInfo is a good example where, you know, DiscoverOrg was really focused on high-quality data, but on a limited data set. ZoomInfo was focused on finding as much information as possible out there but didn't have the same level of quality. So when we merged the technology that we'd built to really drive quality with the technology that ZoomInfo had built to really drive quantity, when we married quality and quantity together, we were able to deliver a lot more value to our customers. So we went out to our customers, and we said: "Okay, this is a much better product. We have all these other things in here.
You have a much broader array of data that's higher quality, perhaps, than you had in the past." You know, we worked with our customers to drive, you know, additional revenue from that value. You know, over the two or three years following that acquisition, we were able to migrate all of our customers from the legacy DiscoverOrg or the legacy ZoomInfo platforms to the next best, you know, the new and better platform. We're gonna do that same thing here, so we'll start with customers that have the highest propensity to really drive value from the platform. Part of that's gonna be based on those customers that, you know, already have CRM integrations, as an example, or maybe are already using Chorus or, you know, other things that'll drive even more signals than just the base level of data.
And then work through with, through the customer base over time to continue to bring more and more customers over to the, you know, new platform and off of the legacy platform. Over, you know, two to four years, we expect to ultimately get our entire customer base over.
And then what would be the moat around a product like this? Is it the underlying data at this point, or is there a speed-to-market component? How should we think about that?
We really believe that the quality of the data that we're able to provide is gonna drive much more value for customers. And I think, you know, for 15 years, we've always had the highest quality data that's out there. We've always focused on continuing to drive more and more data, more and more data at really high quality levels to drive better outcomes for our customers. Over the past few years, we've really focused on where can we continue to add signals around that data? So I think the amount and, you know, kind of efficacy of the signals that we're providing are gonna continue to create a bigger and bigger moat, and we've started to create a platform where we can bring in signals from other providers as well.
So G2 is being integrated into the system as an example, where, you know, signals from G2 can help drive a motion. We normalize that within our entire platform of who the buying committee is and who the companies are. So, you know, I think that we're really leaning into our strength in terms of, you know, high-quality data in terms of that moat. And then certainly, you know, we're continuing to train our models and to, you know, drive value for that. So I think there is some level of, we are the first kind of company out here who's gonna be able to really drive significant value through an AI-based platform like our Copilot. And we're gonna continue to make that better and better over time.
But I think the real key to driving that value is high-quality data, almost more than anything else, and, you know, really there's been no one out there that's been able to create the kind of data and maintain it and, you know, continue to drive more and more signals like we have.
So is that the key between winning a customer and perhaps not being able to keep one? How, how should we think about it? It comes down to the data, 'cause there's been some defections, but then you've also had boomerang customers. Can you talk about that dynamic?
Yeah. I mean, certainly at the low end of the market, we do see some customers, particularly when they're under, you know, economic stress or duress, that they go out and look for a lower-priced solution. I think they get, they get promised that the data's good enough or almost as good. I think once they start using it, they realize that it's really not. And, you know, in many cases, we'll see those customers come back to us, you know, basically with the story that, like, our salespeople erupted or, you know, they started not doing as well as—because, you know, even if it's just contact data and you're reaching out to folks, if, you know, 20% of the contacts aren't good, you're wasting a lot of time reaching out to those folks.
You're really frustrating your sales team in a way that, you know, they were used to having, you know, 95%+ accuracy, and now they don't get that. So I think frustration levels, you know, lower productivity from those teams certainly manifest themselves in those discussions. And certainly, you know, when we start looking at Copilot, as an example, you know, the users who are using Copilot are generating twice as many opportunities as, you know, the kind of control group users in the same company that aren't using Copilot.
You know, realistically, you know, we charge relatively little in that context, that if I can make your salespeople twice as effective or help them generate twice as much pipeline, that then they can go out and close, you know, for a salesperson that you're paying $200,000 or $300,000 to, you know, an extra $1,000 or $2,000 is definitely worth it from that perspective. So I think, it's the quality of the data that drives real outcomes, so the actionability and, you know, outcome-driven nature of the data that really kind of creates that opportunity for us, and those are things, you know, that we continue to, to push on.
If you look upmarket, so in the enterprise, as an example, we see very little competition, and part of that is they really care about quality, and they actually test the data oftentimes before they buy it. Anytime we're in a trial where people are really testing the data and testing the actionability of the data, you know, that's like a guaranteed win for us at the end of the day because, you know, that is, again, playing to our strong suit in terms of quality and, you know, frankly, also the privacy that we're able to deliver, basically ensuring that companies are using ethically sourced data, that it's integrated in well with everything they do, and high quality is, you know, why the enterprise has been such a fertile ground for us.
Got it. With maybe a couple minutes left here, maybe coming full circle, so what does ZoomInfo maybe look like three to five years from now? Is it gonna be much more enterprise-heavy? How should we think about that and-
Yeah. So we're, we're certainly focused on continuing to shift the mix towards enterprise. So yeah, we're not going to give up on our small business customers. I think that, you know, we're still providing value there, but where we're, you know, deploying incremental effort or discretionary effort is gonna be much more focused on those larger customers. They tend to be more stable, they tend to, you know, be more sophisticated, and therefore, can derive more value out of what we're providing. And so that'll be our focus. I think that, hopefully we're working through and, you know, can turn the corner on, you know, the mid-market set of customers, and I think improving the net retention for mid-market customers, you know, will also help.
Seeing a business that's much more weighted towards, you know, enterprise and mid-market, that still, you know, has small business customers, but it's a much smaller portion of the overall base, is certainly our goal.
Got it. We're down to about a minute. So I'm just gonna ask about really quickly on margins here. You guys have really strong margins. There's been a little bit of near-term pressure. Just any color there of where we are in that part of the cycle and...
Sure. So, you know, we believe the hallmark of a good business is to generate, you know, strong margins and cash flow, and so we'll continue to do that. Certainly, we are focused on driving sustainable growth into the future, and so, you know, we've been investing heavily into Copilot and, you know, really driving value for our customers there. Copilot's probably a few hundred basis points of margin pressure, but we think very worth it in terms of what we've been able to create in terms of a product and, you know, our vision of where that's going to continue to deliver value for our customers. So, you know, I think as we are able to return to growth, we should be able to harvest some of the natural operating leverage that we have in the business.
As we do that, I'm sure we'll reinvest some of that back into continuing to drive growth, but we'll probably deliver some of that back to, you know, additional profit as well.
Excellent. It says we've got three seconds left, so thank you for your time, Cameron.
Awesome. Thank you very much!