All right, everyone, we're gonna get started. My name is Brian Peterson. I'm one of the application software analysts here at Raymond James. Very happy to have ZoomInfo back with us this year. Graham O'Brien, Jerry Sadzicki. We're gonna make this interactive, so if you guys raise your hands if you have any questions, feel free to fire away. Graham, maybe to get started, just a high-level overview on ZoomInfo and what you guys have been up to on the product side over the last few years?
Yeah, it's great to be back, Brian. Thanks for having us. You know, the last few years at ZoomInfo, the focus has been shifting the business upmarket. We've been really successful in doing so over the last 8 or so quarters. Our upmarket business is growing 6% year-over-year in Q4. It's now 74% mix of the total business. That's up 4 points in 2025 alone and almost 10 points over the last 2 years. Our upmarket business is significantly more profitable than our downmarket business, and we continue to see improving retention up, retention opportunity upmarket as we roll out new AI-powered products for go-to-market.
Maybe just talking about, like, OperationsOS or some of the new products that you've launched. What are you seeing in terms of adoption there, and what kind of value are you providing for customers?
Yeah. The operations story is really positive. That is our data access, essentially DaaS product. That product is growing solidly in the 20s year-over-year. It's over $200 million of ARR at this point, it's not a seat-based model. This is essentially us selling access to our proprietary data asset largely to upmarket and enterprise customers for things like territory planning, you know, as the basis for intelligent campaign design. We can talk about Go-To-Market Studio in a second-
Yeah
... on that front. Again, that business is a nine-figure revenue business that is growing, you know, strong, and it also has profitability that is, you know, in line with, if not better than the profitability of our upmarket business in aggregate.
How has that trajectory been versus your expectations? Has there been any challenges in terms of kinda seat-based versus not seat-based? I know that's a big debate in software, curious how that's gone.
It's going great relative to our expectation. Again, operations is not seat-based.
Right.
You know, we do have seat-based products, they're also, you know, growing well. The opportunity with operations and some of our other products that will live either in the operations suite or near that or adjacent to it, mentioned Go-to-Market Studio, we have some, you know, really promising levers to continue to accelerate that business and, you know, make progress blending the pricing model of the business.
What about the adoption on Studio and in Copilot? I know that's come up a lot over the last few quarters. Maybe give us an update there.
Yeah. It was a great year for ZoomInfo Copilot. you know, we more than doubled the ACV on Copilot in 2025. It's now more than 20% of our total ACV. This is kind of the progression from what was our legacy SalesOS product targeted for end user, direct seller use cases, so think account executives, account managers, SDRs, CSMs, sales leadership. We're, you know, really excited to see the progress there with Copilot. On Go-To-Market Studio, we announced Go-To-Market Studio in the middle of 2025. Q3 was largely a story of building it with a select group of early access customers. Q4, we started rolling out some paid POCs with those customers. Q1 is really where we're starting to broadly bring it to market.
Maybe just think about how ZoomInfo looks in kind of an AI world. I think that's a key debate in terms of, like, there's opportunities, but there's all risks. How could you frame that for us?
Yeah. I see a lot of opportunity. You know, it depends, you know, what your, what your view is of kind of applications and seats in the future. I think across almost all scenarios, we have a really great opportunity. I think about this as, you know, a spectrum of how ZoomInfo helps customers go to market in an AI world. You start with the data foundation, and we kinda touched on that with the operations business. You've got the orchestration layer with Go-to-Market Studio.
You can think of that as almost like a control tower that sits on top of ZoomInfo data that brings in your first-party data from CRM, from Snowflake, from other data silos, marries all that first and third-party data together, and then helps you design intelligent campaign design, helps you enrich data at scale, and then effectively push that out. None of that, from essentially orchestration backwards, is seat-based.
Right.
We push that out to a Copilot or a GTM Workspace, and we can offer the full go-to-market spectrum, or we can essentially show up as the back-end context server for customers in go-to-market.
Have you seen any changes in seats as you think about some of your customers? Like, how are you thinking about, like, seat dynamics with some customers over the long term?
Yeah
... you're selling both at this point?
Yeah. You know, I haven't seen a significant change in the last few quarters. I think that some customers are, you know, reducing seats in aggregate.
Mm-hmm.
Some customers are at pockets where they're hiring or adding seats. We continue to have a lot of seat opportunity in our existing customer base that we haven't actually sold into yet. With the success of our operations business, the rollout of Go-To-Market Studio, you know, if you think about the seat contribution to our revenue base, it peaked in 2022.
Sure.
It's gone down significantly over the last few years with, you know, our fastest-growing business being not seat-based. I continue to see this progression towards a blended consumption model.
Right
... that sets us up well in, you know, across a lot of scenarios.
Maybe just looking at AI from a budget perspective, are you finding that for some of your AI-enabled products that that's coming from an existing budget? Is that net new? Just curious how those conversations are going with customers.
It's a combination, but I would say that AI-specific budget is certainly kind of prioritized and is, you know, kind of better budget to go after. Historically, we're usually coming from a CRO budget or a sales OP budget. Occasionally, it's a CIO or a data budget. We've had success kind of going and actually combining budget at some of our customers and sometimes under kind of an ELA motion, where we get stakeholders and leaders across different parts of the business to come together and align on the long-term investment with ZoomInfo.
You hit on this earlier, maybe just could you elaborate a little bit on some of the data advantages and the process that you have with the data and the sources and how you can use that to provide value for customers?
Yeah. You know, it really does come back down to the kind of moat that we have around our proprietary data asset.
Right.
We have a lot of that data we're able to acquire through our contributory data networks. What that can look like is a non-paying user comes in and gives us access to their business data in return for some limited access to ZoomInfo.
Mm-hmm.
We also have customers that opt in to contribute their business data into our data asset. That scale of that asset is an advantage. We're able to then complement that with licensing agreements, often exclusive licensing agreements with bespoke data providers. Marry that all together, and then there's kind of data science in the background that goes into cleansing, ranking, enriching that data to create that unique third-party asset.
Like, that's a lot. How hard would it be for customers to implement that themselves? They would have to try to recreate the data sources, do all what you do. You don't really see that as a, as a risk?
No, that's not really a viable risk that we see. Like, most of this is not publicly available.
Right.
You know, I think it creates even more value and even more opportunity as customers seek to do go-to-market work, whether with employees or with agents. The accuracy and the actionability of that context layer becomes even more important.
Maybe talk about some of your up-market success. You know, what have you seen there in terms of how you're going to market with those customers? Any changes that you've implemented over the last year or two?
You know, I think a couple years ago, we went and segmented our new business account executives.
Mm-hmm
... so that we had a dedicated enterprise account executive team. That meant, you know, that we were okay with longer sales cycles 'cause we were gonna land at a higher price point. We were kind of rolling out more relationship-based selling than transactional selling, and I think we're basically through that process now. We've effectively reoriented our sales and marketing structures over the past three or four years to become focused on the up market. Down market, it's really an efficiency play for us.
Mm-hmm.
We want those logos. We want them to contribute data into our asset. Generally, down market customers are a little bit more sensitive to near-term trends.
Sure
We're able to go and acquire those customers with a greater rate of efficiency.
And what have you seen competitively? Has anything changed? Maybe you can kind of unpack that. Like, what does it look like up market versus down market?
I think down market, especially kind of the lower end of down market, if you think about customers or prospects that have fewer than 25 employees, there's been a history of, you know, half a dozen or so players down there that are lower cost and lower quality.
Sure.
I think that's still true. As customers grow and they start to value the quality of the data, they, you know, really start to value the kind of our privacy position and kinda being leaders when it comes to security and compliance. That's where, you know, we kind of see the limit of a lot of those down market providers.
Mm-hmm
... as we get into the mid-market and above. Up market, you know, we don't see a lot, and a lot of our sales cycles don't have competitors. You can think about like a Dun & Bradstreet with a legacy company, data installation. More holistically, we're moving more and more into a world where, you know, we can sell you the full spectrum from data to execution application or, you know, show up and essentially do parts of that, in the go-to-market world.
Maybe just talk about the value of the platform, like, anything you can share on, like, the ROI or some of your larger customers, like, what have they shown in terms of implementing the platform and the value that they ultimately get?
Yeah. You know, the value in, you know, several points of data accuracy is absolutely immense.
Sure
... depending on, you know, the scale and the reliance you have on doing your go-to-market on top of that data layer. You could think about, like, directionally hours saved for account executives or account managers who don't need to context switch out of, you know, 12 or 20 different kind of reference points, and they can do all of that in one spot. Then you can think about, like, unlocked look-alike pipeline, where if you don't have ZoomInfo and you're able to identify, you know, $100 of pipeline, with ZoomInfo you can identify $90 of that plus another $90 of similar pipeline.
Right. I know you guys had a lot of success with the software vertical when you guys went public. I know you've diversified away from that. I'm curious, where do you stand in terms of kind of an end market exposure? Are there any new end markets that are really ramping up in 2025 and into 2026?
Yeah. Software was, you know, almost 40% of our total ACV at peak a few years ago. Went through a fair amount of downsell pressure with that kind of end market over the last few years. Most of that was rightsize their spend, keep the logo, invest behind the business relationship.
Mm-hmm.
It's still around 31% or 32% of mix, so it is still our largest end market. You know, generally what we see there is that the customers are looking for, you know, whether it's the application side or the data side, they generally have a better sophistication when it comes to go-to-market AI use cases.
Sure.
You know, continue to be hopeful about the prospects there. Outside of software, you know, things like finance and insurance, real estate, transportation, some of the more legacy verticals, we've had success growing those as kind of software rightsize.
Well, what has been the impediment or to adoption in some of those other end markets? Are they just kinda late to the stage in sort of technology and AI and what are you doing to kinda educate those end markets about the value you provide?
Yeah, I think that's exactly it. You know, if I think about, you know, where we kind of fit in t companies that are doing a go-to-market, my belief is we fit in somewhere with everyone. The surface area of ZoomInfo's go-to-market application is expanding. If I have a large conglomerate that's in a more kind of legacy vertical, they might not be as sophisticated when it comes to AI use cases. Usually we show up in that situation. We are the data foundation with Operations. We are kind of the first time they've seen go-to-market orchestration with Go-to-Market Studio. We are their seat provider for a Copilot or a Workspace.
On the flip side, if you've got, you know, a smaller company that's an AI startup that has, you know, well-funded and a high sophistication, Around these, essentially applications. We might just be a context layer where we plug in as an MCP into Claude.
Mm-hmm.
They're doing a lot of their go-to-market work in Claude, but we are still their trusted context layer in that scenario.
What is their data strategy? If you're like an insurance carrier or some of these guys that are maybe legacy to this situation, like, what are you typically replacing or is that viewed as mostly greenfield?
It's mostly greenfield. Usually in those scenarios, the data strategy's being developed when we show up.
Okay. How do you think about that net new logo opportunity then? Like, there would seemingly be a lot that you can lean into. What are we thinking about net logos as part of the growth algo?
Finite set of, especially at the higher end. You know, the higher we go in the enterprise, there's just a finite set of companies out there. There are still logo opportunities, but the real growth opportunity comes from expanding with them. You know, I point to our 100K logos.
Mm-hmm.
where we're, you know, almost back to record highs there. We continue to grow that logo population. We have 1,921 customers that spend $100,000 or more with us annually. The next kind of the future of growth there is gonna be coming from someone that spends $200K that jumps to $1 million.
Mm.
-or from $1 million-$5 million.
What's the right way to think about the NRR expansion then? I know that maybe it looks a little bit different kind of up market versus down market, but how should we think about that over the long term?
Yeah. NRR is 90% right now. That's up from, you know, 85% and 86%, a year or so ago. We've been able to improve that as we shifted the business up market. Up market NRR is about 100% in period the last few quarters. I think, you know, the next goal there would be get that closer to 105%. I think that's gonna come from a couple things. One would be, you know, effectively improving growth retention with stickier products, with kind of improving, you know, customer relationships. I think a lot of that's already in process. The second part of that is expanding product footprint with those customers. That is a Go-To-Market Studio. That's a GTM Workspace. That's an operation thing.
In, I guess maybe down market, how are you thinking about the NRR there and I guess blended that should probably improve, right? As the mix continues to evolve more and more.
You know, blended 90, I think just improving that will come, you know, would come from improving up markets. Down market, the goal has been to make that a smaller and healthier part of our business. We still value the down-market business. We still value those customers, and a lot of them are important contributors to our contributory data network. You know, it is smaller. It is 26% mix now. It is healthier. We are seeing better retention outcomes from down-market customers in the back half of last year relative to the first half, part of that is we're qualifying the business we put in there at a much more rigorous level. We're selling less new business down there deliberately, we're also going through some SEO headwinds with our new business down market.
As we navigate those, you know, I think we have an opportunity to start to get some of that back as we get into the back half of this year and start to get the down-market business going from, you know, -10% now approaching a better number over the next year or 2. The goal of getting the mix up market, down market to 80/20, I think a year ago, I would've said that's gonna take 5 years. We're already at 74/26. I feel like we're gonna be a year or 2 ahead of schedule, and we can get to 80/20 potentially by the end of next year.
I guess maybe a higher level question, the margins are very, very high, but how do you think about the balance of kind of investing in growth or maybe driving more operating leverage?
Yeah. I think we have almost all the investments we need for growth already in the run rate, and we've been able to shift some of that. You know, it's really been a largely a story of shifting resources into up market, prioritizing the product builds that we wanna go and get out there.
Mm-hmm.
Right-sizing some of the down market resources for a business that we are not as focused on from revenue generation. I don't think there's like a net incremental need to go spend to accelerate growth further. I do think we have opportunity to continue to be more efficient in sales and marketing in GNA. I think R&D, like, we are already a smaller and more productive team. In cost of service, as we shift some more of our, you know, more of our revenue base into potentially a consumption model, we might see some gross margin pressure.
Okay. I mean, how would we be thinking about kind of the incremental contribution margins then or anything that you would call out as you guys look to grow going forward?
Yeah. I think the, you know, the guidance that we rolled out a month ago was almost a point of margin improvement in 2026 relative to 2025. Some of that's just entering with a more profitable run rate-
Mm-hmm.
this year. You know, I think you could look at a scenario, whether it's this year or a future year, where it's, you know, 1 or 2 points lower gross margins and then, you know, 1 point plus better from both GNA and sales and marketing.
Maybe opportunities to leverage AI. I know you're doing some of that today, but where do you think you could maybe expand that to drive further margin expansion going forward?
Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, we're customer zero for our sales and marketing AI products, right? Copilot and Workspace, Go-To-Market Studio, you know, we wanna be best in class and to be the blueprint for our customers to show them how to leverage our own product set. Outside of that, I think we're probably a little bit ahead of the curve in R&D when it comes to software development and productivity around that and coding. GNA, I think there's like, you know, some legal finance HR use cases where we've been able to automate and eliminate manual work and do it in a way that actually reduces risk.
You guys have a very large buyback outstanding. I know M&A has been part of the capital allocation plan historically. Where do you guys sit today in terms of, like, how you're thinking about deploying the cash?
I think the story the last few years has been allocating the majority of our free cash flow to buy back stock. I think we still view the market price of a share of ZoomInfo as pretty disconnected from the intrinsic value of a share of ZoomInfo. We're also gonna be, you know, take a risk-adjusted view to this, and we're gonna balance buybacks against M&A, against debt. When it comes to M&A, I know we've been quite successful doing acquihires over the last few years. In a scenario like that, we can go and find an AI native startup that has built something that's on our roadmap that we can accelerate 6 months or 12 months.
There's very little capital, if not maybe no capital outlay, and we're just bringing them on as employees. We'll continue to monitor the landscape there and balance the capital allocation decisions.
Anything from the audience? Okay, go ahead.
Yes. You mentioned, you don't really see customers today deploying AI internally to build their own solutions. I'm curious, what do you see from AI native startup vendors? How do you think they compare to what you offer? What do you see as the moat for ZoomInfo versus those?
Yeah. I think the AI development tools that are out there, stuff that we're using for our own developers, like, make application building easier. I think if you are, or I guess scenarios where AI native companies, like, they might be building some of their own internal applications with us for go-to-market use cases or not. There's always gonna be some barrier about whether that makes sense for them to do it or just to go buy it from a trusted vendor. I do think it further enhances and highlights how valuable the context layer is, 'cause if you don't have the data and you don't have the context layer, whatever you're building on top of is not gonna work.
Maybe just one for me, just on the timing of the buyback. I know that's a question I get a lot from investors. Yeah. How do you think about any rough parameters around, on the timing of where you'd be deploying that?
Yeah. You know, I think you said it's, you know, we got $1.2 billion available with the $1 billion on top of the $200 million of remaining. We generate about $400 million of cash flow every year. We carry $100 million-$200 million of cash at the end of any quarter end. It gives us options if, you know, we wanted to get more aggressive to deploy.
Got it. All right. We'll stop it there, everyone. Thanks for listening in.
Thank you.