Good morning, and welcome to Gartner's 3rd Quarter 2017 Earnings Call. This call will include a discussion of Q3 2017 financial results as well as an updated outlook for 2017. After prepared remarks, you will have an opportunity to ask questions. In addition to today's press release, the company has provided an accompanying presentation as a reference point for investors and analysis. Both the press release and the presentation are available on the investor website at investor.
Gartner.com. Certain statements made on this call may constitute forward looking statements. Forward looking statements can vary materially from actual results and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Including those contained in the company's 2016 annual report on Form 10 K and quarterly reports on Form 10 Q. As well as in other filings with the SEC.
The company encourages all of you to review the risk factors listed in these documents With that, I would like to hand over the call over to Gartner's Chief Executive Officer, Gene Hall. Mr. Hall you can please proceed.
Good morning, and welcome to our quarterly earnings call. Thanks for joining us. We delivered another strong quarter of double digit growth in Q3 of 2017, Our business continues to perform well. We're making great progress on the integration of Partner and CV, and I continue to be excited about our business our prospects for growth and our strategy to drive value for our shareholders over the long term. We're living in exciting times.
Technology is helping out new markets and creating innovative ways to serve customers. Technology driven disruption is providing exponential growth opportunities. And threats to entire industries. Cyber security is a pervasive and critical risk. Technology has also become an critical factor in every function of the enterprise, supply chain, sales, marketing, HR, finance, legal, and the rest.
And if that's not enough, the business environment continues to be mixed, exchange rates, commodity prices, global macroeconomic growth and geopolitical dislocations. Business leaders have never faced the rate of change they face today. They need help to deal with these difficult issues. The combination of CEV and Gartner gives us unique capabilities to help clients address these issues with every function of the business. We're combining the best of both businesses: research methodologies, sales and service best practices, operations, and together, we will be better than either company was alone.
So the combination of Gartner plus CEV will provide a quantum leap in our ability to help clients. In a moment, Craig will take you through the details of our Q3 results. But before he does, I'd like to take you through a few performance highlights. Now as we've done in our previous earnings calls and because of ongoing exchange rate volatility, I'll review these highlights in FX neutral terms. Traditional Gartner business continues to deliver outstanding performance.
For the third quarter of 2017, traditional Gartner revenues grew 14% year over year. The traditional partner research business is doing great. In Q3, we delivered 16% revenue growth, and 15% contract value growth, with double digit increases in every region across every size company and in virtually every industry. We achieved these strong results despite a 2 week disruption in one of our major hubs due to Hurricane Irma and also a higher level a higher than usual level of M and A in our clients. Our sales force continues to be our largest investment.
At the end of Q3, the traditional Gartner sales force grew 17% year over year. Salesforce growth accelerated as we identified and hired a large number of highly qualified salespeople, allowing us to reduce our number of open sales territories to near record low levels. This provides a great foundation for future growth. As I mentioned in our last call, improving sales productivity remains a top priority for us. Over the past few years, we've implemented a number of programs to improve sales productivity and those actions are working.
We drove another consecutive quarter of sales productivity improvement. Sales productivity for Q3 2017 improved 11% organically over the same quarter last year. And looking forward, our sales pipeline is strong. The Gardner Consulting segment had a mixed quarter in Q3. Most of the business performed well.
To specific teams and operational problems that we're addressing. One team had a higher than usual number of managing partner open territories, which, of course, impacts our bookings. The second team has a relatively high number of new managing partners, and we expect their performance will improve with a gain experience. In addition, our contract optimization business, which alternate swings between quarters, was down 11% year over year. Looking forward, we've begun addressing these issues and our consulting business our consulting new business pipeline is strong.
The traditional Gartner Revance business had a very strong quarter, with a 25% increase in revenues, including an 18% increase in same event revenues. In short, across the traditional Gartner business, we've got great momentum, and we expect to maintain this momentum as continuing progress with the integration of CEV. Now turn to the traditional CV businesses. Contract value for the traditional CV Research And Advisory business experienced a 1% decline in Q3 in line with our expectations. We're investing in this business to fuel future growth We're hiring approximately 80 new sales professionals for this organization, and they'll be in territory early in 2018.
We introduced several new Seapace products that will deliver more value to functional business leaders in HR, finance, sales, legal and of course IT. We already made sales in all of these new products, and we plan to introduce more new products at the beginning of 2018. Expanded service teams to drive retention of these new products. Our sales and service support team has increased by about 40% through a combination of filling open positions, and new roles to support growth and improve retention. In returning our teams on operational best practices and building service capabilities to support retention and growth.
Taken together, these are broad based initiatives that leverage Gartner best practices and build on the strong CEB Foundation creating a platform for enhanced growth and profitability. As we discussed last quarter, we're executing as many of the larger changes as practical 2017, which could create some speed bumps along the way. While there could be near term challenges, we're confident that these are the right actions to position us best for the long term. I recently met with the sales leaders from this organization. They have incredible enthusiasm and support the changes we're making and the opportunities for growth in this business.
Let me now turn to the TA and Other segment. Adjusted revenue in the TA and Other segment declined by 4% compared to a year ago quarter. This was primarily due to a large number substantially reduce the number of open territories, which positions us well for the future. In addition, we've hired a strong leader experienced intel assessment to lead this business. CDB TAL assessment is a leading global provider of TAL assessment solutions.
They have a best in class portfolio assessment tools, benchmark data and predictive technologies that equip organizations to assess, select, and develop the right people for the right roles. As I discussed last quarter, we established CEB's talent assessment as a standalone business. On October 4, we announced that we're exploring and evaluating strategic alternatives for this business. But this business is an industry leader in attractive market However, it's not aligned with the core focus of the rest of Gardner. Our goal is to determine how best to support innovation, product development, and long term growth for the talent assessment business, and we'll keep you updated on our progress.
We've also made some leadership changes at Gartner. Some of you may have seen that our former head of consulting, BA Warren, announced his retirement. EA was with Gartner for 19 years and led our consulting business for more than a decade. Under PA's leadership, we transformed the consulting organization to align with research in supporting the mission critical priorities of our client. In addition, PA led the development of our managing partner model, which significantly improved the value we deliver to our clients.
We all wish him best in his retirement. To build on PA successes, I'm thrilled to announce that Scott Henssel is showing Gartner as Executive Vice President Consulting, he'll join Kartner's operating committee reporting to me. Judd comes to Gartner from Terex, where he led their services business and was a member of their executive leadership team. Prior to Terex, Scott spent 14 years at Mackenzie, serving clients in high-tech industrial and business service sectors. He brings a wealth of experience in business transformation, strategy development, sales effectiveness, and operations and organizational design.
I'm excited about the level of operational execution and continuous improvement innovation that Scott will bring to this important business segment. But we're now in the fourth quarter, which is when we were in the majority of our Symposium IT Expo Coffee Series. This remains our flagship event. Tells in eight locations around the world designed to support CIOs and senior IT executives. I recently attended our UA special event in Orlando, Florida where thousands of CIOs, convened to share experiences and gain critical insights that help them achieve their mission critical priorities.
The CIOs there were inspired and felt empowered to succeed as a result of the insights we delivered at this important event. As you might imagine, creates even more opportunity for our sales organization, and they're very excited as well. In summary, I continue to be extremely excited about our business, our prospects for growth and our strategy to drive value for our shareholders over the long term. The combination of CB and Gartner will create a quantum leap in capability and sustained extraordinary growth over the long term. Together, we'll be able to address the mission critical priorities with leading insights from the best of the 2 organizations.
Our outstanding Q3 results to demonstrate our operational effectiveness on a global scale We know the right things to do to drive success in our business. We're executing on a very aggressive integration plan, and in aggregate, it's going great. We're living in exciting times and it's exciting time for Partner. With that, I'll turn it over to Craig Safian, our Chief Financial Officer. Thank you, Jean, and good morning, everyone.
Because of the tremendous value we provide to our clients around the world, the investments we are making to capture our vast market opportunity, our focus on strong operational execution and our exceptional business model, we delivered another strong quarter. On a combined basis, As Jean detailed, we are also progressing in accordance with our plans to integrate CEB into the Gartner business. Please keep in mind that as we discuss our results, we will be looking at the total combined company on both a GAAP revenue and adjusted revenue basis. As we discussed last quarter, the only difference is that adjusted revenue excludes the deferred revenue fair value adjustment that is required as a part traditional Gartner or traditional CEB business performance. You will also find an in-depth overview of our Q3 performance a presentation on our Investor Relations website.
Turning to our Q3 performance. Our year over year financial performance for the quarter included: total combined company adjusted revenue growth of 11%, driven by 15% growth for the traditional Gartner business, and a 1% decline for the acquired CED business. Combined adjusted EBITDA of $149,000,000 and combined adjusted diluted EPS of $0.65 per share, which is $0.13 above the top end of our guidance range for the quarter. Please note that our third quarter 2017 GAAP revenues of $828,000,000 includes an approximately $64,000,000 deferred revenue adjustment. Therefore, on an adjusted basis, Our exceptional business model continues to create a consistently high level of free cash flow conversion, On a combined basis, over the last rolling 4 quarters, our free cash flow conversion was 139 percent of adjusted net income.
I'll now discuss our 3rd quarter combined business segment results and P and L in-depth, highlighting the performance of the traditional Gartner and acquired CEB business where appropriate before turning to our balance sheet and cash flow dynamics. I'll close with remarks on our updated 2017 guidance we will then be happy to take your questions. Please note that my segment discussion will focus on the adjusted revenue and adjusted contribution margin performance in Q3 therefore adding back the deferred revenue fair value adjustment I just mentioned. Please also note that we've included a lot of this information the presentation on our IR website. Beginning with research.
On a combined basis, adjusted research revenue grew 13% in the 3rd quarter, The adjusted gross contribution margin for research was 69 percent or an 80 basis point decline compared to the third quarter of 2016 on a comparable basis This modest decline is primarily due to our newer acquired businesses such as Kapterra, SEM World and L2, having lower gross contribution margins than our traditional business. I'll now focus on the traditional Gartner Research business, Adjusted revenues increased by 18% in third quarter. Acquisitions, primarily L2 and Makena Research, contributed to adjusted revenue growth Our other metrics for the traditional Gartner research business also remain very strong, with 15% CV growth, accelerating sales productivity, and improvements in our retention metrics. Total contract value FX neutral growth of 15% versus the prior year, roughly in line with the growth we delivered last quarter. For reference in comparison, our Q3 2016 total contract value at current year FX rates was $1,790,000,000.
On an organic basis, excluding the contribution of L2 which we acquired in March 2017, Total contract value growth for the traditional Gartner research would have been 14% on an FX neutral basis, also consistent with the growth we delivered last quarter. We continue to drive contract value growth through strong retention rates and consistent growth in new business. A traditional Gartner research perspective, client retention was 83%, up 70 basis points from the third quarter of 2016, and flat on a sequential rental basis. Both retention figures are close to our all time highs. New business growth for traditional Gartner research remains strong.
Up 11% year on year in Q3. The new business mix is consistent with prior quarters and remains balanced between new clients and sales of additional services and upgrades to existing clients and as always, we also benefit from our annual price increases. Our new business growth reflects our success in penetrating We ended the 3rd quarter with 11,338 Enterprise clients, up 6% compared to Q3 2016. The average spend for enterprise also continues to grow. It now stands at $182,000 per enterprise.
Up 8% versus prior year on an FX neutral basis. This increase in average spend reflects our ability to drive CV growth through both new and existing enterprises. Turning to sales productivity for the traditional Gartner Research Salesforce. Over the last rolling 4 quarters, we delivered $272,000,000 of FX neutral net contract value. When divided by our beginning of period headcount, which was 2331 quota bearing heads, our rolling 4th quarter per activity per account executive was $117,000.
Excluding the impact of the L2 acquisition, sales productivity was up 11% year on year 1% sequentially. As always, we remain highly focused on improving our sales productivity and remain confident that the initiatives around recruiting, training and tools that we've implemented to drive productivity will positively impact the results over both the short and long term. Turning to the performance of CEE research in the quarter. CED adjusted research revenues were flat year on year in Q3, a modest improvement from the year on year decline in Q2. We saw many positives with CED's other research metrics in the quarter despite a modest decline in contract value.
We ended Q3 with $571,000,000 of traditional CEB research CV down 1% on a year over year basis. In addition, wallet retention, also using Gartner's methodology ended the quarter at 93%, roughly flat compared to the year ago quarter. While retention rates continued to show improvement, we did see a slowdown in new business as we implemented a number of Gartner best practices around pricing and contract terms. We also introduced a host of new seat based products. As we alluded to last quarter, we believe there would be speed bumps along the way as we integrated the CED and Gartner businesses.
We are confident these impacts are temporary and that the actions we are taking position us well to drive growth and value in the future. Moving to events. On a combined basis, adjusted events revenues increased by 25% year on year in Q3. Event's 3rd quarter adjusted gross contribution margin was 36%, up by approximately 40 basis points compared to the year ago quarter. PEB events revenue increased 16% year over year in a seasonally low quarter for that business.
The traditional Gartner events business had a very strong quarter Q3 with a 25% year on year increase in revenues, driven by an 18% increase in same event revenues. We continue to see strength in attendees reporting a 21% increase in same event attendees. Foreign exchange had a roughly 3 point benefit on our traditional Gartner events reported revenues in the 3rd quarter. Turning to Consulting. 3rd quarter consulting revenues declined by 2% on a reported basis and declined 3% on an FX neutral basis.
In the labor based business, revenues declined 1% versus Q3 of last year, while the contract optimization business was down 11%. On the labor base side, global headcount of 682 was up 8% and we had 134 managing partners at the end of Q3, 17% increase over the year ago quarter. Broadly speaking, the NP strategy is working. As Gene described, we've experienced some operational challenges related to managing partner productivity on 2 teams. We'll be temporarily slowing down our MP growth on those two teams so that we can focus on improving productivity.
Once we see signs of improvement, we'll look again at increasing capacity on those teams. Backlog, the key leading indicator of future revenue growth for our consulting business, ended the quarter at $91,000,000, up 2% year on year. Our bookings performance strengthened in September and our Q4 pipeline looks strong as well. Consulting gross contribution margin decreased by 2.30 basis points year on year. Primarily due to modest softness in the contract optimization business and a slight decline in utilization.
Turning to talent assessment and other. Adjusted revenue in the TA and other segment declined by 4% compared to the year ago quarter. Of a large number of open territories that existed at the time of the acquisition and the mix of lower tenured salespeople as we filled those open territories. As we discussed on our last call, we also established TA as a standalone business. This caused some short term disruptions that we feel are now behind us.
As Gene mentioned, in early October, we decided to explore and evaluate strategic alternatives for the CED talent assessment business, formerly known as SHL. This business makes up around 2 thirds of the TA and other segment and approximately 5% of total Gartner company adjusted We are less than 1 month into the process, and I'm pleased to report that it is progressing well. We will provide further updates as and when appropriate. Moving down the income statement. On a combined basis, SG and A increased by 13% year over year in third quarter.
FX had a roughly one point impact on the growth rate. Our sales force continues to be our largest investment. And as of the end of the third quarter, the traditional Gartner business had 2716 quota bearing sales associates. This is an increase of 3.85 or 17% from a year ago. While this is an acceleration from prior quarters, the increase is primarily due to the fact that we were able to reduce the level of open territories in the quarter, which should The acquisition of CED adds more than 500 frontline quota bearing research sales associates.
We've been focused on filling open headcount and are beginning to grow sales headcount. We will leverage our proven best practices around recruiting, training and tools to drive accelerated CV growth and improve productivity. As a growth company and now is a much larger growth company, continue to invest in areas such as recruiting, technology, facilities and other areas to support our strategy of delivering sustained double digit growth over the long term. At the same time, we continue to make good progress on cost synergies related to the CED acquisition specifically in the G And A functions. Due to the investments we've already made and plan to make through the balance of the year to drive accelerated growth in CED's contract value, we continue to expect modest net synergy in subsequent quarters.
Adjusted EBITDA for the 3rd quarter was $149,000,000, which is essentially flat on a combined year over year basis. This result is driven by growth for traditional Gartner EBITDA, offset by year over year decline to to traditional CED EBITDA. Moving down the income statement. Depreciation charges increased year over year in the quarter domitantly reflecting the addition of CED, while amortization and integration charges were up significantly, again, related to the transaction. Our GAAP tax rate for the quarter was 22.2 percent.
Adjusting for acquisition and non recurring charges, our adjusted tax for the quarter was 29.3 percent. The lower than expected adjusted tax rate impacted our Q3 adjusted EPS by about $0.05 The lower rate resulted largely from the timing of certain tax costs. We expect our full year GAAP tax rate be approximately 33% to 34% and approximately 31% to 32% on an adjusted basis. GAAP diluted earnings per share was negative $0.53 in the third quarter. Our GAAP EPS figure also includes $1.18 of non GAAP adjustments.
Therefore, on an adjusted basis, our EPS in Q3 was $0.65 or $0.13 above the high end of our guidance range. There are 3 primary reasons for our EPS beat in the quarter. 1st, EBITDA performance was better than forecasted. This contributed approximately $0.04 of upside. 2nd, below EBITDA, we have lower than forecasted depreciation as a result of purchase accounting adjustments, as well as other incentive credits, which weren't forecasted.
These two items contributed about $0.04 of upside. And third, our lower tax rate, as I just discussed, impacted our quarterly earnings per share by approximately $0.05. Turning now to cash. In compared to $120,000,000 for standalone Gartner in the year ago quarter. Our combined operating cash flow increased 16% year over year.
It is also important to note that our Q3 operating cash flow includes significant acquisition and integration payments, which we adjust out for our free cash flow calculation. Pivoting to free cash flow. Q3 2017 CapEx was $34,000,000 and Q3 cash acquisition and integration payments were approximately $29,000,000. This yields Q3 free cash flow of $144,000,000, approximately 14% higher when compared to combined company free cash flow in The timing of our contract value growth is a key driver of our quarterly free cash flow performance and our strong research results from March, Q2 and across Q3 have begun converting to free cash flow. Dollars of gross debt we had as of April 5, we have repaid around $245,000,000 by the end of Q3 with a active, we had less than $2,800,000,000 at the end of Q3, which translates to approximately 4 times leverage on a combined last 12 months of adjusted EBITDA.
Given the favorable cash flow characteristics of the combined company, We remain firmly on schedule to de lever to approximately 3 times gross leverage within the 1st 2 to 3 years of closing the acquisition. Turning now to guidance. Slide 13 of the presentation provides you with our updated outlook for 2017. As is our practice, our EPS guidance is on a both a GAAP and adjusted basis. At a high level, we've modestly increased our adjusted revenue outlook and tightened our outlook for the full And I'll also remind you that our full year guidance includes 12 months of Gartner plus 9 months of CED results.
Starting with revenue. For 2017, we expect combined company adjusted revenue of approximately $3,500,000,000, This is comprised of the following. For research, we expect combined adjusted revenues of between 2.6 and $2,625,000,000. For the traditional Gartner research business, we expect to continue our trend of mid teen revenue growth in 2017. This is obviously supported by consulting, we expect revenues of between $320,000,000 $335,000,000.
For events, we expect adjusted revenues of between $330,000,000 $345,000,000. For the traditional Gartner Refense business, we continue to expect double digit adjusted revenue growth in 2017. And for TA and other, we expect adjusted revenue of between $210,000,000 $225,000,000. Again, these are adjusted revenue ranges. You will find the reconciliation of our adjusted revenue guidance ranges to GAAP revenue on Slide 14 of the presentation.
Turning to adjusted EBITDA. As mentioned, we have narrowed our expected adjusted EBITDA range for 2017 trimming the high end of our previous guidance range by $10,000,000. This modest reduction to the midpoint of our adjusted EBITDA guidance is driven by a few dynamics, the most notable of which relates to continued challenges in the TA business. As both Gene and I discussed earlier, the situation is getting markedly better as we fill open territories. But those improvements will not have an impact on the Q4 P and L.
As I commented last quarter, our GAAP 2017 earnings per share is expected to be significantly impacted by acquisition and integration charges, of which the vast majority are noncash in nature. Slide 15 of the presentation reconciles a per share difference between our updated GAAP and adjusted EPS guidance ranges. We now expect the after tax impact of these adjustments to total approximately $4.20 at the midpoint of our guidance. Putting this all together, we now expect full year 2017 adjusted EPS of between $3.39 $3.50 per share. Which is a $0.05 increase to the midpoint of our adjusted EPS guidance.
Slide 17 details the key assumptions below EBITDA that we have used to calculate our updated adjusted EPS outlook. For our tax rate, we project an annual effective rate for and for adjusted earnings projected geographic mix of earnings, the impact of ASU 20sixteen-nine related to Stock Based Award as well as the fully diluted share count of approximately 89,900,000 to 90,500,000 shares for the full year 2017. Before concluding, I'd like to provide a little more color around our fourth quarter outlook. As you know, the 4th quarter is our seasonally largest quarter. It's our largest events and consulting quarter.
I'll also remind you that during the fourth quarter of 2016, we had some softness in both our events and consulting businesses. As we have rolled into the fourth quarter of 2017, we have great momentum in the traditional Gartner research business, and our NCVI performance through 2017 flows into the P and L. We also had easier compares for both the events and consulting businesses, and that flows through as well. We are expecting to finish Q4 and the year strongly, consistent with our performance through the performance through the third quarter. Our research business delivered another quarter of mid teens growth and contract value growth was 15%.
We also saw acceleration Our Events business is on track to deliver double digit growth in 2017 and the adjustments we are making in consulting should position us strongly for the future. We are running a process to explore strategic alternatives for the talent assessment business and look forward to reporting back to you as that progresses. The Traditional Gartner business is performing very well. The addition of Ceb further strengthens our ability to capture the vast market opportunity ahead of us as we are now able Worldwide. As Gene mentioned, the integration is going exceptionally well.
We set aggressive timelines and we are achieving or beating them. As discussed last quarter, this has given us the confidence to accelerate a number of investments, such as growing the CEB sales force, to accelerate our ability to capture acceleration of performance in
questions. Your first question comes from the line of Tim McHugh, William Blair. Please proceed.
Thank you. First, just on the CB, I appreciate the color on it was new sales, I guess, that were a little weaker. And I know you gave a few reasons, but just, I guess, in general, can you elaborate on, were there particular regions, particular types of clients, I guess, any more color on, I guess, how the business was impacted by some of the changes that you're making?
Hey, Tim, it's Jean. So, the CP integration is going really well. And our plan calls for making the most disruptive changes, the biggest changes in the during 2017, we'd like to get that stuff out of the way. And so we've made changes to new products as we talked about. We made changes to contract terms, which us to the ability to discount.
So lots of changes that we know positions well for the long term. That when we make all those changes, sales people have to learn what those stages are and adapt with the journey and learn to actually work with both of the clients. And so, anytime you make that kind of there's going to be, as people learn, and stop selling old products or selling new products and new terms, etcetera, there's going to be some time it takes to adapt to that. What we saw actually has been fabulous, which is that our CV growth in this EP business was kind of on trend despite making all those changes. And so Craig mentioned, retention was up, the business down a little bit.
I think given the rate of change we had to be kind of what we've had seen minimal disruption given the extreme are given the significant changes we've made that position us very well for the future. So overall, I'd say it's kind of in the ballpark much better than we might have expected given the degree
Do you any sense or any signals about how long that disruption to the new business side can last I guess as people
adjust? So, we don't know, but I'd say that I'm quite optimistic on what we've seen today. That, if I look at if we look at kind of pipelines, how things are joined? I'd like to first, do people understand the changes that we're trying to make absolutely understand are the committed to making those changes to believe in those changes, the salespeople absolutely in fact, that has grown better than I would have expected. And if I look at the pipelines that people have developed with these new products, they're head of our ability to expect as well.
And so you can't be for sure, but I'd say the leading indicators are very positive. And Tim, Craig. The one other thing I mentioned is we talked about this last quarter too. We've really only been in the market with the new C based products for a very short period of time. And so it's too early to give full market color or market feedback.
What I can what we can say is we've actually had sales in each and every one of those new seed based products. And again, to Gene's point, in looking at pipeline and activity, those things look fairly favorable as well.
Okay. And then one last one. I think you mentioned you're starting to grow the CAB sales force. How quickly at this point? Are you growing it?
Even kind of as you exit the year, what will be the type of number?
So to give you a flavor for it, their existing sales force is about by a little over 500 salespeople. And as I mentioned, my remarks spoke last time this time, we're expecting to start 2018 with at least 80 more sales people. And so it gives you a flavor for the growth rate there. In addition to that, There are, people that do sales and service support that are more junior people. We've joined this Gartner for a long time.
That's that team that we've increased this size by about 40%. It's not total 40% growth positions because there were a lot of open positions. But between closing the open positions that are already there, and then the additional growth is quite substantial. So we'll go into 20 18 with a sales force that's larger in those 2 dimensions. And I think, Tim, just to add to that point, the same can be said on the traditional Gartner sales side as well, where we've filled more open territories than we've historically done.
In fact, we'll probably we're at historical low levels of open territories, which is a positive. And again, that should start flowing through or gives us a bigger army, if you will, as we head into the fourth quarter, but most notably as we head into 2018.
Great. That's very helpful. Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Gary Bisbee RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed.
Hey, guys. Good morning. Just to follow-up on the questions on sales in CEB. Can you give us some flavor about, how you think about the folks that are going through your sales training and then selling the CEB product, what's the how do we think about when they get to sort of a normalized productivity? Is a year a reasonable range.
I know you've talked about your legacy business. The 2nd year is a lot better than the 1st and it grows for a while, but is there learning curve that's going to be different? Is the training you're providing different? Or should we think that the investments you began to make midyear this year really should be impacting CV at some point in 2018? Thanks.
So, Gary, team. So, when we've done acquisitions in the past and brought sales people and made similar changes, which we've gotten in places like when we bought AMR, for example, who had we did enterprise agreements, same kind of changes we did meta. We found that, and this is we've done the same thing with CEB here. That, the salespeople are, very talented and knowledgeable, know how to sell a syndicated research kind of product And so it's not like starting with a sales person who's from a different industry off the street. It's actually starting someone who understands what we're trying to do, understands their market and so while somewhat off the street might take 3 years to get fully up to speed, what we found in previous acquisitions is that, when we once we train people in the new terms and the new products that they get up to speed quite quickly and much faster than the 3 years.
And so, I'm expecting in CED, again, we found that salespeople will be just terrific. They really understand what they're doing, quite talented salespeople. And so I'd expect the transition is going to be much quicker than if we had people off the the other thing I'd add, Gary, good morning, is fundamentally the new seat based products because they do leverage best of both research from the traditional CED side and from the traditional Gartner side. And because they are seed based products sold to a specific individual. And then servicing a specific individual are by their very nature, higher value products.
And so what we're doing is transforming the way that the CEB sales force has sold, but they are selling what we believe to be significantly higher value product over the long term as well. And what have you done with the product specifically to make it that higher value product. You talked at the time of acquisition about adding some mobile capabilities over time working in some Gartner research concepts and ultimately just that's the option if you're a new customer to buy it that way. But are there other changes to the product that are going to start to allow you to upgrade that into the existing base? Or should we think that's more of a longer term strategy?
So the fundamental changes to the product. 1st, the product is a seat based product, which is an important difference because It's about providing value to that individual. And so right off the bat, you saw the product that, provides for value to it's value to a specific person. And so just through design of the product structure, the second thing we've done is that we've added content from both Gartner and from CEB. And that's true for every function.
So if I use for our CFOs in here, I'll use finance as an example. Many of the issues in finance are technology related as well. We had existing Gartner research that's very relevant for CFOs and their teams making decisions on technology. And it's a big earlier issue. That was not a strong point of CEDs.
And so if you take the traditional CED content plus you add in the technology earning content that would be relevant for a CFO or head of HR or any of the other roles within a company, you have more content in addition to a part of the structured better, you actually have additional content. And the third thing you've done is in terms of research processes, Gartner and CEB, had different kinds of processes. We've taken both of those. All the new products have both the traditional Gartner research process, which was about analysts doing expert base research. Combine that with the CED, which is about more using case studies and research based on on what clients were actually doing, that adds more value to get either one did alone.
And so these new products are commissioned. It's better structured It has a combination of both technology content as well as business content. And in addition to that, it has both types of research. And so fundamentally, these are much higher value products. The past.
And so we expect that they will sell really well. And in fact, early returns are great sales versus the CV sales versus very excited about about these new products. And we expect that will change better as well. And then lastly, we've already seen this as a new sales, there's going to be a mix of sales we've already seen clients that were CEB clients with the old products, say, Hey, these new products are great. I want to upgrade those new products and see if you did an upgrade right there as well.
We're enforcing that upgrade, but I think when people see the value, this is the experience we've had in the past as well.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Mueller, Baird. Please proceed.
Yes, thank you. I know Gartner is always about continuous improvement but in terms of the major changes you're planning to make to the CEP, I guess, sales processes and products Have they been made at this point, or are you halfway through rolling them out? Just any commentary on that?
So, there are a lot of, at Gartner, we have a lot of really good approaches in recruiting, training and tools for salespeople. And it will take time to implement all of those. It'll take a couple of years probably to implement all of those. What we're doing is starting with the highest leverage wins first. So we're kind of taking the low hanging fruit first once at the highest impact.
And so we're focused on making sure we those things first. And so what you'll see is that, while it'll take a couple of years to get everything fully implemented first on the highest leverage items first. And so we'll get the biggest bang from those things as well.
Okay. And then on the acceleration in the traditional Gartner Salesforce headcount growth. And I know it's closing some previously opened territories, but anything in particular that's driving that new recruiting strategies, compensation plans or just why the step up
So, 2 things really. One is that, we know that we sell more in a territory that has a salesperson that wanting compared with one that doesn't have a salesperson. It does have regulatory because, you have people that either go perform. And so they're not a good fit with Gartner or if they get promoted to become, managers or go to a more senior sales role, they get another area. So you also have some level of turnover and we've been conscious of that.
So one of the strategies we've had is how can we be innovative and reduce those open sales it has to do with how we recruit, how long the recruiting pipeline is, things like that. And we've done some fundamental elevations there. That have allowed us to, focus on reducing those territories. The second piece of it is, and again, this has to do with innovations in our recruiting process, is that We have been continually improving our ability to identify really talented salespeople. And so the two things that made this come together now our first, a purposeful, explicit strategy of making sure we have fewer open sales territories and design recruiting HelloOne sales to do that And then secondly, improvements in our whole recruiting approach and process that has identified, really people that are really great fit which has allowed us to accelerate that at this point in time.
As you can think about it, again, we're aiming to grow the sales force about 13% and the other 4% is closing territories that otherwise would have been open. And of course, like I said, we'll somewhat have higher retention with that.
Okay. And then just finally, with the accelerated sales percent growth on the traditional IT side, and then Is the $80,000,000 $500,000,000 totally comparable? Are you saying 16% growth in the CAB side? And then I guess related to that with with teens growth in both. Any early read on how to start thinking about 2018 margins?
So, on the first part of your question, there's a bit over 500 people at various day, David, about 517 salespeople in the traditional CED selling organization. So we've added 80 and so you can give them up on what percent growth that is. Obviously, the eighty people will be in their 1st year to date salesperson. And we know they sell less than their 1st year than they do in their 2nd year and less than their 2nd year. They do their 3rd And so this is an investment that's going to pay off over the next 3 years and thereafter, but we'll accelerate the next 3 years.
And so you can calculate kind of you can estimate, what the growth is there. Obviously, it'll take time to ramp up. We're very happy with the quality because we're planning to have an in territory already trained, ready to go January 1st. A lot of these people are actually already on board and in training, and the quality of sales people is just terrific. They're a great fit for the business.
Then second part of your question, I'll let Craig answer. Yes. So I mean, the other thing I'd just add, on Deane, point is on the 80, we are that is not 80 in one area one function. So it's actually spread out across the various functional sales teams that we have selling on the business side. So I think HR, finance, marketing, etcetera.
And it's also distributed geographically as well. So sounds like a big number in terms of the absolute growth rate. But again, like we do on the Gartner side, we are managing it so that it's not wildly disruptive in terms of our go to market and selling processes for next year. On that point. We did the same thing there as we've done in Gardner.
In the past year, we talked about what determines the growth rate that we achieved in our sales force, fundamentally as management capacity, where do we think we have managers that have the capacity to grow? And so as we looked at the CEB sales force, we looked at where there was management capacity so this the adding the 80 or so salespeople had to do with looking at an individual 1st line manager where their 1st line throughout the organization that had additional capacity. They're performing well. They have a capacity to take on additional headcount growth or people that we could promote to managers that we think would have that capacity as well. So this was done in a bottoms up way just as we've always done, Carter.
And Jeff, the second part of your question, just remind me again,
Just the implications for an early 2018 margin outlook with accelerating headcount growth on both sides?
Yes. So I mean, the way to think about that is, on the Gartner side, we've been focused on adding in areas where, we are doing the best and obviously slowing down in areas are a little more challenged. The good news is as our average productivity has shown improvement for the last couple of quarters, that gives us the confidence in more areas, quite frankly. And again, we do expect given that we've seen this increase in the second half of twenty seventeen, they are in territory and they will be selling in Q4. And obviously, during their 1st year, but as they progress in their tenure, you can look to see, nice improvements over time in their overall productivity.
We're not at a point yet where we're giving 2018 guidance. But I do think the way to think about it, particularly on the traditional Gartner side is we will enter 2018 at current course and speed with a larger army and we are very focused on driving the productivity of that army as we head into 2018.
Your next question comes from the line of Ann Singh, Credit Suisse. Please proceed.
Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I have a 2 part one to start off following back up on the softer new sales at CEB. Is this more of the Salesforce needing to ramp up to the new, changes? Is it more sort of the pricing that's a pushback, the contract structure being a back from clients?
Or are they all 2 interrelated factors to parse it out that way? And Jean, I realized it was a while ago that Gartner underwent this change. But is the reception or pushback, the disruptions you're seeing in line with what you had seen back then, or are there some other complications that you'd call out?
So, on the question about the new business impact, what I'd say is the impact is very limited and that, there's a combination of factors. Like for example, I mentioned earlier, some of the were a bunch of open territories with the sales and support teams. Those actually help generate some of the new business by identifying opportunities and helping sales people I think the and we do not build those, which is great. And then secondly, in terms of the change, the sales force, as I said earlier, there's 2 things you want to focus on. One is do they understand and want to do the changes?
And secondly, do they actually have the skills to make those changes? We kind of call it will and skill. On the will side, we are 100% there. I mean, I think from the sales leaders down the frontline salespeople that people totally understand what we're trying to do and are committed to it. And it's that's gone at a much faster pace much better acceptance than I would have even expected.
And then there was on the skill side where it takes time to adjust your selling process. And again, I'd say that's faster than I would have expected. And so I would characterize the kind of change new business. Maybe half of it is due to sort of the open more junior support people is now filled. Another half of it, and this is not a big problem anyway, was due to the adjusting to the new world we live in.
So, yes, we need to compare it to, when we made these changes at Gartner, but also with Gartner, after Gartner, we had Neta. We bought Neta. We had MR, we bought AMR at Burton, we bought Burton. So we've gone through this journey a lot. And, especially compared to what we did this with Charter, the, our ability to help people understand what the changes are and develop their enthusiasm around and the wife's bed could for them is great.
And in fact, if I compare it, this is really much faster than any of the other ones we've done, despite being very large to a much faster than any of the we've done. We knew it was going to be a lot because there's such a large organization compared to our previous acquisitions. So we put a real focus on change management. And that's really paying off. And so if I compare the past, either would we get it Gartner or with other smaller acquisitions This is going very smoothly and very quickly.
Yes, Hans, I think the other thing I'd add is, we talked about this last quarter and we talked about it again, this quarter. These are absolutely the right things to do to support and drive future sustained growth. And I think what we're seeing in terms of dislocation or impact is kind of noisy a little bit in terms of the overall results. Again, with all these changes, as Gene mentioned earlier, CEB contract value was still kind of on trend to what its performance had been prior to the acquisition. While we're getting ourselves ready to actually tune up the machine and drive growth into the future.
So we were 100% committed that these are the right things to do. Again, we've done it on the Gartner side historically. We've run the same kind of plays when we've done other similar type of acquisitions that had similar business characteristics to what we've inherited or what we've acquired from the CEB deal. And so again, we're thinking about this around laying the foundation for future growth. And again, having seed based products, having them with the right kind of contract terms, having them with pricing discipline are all the right things to do as we we head into the future.
Okay, got it. That's great color. A quick one on EBITDA, the change there. I just wanted to make sure I understood that correctly. Is that entirely being driven by the softer TA outlook?
Or is there some impact from the core CEB business performance or your higher sales force headcount at Gartner?
Yes, it's a great question, odds. What's happening there is predominantly related to the TA business. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, there's a number of dynamics happening in there. Some significantly smaller and going in both directions, quite frankly, really probably I'd highlight one other specific item which we alluded to in our consulting comments is, we are still seeing a little bit of a productivity lag And that obviously we can only burn the revenue that we have in backlog. And while we did see some nice uptake, or uptick rather in the backlog position from Q2 to Q3.
We're still not exactly where we'd love to be on those 2 teams. And so there is a little bit of a drag related to the EBITDA adjustment from consulting. But again, the way to think about it is it's predominantly related to the continued trends on the TA business and there's a variety of other little or smaller puts and takes in there as well. Your next
question comes from the line of Joe Foresey, Cantor Fitzgerald. Please proceed.
Hey guys, this is Mike Reed on for Joe. Thanks for taking our call. We noticed this year in the event segment, we're seeing a good uptick in the number of attendees per event. Could you give us a little color on what you think is driving that uptick there?
Hey, it's Jean. So, there's 2 things that are driving the uptick. One is that, as we, for our research clients, many of them get an entitlement to go to an event. And we know when they get to go to an event, they get a lot of value to that event. And so we have growth in the research business, which has more people that are entitled.
And then as those people are entitled, a higher percentage of them going to the event because of our encouragement, we know they get value. That's one piece of it. Then the second piece of events growth is that, we know that people get a lot of value going to the event, even if they're not a research client and those become could be prospective future research clients. And so, we have a very active and, quite innovative program to sell tickets to people that are not existing research clients, again, both for their initial value they get initially, as well as because they learned about Gartner and they could be research clients in the future. And so it's a combination of those things, both be getting more of our existing clients.
And secondly, having, lithotropic marketing programs that drive people that have challenges in their IT business to go to those events. And by the way, we're going to do the same thing on the I see, we did not have those capabilities. And Seabee again has great events. We're going to be implementing those same marketing programs to drive a lot higher percentage of non research clients to the CD events. And Mike, fundamentally, the our reason for being in the events business is to provide that amazing experience for the end users.
And Joe, is that our Orlando event? And many of you on the call were at our Orlando event as well. That's the kind of experience that we want to provide to all of our attendees that go to our events across the entire portfolio. And it's just a great opportunity for, as Gene mentioned, Gartner's seat holders to go and actually experience the research live and for non Gartner's seat holders to go and experience the research live. And the reason that they're willing to carve out a couple days of their busy schedules and buying a ticket is because they get so much value at that event.
Got it. Thanks. And then in consulting, you said some of the issues revolved around just a couple of teams. Have you ever given a number of total teams that are in the consulting business?
Yes, so the way to think about it is, we're organized by geography and practice. And there's some are organized just by geography and in some places where we're larger. Organized by a combination of, region or geography and practice. What I'd say is we talked about 2 specific teams here. It's out of several across the entire consulting organization.
So as Jean mentioned in his comments, and I think I did as well, broadly speaking, the consulting business is performing well. We're driving very strong managing partner productivity, broadly speaking again across the business. We have 2 pockets of challenges, Jean, described in detail, the specific challenges for each of those teams, we are working them, and we expect to have those things in much better shape as we roll into 2018.
Got it. Thanks guys.
Your next question comes from the line of Hamzah Mazari from Macquarie.
Hey, good morning. Thank you. The first question is, just on the CEB sales force, growth of 16%. Is that number big enough? And the reason I ask is if I look at CED, they didn't invest in SG And A at all.
In 2015, it was 1% growth, 2016. It was low single digits. And so just curious, is there a catch up spend on the CEB sales force you need to do or do you feel comfortable with current capacity in the system?
So, we aspire to have really good double digit growth of CEB for a long time, for decades. So that's going to take a lot of Salesforce growth. And so, again, I think in terms of sales capacity, we'd love to have it ten times as big as it is today. And a welcome day. But in the short term, we felt like as we get started that to open up 2018, is it going to be back up as I said, the way we determine how fast we are the sales force is what's our operation capability, which is fundamentally limited by the bandwidth of our management team.
We look to the management team at CEB today, that we could get this level of growth, which we think will be on or ahead of track of what we would have expected And, that won't be the last time we get salespeople to see it. We will keep adding as we see management capacity there. I take it as this is the first, the first trajectory change, not the last. Yes, Hamzah, it's Craig. Just to add to that, I think your observation around lack of or limited investment is 100% spot on.
And that's probably true across a number of other areas of the business, but particularly on the sales side, But again, what we need to do given the fact that we are implementing so much change, again, we have to manage how much change in disruption teams can handle at one time. And again, what we've done and we've learned this through experience on our own side is you have to find that right balance. And the additional 80 right now in terms of that first foray of significant growth coupled with all the other operational change we're implementing is what we believe to be the right balance right now. If we are performing better, we'll figure out how to go faster. If it's not going to plan, we'll figure out how to tweak it to maybe go faster.
But think of this as kind of 4a1 in terms of injecting growth and investment into supporting longer term sustainable growth for the CVV contract value business.
That's very helpful. Just to follow-up and I'll turn it over. Just on the consulting business, could you remind us of the lag from when you hire a new Managing partner to when you start seeing business come in? Is that lag different than on the Salesforce side in the legacy research business? Just curious on the consulting side.
Thank you.
So when we hire a new Managing partner, those banking partners more than pay for themselves in their 1st year and their productivity continues to improve over the next 2 years. So it's pretty much a ramp up like sales. It takes 3 years typically to get to full productivity. But they've been the people we hire in general do very well their 1st year as well. There's and Hamzah, the one difference we generally have on the managing partner side as compared to the research sales side is a portion of our managing partners, our promotions, from within.
And so in those cases, while they're more junior from managing partner perspective, they know Gartner, they know our capability, they have relationships with Gartner clients, etcetera. So those, while certainly smaller numbers tend to ramp up to productivity a little bit more quickly than people coming from the outside. And so we have a mix. And again, it varies by region. So there's really no answer around how much is promotion versus, how much is hired externally.
But we are dealing with those 2 populations as we grow our managing partner capacity.
Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Toniqaplan, Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.
Hi, good morning. I was just wondering, if you saw any increase in demand in cyber research following the Equifax data breach and just some examples of maybe what products might apply in that case where people would be focused on trying to increase their cyber security?
So Tony, cybersecurity, clearly a very hot area for us. We have a security conference that is growing at very rapid rates and the demand our security analyst is kind of at capacity because of, as you said, there's it's so visible in the world today and every company needs to deal with it. So it's clearly a very hot topic area for us. And Tony, the one thing I'd say from a product perspective, and this is sort of the beauty of the Gartner product portfolio is you're buying annual subscription and you have access to all of that security content when you need it. But tomorrow, the issue might not be security.
It might be moving to the cloud or it might be digitalizing your business. And so again, we're not a generally speaking, a consulting organization where we're going in with spot solutions, we do have a consulting team that actually does help with those kinds of things, but our research business, again, which is three quarters of our overall business, it's really about selling the annual subscription and giving our clients the view that the value proposition is broad and deep when they need it. And so when there is when security is a big deal, they have access to that security stuff. When cloud is a big deal for them, they have access to the cloud stuff. It certainly doesn't hurt as a conversation starter around, hey, you read about the Equifax briefs last night.
We last week rather, we have great stuff that can actually help you out. That's absolutely true. But again, the beauty of our products and offerings are it's a 12 month subscription with access to everything when you want it and on demand.
Great. And then Gene, you mentioned contract optimization was down 11% this quarter. Is there anything that you attribute that to on what you're hearing from customers? Or could this quarter just I know that tends to be volatile. So could this quarter just be a little bit of an anomaly and not really more of a trend in delaying purchases?
Craig. I think it's absolutely the latter as you just described it. Just to put it in perspective, Q3 generally is a pretty small quarter for our contract optimization business. So that 11% down was rough was worth roughly $1,000,000. And on a year to date basis, our contract optimization business is actually up nicely year over year.
So it was a little bit of a blip in Q3. Nothing we'd say or see from a trend perspective. In fact, probably the opposite given the on a year to date basis that we are performing better than last year comparably.
And just one last one for me. In research, despite all of the challenges that we've all been talking about on earlier in this call on the CEB side, you did raise the research guidance, revenue guidance a bit. So can you talk about maybe what was particularly better than what you previously expected on the legacy Gartner side? Thanks.
Yes, it was a pretty modest increase on a very large number. I think 2 things there. One is the traditional Gartner research performance, has improved consistently over the course of this year. So we saw acceleration from Q1 to Q2 up to 15% growth. We stated 15% growth in Q3.
And that, as we talked about a little bit, as we described our Q4 guidance. That is flowing through. That's the bulk of it. As always, we're adjusting for latest foreign exchange rates and things like that. And so there's a little bit of modest tweaking, on each of the revenue lines, but from a research perspective, it's really predominantly driven by our year to date NCVI performance on the traditional Gartner business.
Perfect. Thanks.
Your next question comes from the line of Peter Appert Hyper Jaffray. Please proceed.
Hey, guys. This is actually Kevin S. Stock. So I just had a quick question about any momentum in recent strategic initiatives, like a rollout of DNB Cooper's, other product initiatives you guys have? Or any color you can provide on those would be great.
I'm sorry, Kevin. Could you repeat that?
Yes, I
was asking about, recent strategic initiatives
like the rollout of DNB Hovers of the product
Any color you could provide on those?
That's not part of our product. So that's not how we're making.
Yes. Okay. And then, so see the total contract value down, and there are, some underlying, I guess, effect, the trends affecting CV Research Business.
I know CV has been stronger with larger clients. I guess with the industry overall moving from seed based pricing enterprise pricing and you guys moving
in the opposite direction, so where are you in the process of penetrating smaller clients which is VRCV, particularly it's not done as
well. So, 2 things I'd say. One is that Gartner, we serve all site clients. So we serve everything from the largest companies, enterprises of the world down to, in our enterprise space, down to small enterprises we've done it very successfully. All segments have grown at great double digit rates, quarter effort for many, many, many quarters.
And so we're good at all segments. We're taking that same expertise and applying it to CB as well. They do have a business that's comparable to, that serves midsize enterprises just like partner does. The talent there is terrific. We've as we've introduced products, just as we introduced new products, not only for each functional area, but also we have distinct products for large enterprises versus the smaller ones, because the combination, I think, of products that are tailored, it's the same thing we've done in Gartner's made us successful, which is combination of products that are tailored for those specific market segments being unit size segment as well.
And applying the same processes that we do have traditional partner, we feel really good that, will perform really well in the midsize enterprise space, just as well as cargo.
Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Hall for closing remarks.
So to summarize the key points for today's call, first, The combination of CEB and Gartner creates a quantum leap in capability and sustained extraordinary growth over the long term. We'll be able to address the mission critical priorities for every function across the enterprise with leading insights from the best of the both of 2 organizations. During Q3, the performance of traditional Gartner business continued to accelerate. We functionally integrated CEB and launched a host of new seed based products. We introduced new commercial terms, accelerate Salesforce hiring, and we're exploring strategic alternatives for the talent assessment business.
Thanks for joining us today, and we look forward to updating you again next quarter.
Thank you. That concludes Gartner's 3rd Quarter 2017 Earnings Call. Thank you.