Greetings! I want to welcome everyone to day two of the 27th Annual Oppenheimer Technology Internet Communications Conference. I'm thrilled to kick off the day here with a new name that we've added to the franchise, Sprout Social. We've got part of the leadership team here. We've got the CFO, Joe Del Preto, and we also have the head of investor relations at Sprout Social, Jason Rechel. I wanna welcome you both to the Oppenheimer Tech Conference as a covering company. I appreciate it. It's good to see both of you.
Yeah, Brian, thanks for having us. Very excited to be part of the conference, and looking forward to the conversation.
Yeah, thanks.
Sounds great.
Thanks, Brian.
Well, let's dive into it.
Brian, you left it.
I think I mentioned that this is a new name that we've added to our SaaS franchise this year. So, we may have new listeners who are on this call that may be not as familiar with Sprout Social. So, feel free. I'm sure Jason can jump in after if we forget anything, but how about, like, take us up 20,000 ft-
Yeah
... just to level set the discussion. Maybe you can give a brief company background, maybe the problems that your company-
Yeah
... solving for your customers. You know, why do businesses need-
Yeah
... a modern social media management platform from Sprout Social?
Yeah, so Brian, maybe I'll start higher level to your point and kind of give you, like, why was Sprout even, you know, founded in the first place, and then I'll kind of give context to, like, what we've built upon over the years. So the founders of Sprout came up with the idea that social media was gonna change the way brands and consumers communicate. Very similar to the way that phone and email disrupted the way, you know, that consumers and brands interact, all the software tools we use today, right, like, were all based on this concept, either a phone or email, and they thought social was gonna do something very similar. And this was back when Twitter had 20 employees, Facebook business pages didn't even exist.
They knew that social was gonna be this new communication medium, and they knew that businesses eventually were gonna have to solve for this. At the time, it was just a very consumer... You know, social media, if you imagine the early days, Brian, was just very consumer-focused, right? It wasn't something that businesses had to deal with. Their vision was that they didn't know how many networks there were going to be. They couldn't foresee the number of use cases that we would eventually have to solve for, but they knew that businesses were gonna have to figure out a way to manage this across their customer base.
And so they knew there were gonna be multiple networks, they knew there were gonna be multiple use cases, and so their vision was, "We need to build a platform that was gonna allow these businesses to manage all those different types of communications across all the different types of networks that might exist." And so they set out to kind of build Sprout Social in a way that would scale with the industry. And what does that mean?
That means they came out with this initial concept that we were gonna build this on a single code base, which is very important today if you think about the way we go to market and the way that we kind of approach the industry, which is, hey, they knew there were gonna be various networks, they knew they were gonna move very quickly, and we wanted to build software that didn't require a bunch of heavy professional services, didn't require a bunch of implementations, and we wanted to make sure that it could move very quickly. And so you fast-forward today, and why that's really important, Brian, is, you know, back when they started, there were one or two networks you had to integrate with. Now, Sprout Social integrates with over three dozen networks.
You think about the complexity that it involves today, the fact that if one of those networks makes a change, we make that change on our end, and all 30,000 of our customers get that change the next day. Where if you... You know, some of our competitors that built a very different version of, of what we did, which was heavy professional services, heavy customized software, when these networks make a change on their end, it might take months sometimes, where some of our competitors have made the changes on their end because they did not build under this premise of, "Hey, by the way, we wanna build on a single code base. We wanna build on this premise that social is gonna constantly be evolving." And so that was one of the key kind of core tenets of what Sprout was built on in the early days.
The other core tenet on the other side is the use cases on the front end. When Sprout was originally founded, it was under this premise, as you can imagine, that was purely a marketing, publishing use case. Like, the early days of social media management was, "Hey, I'm a brand. I wanna publish organic content across, let's say, Facebook and Twitter or Instagram at the time, and I want a platform that's gonna help me manage some of the basic of publishing. Hey, I can figure out how to get my content out on various networks. I can figure out having multiple users on these networks." And so the original premise was just under this kind of concept of a marketing use case.
But at the same time, like I said earlier, they understood that these use cases were gonna expand over the years. And so they didn't wanna custom-build solutions for one use case, 'cause they knew they were gonna change over time, Brian, but they didn't know how. And so now you fast-forward to today, and we're solving for all sorts of different use cases. We're still solving that original publishing use case, but now we're solving, for example, we might have the sales team in there wanting to understand feedback on new product launches. We'll have the product team in there. We'll have social customer care has been a huge use case. And what's proven true over time is that social is a very horizontal in nature platform, right?
When someone posts something on Instagram or someone sends you a tweet, you don't know if that's marketing feedback, you don't know if that's a customer care issue, you don't know if that's a response to a recent product you launched. And so because there's this, this horizontal nature of social, you need a platform that can manage all those different use cases in one spot... and that's how Sprout was built, right? We were built for you to have multiple teams solving multiple use cases across multiple networks. At the highest level, that's what we're solving for today. And I know I said a lot, Jason. I don't know if there's anything to add there.
I was trying to keep it as high level as I could before we dig into these different areas, but that was the kind of the premise of why Sprout was founded.
Thank you, and you said it well.
How did you do, Jason?
Said it well.
How did I do?
Good.
You did a good job.
10 out of 10.
Joe, maybe, one other just last high-level question. You actually touched upon it, but maybe I'll just fine-tune it again just to talk about the moat and the competitive-
Yeah
... differentiation. Maybe I gave you the question-
Yeah
... if I was a CMO, if I was a CTO, and I had to decide between, you know, a Sprout Social versus a large CRM provider or a Sprinklr, Hootsuite, et cetera-
Yep
... you know, how does Sprout Social differentiate in the market?
Yeah.
Why, why are you winning?
Yeah. So I think the first thing that we would do, or we do in those competitive situations, probably that differentiates us, is that we put you in the product. So unlike any of our competitors, when we, even in these larger RFPs and these larger enterprise deals, we lead with the product, right? Sprout was founded back in the day, maybe back to what I originally said, where we, we didn't have a sales team, right? You, you put your credit card in, 30-day free trial, and customers get it up and running with almost no interaction with anyone from our team. And so that's still... So we've built our software that way from the beginning.
So even in these large enterprise deals, when they're comparing us to one of our competitors, and our competitors, for example, are doing PowerPoint presentations, they're doing demos, they're telling them, "Hey, it's gonna be six or nine months before you can actually use the product," we're saying, "Hey, go in, go into Sprout. Do all the things that you said you need to be done in your RFP. You can even do the advanced capabilities like social listening, premium analytics, you can do all of that." So one of the big differentiators we have in these competitive kind of situations is the fact that you can try the product before you use it.
Number two is back to what I talked about earlier, the fact that this was all built on a single code base, is that you can understand in our platform, if you're on the care team or you're on the marketing team or on the sales team, you can segment, for example, which parts of the product you want to use or not use. At the same time, you can understand who's dealing with what messages and what's going on in the product, because it's all in one spot. So the marketing team can understand what the social customer care team is doing. And that's been another big kind of differentiator from us and our competitors, is the fact that you can have these large teams in Sprout, and at the same time, they can understand what everyone else is doing.
Where our competitors have been built over many acquisitions and very siloed experiences, so if someone's in one part of the product in one of our competitors, they might not understand, for example, what someone's doing in another part of the product. And so that's another big differentiator for us, is that you can have multiple large teams in our product with them all understanding what everyone else is doing.
Brian, you referenced large CRM providers and kind of... So I'll maybe speak to the moat part of that question, which is, if you think about most front-end software applications today, right, CRM, marketing automation platforms, these systems are all built around the concept of email being the unique customer identifier within those systems. And social doesn't work that way, right? So within any marketing automation platform, I'm going to exist as jason.rechel@sproutsocial.com, or in my prior life, jason.rechel@opco.com. And social doesn't work that way, right? Because my Twitter handle is distinct from my Instagram account, it's distinct from my Facebook account, I'm anonymous on Reddit. And so you have all of these different data streams with different data architectures and different back-end technology APIs.
The system itself is oil and water relative to other front-office software platforms. That's an enormous moat around the market, because in order to build a social media management platform, you need to build into, in some cases, multiple different APIs across every social network that is relevant today, right? We integrate across, I think, more than 36 now social media networks, across many variations of APIs within different networks, and each of those things are a technology hurdle in and of themselves. When you think about it from a data ingestion perspective, we ingest billions of messages per day in Sprout, and, you know, really, that is on top of those APIs, an enormous technical hurdle.
And then on the front end, you know, the networks, ever since Cambridge Analytica a number of years ago, the networks want to work with partners that have proven scale, have proven security, have proven compliance requirements. And we've proven to be one of a very small number of trusted partners that the networks are electing to work with. And I think all of those things combine to create a pretty compelling moat around the business.
Right on, on the money. Jason, I thought you were gonna add that leadership, the CFO, is also one of the big moats that's out there for the company. But it's on there. But it's a real structure. You know, all kidding aside, you know, you can see that there's a real structural advantage for your business in the market. I think you articulated that well. Joe, we can get a little more granular now-
Yeah
... talk about some company-specific stuff. But again, I'm gonna keep it broad here. So, talk to us a little bit about some of the growth initiatives, some of the things that, that you're really excited about on the growth side these days for Sprout Social. Maybe I'll just ask you which growth vectors currently have the best momentum for the business.
Yeah, I think that, if I think of a couple of areas that have been really working well over the last, let's say, 12 to 18 months, Brian, with, like, the big drivers of growth, I think, you know, number one is the move up into the mid-market, upper-mid-market enterprise, right? Like, historically, like I said, up until the last couple of years, maybe three or four years, we've definitely more, you know, SMB, agency, lower mid-market. Over the last couple of years, we've started to move up into mid-market enterprise, and so I think that's one of the biggest growth levers. Like I said, a lot of the incumbents up in the enterprise had built software in a very different way, like I talked about earlier, and what we're seeing is a lot of success up in these larger enterprises, so that's one.
I think number two is the advancements we made with our premium, you know, modules, like Social Listening, Premium Analytics, the Tagger acquisition we did over a year ago. You know, we talked about the, you know, we continue to see really strong growth in our premium attach rate. So the other growth lever is that as we're getting in these larger organizations, not only are we seeing larger user counts, but we're also seeing, you know, them adding things like Social Listening and Premium Analytics, Employee Advocacy, and so we're seeing a lot of our modules kind of take hold. I think the other, you know, growth lever over the last probably 18 months has been the rise of Social Customer Care in our industry, right?
If you think about it, historically, a lot of care was phone, email, and chat, and what you're seeing is more and more of customer care is moving to social. And so we're going to these larger organizations, and, you know, not only are we winning parts of the marketing organization, but we might be winning hundreds of social customer care agents that need to get into Sprout. And so that's an area for us that we continue to see a lot of growth opportunity in that front. And I think the other area, and this has been something that we see as a bigger opportunity going forward, but something we've definitely been focused on, is we see opportunity in international, right?
Like, Sprout Social, if you think about the larger, you know, software companies out there, much more of their business comes from international than we have at Sprout today, and so we think international is another opportunity. We, you know, we have an office space in Dublin, and we've invested in that part of the world, but outside of that, we haven't made any major investments, and we're starting to see, you know, increased demand from other parts internationally. So we think international is another area that, that's gonna be an opportunity for us. And I don't know, Jason, if there's anything else you'd add in there.
I think you hit it.
You got it. You can give you a thumbs up on that one, Joe. What I wanted to follow up with just on the customer care, 'cause, you know, clearly it's been, you know, a highlight for the business here for a little while. You touched upon it, but customer care has been around that market for a long time. But your business is seeing really good momentum in that category. Again, you touched upon it a little bit about the change in communications, but maybe you can talk a little deeper on why-
Yeah
... does the customer care market look so ripe for disruption?
Yeah. So, a couple things. One is the investments we made on the product side. So if we go back a couple of years, Brian, we probably weren't on par with some of our enterprise competitors on the care side, right? If I went back two years, we didn't have some of the functionality around case management, we didn't have some of the functionality around, like, escalations. You fast-forward to today, and now we've closed all the gaps between us and our competitors in this space. So number one is we've made the product investments to be able to serve these larger organizations that require a bunch of, you know, permissioning, like I said, case management, escalations, reporting, that didn't exist, for example, in our product a couple of years ago.
So investing in the product and the R&D work that we've done has been outstanding, and that's really driven the fact that we can go on these larger deals and not have any gaps in the product from our competitors, so that's number one. I think number two is, and you called this out, is just the evolution of social within these organizations, right? If your business and your brand is becoming more social forward, for example, if you're a social-sophisticated customer and you're out there, and you're doing really good brand awareness, and you're doing really good marketing, and you're doing a lot of things on social, what happens is you're driving more engagement from your customers on social, which is great, right?
Not only is that driving potentially more business and more sales and more revenue, but then it's also now gonna start driving... What comes along with that is, if I'm engaging on social with everything else, I'm also gonna engage with you when it comes to customer care, right? So, the second order that we see with our customers is as they become more social, socially sophisticated, then the next order after that is the care side. Because now their customers are used to engaging them on social, and that's where they're gonna go when they wanna give you feedback or they have questions or they have concerns.
And so that's why we think we've seen this adoption or this growth in the care space across these different brands is because they've moved away from traditional advertising mediums or traditional kind of, "Where am I gonna get the most engagement with my customers?" It's on social versus other, any other medium these days, and so that's why I think we're seeing this growth in care that's kind of happened over the last couple of years.
Yeah. I think the other thing to add there, Brian, is just the change in consumer preference and consumer demographics, right? And so if you think about a large organization 10 years ago, the ways in which you serviced your customers or provided customer support and customer care to your customers is gonna look very different than you need to today, because the preference of where your consumers are electing to engage with your brand is changing, right? And I always encourage people to, like, tweet at a brand, send them an Instagram DM, and then send them an email and call them, and see where you get the fastest response time, and see how you get your case or your ticket or your question resolved most quickly. In most cases, it's social, right? And so companies have to operationalize around that change in behavior.
The other thing there, there's been kind of a band-aid solution. One of our large enterprise customers on the care side here, McDonald's, actually gave a great presentation in our customer webinar, in our customer community as a webinar recently. One of the things that McDonald's was talking about was a band-aid to this evolution in consumer change and consumer preference has been historically where if you would've tweeted at McDonald's, the McDonald's care agent would've hopped into that message and said, "Hey, here's the phone number to call us, and here's the email to email us, and we can resolve your question that way." But consumers don't want that, right? Consumers want their question or their case resolved in the channel in which they asked it, right?
If I approach you on Instagram, I want you to come back to me and converse with me on Instagram. And so McDonald's found that that was resulting in lengthier response times and broken customer experiences in terms of trying to take customers off of channel. And so they elected to deploy Sprout for all of their North American customer care needs, and they subsequently elected to deploy people behind that to start to engage with their customers, engage with their audiences on social. And part of this is the integrations as well that we've built into, you know, other aspects of your customer care tech stack. So think about Zendesk, think about Microsoft Dynamics, think about Salesforce Service Cloud.
The integrations that we've built allow our customers to be able to manage customer care holistically from an omni-channel care perspective, where you shouldn't have to care whether a customer comes at you on Twitter, or calls you, or chats at you, right? We don't solve those other channels, other great technology partners of ours do. And so allowing us to leverage technology integrations puts our customers in the perspective to think, to think really holistically about for, about how they solve those customer pain points.
Yep, thanks for doing it. I mean, to me, when I pick up the phone for customer care, it's like a doom loop that I essentially get. So, I appreciate it, and please keep investing in that category. Joe, I wanted to ask you about Tagger. And, so, you know, last year you bought Tagger to go deeper into influencer marketing, and it was the highest-valued acquisition in the company's history, so clearly shows strategic value.
Yep.
Share with us a little bit about how you think about the growth opportunity for Tagger. Maybe the second question is, how you see the path of achieving the growth and cost synergies with Tagger in the future?
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question, Brian. I think it goes back to the original thesis behind why we acquired them. When... You know, if we look back a couple of years when we were going out to our existing customers and asking them for, "Hey, what are the, what are the other things you would love to be doing in Sprout or love to be doing in social, and, and what aren't we solving for?" We kept getting influencer marketing, kept popping up in all our conversations. And if you think about it, if you think about an organization and their marketing strategy, there's like, you know, we call it, like, the three legs of the stool, which is you got your paid advertising approach, you've got your organic social approach, and then you've got your influencer marketing approach.
The one thing that wasn't being solved by any, us or any of our competitors, was the influencer marketing space, and this kept popping up in a lot of, like I said, our enterprise, our RFPs. So when we looked at the space, we realized there's a huge opportunity to, one, to differentiate ourselves from our competitors, and number two is to solve a problem that is right in our wheelhouse, which is on social, right? So something we're very familiar with, and also something that we can help integrate into the rest of our kind of products and platform. And so since we've acquired them, Brian, to your point, it's been our, you know, granted it's off smaller base, but it's our fastest-growing product, and a lot of that has come from our existing customers, right? A lot of our...
Like I said earlier, yes, we've seen really strong momentum from net new business, but actually, the strongest part of this value add right now has been from our existing customers. And the reason for that is, if you think about, you know, the ROI, and then the analysis you can do on influencer marketing is it's very measurable. And so the reason why our customers really, like, there's been this gravitation or this pull towards influencer marketing is you can see, for example, the impact that those influencers are having in real time on your brand. And I think that's something that if you're a marketer and you're in this environment, and you're trying to say, "Okay, is this a good investment or not?
Is this something we can measure?" I think one of the areas that really drew us to this is it's something that, for our customers, not only is it gives them the ability to enter into influencer marketing, but it also gives them all this reporting and data and information around the influencer marketing space. And the biggest part of that, Brian, and one of the biggest differentiators we have with Tagger is the discoverability, and the way they built their product. So they built their product very different than some of the other folks in the market. What they realized was that the influencer marketing space was moving away from these macro-celebrity kind of influencer approaches, where you cut these million-dollar checks to these big celebrities.
What they realized was the ROI on those types of investments was not very strong, and the real ROI in influencer marketing was this long tail of micro-influencers. And so what Tagger had built was the ability to find those micro-influencers across all these different products across all these different networks. And so what you can do in Tagger, Brian, is you can go in there, and let's say you're Nike, and you're running a new CrossFit shoe, and you wanna understand, for example, who are the biggest influencers in CrossFit, right? It could be a bunch of different gym owners, it could be a bunch of, you know, that exist in all these different cities, and they have really strong local presence.
And so you might run a strategy that says, "Hey, I'm gonna hit all these local influencers in all these cities that really have a real strong CrossFit presence." But if you're Nike, without a platform like Tagger, you're never gonna be able to find those micro-influencers out there. And so the reason why we're seeing so much growth and potential in this product is the ability for these larger brands and any brand to find the influencers that will have the biggest impact on their brand.
Terrific. How'd he do, Jason? 'Cause you probably preworked on that deal, I assume, with your corp development title, so
He did well. I think the only thing I might add to that, just from a growth perspective, I mean, obviously we had a thesis behind the acquisition initially, and some of the larger brands that we've been in a position to work with in the first, you know, year here includes, you know, Kroger and Ford and Cummins and NETGEAR. Like, these are big brands that you might not necessarily think of as being, like, influencer... Those that are likely to deploy an influencer marketing strategy, right? And so I think as we've gone deeper, the education from customers back to us just continues to validate the size of the opportunity and kind of where we think we can take that product over time.
We've talked about Tagger being a $100 million ARR business a few years out. I think it's examples like those customers, where you're dealing with non-obvious or non-traditional use cases, that probably gives us incremental confidence into, into that target, you know, a year into the acquisition year.
Sounds good, Jason. Hopefully, you can find another Tagger for the company here in the, in the future. But success. Joe, wanna ask you, wanna bring the discussion to AI, 'cause it's 80%, maybe it's 90% of the questions that, that I've gotten in the last 12 months. But, so maybe we'll just start first at a real high level here. So your business was an early evangelist for AI, so, you know, share, share with us how Sprout Social's AI is differentiated, you know, from other suppliers in the category.
Yeah, I think it's really important to understand, in general, the position we sit in. Very, like, to Jason's point earlier, the motor around our industry, I think at a high level, Brian, one thing that's important to understand is, like, very few companies have access to the amount of social media data that we do, right? Like, it's a very small pool. The networks are downsizing the number of folks that have access to their data.
And so from the outset, I think we come from a really strong position with our ability to leverage that information and data in various ways with our platform is gonna be very unique, and it's gonna be hard for other companies, for example, to come in and say, "Okay, I'm gonna disrupt the social media space with AI," because they just don't have access to the data. So number one, we feel like we're already starting from a pretty, pretty strong area. I think there's a couple areas right now that we're focused on from an AI perspective, and one thing we decided at Sprout is that, hey, we wanna make sure that we are deploying different versions, or not different versions, but we're using AI across our platform.
So instead of having it being this own standalone thing, it's basically being built in the DNA of, like, every aspect of our product. So how does that kind of resonate, or how does that show up in the product right now? Number one, for example, is on the care side, right? Like, how do we... If you're getting a large volume of inbound messages, how do you understand with AI which of these messages are the most important? Which one of these can be, you know, need to be routed immediately for escalation? Is there a certain sentiment that's been building with your brand, like, hey, if I look at all these messages combined, is there a broader issue going on with a product release, or did something happen in the market that I wasn't aware of?
So, how can we use AI, for example? And maybe you take something that was in the customer care space, and now I can look at all those messages, for example, and I can go back to my marketing team and say, "Hey, by the way, we've got a bigger issue here that's been bubbling up, and we can take that to the product team, for example." And so what does it look like, for example, to do that kind of stuff? Another area, and we've had this before, is on the publishing side, right? When you look at all the different networks and you look at your message, and we've had this historically, but we're constantly kind of fine-tuning it, is what's, you know, what's the optimal time to post, on which networks, what type of content?
How can I help you develop content faster, right? Like, how can we... We think one of the advantages of AI, Brian, in our space is it's gonna help companies overall generate more content on social, 'cause AI will allow them to do that in a much more efficient way, which is good for us, because the more and more of the discussion and marketing that's moving to social, that means there's more messages, there's more volume, there's more interaction on social, which means that brands are gonna have a bigger use case for Sprout, right? The more and more we can drive more volume across social, means that you're gonna need a solution like Sprout, 'cause the message volume's gonna get unmanageable for a lot of these companies.
And so those are a couple of areas, Jason. There's probably a couple more I missed that you probably could hit on.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the other questions on AI that we get pretty frequently, and I'm sure you get pretty frequently, Brian, is, you know, what AI means for the addressable seat opportunity inside of marketing departments, inside of customer care departments. And I think one thing that is clear, you know, if you go talk to CMOs, you go talk to chief customer officers or chief digital officers, one thing that's clear is that very few brands are likely or at least for the foreseeable future, unlikely, to unleash AI to on its own, manage your marketing campaigns, to on its own, manage the customer experience on social. Because social exists in the public domain, and it's very different from other channels, right?
And so what you need when you think about AI on social is a very specific set of guardrails and workflow and security and approval processes that allows your teams within your organization to use AI to get your work done faster and more efficiently, and then use a platform like Sprout to make sure that you're operating with brand consistency and that you're staying on message, and that the content that you're publishing on social is, has been approved by all the necessary stakeholders, those sorts of things. As we think about where we're coming from, a resourcing and seat perspective, social historically has been an under-invested category, right? It's not often that, like, social represents 80% or 90% of a marketing organization or a customer care organization.
And so as we make teams of social users within various departments more effective and more efficient, it also kind of elevates the category to do more within those organizations. And so all things that, you know, over time, we feel really good about as being potentially tailwinds to the business longer term.
Okay. Maybe you touched upon this, but maybe just the follow-up question about with generative AI and the debate that I have in every category. You know, there's, you know, the debate as, okay, is generative AI... You know, for your category, is generative AI gonna be so good that it's gonna be able to handle the social media management process on its own, and it's gonna put social marketing and care people out of business? But then there's the other side of the debate, which I think you're talking about, that now generative AI is gonna actually create category growth, not category compression. You know, it's a high-level question, but, you know, I'm curious to get your thoughts, and, and, you know, just reiterating, I assume-
Yeah
... that's your opinion on-
Yeah, Brian, I think, I think the two things you called out I agree with. One is, it's gonna create more volume on social in general, which in our mind is a good thing, right? Like, the more content and the more marketing and the more the conversations that are moving from your traditional, you know, advertising or, you know, brand mediums that are moving to social, that's good for our business. And then number two is back to the other point I brought up earlier, is, like, in order to deal with all the Social Customer Care and deal with all this message volume, you have to have access to the actual data.
And like I said, there's very few companies that have access to that data in order to apply some of this generative AI stuff to all the things you talked about. And so we think we're pretty well-positioned with a pretty big moat around our ability to manage those types of things as generative AI kind of evolves. And so we actually see it as a very positive thing in our space.
That's good. There's one question that came in from the audience, so I just wanna ask it before we run out of time since they're listening, but it was about the Salesforce partnership. I'll just read it. "So you talked about good momentum with Salesforce's Service Cloud on your earnings call. You have a long-term partnership with Social Studio products. But specifically, how do you rate the progress with Salesforce in the customer care so far? And then technologically, how integrated or natively embedded is the Sprout Social product with Salesforce's clouds?
Yeah, so it's the only solution in the market versus our competitors that's natively integrated into Service Cloud. So the second part of your question, Brian, is it's integrated in the fact that if you're a Service Cloud care agent, and you're in Service Cloud, you can be managing social without ever, never ever logging into Sprout. For example, Sprout is running in the background, and you can. Like, that's the beauty of what we built, is that there's not all this additional training that you have to do if you're deploying it to hundreds and hundreds of Service Cloud customers, which in some of the accounts that we've won with them, it's been hundreds, and I think we have a couple that are thousands of seats.
And the reason why they're able to deploy Service Cloud across all these large customer bases in such a very quick way is they're already trained on Service Cloud, and this is just another piece, you know, another source of care that's coming into their module, and we're the only ones that have that. You don't have to log out of Service Cloud and log into Sprout—you don't. There's no going back and forth. It's a bidirectional integration. And so, for example, when you respond in Service Cloud, that's gonna go back through Sprout, back onto the social network that you don't even see. And so that whole interaction's happening in the background.
So I think that's where we have this unique relationship, this unique integration, and that's really what's driving the success we're seeing in Service Cloud right now, and we feel like it's a, it's a really good relationship. We've been very happy with the deals that we're seeing, and we think this just is a big growth driver for us going forward as well. Like, we just see a big opportunity there that we're just getting started on.
Yeah, and just to add to that, Brian, I alluded to the McDonald's customer reference earlier. And that's a good example of where we co-sold that account with the Service Cloud team. And so the combination of Sprout and Service Cloud is what has allowed McDonald's to rethink the entirety of their customer care strategy. Another good example of that is Honda and a Fortune 50 logistics company, where it's this combination of Sprout and Salesforce Service Cloud that are allowing these very large and very high-volume customers to rethink their approach. I think the other thing, as it relates to the overall Salesforce relationship, was our new CRO, who we hired last week, Mike Wolfe, who was a very long-tenured and very well-respected Salesforce veteran. And Mike had...
Most recently, he'd been the CRO of salesforce.org, but he had run their ISV and partner ecosystem for a number of years. And so he absolutely will help us go deeper within that ecosystem. He absolutely will help strengthen that relationship with the broader Salesforce team. And so, looking forward to having him on board in a couple of weeks here.
That's great. Congratulations on the hire. It definitely has caught the news, and we've been taking calls on it. We ran out of time. But I want to thank very much Joe and Jason, and for our listeners, I hope you take a look here at Sprout Social. It's a very attractive entry point, you know, from our research lens right now. Thanks a lot-
Thank you-
... Joe and Jason. Good luck with your investor meetings the rest of the day.
Yeah, Brian, thanks. Thank you so much. This was great.