Are we resetting the clock, by the way? Oh, there we go. Okay. Hey, welcome to our next session. Let's start. So for Sprout, there's obviously what we see, like, in the market for all of software.
Yeah.
Not pretty, sorry. For all of us.
Yeah.
And lost a tooth and everything here this year. It's like, it's gonna be always a tough year. But from a management perspective, just in the real world.
Yeah.
Like, how did the year play out for you so far?
Yeah. What I would say was, throughout the year, it's gotten better every single quarter.
Mm-hmm.
So it holistically, yeah, do we want you? You want the year to go better than it probably did? Yes. But what I would say is the momentum we've seen, like, Q2 was better than Q1.
Mm-hmm.
Q3 was better than Q2, and Q4 is looking pretty good. So I feel like there's been more momentum this year as we moved throughout the year. So I think that's a net positive.
Yeah.
I think for us, you know, we're seeing success. If I look at the year, we're seeing really strong success up market. You know, we've talked about our 50K customers and how well that part of the business is doing. We've been really happy with some of the product launches and the things we've done around social customer care.
Mm-hmm.
The things we're doing on influencer marketing, the things we're doing around social listening. We did the NewsWhip acquisition, and so I think, we just did the launch of our AI. We did, you know, we had Breaking Ground, which is our big, like, quarterly release. We demoed our AI products that are gonna be coming here shortly.
Yeah.
In November. And so I feel like there's a lot of product momentum in the business. And so we feel like the year's gone well as it moved on. Also, I think, you know, at a high level, I think we've done a really good driving margin in the business. So I think our operating margin continues to be really strong on a year-over-year basis. So I think, and then that we feel good about how the year's progressed. But obviously, this is a much different environment than we were a couple years ago. And so I think from that perspective, we always wanna be doing better.
Yeah.
So let's be very clear. Like, management feels like we could always be doing better.
What are you seeing? Is that driven by end demand getting more stable? Because at the beginning of the year, people were, like, tariffs, volatility, etc.
Yeah.
And now it's settling down? Or what's driving? Is that.
Yeah.
Talk to end demand a little bit.
Yeah. I would say I think what's driving probably a stronger back half. First of all, most of historically over the last three or four years, we've gotten stronger in the back half. I think that's generally we see budgets open up a little bit more.
Yeah.
People tend to spend a little bit more money depending on how the year is going. I think also some of the product investments we made earlier in the year are starting to play out in the market. We've released some really good functionality around social customer care. We've done some really good things around influencer marketing. And so I think, you know, some of those things have allowed us to win some of these larger deals. And so I think part of it is just, like, the normal slope of the year. But also, and I think you're gonna see this over the next couple of years. I think consumer behavior is consistently shifting to social. And I think that continues to play out throughout the year as well. That's kinda driven some of the success we've seen in the back half.
Yeah. Okay. And I'm sorry for it sounds like a tough question, but it's not.
Yeah.
Like, if you look at the growth profile, and you and I have been at this conference for many years, etc., like, the growth profile for the whole industry looks different.
Yeah.
Can you maybe speak a little bit about where we are in that industry?
Yeah.
In terms of evolution of industry and where we are now? And, like, but also it does sound like you're getting more and more excited again. So, like.
Yeah.
You know, where are we going from here?
Yeah. I think what you've seen in our industry over the last, let's say, 12 months. It's probably different than, like you said, the couple years before that is you have to remember we're still very early in this journey.
Mm-hmm.
Most companies that we come across don't have budget allocated to this, this sector, right? And so it's a lot of the time we're educating customers. We're trying to build the market with our competitors. It's not like something like email marketing or marketing automation or CRM that's been around for 20 years inside these companies. They have budget allocated. They already know exactly what they wanna do, and they're just looking at other folks in the space.
Yeah.
When we get to those type of deals where they, hey, they're bought into social. It's strategic to their company. They have us or one of our competitors. In those situations, we see a lot of success.
Mm-hmm.
But in a lot of scenarios, what's happened over the last 12 to 18 months, Raimo, as budgets gotten a little tighter, has AIs kind of made people pause and look at their overall spend, if this isn't a category they already had invested in. It's probably not, you know, what we've seen, especially down market, not one of the top priorities because they're looking at other areas, so I think that's been one of the things.
Yeah.
I would say, like, in a cyclical standpoint that's been different in the last 12 months versus the couple years before that.
Yeah.
But on the flip side, if you look at consumer behavior, like I said earlier, we feel like that's gonna start to shift over the next couple of years.
Mm-hmm.
If you think about, you know, 50% of consumers now will check social before they buy something.
Mm-hmm.
55% of consumers, before they buy something, are influenced by someone in influencer marketing, and so the trends of where consumer behavior is going. I mean, the average consumer spends about two and a half hours a day on social, and so we believe, like, this, you know, eventually these businesses that haven't had this become a priority. This will start to become a priority over the next couple of years. It's just not been the top of the list historically because, like I said, this category hasn't existed within these organizations for a very long time.
Yeah. And so you talked about, like, that pause from AI coming in. Do you see, like, a slightly better understanding of people around that too?
Yeah.
Help you already?
I think what we're seeing, and we're doing it internally as well. It's not so much okay, we think AI is. There's other products that can do what you're doing in AI. We don't see that at all. It's more like, hey, if I've got another dollar to spend at my organization, I'm gonna stop and wait and say, hey, is that gonna go into the marketing org? Is that gonna go into the sales org? Or am I gonna look internally, is this something that money gonna go towards some kind of AI product? So I think it's more of, like, just this overall.
Yeah.
A lot of companies are just pausing or reevaluating where they're putting their dollars before they spend the next dollar, and I think that's been across all of software.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Especially front office software.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
It's, where's that incremental dollar gonna go? And I think right now we're kind of in this, like, let's wait and see where we might put that money.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. And then, you guys changed as well as an organization. Like, now if I look at the signings, the customers that you're signing, it's like, oh, I know them. Like, you remember, like, a few years back it was like, you know, very low end where it was tough. Now, like, very well-known brands are showing up on the list. Can you talk a little bit about that evolution?
Yeah.
to go more up market?
Yeah. I think the evolution started a couple years ago when we started to invest in the product and what some of those up market customers are looking for.
Mm-hmm.
And there's a couple areas here. One, they want integrations. They wanna be able to bring the data into other parts of their platform. So making sure, like, for example, the integrations into things like Service Cloud or, you know, other parts of a platform that are really important, whether.
Yeah.
Across an organization. So bringing data across the organization. For example, we launched an integration to Canva and Adobe Express. And so these enterprise customers wanna understand or they wanna be able to take social data other places within their platform. So investments in that area. Investments in social customer care and workflow management and be able to triage, like, mass inbound messages. We talked in Q2. We signed a customer that has around 90,000 customer cases a month that come inbound. If you think about that volume.
Yeah.
On social, if you remember on social, when someone posts a message on, you know, Facebook or Instagram or X, it doesn't say it's a social customer care. It's just a post. And so what we've been able to do is take all these inbound messages and in an automated fashion weed out what's support, what's spam, what's marketing feedback. And so being able to build that out for these large organizations to automatically triage these messages.
Yeah.
Is another huge area that's been able to allow us to go up market. And then I would say the things we're doing on the influencer marketing side have been, you know, as that category continues to expand, a lot of these larger organizations now are understanding that they have to be working with these creators. And so a lot of the success we've seen up market has been, you know, driven by the product investments that we've made.
Yeah. And then, I mean, as part of that is, there's the product aspect, and then there's the organizational aspect in terms of go-to-market, etc.
Yeah.
Can you speak to that because that has also been on a journey. Can you speak to that?
Yeah. So definitely, if you look at the investments over the last couple of years on the go-to-market side, it's definitely been up in the enterprise segment, right?
Yeah.
Almost half of our, you know, sales and marketing spend is now going into the enterprise, what we would say, sector of our business, and that's not just AEs, but think about sales enablement, solution engineers, professional services that help.
Yeah.
Like, demo these products and get in front of customers. And so that's definitely been a direct investment based on the inbound nature of, like, the demand we were seeing. So we were getting pulled into these larger deals that historically weren't being pulled into. The product was starting to resonate with these larger enterprise customers. And so what we had to do is we had to follow that up with, on the sales side, making sure we had the right level.
Yeah.
Of AEs within the organization and the right support system between, and then on top of that, as we've expanded outside of, like, the core use case, right, we've introduced some new products via either acquisition or via our own development, and when you get into these organizations and now you're selling multi-product, you've gotta have AEs that understand what's the use case I'm solving for.
Yeah.
I don't wanna go into this customer and try and sell them everything, and so you'll need a little bit different type of sales leader and AEs in these accounts in order to understand the dynamic there.
And then it did obviously have also then implications for the low end.
Yeah.
You know, it's going back now a little bit that you had, like, disruptions there. Are we kind of fully settled, so we know, you know, the level of investment I need to do low end.
Yeah.
I kind of have that kind of tied up. You know, the larger the bigger push is probably more high end going forward?
Yeah. We definitely have the investments figured out. I think for us, where we've seen, and we talked about this a little bit earlier, like, where we see the most pressure from a demand standpoint and a budget sales has probably been more.
Yeah.
In the lower mid-market and the SMB market, right?
Yeah.
They're just a little bit more constrained. And so I think we have the right level of investment in that part of the market. We've made changes where we think we have more of a lower touch type of approach to that as a market. Now.
Mm-hmm.
We think there's a huge opportunity there over the long term, but I think we've kinda right-sized the level of investment internally into that segment of the market. Now it's just a matter of, like, how can you continue to execute in this kinda more self-serve, low touch kind of approach.
Yeah.
That's a lot different than, for example, the enterprise approach.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So internally, we definitely have separated those motions and have a better understanding of, like, what those customers want. They don't need all the bells and whistles sometimes of the, obviously, of the enterprise customers. And so how do you make sure when you're approaching those customers from a product standpoint that you're only showing the things they actually wanna do? Maybe they just wanna do some publishing and light engagement and reporting. Let's not show them very complex features that they might be like, "Well, I don't really need that.
Mm-hmm.
And so, like, we're always trying to figure out what's the right part of the product to show those types of customers.
Yeah, and maybe summarizing this part of our conversation, like, so it does look like, I mean, you're still gaining market share because I'm looking at your peer group as well.
Yeah.
So you're gaining market share. Growth is lower for everyone. Listening to you, it sounds more this is like a cyclical thing because there's other forces going on rather than a structural thing.
Yeah.
Would you agree with that?
I would agree with that. I would say that. Like, like I said, if you look at some of the stats and where consumer behavior is going, and I think right now, you know, like a lot of companies we talked about earlier and the pressure on front office software and AI, I do think this is something that over time will shift.
Mm-hmm.
Because consumer behavior is shifting. And, like, that's where consumers are going to learn about products. That's where they're going to complain or promote products. I think the rise of the creator, you know, space. So we do believe there's this longer tailwind in our industry. And right now, you know, we're still in the early stages of that. And so I do think this is not something that's more structural. I think it's more temporary.
Yeah. Okay. And then shifting gear a little bit to AI as this, this big new thing.
Yeah.
How should we think about AI for your world?
Yeah. We actually are pretty excited about AI because you think about it, we're one of the very few companies that have access to the social data that's out there, right? This is data that's not available to a lot of players in the space.
Mm-hmm.
You can't scrape the information. We integrate with over three dozen different networks. We ingest about two billion messages a day. So you think about the data that we've accumulated over the years, and then we can apply AI on top of that. And so what you're gonna see from us, and we, we talked about this in our Breaking Ground, you know, release of, of our AI product, which is gonna be Trellis. There's a lot of different use cases we're looking at right now. The first one you're gonna see is an AI agent around social listening.
Mm-hmm.
So historically, you had to go manually build these queries. And obviously, it was a lot easier on our platform than others because it wasn't custom code that you had to write. But you still had to understand what you wanted to go look for and what you had to ask. And you had to have these queries running.
Yeah.
If you looked at the demo we did, it's pretty cool where you can just go into the social listening and go to our AI agent and just start asking it questions, and it'll go out and just do the work for you. And then on top of that, you can set it up where it'll actually proactively go out and say, "Hey, by the way, we noticed this trend over the last six months or 12 months." And so it's gonna make the accessibility to the data information for these companies that have really struggled to understand what's going on, it's gonna be a huge advantage for them.
And then there's things we're doing, for example, on the, like, social customer care or engagement side where we can have an AI agent automatically identify messages and understand, "Okay, do I need to respond to this message? Do I not? Do I need to send this to somebody else?
Mm-hmm.
And so basically run triage within all the messages you're getting. Where before, someone would have to tag those messages. We had some auto-routing, but you had someone kind of monitoring that inbox. What if you had someone doing that for you so that you could kinda streamline.
Yeah.
That. And then the other thing that we talked about is you're gonna see some really cool stuff on the influencer marketing side where we can help you in a much easier fashion find the creators that are a bunch more best match for you using AI. We can go out across all these different networks based on the parameters you put in there.
Yeah.
Intervene in a proactive way, say, "Hey, by the way, here are the folks you should work with. This is the brand fit. This is brand safety," so, like, we released a lot of things that a lot of businesses, when they're looking for creators, they don't understand, "What has this creator done historically? Do I have a brand safety issue?" Like, for example, if I'm selling kids' toys and this person's talked about drugs and alcohol.
Yeah.
I probably don't wanna have them on my platform.
Yeah.
And I can't go through and listen and watch every video they've ever done. They may have thousands of videos. And so what we're using is AI to go through all those videos and very quickly tell the customer, for example, "Hey, this is a good fit for your brand or this is a bad fit for your brand.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And so things like that you're gonna see. Those are a couple of examples of why we get excited about what AI could do for our platform.
I mean, if you like, and I was just talking with an executive of a large company in there and they run tests. The issue is, like, you run, you get so much more insight from the data, that you then can use. But so in theory, you are in a very good position then for that.
Yeah. 100%. And then, you know, along those same lines, when it comes to the data and some of the things we're doing on the AI front, and we haven't talked about it, but the NewsWhip acquisition we did.
Yeah. That's been interesting.
It's like the real-time version of what's going on across social media and the traditional media, which we can get into. But we also think, like, the data available via NewsWhip is another area that we're super excited about.
Maybe talk to that a little bit.
Yeah.
Because, like, you know, maybe not everyone in your audience is.
Yeah.
Like, fully up to speed there. Like, so why is that deal so important?
Yeah. So what NewsWhip had built, which was really interesting and cool in the market, and they have some really large clients. You can go to the website and see the types of clients they work with, very large Fortune 500 companies.
Mm-hmm.
What they built was this: the ability to look and understand the crossover across traditional media, websites, blogs, newspaper, like local newspaper articles.
Yeah.
And social.
Mm-hmm.
So, for example, what you've seen in media these days is if something is bubbling up on Reddit, all of a sudden you might see it in a local, like, you know, article in a newspaper and then it blows up.
Yeah. Yeah.
Or vice versa. There's a big article locally in some, for example, some small city, and then all of a sudden it's blowing up on social. What NewsWhip built was this real-time, I'm saying, like, minutes and hours ability to look at both of those things together and alert customers, for example, within organizations, say, "Hey, by the way, this thing over here," and it has this predictive analytics that it does, which tells you, like, "This thing is gonna be a big problem in a couple hours or this is gonna die out pretty quickly.
Yeah.
Based on, like, they have all this data on historically how news articles and social media articles have trended over time so they can let you know this is a problem or not a problem.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And so what we built, what they've recently come out with, and what we've come out with is this AI agent that does that for you in an automated fashion that is constantly looking across these things and alerting you and telling you, for example, "This is something you should worry about or not." And so what we found is that this has been really critical for a lot of organizations. Think about PR, think about crisis management.
Yeah.
Like, there's a lot of things here that customers really wanna know about instantly. A great example is, like, one of the customers we talked about that we landed in Q3 was the Royal Family. So they bought, you know, they bought the product 'cause they wanna know real-time.
Yeah.
What's going on? Articles coming out about us. Do we need to be monitoring this real-time, and so they, for example, signed up with our NewsWhip product that could, and it's not. It's a little different than social listening. Social listening is more deep, long research, what's happened over the last six, 12, 18 months.
Yeah.
I ran a campaign a year ago. I ran another campaign today. Is this better or worse? NewsWhip is like real-time. It's like literally minutes of what's happening in the market with your brand.
Yeah.
So you can understand if there's something you need to deal with.
Yeah.
Sometimes they use it not just for crisis management, but for, like, supply chain management. Like, for example, we have some large manufacturing companies that use it to understand, "Are there issues bubbling up in my plant? Are there issues, like, bubbling up in, like, my supply chain because there's, like, issues with weather or there's issues with, like, you know.
Yeah.
Different situations? And so they might not just, they might use it just to run their, like, general day-to-day business, not so much crisis management as well.
Yeah. Like, question though, like, from a product perspective, you as the CFO, you kind of probably think a little bit more like us in terms of, "Okay, how do I, how do I monetize this?
Yeah.
How do I have to think about this product as a tool?
And as a tool, yeah. So the way we think about it, a couple of things when it comes to monetization, one of the reasons we did the deal to begin with was they had very little distribution. So they had like five AEs.
Gotcha.
They're based out of Dublin. You know, they'd really invested in the product over the years and not really in distribution.
Yeah.
So it's a really awesome product that a lot of people didn't know about because they didn't have a lot of distribution. So when I thought, when we looked at this deal, one of the huge opportunities we saw from a monetization standpoint is they were able to put that into our Salesforce, which has got hundreds, you know, a couple hundred AEs.
Yeah.
That can now sell this across varying platforms. And so from that standpoint, we got really excited. Their ACVs are around, on average, three times higher than ours. And so from that perspective, we thought it was a huge opportunity to, like, really find another level to monetize that product that didn't exist prior to us buying them.
Yeah. So, did you give any? So, how should we think? I mean, if they only had five AEs, the numbers were probably small when you bought them.
Yeah.
How big do you think this will be? Like, I mean, if I'm listening to you.
Yeah.
It's almost I could cross-sell it to every single of my customers.
Well, yeah, it's like everything else. So you've gotta go out there and educate the market. You've gotta make sure they understand what the product does. You know what I'm trying to say?
Yeah.
So, like, we believe this is a product that over the next three or four years can be a real, like, value add within our AEs, but it's gonna take some time, you know, to make sure that the market understands what we're doing.
Yeah. Yeah.
Educating people in the market. So it's not like something that overnight, I don't think that everyone's gonna start buying it. I think we have to do a good job educating the market on it.
How do you think about it from a growth perspective as an organization? You have like your core solution, but then, you know, you bought a company to get you into influencer marketing. We now have NewsWhip. Like, one way you could say is you just keep adding products and the sales guys keep selling it, but that's. I don't think that's kind of long-term a good strategy.
Yeah.
Like, how do you bring that all together?
Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. I think historically, you know, we haven't historically done a lot of acquisitions. We built a lot of things from scratch.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so over the last couple of years, what we've done is, can we find really good technology that would take us a couple of years to build ourselves that hasn't really gone to market very hard with it? And can we quickly, have they built it in a way that the way we build products, which means, is it scalable? It's not heavy custom code. It's something that can be available throughout, like, our customer base. So if you look at all the things we have acquired, they're built in a very similar way of Sprout. And is there very good overlap with what we're doing? Are they focused in some way on social? 'Cause, like, at core, Sprout wants to solve the social, like, we wanna be the number one place you go for everything social.
Yeah.
And so those are the kind of premise we use when we've acquired these companies. And so we found some really good technology here. At the same time, we are building out a lot of our own kind of feature sets internally, like I talked about. We built.
Mm-hmm.
A lot of integrations into other platforms. We're building out our social customer care. You know, so we're doing a bunch of different things. So I don't think we're gonna be largely acquisitive going forward, to your point. And these aren't huge products that, like, in my mind, if you can't build on top of these products and do distribution, they actually don't help fuel your growth. You know what I'm trying to say?
Yeah.
But I do think our customers are continually asked to do more in Sprout. They're like, and that was the main reason we bought the influencer marketing company we did is because our customers were coming to us saying, "Hey, by the way, we're starting to get into this area. We do everything else in Sprout. We would love for you.
Yeah.
To be, like, we would do this if you had a product." And so a lot of the times, the things we're getting into is feedback from our customers. And internally, we have to decide, "Hey, how long would it take to build that thing? Or do we think there's a really good product in the market that'll make sense to acquire?" And so that's always been kind of our thesis behind whether we build something or buy something.
Going back to my question, like, how do you monetize it? It's like, you know, some companies take like a kind of a SKU kind of approach.
Yeah.
Of, "I'll give you more," and each.
Yeah.
SKU has a little bit more of the capabilities. Like.
Yeah.
How are you thinking about that?
Yeah, so the way we think about it is every product is a little bit different depending on the use case. For example, influencer marketing, the way we're starting to price that product is more about how much money are you putting through the creator space and how many creators you wanna use, right? For example, if you're gonna have 1,000 creators and spend $20 million through our platform.
Mm-hmm.
You're gonna pay. You're willing and will pay a lot more than someone that maybe wants 10 creators and they're willing to put $1 million to the platform, and so for that product, for example, it's more of like, what's the amount of volume you wanna do through the product?
Mm-hmm.
Very similar on the NewsWhip side. It's about, like, how, you know, what's the breadth of the product you wanna use? It's not so much about the user, you know, based pricing. It's more about, like, what's the value you're getting out of the product. And then you have our core platform that historically has been more user-based, but social listening is a little bit different 'cause that's based on how many queries you wanna run, what's the consumption you wanna do. And so I think the way we're thinking about it is it doesn't have to be one price fits all. Like, we don't need to have one pricing model for everything we do.
Yeah.
I think what we're learning in the market is the market's evolving pretty quickly in the space, and so what we're trying to do is let's tie the customer, what's the customer value they're getting out of our product?
Yeah.
How to help drive the pricing versus trying to just make everyone fit into the same square, like, "Hey, historically, everyone has to be a per user, you know, type of product." Like, well, it doesn't always have to be per user.
Yeah.
I think what we're finding in this environment is, you've gotta be a little bit flexible with your pricing strategy, especially as things are moving as quickly as they are, and so I think what you'll see from us is you're gonna see different types of pricing models depending on what's the product they wanna buy and what's the use case they're using it for.
Yeah. So it's evolving.
It's evolving.
It's.
Control is control.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, and so we've always, you know, taken that approach is like, let's not just be stuck in one way to price a product because I think it can vary.
Yeah. Now going back to our world, like, you know, you said at the very beginning, like, things are feeling a little bit better.
Yeah.
How do we measure you? Like, and that's been.
Yeah.
A debate we had for you for a few years.
Yeah.
So, like, from your perspective now, if you look at the progress and where you're going.
Yeah.
What do I look at?
Yeah. I think what you're gonna see more from us is, you know, we started talking about this on our last call, Raimo. I think there's two parts of our business right now. There's the 50K customer cohort that we talked about. Like, that's almost 50% of our business, and that's growing in the high 20s.
Yeah.
And so I think that's gonna continue to be a data point that we give people to understand, "Okay, here is the part of our business that's doing very well. It's becoming a larger part of our business." And so I think that's a good leading indicator of, like, is this business moving in the right direction or not? And then we have the customers.
And when you say high 20s, that's, that's revenue?
Yeah. It's % of, like, the revenue growth.
Yeah. Revenue growth.
In the high 20s.
Yeah. Revenue growth.
For that cohort.
Yeah.
It's almost 50% of our business.
Okay.
And then you have the sub-50K cohort that's growing low single digits, right? And so that's still gonna be an important part of our business going forward. And the key there is gonna be, how do you stabilize that part of the business? How do you figure out how to serve that part of the business? How do you make sure that they're getting all the value out of the product? We talked about that a little bit earlier.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so I think for us, the right now where we're at, because if you look at it holistically, it looks like the business is doing okay, but not as good. But it's really, there's
There's two things happening in our business.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I think what we're gonna try to do a better job going forward is kind of explaining those dynamics and why one thing is working really well, why this thing is okay, but could be doing better. And so I think you're gonna see more from us that kind of breaks those things out and helps you understand what's really going on behind the scenes.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That, yeah, I'm looking forward to that. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. The last couple of minutes, profitability.
Yeah.
Talk a little bit there. We've seen good improvements there. Is that like you using AI? What are the initiatives, you know?
Yeah. We definitely are doing some things on the AI front internally. Like, I think there's like probably three areas there that you're gonna see us focus on, and this is not probably uncommon for a lot of companies. One, I think there's a huge opportunity on the engineering side and the ability to.
Oh, yeah.
Ship more product, move things along quicker. I think there's an area. We've got some things going on the support side. I think we can get way more efficient with some of the.
Yeah.
The tools that are out there, and then I think you can see things on the, like, sales enablement side, right? I think a lot of the sales processes, the early sales processes, I think you're gonna see benefits, but that historically has not been what's been driving our margin. I think that's what you're gonna see us, how we use AI going forward and how that can help going forward. Historically, what we've seen over the last couple of years has been able to drive, you know, decent margin over R&D. A lot of that has to do with when we did the influencer marketing acquisition a couple of years ago, that whole R&D team was based in Poland.
Mm-hmm.
And historically, all of our engineers had been in the U.S. And so we've started over the last couple of years to not only use that for the influencer marketing product, but we started moving more and hiring more folks in low-cost locations, which has really allowed us to, for example, get a little bit more leverage off of R&D.
Yeah. Yeah.
And then you've also seen it on the sales and marketing side. As we move upmarket, we've seen better unit economics. You see more leverage in the model. I think that's probably the biggest opportunity going forward is I do think you can see us as we expand, as our ACVs grow, as we do more of these multi-product deals, I do think you can see leverage off of the sales and marketing line. I think there's a big opportunity there over the next five years.
Yeah. Yeah.
I think that's where a lot of the leverage will come from. And then obviously you get your probably standard scale off of G&A.
Right.
As you see other organizations.
Yeah. Yeah. So, because we are at that this time of the year, if you think about budgeting, and I don't want numbers, but like, is that the starting point is my margins need to go up, my margins need to be stable, or how do you think about and, you know?
Yeah. They have to go up. I mean, I think our internal philosophy is like every year we, every year since I've been there, we've driven incremental operating margin in the business year over year. And I don't see us changing course.
Yeah.
I feel like it's really important. I don't think we have to be successful. I think we can continue to drive the investments and growth that we need to do without sacrificing margin.
Mm-hmm.
We definitely will see margin improvement going forward. I don't see us ever going backwards.
Yeah.
On that front. So I, you know, we've kind of talked about that and committed to that. And not just externally, but internally as well, that's kind of like the management team is really focused on making sure that we're driving, you know, incremental margin in the business.
Yeah. And then, we have one minute left, so I have one quick question.
Yeah.
It's like, capital allocation. So we had like.
Yeah.
The small acquisitions. You know, in theory, your share price is kind of at a level where it kind of makes sense to kind of look at that as well. Like, how do you think about that allocation?
Yeah. I think, you know, right now, given that we have positive free cash flow, as you know, we've never went out and did a big, like, debt raise. We never did a big, like, convert.
Yeah. Yeah.
So it's not like we have tons and tons of cash on the balance sheet to do anything like, for example, like, I don't see us doing any major investing into the organization as it relates to that because we wanna keep a certain amount of cash on the balance sheet.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So you might see us do some small acquisitions over the next couple of years, but nothing major, just given the cash balance that we have.
Yeah.
You know, I don't see us going out and doing some huge debt round in order to do something at this stage. I think we're gonna be pretty cautious in the way that we spend our money.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's a good closing statement as well.
Perfect.
Perfect.
Okay. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Thank you.