Continues to evolve, you know, change is the only constant.
Yep.
I felt like 2024, you know, if we had to put one word on for what it was for Yext, it was stabilization, is what it felt like to me.
Yeah.
You know, we stood on the stage a year ago, you kind of talked about continued elongation in sales cycles.
Yep.
But an environment that you didn't expect to materially worsen versus 2023.
Mm-hmm.
Just curious, from an organic perspective, 'cause I will get into the M& A later, but would you say that 2024 played out as you expected it?
No, no, it didn't. Well, I mean, it did and it didn't. I think the first half of 2024, and, you know, if you're following kind of, you know, front office software at all, what you heard at the end of 2023 was there's a lot of pipeline, there's a lot of opportunity. We've been through two years of, you know, aggressive cost cutting and, you know, things are gonna get better this year.
Mm-hmm.
Right? And there was a lot of signal, there was a lot of interest, there was a lot of what we refer to in our world as pre-qualified pipe. So a lot of like opportunity that we didn't have visibility in the closing. And I don't think we're alone in that.
Mm-hmm.
And so we, you know, look, we made, you know, a decision at the beginning of 2024 to kind of lean into what we saw as a demand, as an improving demand environment. 2023 had been pretty disastrous from that standpoint, for you know, I think for most of our space. And then what we saw in Q1 and Q2 of this past year we're finishing right now is really things actually did get worse.
Mm-hmm.
And it, you know, that a lot of that pre-qualified pipeline just didn't convert.
Mm-hmm.
It wasn't moving towards conversion. You know, this makes sense. I mean, interest rates were, you know, inflation was sticky, interest rates were higher, and you know, the CFOs were really in control.
Mm-hmm.
Well, you know, what we've talked about more recently is we really haven't seen that worsening trend continue.
Mm-hmm.
In the second half of the year. And we've probably seen, you know, kind of very modest signs of, you know, maybe the extreme cost cutting and kind of environment that we've been in is starting to moderate. I think the conversations are becoming more strategic. And so, you know, as we look forward, I do think what we learned is that, you know, we'd rather be a little bit behind the curve.
Mm-hmm.
In investing in that growth curve than be a little bit ahead of it.
Yeah.
And so, you know, that's probably a little bit always my leaning, but it was reinforced by, you know, we made some investments in sales capacity and BDRs and marketing in the first half of last year that it didn't pan out. And so, you know, you can see that in our financials. We were, you know, significantly more profitable in Q3 and are expecting more of that in Q4. So.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we learn and we move on.
Yeah.
but yeah, I'm not nearly as bearish going into this year, partly because I think we're much fitter as a company and you know, we're prepared to react to a market environment that might get better and that might not get better.
Yeah.
But I think there are opportunities for us to thrive in all those scenarios.
If we use stabilization for Yext as the word for .
I like it .
Mike Walrath, is it cautious optimism for Mike Walrath?
Yeah. Look, I mean, I am, I am more than cautiously optimistic.
Perfect.
You know, where you know you're gonna struggle is getting me to put a timeframe on it.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
Because the macro trends are turning in a way, and I know we'll get into this, are turning in a way that favor, you know, that have really been a headwind for us for the last five years. And when I talk about, I'm talking about the Yext-specific kind of, you know, value proposition.
Mm-hmm.
And it's been a very challenging, I think. Feel like we've been eating glass for five years.
Yeah.
What's that, Sean Parker, you know?
Yeah.
You know, you eat glass and eventually you come to like the taste of your own blood. I think you know, the last year, you know, we're hoping that this year is a little less glass eating.
Mm-hmm. Nice. Good image. We'll talk about what's going on in the search industry sort of more specifically in a moment. But you know, it really feels like 2025 is a increasingly difficult year to be a CMO in terms of you have obviously big change in search. You know, Google came out, whatever, earlier this week, last week, that they're now below 90% market share for the first time.
Since 2015.
Since 2015.
Yep.
Then you also have changes, you know, in social media, whether it be potential TikTok ban here or Meta getting stricter on how you target.
Yep.
Do you think that these factors create a catalyst for the CMO to get back in control versus last year? You said sort of CFO last couple of years took the reins?
Maybe. I think I'm not sure that the CFOs are gonna ever hand the reins back to the CMO and the CIO the way that they were for the last, you know, the sort of 12 years leading up to 2022. Hopefully, you know, we've certainly learned that lesson inside Yext too. Darryl will definitely exert more control over spending. I think that's probably true for all of our customers as well. I think the CMO is faced with a strategic challenge. Look, it's the CMO and the CIO.
Mm-hmm.
Because a lot of these systems are now so intertwined that you really.
Yeah.
You know, you need to check both boxes. I'm not sure that we've seen a landscape this complicated since probably the launch, you know, the sort of iPhone launch of the smartphone.
Yeah.
And I actually think this is a much bigger shift than that.
Mm-hmm.
That was a big shift. In a lot of ways, our market was created by that fragmentation and every app on the mobile smartphone becoming geo-aware.
Mm-hmm.
That created this kind of proliferation of geo-aware experiences that needed to understand where your products were, where your stores were, where your advisors were, so I think what will happen is there'll be a big conversation in the C-suite this year around if the world is changing and if Google's not gonna be the only thing that matters and it's not gonna be the only thing that matters, what do we do about it?
Yeah.
How are we set up to not lose in that scenario?
Mm-hmm.
We know this because this is the conversation we're starting to have with our customers.
Yeah. Absolutely. You're providing good visuals today. Like I just got a vision of like Darryl, like kind of marching around the office and everybody fleeing, you know, and it's tight?
He's much loved. He's much loved.
Yes, he is. Okay. So, you know, we.
I don't think our software vendors love him as much as other people do.
Probably not. Probably not. So I wanna talk about the recent third quarter results in which you reported about a month ago. And in your shareholder letter and during the Q& A session during the earnings call, you talked quite a bit about the fact that we're sort of in the early phases of a fragmented search environment where a lot of new generative AI search is starting to disrupt Google's, you know, traditional monopoly. And we, we obviously talked about the statistics there. Can you just talk about how this is translating into customer conversations and potential pipeline generation?
Yeah, totally. So first of all, the Google share erosion has nothing to do with generative AI directly. So there is no, so when you look at those numbers, which came out earlier this week, for the entirety of Q4, Google sat below 90% for the first time since 2015. That does not, none of, you know, OpenAI, Perplexity, Grok, none of those, you know, what are those are search engines.
Mm-hmm.
Right? None of them are measured in that, in that analysis.
Mm-hmm.
So that is purely organic. We've passed the nadir. You know, Google peaked at 92.5% share. I believe they've now crossed below the 90% threshold. And if nothing else happened, you would expect. I believe that between Google's excessive monetization of the SERP page and others catching up in terms of the overall value proposition, that trend would continue. But the bigger trend and the thing that I think is much more operative inside the C-suite today is that there is no measurement yet, no meaningful measurement yet of how many of the questions that are being asked are going to places like SearchGPT and ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Mm-hmm.
We'll get that information.
Yeah.
What we'll see is that actually Google's share of, you know, capturing questions asked is dropping much faster than the, and that's simply because the for many queries, the consumer experience is already much better.
Mm-hmm.
On the AI engines than it is on Google. And a big part of that is the fact that Google's protecting a $200 billion search business.
Mm-hmm.
Right? And I know this from firsthand experience because from 2008 to 2010, during the peak of, you know, Yahoo fighting for its life as a search engine, I ran the search business at Yahoo.
Mm-hmm.
And every morning we woke up and made the decision between monetization on the search page and consumer share. And every day we woke up and we chose monetization on the search page and Google and Yahoo. I'm sorry, today I believe has about 1.5% search market share.
Mm-hmm.
That is, Google is faced with exactly the same problem.
Mm-hmm.
They're being very clever about how they talk about it.
Mm-hmm.
I would not bet against Google because Google has a lot of really great things going on. If there was a way for me over the long run, I might short that search business, as a standalone entity, but there's no way to do that.
Yeah.
Or at least not one that I'm smart enough. And I've never shorted anything. So, but I think fundamentally Google's gonna have to choose between do we provide a consumer experience that feels as magical as the consumer experience that I get when I communicate with ChatGPT or Perplexity in a conversational way without all the monetization, without all the sponsored links hiding everything else? Or do I continue to harvest as much cash as I can from that business at the expense of allowing all these competitors to encroach? And I don't know what they'll do.
Mm-hmm.
But I don't think it matters. You know, there is no scenario where Google retains anything like the type of competitive position that they have today.
Mm-hmm.
When it comes to answering consumer questions.
Yeah. Well, and look, I mean, so far we've seen some impact in some companies we cover that are more knowledge-based questions, sort of exploratory search where it's showing up in AI Overviews and that's changing how.
Yeah. That's a good one.
Let's say those vendors are.
Yeah.
Like getting to the website, but we haven't seen, let's call it monetizable or exploitable search, right? Where they can actually generate revenue based off of, you know, that you still, if I look up how to find a specific medication.
Yeah.
Or, you know, that's or some sort of product. You still get the traditional Google search there.
This is the other thing that's confusing, you know, is that Google's talking about, you know, a significant portion of the responses being AI generated.
Mm-hmm.
They're very smartly telling you that the monetization on those AI generated responses is just as good as it is on.
Yeah.
Those queries when they don't deliver an AI response.
Yeah.
Now I believe that's true because I believe that Google is very, very good at selecting unmonetizable queries to deliver AI responses to.
Yep.
I'll give you my favorite example. If you go to Google and you search for emergency plumber near me.
Mm-hmm.
You're almost definitely gonna get a whole bunch of sponsored results.
For sure.
A Local Pack that gives you a bunch of local emergency plumbers who've paid a lot to be in these positions. That is a highly monetizable, highly exploitable query. If you go to Google and ask it, "Do I need a plumber to unclog my toilet," you are almost certainly gonna get an AI search result.
Mm-hmm.
The reason why is because that is an unexploitable, unmonetizable query. If you do show sponsored results on that second query, what's gonna happen is people are gonna scroll right by them and they're gonna choose the article that tells you exactly what the AI Overview is gonna tell you in a more succinct form, which is get a plunger and try that first.
Yeah.
Right? So, you know, it's all very clever and Google is incredibly smart. I think, you know, if they were an entrant, you wouldn't bet against them actually eating this whole market when it comes to providing a magical consumer experience around Gemini or an AI Overview. Like, the constraining, you know, factor for them is that they do have to protect this $200 billion.
Yeah.
Search business, and that's gonna cause them to be slower and it's gonna create an opportunity for the rest of the market to potentially leapfrog them on these explore queries.
Mm-hmm.
Where it gets really interesting is when the AI systems, the AI engines start to have the ability to do more of the exploit queries. So when they're, I like to use the free versions because I actually think the free versions are a better example of like sort of how everyone's gonna use these things.
Mm-hmm.
So if you go to ChatGPT, at least as of this morning, and you ask it, where's an emergency plumber near me? It's effectively gonna tell you, go to Google.
Mm-hmm.
Right? That will not always be the case.
Yeah.
There's no way that they're going to see the exploit monetizable query to Google, and that is the sea change that if you're a CMO, you better be thinking about today.
Yeah. What do you think the level of urgency is with CMOs today for this issue specifically, say relative to when we were on the stage a year ago talking about the general generative AI opportunity of, you know, building, you know, AI using Gen AI to automate content creation or chat, you know, where there, it sort of was a delayed monetization ever here in the industry broadly?
We work with brands who tend to be, have some local.
Mm-hmm.
You know, some agent location advisor practitioner element to their business.
Mm-hmm.
Digital discovery is by far the top of the funnel for them.
Mm-hmm.
Right? It's the most important thing that they do. And so for those CMOs, if they're not highly concerned about how do I make sure that I continue to win in a world where, you know, I mean, for 15 years we've played this game exactly one way. The whole entire SEO industry is built around how do I manipulate the SERP page of Google, win in the organic. And then there's a whole paid element too. To the extent that the questions are being asked somewhere else, there's gonna be a lot of agitation around how do I make sure because the rules of how I appear in ChatGPT and how I appear in Perplexity are gonna be different.
Yep.
that doesn't mean that you're not gonna be able to do it. It just means you're gonna have to understand the different ways of delivering data and ultimately, you know, thinking about content as data to all of these different systems. And so if you're not, you know, if you're a CMO and you're in that space and you're not thinking about that, you're in big trouble.
Well, and so then maybe to bring this back to Yext then is how can sort of with your Knowledge Graph and the conversations, how are you educating current existing customers, prospective customers on how to better build out that Knowledge Graph to be able to improve their search results and better positioned for this sort of impending shift here?
Yeah. So, you know, there are three versions of this. We talk about them internally. There's the Insight Layer, the Recommendation Layer, and the Action Layer.
Mm-hmm.
Right? And so when you think about search, insight is, you know, sort of what we've known for 15 years about like how you create digital visibility.
Mm-hmm.
Recommendation is basically what you look for your partners, your agencies, your internal marketing team, or a partner like Yext to help you with.
Mm-hmm.
And then action is how you actually do it. So how do I actually structure the data?
Mm-hmm.
How do I deliver, you know, my listening data across 200 publishers? How do I publish fast Schema, Schema optimized pages? How do I manage my reputation? How do I manage social media posting? And then how do I create this flywheel of value around that? What I think we'll see over the course of the next couple of years is that the Actions will remain incredibly important. The emphasis when there's a question about what should we be doing.
Mm-hmm.
The Recommendation Layer will become incredibly important.
Mm-hmm.
And then, ultimately, what drives the Recommendation Layer are the data insights around the rapidly evolving world of how do you make yourself discoverable.
Mm-hmm.
And so, you know, I, I think this is, for us, this is an incredibly exciting thing because nobody does the Actions better than we do.
Mm-hmm.
We have the, you know, I think we've been investing, you know, infuriatingly at times for 12 years in a system that's built for unlimited endpoint distribution in a world where, you know, it's been hard to convince marketers that unlimited endpoint distribution and structured data is a really important part of their strategy, and then I think we're advantaged when it comes to expanding and rolling out a much more agentic, much more interesting.
Mm-hmm.
Insights layer.
Mm-hmm.
And so that, you know, that's the stuff that gets us really excited right now because we think that there's huge innovation opportunity here, but most importantly, the environment becomes one where this is like, this is no longer a nice to have.
Yeah.
This is an absolute have to have thing.
So clearly it's something you're having a lot of conversations with.
Yes.
Almost daily with customers and prospects. You've obviously got a solution that can help meet this need. Do we extend your cautious optimism to, you know, Gen AI being a contributor to bookings or, you know, pipeline conversion, this year?
You know, you know me better than that. We know the conversations are getting easier to have.
Mm-hmm.
We know that there's a real sensitivity around this. There is still plenty of uncertainty.
Yeah.
And you know me well enough to know that I'm not gonna get ahead of myself on this. We have been seeing, you know, the green shoots, right? So I talked about on the last call, we've seen three quarters straight of modestly improving renewal rates.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously we're lapping a big customer churn in Q4. So that's gonna, you know, point some of the metrics in a better direction.
Mm-hmm.
We have not seen a, you know, proliferation of that one single large customer churn, which I think was one of the concerns we faced last year.
Mm-hmm.
If anything, what we're seeing is, you know, I think, an opportunity, an environment that's getting better for us. But.
Mm-hmm.
You know me well enough to know that I'm gonna be.
Yeah.
You know, I'm gonna be understated on this until we are delivering the results that we expect to see.
Had to take the shot.
Yeah. You gotta take the shot.
Yeah. All right. Let's go back to.
I'd make Nils' life easier if I was willing to be a little more out there.
That's right. All right. Let's go kind of bring it back to the sort of core business and the results from the recent quarter. So.
Yeah.
Obviously, Q3 fiscal 2025, solid performance across the top and bottom line. You know, shares traded off a bit though, obviously since then.
Yeah.
You know, maybe just talk about, and I know some of that was like, or a lot of it was FX related.
Yeah.
But maybe just kind of clarify sort of, you know, what kind of resulted in the sequential guide down, I guess, if you wanna call it. If it's just all FX, if there's anything in the business we should be aware of.
I think it's FX.
Yeah.
I think unfortunately, I think there were two things as far as I can tell, and I'm not smart enough to know why. I actually thought we had a great quarter.
Yeah.
I think it's one of the best quarters we've ever had. We're super happy with the Hearsay deal.
Mm-hmm.
It's contributing. We're, you know, getting fit.
Yeah.
We have lots of cash flow. Like, you know, I, I think unfortunately, you know, part of what happens is just like we're heavily geared towards the European, you know, FX rates.
Mm-hmm.
And so we had this kind of bubble of upside in Q3 and then the rates plummeted and have plummeted further. And so you kind of get this, you know, a bunch of upside in Q3 and then a bunch of FX downside. We're naturally hedged, so it makes no fundamental difference to the business, but optically the kind of guide didn't look good.
Yeah.
The other thing that I think, you know, I don't know if it had an impact, but it certainly seemed to, you know, be instantaneous was there was, because of the purchase accounting on the Hearsay deal, there was a big gap in net income miss in Q3, I believe.
Yeah. Yep.
And so, you know, I don't. I've given up trying to predict which way the stock is gonna go 'cause I think we had one of the best quarters we've ever had.
Yeah.
But look, we're thrilled with where the business is.
Mm-hmm.
I think, you know, you talked about last year being a year of stability. It was a year of getting fit.
Yeah.
We now have, you know, I think we have a business that consensus says over $100 million of EBITDA next year. We have no debt.
Mm-hmm.
We have cash on the balance sheet. You know, I, I think we're executing better. We're seeing, we're seeing the green shoots, and you know, I, I'm giving you everything but the, like, you know.
Yeah.
The bullish projection of growth that you and everybody else, including, you know, the 1,200 people who work for me, want to hear me say up here today. But, you know, we'll, you know, hopefully we'll give that to you soon enough.
Yeah. For sure. And when you strip out Hearsay and look at the organic performance on ARR in the quarter.
Yeah.
In the last couple quarters, it's kind of bounced around a little bit.
Yeah.
Third quarter it was down, I think, around 3.5% organically.
You're talking about the year- over- year number?
Yeah. Yeah. The year- over- year number.
Yeah.
Maybe if we look at the core business, how does that frame up what you think growth in that core business should be? Like, is it, is it maybe a stabilization? Is that a flat business? Is there some slight declines there?
Yeah. Look, I'll answer this question this way. I think we've been talking for the last couple quarters about, you know, the core business being, you know.
Mm-hmm.
You know, over the midterm being stable to modestly growing.
Mm-hmm.
I think some of that's gonna be how quickly does the sort of market environment improve both from a kind of capital and macro and also from this sort of trends of our products becoming more important, which we fundamentally believe they are.
Mm-hmm.
You know, Hearsay is growing modestly, so there's a little contribution there and it.
Yep.
It makes the numbers a little harder to unpack. Over the mid- to long term, I, you know, there's no doubt in my mind today that the organic business is a growth business and it has a lot to do with, you know, what I think is two and a half years of great execution by our team.
Yep.
Getting fit, being in a position to be able to invest into the growth trends as they show up, and then this macro shift in the environment and the importance of getting yourself, your data and yourself fit, so you know, it's just impossible for me to tell you. Like, we're talking about, I mean, this large customer churn last December was a 3% impact.
Yep. Yep.
Right? So like, you know, we had a little bit of upside in Q2 and a little bit of downside in Q3, and like, you know, we're gonna keep doing the right long-term things for the business, and that means, you know, keeping customers and restructuring contracts where that's necessary, and if that causes a little bit of up and down wiggling in that number, we're not gonna get too agitated about it.
Mm-hmm.
Because we see the bigger opportunity and we know that, you know, preserving those customer relationships and having the upsell, cross-sell, and pricing opportunities that we have in the future are gonna be valuable to us.
For sure. So speaking of sort of cross-sell, upsell.
Mm-hmm.
You know, let's talk about Hearsay.
Yeah.
Obviously an interesting and complementary business you acquired during the year.
Yeah.
You know, and it's a nice opportunity to sort of integrate compliant customer engagement with your digital presence platform.
Yes.
So.
Yep.
Can you just talk about, you know, a little bit dive a layer deeper on that, the strategic rationale, where you see sort of the best opportunities for cross-sell now that it's integrated?
Yeah. So first of all, we're thrilled with the acquisition.
Mm-hmm.
I think the integration has gone beautifully. There's a lot of cultural, you know, kind of synergy between the team. We've kind of, you know, we've followed different paths, and so, you know, that business, I think the kind of core social platform, you know, in some ways struggled the way that our core business struggled and has recovered nicely.
Mm-hmm.
Obviously the compliance environment here is pretty intense for financial services, and so we're seeing a ton of interest in, like, you know, I mean, we saw a bunch more fines yesterday. The.
Mm-hmm.
You know, noncompliant communications has clearly become a focus area for the SEC and.
Especially in this community.
Especially in this community. And so, you know, that's really exciting. And I think that creates a fertile environment for that business. But what we love the most about it is that, you know, we were gonna have to get there.
Mm-hmm.
Or, and Hearsay, you know, was gonna have to try to challenge us on the Listings and Pages because at the end of the day, all of these things are digital experiences that are powered by a data layer, and what we're seeing now is some of the benefit of connecting these things. So the ability to say, I mean, it's interesting, like most of the Yext products are really, you know, kind of presale, you know, early in funnel.
Mm-hmm.
You know, they're meant to drive early in funnel discoverability. Social is interesting because it kind of crosses that line. It can be prospecting, but it can also be CRM.
Mm-hmm.
And so you have to do that right. But when you're doing that, you have both a customer engagement opportunity and also a customer acquisition opportunity.
Mm-hmm.
Connecting the products and saying, okay, like customers coming in through the social door, through a post about fixed income or retirement accounts or something like that, obviously compliant and authored and passing all those filters. We can now start connecting the page of the financial advisor to the compliant communication element of the, so click to talk, click to text.
Yeah.
Click to communicate with that advisor. That communication has to be compliant, and so those are the pieces that are starting to click together.
Mm-hmm.
I think when you, when you wrap that all into what will be an increasingly robust kind of single pane of glass insights layer.
Yeah.
It feeds the recommendations, which then feeds more rich content over here and the whole thing becomes a flywheel of value that.
Yeah.
You know, we're beginning to have some really interesting conversations with our largest customers about this.
Well, and a single pane view really is almost required from a customer experience perspective, right?
Yeah.
You've talked about the integration going well so far. You know, where are we on the product integration specifically? Do you need a fully integrated product to generate revenue synergies?
Yeah, so we don't.
Okay.
Actually, I think it's a question we'll ask over the long run: is at what point, you know, we have Yext Social, which is basically for, excuse me, non-compliance use cases. And we have Hearsay, which is for compliance use cases.
Yeah.
It's not entirely clear whether we should ever will need to entirely merge those two products together.
Mm-hmm.
I'm not a technical architect, but I know enough to be dangerous. I could tell you, like there's a path where you merge it into a single product with a bunch of toggles and switches around the sort of how much compliance is required.
Yep.
There's also a path where you, for a meaningful period of time, you keep the product separate.
Mm-hmm.
But you unify the data layer and the Insight Layer across the top. And that's really what I think we're starting to see is that, you know, there are, and financial services is a great example between customers who use Listings, Pages, Reviews.
Mm-hmm.
And then Hearsay Social and Hearsay Relate. Like that's just at the highest level, that's five. And there's an Actions product that Hearsay sells as well, which is connecting the leads, you know, so five or six products there that a financial services company might've been using four or five different vendors for.
Yeah. Yeah.
Right? That means four or five panes of glass, four or five different data systems, and a total lack of readiness for an environment that's more complicated than like LinkedIn and Google and a couple others.
Mm-hmm.
Right? And you know, I'm gonna keep coming back to it 'cause it's the most important trend in our business is that you have to be ready for what's coming from a data standpoint.
Yeah.
If you're not, you're gonna be in big trouble.
Yeah. Makes sense. I feel like this is the point I disclose that Needham is a Hearsay Social customer.
There we go.
There's your cross-sell opportunity.
Perfect. So at least we know all of your communications are compliant.
That's right. That's right. Cost synergies are obviously another factor of this. You've already made amazing progress in terms of margin expansion over the last several years.
Yeah.
How quickly can we start to sort of generate these sort of, cost synergies? And then what does that mean for sort of margin trajectory of the overall Yext business?
Yeah, so high level, I think, you know, our guide at the end of this year implies something like 15% or 16% EBITDA margins this year.
Mm-hmm.
I think, you know, we talked in the last call about, you know, sort of a starting point being something like, you know, the kind of margin in Q4 for the, for the full-year. We always have some seasonality in our business where Q1 and Q2, because of some marketing expenses and our compensation cycle tend to be a little bit lower on the overall margin side.
Mm-hmm.
We haven't given any guidance for next year yet. But, you know, I think, I think that is kind of the right way to think about it is that, you know, from, from the standpoint of how we invest and how we allocate capital, we're pretty comfortable with that as a starting point.
Mm-hmm.
You know, the hard part of our job is, you know, the question is, you know, is mid-twenties margin, low-twenties margin, high-twenties margin, what's the right margin for the business next year?
Mm-hmm.
That's in a lot of ways gonna be dictated by how much opportunity are we gonna be able to convert and how.
Yeah.
Are we seeing that? And so, you know, I think the range of possibilities is anywhere in there. And it really depends on how much opportunity we see on the growth side. And, you know, we're annoyingly capital allocation-minded in a sense.
Mm-hmm.
Annoyingly unreligious about it.
Yeah.
So, you know, I would like to be a little bit behind the investment curve just to make sure that the opportunity's there before we start investing. But I could see a range of outcomes ranging from kind of, you know, where we run rate in Q4 to potentially, you know, higher or lower depending on what the growth story's telling.
Got it. I mean, if the market, if you start to see that improved environment based on the investments you've already made over the past year or so.
Yeah.
Do you feel like you will need to incrementally hire to capture demand? Or do you feel like you're at a spot where you can sort of.
Yeah.
Capacity-wise that.
I'd love to be in a spot where I feel like I need to incrementally hire. I think the data, you know, we're a very data-driven organization now.
Yeah.
The data will tell us that story.
Yeah.
I'm quite confident that we have quite a bit of elasticity in our, you know, that we have the opportunity to grow the bookings and revenue and, you know, the ARR without having to add a lot of sales capacity.
Mm-hmm.
You might lean into marketing a little more. You might lean into demand generation a little bit more.
Yep.
Certainly, you know, I think if we're seeing opportunities to accelerate the product roadmap, you know, so I think Yext has a history, you know, of being, you know, very sales and marketing heavy when it comes to investments.
Yeah.
I think you can expect that to shift a little bit.
Mm-hmm.
We've become much more efficient on the sales and marketing side, and I think we're seeing better execution there, and that allows us the opportunity to potentially accelerate, you know, to kind of flow upside into the R&D budget.
Mm-hmm.
You know, as much or more than we typically flowed most of the historical upside into the sales and marketing line.
Makes sense.
And I think that's a healthier, like that makes it very hard for competitors to catch up to us.
Yeah. Oh, with the time remaining, I wanted to open up for the audience. Does anyone have a question for Mike? Okay. As you think about, obviously this year for probably the first time, you know, M&A became a, a part of the growth.
Yep. Yep.
Vector, if you will, for the business growth algorithm. As you think about driving growth in the business, you know, maybe talk organically where you think what within Yext's product portfolio has driven the most or the opportunity for growth. And then how is M&A or additional M&A factoring into the growth algorithm moving forward now?
Yeah. So we certainly, you know, I'll say it again. We absolutely expect the core business to grow.
Mm-hmm.
I'm gonna stop short of predicting when we expect that ARR growth to arrive and what magnitude just because I think it's an unpredictable environment. We're super pleased with the Hearsay acquisition. The team's done an amazing job on both sides integrating that acquisition. And we feel, and I said, I think I said during the call that we, you know, expect that to be pretty fully integrated by the end of the year. I think that's a benefit to our customers, but it's also got benefits for us because it means we can start to unlock some of the synergies in that business. I think it's a really interesting environment for M&A. I think there's a lot of, theoretically, a lot of opportunity out there.
I think there's still a lot of companies who are living in, you know, three or four years ago when it comes to how they're thinking about value.
Yeah.
and we're just gonna be a very disciplined acquirer to the extent that we do anything.
Mm-hmm.
I do. I also do think there are some really interesting kind of smaller tuck-in opportunities. There are some teams out there that, you know, are, you know, working on things that are a lot of value, but, you know, this is not an environment where there's a lot of funding.
Mm-hmm.
For some of these teams. So we're gonna look at all of it, including even, you know, kind of larger, more transformational things. But we'll, you know, our promise is always we're gonna be really disciplined and really thoughtful about both the, you know, kind of revenue side as well as the cost side of any transaction.
Mm-hmm.
And obviously the balance sheet capital that we use to do it. But we're in a great position from a, you know, no debt and, you know, a lot more cash flow than we've historically had, which gives us a lot of optionality.
Makes sense. On the R&D front, you know, we obviously had a long conversation about generative AI and as it relates to Gen AI or the new search environment. Is there anything you need to do to better productize sort of your expertise in this area as CMOs look to deal with this?
Yeah. Look, I think there's a ton of opportunities to.
Yep.
streamline the way that we communicate value to our customers.
Mm-hmm.
and also to bring the insights and advisory, you know, the kind of insights and recommendations layers together.
Mm-hmm.
There's always opportunity to improve the performance of the core underlying.
Mm-hmm.
You know, kind of action products, and the workflows and things like that. But what I think will happen is in a market where, you know, the CMO and the CIO are demanding a lot more insights around how their digital acquisition work is performing and their top of funnel, or even their mid-funnel activities.
Mm-hmm.
That there's a big opportunity for us to be a driver of innovation on that.
Yeah.
On that front, I think you can expect that from us this year.
Makes sense. I won't try to ask you what the mix of growth and revenue on the Rule of 40 framework you try to operate on.
Mm-hmm.
But maybe given some of the change you think about, because you said, you know, if we see a better demand environment, we'll invest for growth.
Yep.
How far off do you think the Rule of 40 is for Yext?
Oh, it's an interesting question. I mean, I think, you know, we've made a lot of improvement.
Mm-hmm.
On that side.
Very much.
you know, I think the trick in our business is that you obviously, because of the length of our sales cycles.
Mm-hmm.
You know, you're investing ahead of the, you know, the ultimate, you know, bookings that drive the revenue, and then the revenue growth follows the bookings.
Yeah.
Right? So you kind of see that coming through the ARR trends.
Mm-hmm.
Our goal, you know, we, we sort of have unwavering, you know, have been unwavering since we started that I believe every software business, you know, can and should be, of any maturity can and should be a Rule of 40 or better company.
Mm-hmm.
We could get there a lot faster by cutting more expense. But I think, you know, there is a point where you might forego some of the higher value revenue, organic revenue growth opportunity if you do that. So.
Mm-hmm.
This is not a, like, quarterly or annual conversation at Yext. This is a daily conversation at Yext.
Mm-hmm.
The entire team is oriented around getting there.
Mm-hmm.
I'm gonna, you know, I'm not gonna predict a date, other than to tell you that I think we, you know, as we think about the next few years, we will continue to improve. And I see absolutely no reason why we won't get there.
Awesome. All right. Well, we're running out of time, but, thank you, Mike, for joining us today.
Thanks for having me.
Great conversation as always.
Appreciate it.
Thanks everyone for joining us and enjoy the rest of the conversation.