Hi. My name is Yuka Broderick, and I'm head of investor relations at Yext. I'd like to welcome you to the Yext twenty twenty one Investor Day. We have a great lineup of executives to share our vision, strategy, and financial performance and targets with you. Let me briefly walk you through our agenda for today.
First, CEO Howard Luhrmann will speak to you about how keyword based search is ripe for disruption. Our Chief Strategy Officer, Mark Ferrantino, will follow with some demos and an explanation of our technology and differentiation. Then we'll have some time for Q and A with Howard and Mark. After a short break, we'll return with President and Chief Revenue Officer, David Rudnitsky, to talk about our go to market and share some information about Answers and our platform sales. Finally, CFO, Steve Cakebread, will talk about our growth and productivity drivers and our financial goals.
And finally, we'll gather together all of the executives presenting today for another Q and A session. As a reminder, our presentations today will contain forward looking statements, which do not guarantee future events or performance. These forward looking statements are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions, which are discussed in our reports filed with the SEC. We also will be referring to non GAAP measures. Reconciliations with the most comparable GAAP measures are available in the appendix to these materials, which are posted at investors.yext.com.
Also, I'd like to point you to the Q and A submission window in the bottom left hand corner of your screen. Feel free to type in questions at any time during the presentation. We will select from these submissions in the Q and A sessions. With those instructions out of the way, let's get moving on our Investor Day. Thanks.
They look the same across the Internet. People use them billions of times a day, but the results they get back are pretty underwhelming. That's because most websites search for keywords and deliver a bunch of links back. In fact, keyword search hasn't changed since 1999 until now. Yext is the modern way to search.
It understands natural language. That means when you ask a question, you get a direct answer. So do you want search that's outdated or search built for the age of AI? We think the choice is simple. Yext, a better way to search.
Today, I'm going to tell you about the second most important search engine ever built. But first, let's go back to prehistoric times, 1994. A magnifying glass, keyword search, hyperlinks. The year 1994 marked the explosion of keyword search. In a mere thirty six months, the Internet saw dozens of keyword search engines, including InfoSeek, Yahoo, Lycos, Webcrawler, LookSmart, Xcite, and AltaVista.
And then in 1998, Google launched PageRank, which turned out to be the best algorithm to rank web results for keyword searches on the consumer Internet. This is where most search stopped improving twenty three years ago. Fast forward a year to 1999. Former Xerox PARC engineer, Doug Cutting launched an open source keyword search engine called Apache Lucene. Lucene turned out to be the second most important search engine ever built.
With Lucene, enterprise developers could add a keyword search engine to their websites, to their enterprise apps, in their help desks, ecommerce sites, and more. Now fast forward five more years. In 02/2004, a more developer friendly open source keyword search engine built on Lucene called Solar came along. Solar today retains huge market share in search even as Elasticsearch, its competitor, which is also built on Lucene, gained share. Even today, the odds are that you use Lucene powered search almost as often as you use Google.
You just don't know it. But Google Search is vastly superior to Lucene powered keyword search and that's because Google pioneered a breakthrough in search technology called natural language processing or NLP. NLP understands things. It understands questions like when was Marco Polo born? And it tells you, your searches on Google use this revolutionary new technology.
But nearly every other search experience on a website, in an app, in the workplace, on a help site, That's just a simple keyword search based on the same Lucene technology from 1999. These search experiences almost always give you a set of BlueLinq results that rarely helps you find what you want. You know exactly what I'm talking about here. You see the magnifying glass on a website, you type in a keyword, you get a terrible set of irrelevant results back, so you give up and you try something else to help you find what you want. Keyword search is prehistoric, yet it's still everywhere.
We think that's crazy, so we invented Yext Answers. Yext Answers is a modern search engine that uses NLP powered by advanced artificial intelligence to understand questions, uses multiple algorithms to present different sets of results in a dynamic UX, and is built on a knowledge graph. Google brought modern search to consumers. Yext is going to bring modern search to the enterprise. Let's compare for a minute Yext search to outdated keyword search.
We're going to compare first the input that the algorithms that compute your answer, and then the results. We'll start with the input. Keyword search works like control f in a Word document. You type in your input query, and the keyword search finds all the places in the document that contain the exact string you've asked for. But the problem is that a lot of times, you don't search with keywords that exactly match what you need.
Take a look at this solar powered keyword search on a leading HMO company's website. A search for physicians in Vienna, Virginia gives you no results back, and that's because there's no place in the entire website that contains the exact string physicians in Vienna, Virginia. That's a pretty bad experience. Yext Search uses AI powered natural language to fundamentally understand the user's input. We also use named entity recognition to turn an unstructured question into a structured query of the knowledge graph, and this allows for the ability to understand very precise questions.
Questions like, physicians in Vienna, Virginia who accept Aetna and speak Spanish. Yext Answers automatically turns this question into a structured graph query to find matching entities right on the customer's knowledge graph. And that's how Google works, and so it enables the user to ask much deeper and much more precise questions. Like Google, Yext search understands phrases. Keyword search would literally take that entire string, physicians in Vienna, Virginia that speak Spanish and accept Aetna, and hit control f, if you will, to find places in the document that match it.
Odds are there'll be no results, and that is the nineteen nineties approach to search. Okay. Next. Let's compare how keyword search uses a single ranking algorithm to how Yext Search uses and blends together multiple algorithms to create multiple result sets. The Control F keyword search approach works really well for a reasonably sized document like a research paper or even, believe it or not, a long 500 page book because the user can just chronologically find next, next, next, next throughout the document.
But the World Wide Web exploded into billions of pages and the keyword Marco Polo, for example, is mentioned on the World Wide Web in two zero seven million places and that is way too many for anyone to sort through. These places need to be ranked, and so keyword search engines of the late 90s adapted by focusing on their ranking algorithm. Now if the keyword Marco Polo appears in 200,000,000 places, search engines would need to have a strong algorithm that ranked hyperlinks by relevancy. The user could then click through to the page they felt best matched their keyword, and thus keyword search evolved to be what we call algorithm first. It's designed around ranking millions of results.
Now contrast that to modern search. Modern search uses a list of links only as a last resort. Now take a look at this Google SERP for the keyword McDonald's. There are 500,000,000 results, but only a single web link at the top, mcdonalds.com, it's the best one. The rest are barely visible at the bottom.
Google combines snippets and maps and knowledge cards and other elements to present the user with multiple options for their results. And each of those different elements uses a different algorithm, Answers from the knowledge graph, like maps, or knowledge cards, like this, likely use named entity recognition. Answers in their featured snippets, like this, likely use extractive q and a. That's an algorithm that drives answers from unstructured text. Answers in people also ask this element you see right here, like we use semantic text search to drive answers from semi structured text.
There are many different kinds of elements on every Google search engine results page that get the user what they want, and each element uses a different algorithm. This is how Yext Answers works. For each query that comes in, we apply multiple algorithms to the question and give the user back a dynamic result that best matches what they've asked for. Keyword search uses one algorithm to rank all the millions of results. Yext Answers, like Google, combines multiple elements in a dynamic UX to give the user the best experience.
Web results, they're just a fallback when we can't find anything else. We use them as a last resort. Finally, let's compare results. Keyword search literally provides a list of hyperlinks ranked by relevance. You have to click the link, and then you have to read the results.
This does not complete your quest. It just points you in the right direction. Yext Search completes the search loop by answering your question exactly, and it allows you to transact as the next step. Users get multiple elements to answer their questions. Sometimes it's a list from the knowledge graph, like maps or a list of people.
Sometimes it's direct answers from a knowledge graph. Sometimes it's snippets from extracted q and a. And best of all, when the user gets their results, they can transact right off the search engine results page. Depending on what you ask, your result set offers different kinds of transactions. You can order online.
You can request directions or make a call or buy a product. Keyword search gives you hyperlinks. Yext Search gives you dynamic answers. So ladies and gentlemen, there you have it. Yext Search is better than keyword search on literally every dimension.
With keyword search, your quest continues. With Yext Answers, your quest is over. But we're not just better. It turns out we're also faster and also cheaper. Let's talk about this for a second.
In order to implement a Lucene powered keyword search engine from the nineties, It requires a lot of expertise from specialized developers who know quite a lot about search. There are definitely some companies that ought to build their own custom search engine for their core experience. Spotify or Home Depot or Slack come to mind. Almost every company needs some kind of search, but most companies in most places shouldn't build a search engine. A better approach is just to turn on Yext's search as a service, much like you might turn on Stripe for billing or Twilio for communications.
Admins and developers still have control versus a black box like Google, but it's low code and a developer can turn it on in basically a day. And this means costs are low and time to value is fast as a snap. Better, faster, cheaper. Yext Answers dominates keyword search on every dimension. Our mission as a company is perfect answers everywhere.
And everywhere in the enterprise means roughly five categories in our search platform: Website search, where we already are with over two forty customers and 25,000,000 searches in Q4 Support search, that's next. This is search you might see on a help site and our multiple algorithm approach, especially with extracted Q and A, can help companies answer their customer questions and deflect support calls. We intend to enter this market in H1 of this year. So about app search, that's the third category. This lets developers build Yext Search directly into their products.
Startups and tech companies can easily get a modern natural language search going really easily, and we'll be competing in this market in H1 of this year. E commerce search lets companies sell products in their sites, and we are already seeing a trickle of demand here. We'll be in this category later this year. Workplace search. This is a big one behind the firewall.
It's actually the number one request we receive from CIOs and CTOs. We hear your site search is spectacular, but
when can we
use this for enterprise search needs? Well, look to us to be ready to help serve that need later this year. As we land with one search experience in a line of business, we'll be able to expand with other search solutions to our customers. You heard me talk a lot about our vision to disrupt keyword search with better, faster, cheaper answers. Now it's important to keep in mind that we are well positioned to bring natural language search to the enterprise because of our dominant and growing listings franchise.
Let's take
a step back. Yext was founded in 2006 with the mission of putting perfect answers everywhere. Our founding principle was that and still remains the ultimate authority of information about a business is the business itself. This just makes sense that Tesco in The United Kingdom is the authority on where their stores are, or Wendy's is the authority on nutritional information about a frosty. This basic principle led our led to our breakthrough listings innovation.
It's kind of a simple idea. Let companies control all their own information and services like Google and Apple and Amazon. And these companies, these publishers gave Yext special access to update business information like addresses and menus, but we had to give them all this data, millions of facts in a structured way. We couldn't just send them a flat file of text with all these facts. We had to define what entities exist and what fields are on those entities and what values are populating those fields and most importantly, how those fields and entities matched up to the data in these external services.
This is actually pretty hard. It's really complicated. So our patented match and lock listings technology was born to link up the tens of millions of facts and Yext into all these services directly. So we built a knowledge graph to mirror our data to the knowledge graphs in other services like Google. Every time a Yext customer uses listings, they add the data to their own knowledge graph and we send it to the right cell everywhere else.
One day, a few years ago, we thought, we're sending all these answers to Google and to Apple. Why not let our customers answer questions themselves? And so Answers was born right out of listings. Listings built on our knowledge graph platform is a core growth franchise for Yext and obviously it faced extreme macroeconomic challenges here. In Q4, Google Maps listings were down more than 50% on a per location basis versus the prior year due to COVID-nineteen related location shutdowns.
But despite this, the product still grew in 2020 and that is a testament to its criticality and its resiliency. I don't think anyone thinks that Google Maps volume will be permanently less than half of what it was in the previous year. So we have some really cool stuff coming out for listings. As part of our expansion into the e commerce category, we'll be introducing product feeds. We continue to innovate on reviews.
Our partners are hungry for new types of structured data objects and fields, and we'll be supporting them. And plus, there are new search engines and services gaining traction that are gonna need our structured data. Showing up with 475,000,000 structured facts that are from the primary source is pretty compelling for a new search engine, and that gives us a huge head start in working with them. And in the past year, we added 28 new listings partners to our network, including DoorDash, WebMD, and OpenTable. We also upgraded tons of existing integrations.
Our customers can now share types of structured data like curbside pickup options, delivery, drive through hours, temporarily closed flags, online events in services like Apple Maps and Google My Business and Bing and Nextdoor and Facebook, search is evolving. DuckDuckGo is exploding. Snap Maps is incredibly promising. Evan just talked about that. As long as people use search engines, maps, intelligent agents, they need car directions, there's going to be a need for a clearinghouse of primary structured data, and this gives Yext an incredible position as we gear up to get back to business.
With listings and answers together, Yext has a dominant offering in intelligent search. Enterprises can build a single structured knowledge graph for their company, and AI powered answers appear everywhere in smart services like Google and Siri, and with a natural language search on their own websites, their own support sites, ecom, everywhere. Everywhere is indeed the right word to describe search because search is in nearly every app, every site, your phone, your car. That magnifying glass is everywhere. Fifteen years ago, when we founded Yext, in a cold single room on the Upper West Side, search was all about keywords, ranking blue hyperlinks.
But the search of tomorrow is intelligent. Magnifying glasses are now voice input boxes. Keywords turn to questions. Bright blue links are now answers. The massive platform shift from keyword search to natural language search is underway.
Our opportunity ahead has never been greater. We estimate our total addressable market to be at about $30,000,000,000 by 2024, And our objective is to be the worldwide leader in structured data and AI powered natural language search for the enterprise. For more than a decade, Yext has innovated to put perfect answers everywhere. We always have, and we always will. And now I am elated to introduce our Chief Strategy Officer, Mark Berentino, to give you a demo of our latest and greatest technology.
Thanks, Howard. Hi. I'm Mark Ferentino, Chief Strategy Officer here at Yext, and I would like to talk with you about innovation at Yext. We are accelerating innovation. We are far outpacing our competitors right now in the market.
I wanna specifically talk about our Spring twenty one release that just came out this morning. It's full with almost 65 new features. Some of the highlights are document search. This is a brand new algorithm that we're adding to our multi algorithm lineup that allows you to go into an unstructured document and pull the answer directly out of it. The answer could be a word, it could be a sentence, or it could even be a paragraph.
I want to talk about our data connectors and crawler. This is a brand new feature. One of the biggest things we've heard from our customer base is, I love the knowledge graph, but how do I build one? And so our data connector framework and crawler is built and made so that people can easily build knowledge graphs on the fly. I want to talk about the launch of our SDK and our command line interface, a brand new developer persona that we're putting out through our Hitchhiker program.
And of course, authenticated users. One of the biggest requests that we've gotten is I want answers behind the firewall. I want to use it inside my company, not only outside my company. And so what we've done is we've upgraded our security, added a ton of new features like an encryption at rest, like token based API calls, and now we actually can handle all these different use cases even behind the firewall. So I want to take a minute here and actually do a demo of some of this technology that we put out over the last six months.
So today, I'm going to show you how to build a search experience for Saba. Saba is a New York based shoe company that prides itself on its handcrafted shoes for men and women that use very high end materials. As you can see, they don't currently have search on their website, so we're gonna build the search experience for them. Now if you look at the content on the website, what you'll see is you'll see products, you'll see stores, you'll have FAQs, and they even have something called a journal, which is like a blog post. So we're going to make all this searchable natural language on the Answers platform.
So the first thing we need to do is get this content into Yext. We store content in something called a knowledge graph. A knowledge graph is a database that maintains the semantic structure of the data, us to deliver better search. So let's jump into the Yext platform and show you what I mean. Now ahead of this demo, we started to build out some of the graph.
We added entities for products, for locations, for FAQs, and we actually ended a few articles that were on a different section of the website. Now you can add more entity types if you want to continue making this experience better. Now there are a lot of different ways to get data into Knowledge Graph. You can click on this add button here and add data in by entering a single entity, uploading a CSV, connecting with other systems like Shopify or Magento. By the way, we'll be adding ServiceNow, Zendesk and Service Cloud as part of this release, or you can use our new crawler.
That's part of our spring release. So you can see that I've already populated all of the products. There's twelve fifty one of them. I did this using the Shopify connector. I, put in all three locations by hand, and I used our crawler to bring in all the FAQs crawling the FAQ page that was on the Saba website.
Now the crawler makes it very easy to pull in content into the knowledge graph. So let me show you how it works. So we've already loaded four articles from another connector, but there is actually some additional content on the Saba site under journal, as I mentioned before. In here, you'll see about five journal entries. So I'm going to show you how you would add them into the graph.
Well, the first thing you would do is you would click on add data, and in here, you would create a connector. The correct connector is a combination of two things. There is the source, and then, of course, there is the actual object that we're bringing the data into. And you can see here we've, previously crawled the entire website, so we've already got the pages loaded in the system. And now we're going to create a connector that extracts just those journal pages.
So since we just want the journal pages, we're going to go in, and we're going to set up a filter that takes that takes just the five journals, and we're going to use a star character here as a way of illustrating that. We hit save and continue. Now what we show you here is a preview of some of the information that we've already parsed in. So things like page ID, the URL, page title. And you can see it's got the page title of the journal.
It's got the URL of the actual journal link itself. And what we're also going to want here is we're going want to add the body of the journals themselves. So let's create a whole new field called page body, and we're going to pull in all of the clean text from the HTML page itself. And you can see here, there it is. It's this is literally all the text cleaned, ready to go, pulled out of the body.
So now we have everything we want from the source, and now we're going to move on to the next step of mapping. So our entity ID is already mapped to the page ID. So next, what we're going to do next is we're going to map the website URL to the URL object, of the URL field. We're going to map the page title to the name field, and we're going to map the body to the body field. So now that we have our mappings, we can now save our connector.
And
you
see here is our connector. We can rename it from site connector to article connector, and then we will run it now. So what we're doing is now processing the information, pulling and extracting the information out of each page, and you see very quickly we created five brand new entities. So if you go back to the knowledge graph, you'll see that the article number went from four to now nine entities. You can see these journals are now inside the knowledge graph here with the full body of text.
So as you can see, building a knowledge graph is pretty easy, and you can easily add new content as your content changes. I'd like to show you how to set up an answers experience and how the multi algorithm approach really improves search results of classic keyword search to give your customers that modern Google like search experience. So I set up a simple experience ahead of time for each of the entities in the knowledge graph, like product, location, FAQ, and articles. Here is what the user experience would look like. And as you can see, the tabs on the screens are mapped up to each entities.
Now let's jump over to the Yext admin screen, and you can see the algorithm configuration for each of the entities that we're talking about. Now we set each one of these entities up to keyword search just to start off. So let's take it for a spin and see what it can do. So let's start by searching for NYC. Okay.
So that's good. But the reason it's coming up is that New York City is in the name of the location. So that's fine if someone's just looking for New York City. But what if they're searching for New York? Didn't get anything.
What if they're searching for stores near me? Not much here. What about something really complicated like phone number of a New York location? So as you can see, not a great experience. This is the downside of keyword search.
It's not smart enough to understand the query. So let's go back and turn on one of our natural language algorithms. We're going to turn on the NLP filter algorithm, which is our named entity recognition algorithm just for this location entity. We are now going to be able to do geo searches, and that was all you had to do. You just had to literally change to one of the NLP AI algorithms and then click save.
Now let's go back, and let's try some of those same searches. So New York City. Okay. Great. That works.
New York. Well, that works too. Stores near me. Okay. We get this big map here.
And, actually, since I'm based in Miami, it actually is zooming out to be in to show the three stores across The United States. And let's try that, a very complicated one, phone numbers of New York location. Oh, wow. Look at that. It gave an exact answer, the exact phone number of the New York location.
In this instance, we not only found the most relevant store, but we also found the most relevant field inside of the location object. FAQs are very common. Right now, our FAQ entity has keyword search turned on. So let's try some searches, shall we? Let's try waterproof.
Okay. So that's good. We get some results back. But very much like the location search, it's actually matching against the keyword waterproof. Let's try something a little more interesting.
Let's try water resistant. Okay. Not much there. Okay. Let's try something a little further, a little crazier.
Can I step in a puddle? That's a pretty good one. And once again, no results. Okay. Let's go back and turn on the semantic text algorithm for the FAQ entity.
Once again, I turn off keyword search. I turn on semantic text search. I hit save. So this algorithm works by looking at the semantic embeddings and looking at the space between the query terms and the semantic relevance of the FAQ. So they don't need to have keyword overlap to show up in the results.
Let's take a look at how this impacts the search results. So waterproof. Okay? So we get the same two FAQs before, but we actually get another one, which when you look at it, actually makes sense. Water resistance.
Once again, we get three very relevant, FAQs. And the last one is, can I step in a puddle? And, actually, if you look at them, it's actually pretty accurate and pretty dead on. Now semantic text search leverages semantic understanding that is based on a language model that has read the entire Internet and understands that waterproof and water resistant are semantically similar terms. While FAQs are considered semi structured data, articles are considered unstructured data.
If you remember, we crawled the Saba website for journal entries and put the unstructured text directly in the knowledge graph. We've turned on keyword search for this entity, so let's see how it performs. I'll start by doing a simple search. Resolve. I get back an article that has tons of text about all aspects of resoling your shoes.
You can see the article takes quite a while to load. But, eventually, the full content does load in, and you can see there's tons of stuff here. Let's try something a little more specific. Like, what number do I text for resource? Again, I get the same article, and, actually, the answer is in the article.
It is, seven four six three seven. Let's try something slightly different. How much is a stitching repair? In this case, I actually get a journal entry back about stitching a pair of Sambas, but the answer to the question is actually not in this article. It's actually in a different article.
So let's jump back to the Yext admin console and switch from keyword search to document search, to our new document search algorithm. This algorithm can find the right document, but it also can service the most relevant answer from within the document. So let's turn this on and see how it performs. So we'll start again, resold, and you can see we get the same article back that we got before. So that's great.
Now let's try something a little more sophisticated. Now that we've turned document search on, let's try the same query from before. What number do I text for results? And if you see, we actually got a direct answer. It scanned the entire document, the entire unstructured document, and found the answer and highlighted it directly inside this article.
This now allows us to get direct answers to searches directly in our search results.
So no longer do you
have to jump into the article or hunt around for the answer. The document search algorithm services the answer to your questions directly out of the unstructured data. So let's try another search. How much is a stitching repair? And you can see it returns a direct answer of $35.
If you remember, not only did keyword search not return an answer, it actually returned the wrong documents. So document search is a brand new algorithm that we launched as part of our spring twenty one release. So as you can see, with some light setup, an up and coming shoe company who prides themselves on their craftsmanship and quality can add natural language AI powered search to their website with a few clicks of a button. And so that was a demonstration of the technology that's part of our Spring 'twenty one release, but that's not where it ends. We have an incredible roadmap for the rest of the year.
We're working on scale, more algorithms, entity level access control and one to one personalization. We have an amazing roadmap that we're very excited to get out to our customers. Thank you.
Hi, everyone. So now we're going to start our first q and a session. As a reminder, I'm joined by CEO Howard Luhrmann and chief strategy officer Mark Ferentino. We will be taking questions from the audio line, and we'll take questions from those submitted to us to the Q and A chat window. For those of you on the audio line, a couple of instructions.
Please ensure that you've muted all other audio lines to prevent audio feedback on the livestream. And if you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. So now we're going to start with a question from the chat line, and this is for Howard. When do you expect Answers to have a material impact on the business? And why don't you break out Answers from the rest of the business?
Well, thank you, Yuka, and thank you, Mark. Thank you all for coming to our Investor Day today. We're so excited to reveal more of our vision of our company, our vision for the future of search, and our objective here is to tell you about what we're doing and to inspire you with the future of search and the future of Yext. With regard to Answers, Answers is a pretty new business line that we launched just about a year ago. You're going to hear later from Dave Rinitsky, our President and Chief Revenue Officer, and from Steve Cakebread, our CFO.
But as a little preview, we now have two forty five Answers transactions closed. It's a pretty good number for about a year. And furthermore, 45% of Yext's deals of our ACV is now multiproduct. That is customers that have purchased more than two products. And then just one last data point I'd like to leave you all with is that Answers deals on average are almost nearly three times as great as deals that don't contain Answers.
When you sign up with Answers, you typically are a bigger customer, you pay more. So we're really excited about the progress of Answers. Just the big picture here of when this becomes even bigger, let's just say, gosh, there are five categories of search: site search, support search, e comm search, app search, workplace search. There are numerous applications of search all throughout the enterprise. Think of you as a consumer, how often you use search in a product, in your car, on a phone, everywhere.
Everywhere there's a magnifying glass, that's a search box. If that search isn't powered by Google or by Microsoft or Amazon as a consumer service, it's very likely a Lucene powered keyword search, and that is our opportunity. We are in the very early innings of this opportunity. We've just gotten started. 245 logos in that first year have signed up with Yext Answers and are paying customers, and we haven't even gone in.
We only today announced support search. Think of every help site. Go to any help site. I challenge you all right now. Go to help.whateveryouwant.com, that's a support or help site, and try searching in there.
Try asking a basic customer support question. Invariably, they all fail. You're not going to get good answers for really basic questions. Try asking a question like, how do I log in? Or try asking a question about how do I reset my password?
Try asking a more complicated question. These support sites don't really work that well, and people call up customer support dissatisfied when they can't get the answers that they want. Support search is an enormous opportunity. It's the second category of search, and we only just revealed our document search, our extracted Q and A technology today, which is going to let us get into this amazing new category of search. We haven't got into workplace search yet.
That's going to happen, we believe, in the second half of this year as we work towards getting features ready to go. And we haven't really gotten into ecommerce search, although we do see a lot of trickle we see a trickle of demand for it. There are startups out there which are beginning to build Yext Answers into their own product experiences so that they can add natural language search and knowledge graph powered search into their products right from the get go. So I've never been more excited and bullish about the opportunity ahead. We believe it's a $30,000,000,000 Our total TAM is now nearly $30,000,000,000 by 2024.
These five categories of search can be extraordinary, though right now we are still only in that first category and we just today announced the set of technologies and features that are going to make it possible for us to get into that second category. Now you also asked could the second part of this question, I think, was why don't we break it out? Well, let's talk for a minute about the Answers search platform. So as we grow, our customers purchase a solution from Yext. They buy a platform solution, a search platform solution in which our core listings franchise fits really well for many customers.
It's all powered from the same knowledge graph. Think about it. You put in all the data about stores. You put in all the data or facts about physicians, and that same knowledge graph can also power answers from search. It also can put data into Google and Apple.
And so in many ways, it's one single spot to manage all of your smart answers from a single knowledge graph. And our customers don't necessarily break it down like that, and I'll give you a couple of examples. You might close, and this is a hypothetical, a 7 figure deal, and you buy the knowledge graph, and you buy services around it, and you buy answers. We don't really look at it like that. What we do is we build a solution.
We build a a platform for our client. It's the answer search platform, and that's what that's what we're really gonna be focused on going forward.
Great. Thanks, Howard. Another question from the chat window. For document search, does the enterprise have to put all of its documents into the knowledge graph?
Well, you know, I'm gonna turn it over to our wonderful chief strategy officer, Mark Ferentino, to answer this question.
Thank you. So for document search, what you need to do is you need to put the indexable portions of the documents into the knowledge graph. So for example, if you have a large PDF, well, much of that PDF can be is made up of header and footer and and footnotes and tags and all sorts of things that are not things that you may wanna search. So the part that actually comes into the knowledge graph is the part that you actually wanna search on. Another example would be indexing a web page, but you don't bring all the HTML into the knowledge graph.
You don't bring the header and the footer into the knowledge graph. You just need to bring the content, the searchable text, the unstructured searchable text into the graph itself.
Great. Next, we'll take a question from the audio line. Operator, can you please open the line for the first person in the queue?
Go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for, taking my questions, and thanks for, putting this together today. As you look at sort of the five categories of search moving forward and the usage you've seen from the say the two forty five customers already, how is that dictating sort of how quickly you move into some of these other areas of search moving forward? And maybe could you highlight the key features that maybe you need to build out to move beyond support search into the interesting area to me was the workplace search opportunity or e commerce search? Thanks.
Ryan, thank you for the questions about the five categories of search. Site search, we believe, is really big. Every website needs a site search. We have two forty five live or customers using site search thus far, we believe we have a huge, enormous runway ahead in that first category of search. A pretty common thing that happens is that customers, when they see our site search, they immediately see it and then they say, well gosh, can we add this to our support site?
And gosh, we really love this natural language capability and we love the analytics that are coming back so quickly and we love the ability to control all the facts from one knowledge graph across multiple destinations. Can we use the X search platform in other areas across our company? And that's where we began to uncover support search opportunities, we unveiled the feature set for today. Extracted Q and A is what makes that possible. Extracted Q and A allows us to take answers from unstructured text and surface them, which we saw a great demo from Mark earlier.
As we get towards and let me actually, Ryan, talk for a minute about app search. App search today, we we announced our developer CLI. It's a command line interface. It makes it much, much, much easier for a developer to add natural language or modern Yext Answers search to their own app. So app search is something and it's a category in which we intend to participate in the first half of this year.
And then you specifically asked about workplace search. I'll let Mark talk a little bit about the features that we see that are necessary there. I will say it's a pretty common ask of customers to try to ask us if we can handle this.
Yeah. So the things that we need for workplace so as Howard said, there's sort of a incremental sort of systematic expansion of use cases as the platform as we add more functionality to the core platform. It's not specifically about going after a specific search category, it's about having the right functionality in the platform to then enable for those solutions to be built and to be leveraged on top of our platform. So with the addition of the API and CLI, we now have the ability to go after app search, with the addition of document search that opens up support search for us. And now workplace search, for that area, really the handful of things we need is we need a larger connector library, we need to increase the scale of the overall platform, We're basically row level or document level entity.
Row control is a big part of it also, as is also one to one personalization. These are all sort of foundational concepts that are on our short term roadmap that we hope or look forward to showing everybody over the next handful of months.
Great. Thanks, Mark. Next we'll take our next question from the audio line. Operator, can we take the next question?
The next question comes from Arjun Bhatti of William Blair. Please go ahead.
Hey, there. Can you guys hear me okay?
Hi, Arjun. Can hear you great, man.
All right. Perfect. Hey, Howard, Mark. Good to see you guys. Quick just to follow-up maybe on Ryan's question around the additional search categories that you've talked about today.
How should we think about what this does from a go to market perspective for Yext? Do you still anticipate leading with site search as the primary landing point for Answers? Or is there an opportunity to for one of these other use cases, whether it be e commerce or workplace search, to become the landing point with for customers discovering Answers? And then kind of related to that, is there a difference in buyer persona between site search and some of the additional use cases that you've talked about today? Or do you think there's a centralized kind of buying motion there?
Thank you.
I'm going to answer, Arjun, the second question because I think that will shed light onto the first question, which is when you think about us landing with site search, it really we have a big advantage there because we classically have for our customers the ability to put all their data into a knowledge graph, to structure it and to put Smart Answers their own site and into Google and Apple and the rest of our listings network. This is a really neat way to get going. Higher persona for support search is still often in the digital customer experience department of a company. It might be a slightly different place within the company, but it's still outside the firewall and it's still ultimately in the company lives in the customer experience organization. And companies as you know spend an enormous amount of time and money and effort to create great customer experiences.
Adobe, the leader in DXP, digital experience platforms claims I think an $80 plus billion TAM for that particular market alone. So I realize everyone's excited about workplace search and so are we. But before we get ahead, I just want to talk about what we have today, which is really big. We have site search, and we now have support search, and we have app search. These are three big areas that when you're a company, you're not going to necessarily want to have a bunch of different search platforms.
Now search, unlike listings, and this is a very interesting thing, is not necessarily a winner take all market within a given customer. And that's how we're able to get in because even when companies sometimes might have a solar instance or a legacy Lucene instance even powering some old thing internally, we can still come in and get site search. And then over time, we can build from a line of business owner. And that persona could be the CMO, that persona could be from the person who owns the website, that persona could be support search for the person who owns customer support. But then as we build trust, we begin talking more and more to the CIOs and to the CTOs within the company.
We're thinking platform wise horizontally how to get the best search experiences across not just one line of business, but across the entire enterprise. We've got a really big advantage in that we don't just offer a point search product, we have a full search solution which has our listings and our pages and our knowledge graph.
Great. Thank you, Howard. Our next question is going to come again from the audio line. Operator, the next question please.
The next question comes from Tom White of D. A. Davidson. On
the demo of the new site crawler feature, it seems like it will help new customers kind of get their knowledge graph up and running and reduce the amount of setup necessary. I'm just curious like as you look out over the next several years and as the platform evolves like how much more opportunity do you think there is to even further streamline kind of maybe that onboarding process? Can it get even more seamless, more easy for new customers to kind of get their knowledge graph to kind of critical mass?
Yeah, so Tom, phenomenal question, mainly because I love talking about it. Data what you saw was really the first version of a data connector pipeline, not just simply a crawler. The data connector pipeline has the ability to take in different types of data sources. The crawler is just one of the data sources. You can also take in the JSON feed, you can have webhooks, we can also have the connector library that you see the beginnings of us building out with Magenta, with Shopify, with the recent announcement of Zendesk and ServiceNow, sales Salesforce Service Cloud on the way, and many, many more on the way.
On the crawler itself, what's kinda neat about it is a lot of this is right now, the crawler is is able to go to the site, pull certain specific pieces out, but you have to you know, there's a little bit of setup that has to happen. You have to point to the pages. You have to sort of point to the the the attributes inside the page that you wanna pull in, and then you then have to map it into the field. But where this is going is the ability for the crawler to basically look at a page without any setup and simply extract the structured data directly into the graph. And now this is a long term view.
It's not going to happen all at once. There's not a, like, sort of a magic bullet here. What there is though is that incrementally over time, we get more and more intelligent about the structure of information. We leverage our natural language capabilities and our AI machine learning capabilities to be able to look at pages, understand pages. And so you'll start to see things where we can look at an FAQ page or just look at a website and say, hey.
Those pages have FAQs on it. Well, let me just pull them in. Let me not let let's not bother the user. Or those pages have a have are are low location pages, or those pages are doctor pages. Let me just bring them in.
And so that's what you're gonna see over the sort of short term, long term road map is we're continue to get better and better at that. And then eventually, that's the sort of thing that you could then not just point at a website, but even point at all the enterprise data systems and kind of go from there. And so that is a big goal for us because once you have the knowledge graph, as you guys can see, there's so many opportunities, there's so many applications, there's so many ways you can use it. Building that graph is really the first step for our customer success.
Great. Thanks, Mark. Next question will be from the chat line. It is from Matt Koss from JPMorgan. And the question is, how has the search traffic for map based searches on Google trended during February and March?
Well, Matt, thank you for the question. I think we said in our Q4 earnings call that we saw in Q4 on a per location basis, Google Maps traffic declined more than 50% year over year. That is a pretty staggering headwind, which was obviously caused by location based shutdowns for our location based listings product. Nonetheless, our listings product still grew this year. That is the primary value proposition of listings and listings still grew year over year, which I think is a testament and we believe is a testament to the resiliency and criticality of having listings in Google and other places even when traffic is severely hampered.
We have not yet seen anything that quantitatively suggests
that the world is going to come back.
I don't sorry, that the
world is back yet.
And I don't think anybody believes for a second that in the future Google Maps traffic is going to be down 50%. I think that we all know that that feels like a temporary dislocation and that when the world opens up, it will return. But that said, we have not seen anything quantitative. However, it does there is a feeling sitting here on March 17 that things are about to open up. That said, we're still all sitting here on Zoom.
We're still all sitting here in many cases not going to places that are still closed. My hope, my belief, we all hope that this comes back and when it does, we will be ready.
Great. Thanks, Howard. We'll take another question from the chat line. This one is from Elizabeth Elliott from Morgan Stanley. You announced a lot of new features today, especially around Answers.
Will extractive Q and A or ability to authenticate use cases be included in the current product? Or are these an upsell? How is Answers priced today, and do you expect it to change as you expand into more search areas?
Happy to take that. So the core philosophy, our core architectural vision of Answers, as Howard's mentioned and we also showed the demos, is that we are a multi algorithm based platform, and so we're not charging anything extra for those algorithms. That is sort of part of the Answers platform itself, and as you buy the platform, it doesn't matter which algorithm you use or how much of one algorithm versus the other you use, it's all sort of part of that Answers pricing. So they are not in fact upsells. The Answers pricing itself will not expand.
It will not change as we expand in the use cases. We anticipated, this was our plan, was to expand more broadly as a search platform that could be leveraged across the entire enterprise. And so when we made our change to capacity pricing last year, we had anticipated sort of this expansion into new areas, and this pricing is set up for that. So what we'd like to do is we'd like to see expanded usage of the platform. We'd like to see the platform go from our current model of capacity pricing, where it's based on number of searches and number of entities that you put into knowledge graph.
So as people use it for more use cases inside the organization, the search traffic will increase, the entity counts will increase, and thus create very organic upsell opportunities for us inside of existing accounts. Super.
Thanks, Mark. We'll take our next question from the audio line. Operator, next question please.
The next question comes from Naved Khan of Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks a lot. Howard, you talked about the $30,000,000,000 or so in TAM. Can you maybe just break that up between listings and the five areas of opportunity that you highlighted for Answers? And then with respect to the opportunity with on the enterprise side, is there any effort to tie up with some of the tools that are used within the enterprise to sort of get easier access to the data sets that the managers have set on top of?
Thanks, Naved. We'll get more into the TAM when we get through with Steve and with Doctor, Dave Vernitsky, a little bit later. We'll talk for a second about the enterprise. Mark talked about the connectors, right? Today's announcement of our crawler is a really important announcement because it now lets us go to a site and drive knowledge from unstructured text, and we can do that with the computer.
We're gonna get better and better at this. It's a little easier for us to do this than Google because Google has to go out and do that for the entire world. We can focus on one limited domain like an FAQ page and get better and better and better at it since we know what to look for and what to expect and generally speaking, how to interpret things. The crawler is one way, the first really important way that knowledge, unstructured knowledge can get in DX. But across the enterprise, you're gonna need to see connectors, connectors to existing systems.
Connectors I think today we announced integrations, for example, with Zendesk and with ServiceNow. And those integrations, we can pull in structured knowledge based articles. Those are connectors. So you should expect to see Yext expand the number of connections we have. One of the basic connections we have is with Google My Business.
We have a Shopify connection. We can pull in products from Shopify or locations from Google My Business, and now we can pull in support articles from Zendesk and from ServiceNow. So there's a lot of different systems that we want to build these connectors to. This all comes back to Yext's original strategy, which is to be the source of truth, knowledge graph for a company. And to do what Google did to consumers, we wanna do that for enterprise.
Google brought natural language, knowledge powered search to consumers. Yext, with our connectors, with our knowledge graph technology, and with our unique focus on natural language understanding and AI machine learning understanding, is going to bring natural language understanding to the enterprise behind the firewall via workplace search, but outside the firewall via our breakthrough site search engine and via our incredible support search solution, which launched today, that can answer questions like how do I log in, which other keyword search based engines simply can't do.
Great. Thanks, Howard. Take the next one from the web chat line. We got this one a few times. The Shopify integration looks great, but the majority of enterprises are not using Shopify to power their ecommerce.
Will you have similar connectors with Adobe, Magento, and other leading CMSs to streamline the knowledge graph population?
Yes, so there's two pieces to that. One is of course integrations to CMSs and of course the other one is integrating into e commerce backgrounds. So actually Magento is a connector we already have today. So we had actually launched Magento with Shopify back in December. We are going to continue to expand into Commerce Cloud, into BigCommerce and other e commerce back end systems.
That's absolutely something that is on the roadmap, on
the short term roadmap.
As far as on the CMS side, we have our integration with Adobe, we have our integration with WordPress, we are working on integrations with the other leading CMS systems. When we look at the integrations with the CMS systems, since we have the crawler, we can pull the information in very easily from any website regardless of what it's built in. The integrations with the CMS systems are really around deploying deploying the search results in the toolbar in the actual search bar very quickly. It's about making it easy to deploy that specific search bar. While in the case of the ecommerce sites, that's really about making it easy to pull in product information, product catalog information, the information from PIM.
Those are areas that all just make it much, much easier to deploy answers to any site of any in any company of any size.
Super. Thanks, Mark. Another question from the chat window. Why is search best as a separate field on a customer prospect's website instead of an integration into existing chat boxes like Zendesk as the answers their bots provide?
Okay. This is something we think a lot about. We think a lot about how consumers want to interact with knowledge, how consumers want to get answers. I'm not even sure I think search is best on a separate field on a customer prospects website. I think sometimes it's best.
This is a sophisticated answer, so bear with me for a second because we have a point of view here. It's our strategy to have the knowledge and the ability to answer questions to consumers wherever they may be. That could be on Google. That could be in Alexa. That could be on a company's support site.
That could be on their site. It could be behind the firewall. It could be accessed through a search box, but it could also be accessed through a chat. Chat is a different type of experience. People engage with chat differently.
People tend to, when they're talking to a chatbot, think they're talking to a person, and they're less likely to be truthful with their question. A lot of times when people chat, they won't reveal what they really want, whereas when they search, they understand that to be a fundamentally private lookup and will type in something totally different than they're willing to type in to a chat bar, and you can see that in the analytics we have where you can look at the different types of questions people ask search versus people ask chat. We don't take a particular stance on the future of consumer interaction. We only take a stance that the future of consumer interaction will be answers based, which means there needs to be a knowledge graph and natural language to help people get the best information they want, regardless of the way they ask the question.
Thanks, Howard. We are going to take a question from the audio line. Operator, next question please.
The next question comes from Brett Koneblack of Berenberg Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question and putting this on. I guess before you launch Answers, you said your kind of TAM was around $10,000,000,000 then you launched Answers and said it was $20,000,000,000 and now we're at 30,000,000,000 So I guess can you just help kind of rectify the math behind that calculation? And then one follow-up regarding Zendesk. I guess if Yext Answers allows you to output the answer somebody's searching.
Do you really need Zendesk or can this replace what Zendesk is providing you? Thank you.
Well first, we can have a deeper discussion about TAM. I want to be clear, the 30,000,000,000 of TAM is $20.24. Is that right, Yuko?
Yes.
Right. So there's a there's a implied growth in there, and Steve will be here in just a little bit to help break that down for you. Right? You also asked about Zendesk. We're just providing a search on top of a knowledge base.
Zendesk is a full customer success ticketing suite Ticketing. Ticketing systems
Resolution. Everything.
Customer resolution. So it's a pretty it's a pretty different product. What we're saying is, hey. If you have a help site powered by Zendesk, a knowledge base with articles, we can now easily pull those articles in and if you want to add our search to that kind of site using extracted Q and A, we're really good at answering those questions.
Yeah. I guess if you already have the knowledge prep there, you don't really need the support that Zendesk is providing if you are giving the support. Right?
The support content all lives in Zendesk as does the ticketing system, which people use. We're taking our search technology and just adding a search box to a help site, whether it's Zendesk, whether it's ServiceNow, right, any any customer experience or knowledge base with articles. We can now help get the answer out of those articles. We can mine the answers out so that when the consumer has a question, they can just ask that box and get the answer. But the customer experience systems like Zendesk do a lot more that involves customers and tickets and knowledge base, which we don't do and we won't do.
Understood. Thank you.
Okay, great. Well, that concludes our first Q and A session. We're going to take a ten minute break. If you're able to stay with us, we're going to play a great video from our Chief Data Officer, Christian Ward, speaking about building trust in the information age. Thanks.
Hello. My name is Christian Ward, and I'm the chief data officer of Yext. My role at Yext is a bit different than other CDOs in that instead of managing the internal data assets at Yext, I work in market with our customers and partners to help them identify, structure, and deliver the right answers to their customers through search. So let's start with the information overload paradox. You've probably heard different names for this paradox in the past, too many choices, TMI, analysis paralysis, and the list goes on.
The paradox demonstrates that as the amount of information we have access to skyrockets, our ability as humans to process that information actually declines. The problem with information overload is that it disconnects our ability to process our options in a meaningful way, often leading to frustration and indecision. Now don't get me wrong. Being able to search through a universe of information at our fingertips is one of the most incredible advances in human history. But as we will see, that massive amount of content has caused a glut upon the customer journey and additionally led to huge amounts of misinformation online.
Unfortunately, this massive explosion in content isn't slowing down. It's actually speeding up. Current estimates from IDC are that content online doubles every two years, and that's not including the growth that will come in the next year or two from content written and generated by artificial intelligence systems like GPT-three. So for the average consumer or citizen, this massive content explosion is leading us to a poor experience. Now many of us grew up in the age of linear persona marketing.
We talk about linear journeys, meaning there's a starting point, a series of steps or touch points, and we track them to a conversion event, like a sign up or a sale of an item. Persona marketing is essentially trying to build different linear paths for different types of people at different stages of their lives. For example, I'm definitely in the middle aged, has teenage children data geek persona category. Typically, marketing funnels have relied on this approach for years. They have a persona they have identified on the left and an outcome sale or conversion on the right.
Marketing content, ads, billboards, radio, TV, it's all designed to get the customer on the left to convert on the right. The problem is no one does this anymore. When was the last time you had a question about a product or service, you went to the website of a brand and ended up on a brand landing page and perfectly followed the step by step path to conversion that they laid out for you. Yeah. Me neither.
No one does this. No one does a straight line. They go all over the place. We do this seeking information and the best options. The information age has opened up the opportunity to ask any questions for any brand or business or entity and to explore an extraordinarily unique path before choosing exactly what to buy or engage with.
And search has taught us to do this. About 93% of people online begin their digital journey with search. When a consumer starts with search and they land on your website, they're typically greeted with drop down menus, offers, sign up forms, and generally your interpretation of what they need to know about your brand. Unfortunately, that also means that every single website is a new UI to learn for the visitor. And what typically happens?
When the customer can't find what they're looking for easily, they bounce back to Google, and they click on the next link or start a new search or head off to your competition. Now here's unfortunately where the problem of consumers bouncing out of your customer journey becomes a bigger problem. Instead of digital marketers fixing or focusing on a better journey for answering customer questions, they turn to cookies and other tracking technologies to follow you wherever you go. Cookies have long been the consolation prize to marketers where they have persistent ads and retargeting meant to bring you back to their website. And you guessed it, they put you right back in that linear persona flow that didn't work the first time.
Where does that leave us? How do we enable the customer journey and rebuild trust in this amazing age of information? Well, let's start by examining the word trust. Trust is an interesting word because it actually has two very different definitions. The first definition is trust as an emotion.
It is literally felt by you when you think of someone or something you trust, and your brain releases oxytocin. But the second definition of trust is about experiences. It is about the logical set of experiences whereby trust is earned and gained. See, trust is a loop between these two definitions. The more experiences I have with a brand or person where the outcome is accurate and helpful, the more emotional trust I feel toward that brand or person.
When that loop is broken, it reminds me of the old adage, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. So let's talk about brands that have really done an amazing job when it comes to building trust through their digital experiences. Let's start with Google. Look, you might say publicly that you don't trust Google, but the vast majority of us still type in our most intimate questions on a regular basis.
For example, my family, maybe like yours, is constantly talking about where we might wanna go together, hopefully, once the pandemic is over. I've googled many places trying to find a potential destination. So Google knows this. Now let's say things do open up and we decide to go where Google knows I'm likely to go with my family. What happens next?
Well, next, I'm gonna get in the car of a perfect stranger with my family because I also trust Uber. And then I'm probably gonna stay in the home of a perfect stranger because I trust Airbnb. Lastly, I'm likely to drop down on the couch in that perfect stranger's home and start to look up audiobooks because I also trust Amazon. But why? Why do we trust these companies so much?
The answer is in their UI. Look at Google, Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon. Each one of those platforms is a search first approach. They've spent billions of dollars making absolutely sure that no matter what you ask them, they can provide you with an accurate answer. When we ask questions about a topic, we are sharing both our interests and our intent.
It's what we are interested in right now. This is why these companies focus on search to build trust by providing a great experience, but more importantly, the right answers. So where do we start? How do we build an amazing search experience that builds trust, cuts through the noise, and doesn't rely on creepy tracking to provide a truly personalized experience. The best way to start is to think about the questions people ask.
Every question can be divided into four different categories in a two by two table. Start with if the question is branded or unbranded for the two columns, and then whether or not the question is objective or subjective for the two rows. The four resultant boxes in the table will really help focus your approach. For example, the question, what are marathon sneakers? Is an unbranded objective question, and there's gonna be billions of Wikipedia articles that come back from Google for that type of query.
Next, who makes the best marathon sneakers? Is still unbranded, but that's definitely a subjective question. Here, you're gonna find top 10 blog posts and millions of people writing content to attract non branded traffic. Third, a question like does Nike make a decent marathon sneaker is now a branded subjective question, and this is where ratings and review sites are gonna kick in. Probably, again, millions of search results, but certainly fewer than the unbranded categories.
And lastly, we come to the branded objective question. This would be something like, does Nike sell marathon sneakers? Or any other question that can only really be answered by Nike. Because Nike, as the brand, controls what products they sell, what services they provide, what times they're open. Every factual response needed to answer questions like those comes from the brand.
The first three categories of questions are what I would call classic content strategies, and they're important. But to build the absolute best search experience on your sites, you begin by focusing on the branded objective queries, the ones that only your brand can provide the authoritative answer to. Search is universal, and it's universally understood at this point. Thanks to digital assistants like Alexa and Siri, we now expect to be able to ask questions and far more complex ones at that. I mean, is there any world where you imagine talking less to machines over the next five years?
Yeah.
Me neither. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that this isn't about being digital first anymore. The acceleration of digital transformation has demanded that we start to be our digital best, best in class at engaging people in an open, honest conversation where they can trust the answers they are getting. So leverage technologies and solutions that will enable an incredible search experience. When people ask your website questions and they share what they're looking for, you don't need to follow them around with cookies or trackers.
You just need to provide them with perfect answers to those questions. By doing this directly on your sites, time and time again, you will build incredible trust. Thank you.
Welcome back to the Yext twenty twenty one Investor Day. Now I'd like to turn it over to our President and Chief Revenue Officer, David Rudnitsky. David?
Thanks, Yuka. Thank you very much for your time today. I'm excited to tell you about how we've evolved our go to market approach and our sales strategy. I want to start by giving you some insight in how we structured our go to market strategy. We've grouped the market by three customer sizes, enterprise, mid market, and SMB.
Our direct sales team sells directly to the end customer. It's focused nearly entirely on enterprise and mid market opportunities and customers. It's supported in part by our strategic alliances group. Our resellers team is the best way for us to address the SMB customer group. I'll provide more insight on each of these groups, starting with our direct sales team.
I'm surrounded by a set of very experienced world class leaders and professionals, including Brian Distelberg, who's our cofounder, president, and COO. In North America, Carrie Bosworth is responsible for our CBU business. Lindsey Johnston in North America is responsible for our enterprise business. In EMEA, John Bus is our managing director for the entire business, and Shimagaki san is responsible for the entire business in Japan. Mary Fratoreau is our worldwide chief customer officer.
Five years ago, we started investing in our sales teams, focusing on our enterprise and mid market direct salespeople. In that time, we have more than doubled the size of the team from 100 to nearly two fifty today. As we noted on the q four earnings call, we're planning to increase the team to two fifty five quota carrying salespeople in fiscal twenty two, though we'll look to accelerate hiring as the economic conditions improve. We have never had a more tenured sales team than we do today. The average tenure, because of our investment in scale, has gone from eighteen months to twenty one months.
Our teams are focused on reducing our sales cycles, growing our pipeline, improving conversion, sharing best practices, and accelerating sales. Our direct team works alongside our strategic alliances team. They represent our ecosystem of tech partners, systems integrators, and agencies that work with us to create solutions and solve business problems for their client base. These partners often work on digital transformation and other major tech infrastructure projects. By working with these partners, we're able to enter the conversation with the prospective customer at the right time and with the key decision makers, many of whom are in the CIO office.
We're very excited about our growing relationships with these great partners. It's still relatively early, but we've already made significant progress with our strategic alliances program. Yext became a charter member of Adobe's premier partner program last year. Since then, we've already closed multiple deals, including some in each major geographic region. We're building a strong pipeline of opportunities in fiscal twenty two, and we're really excited about our relationship with Adobe.
Our partners have become increasingly familiar with our project. We have over 500 hitchhikers trained at our strategic alliance partners since September. I'll tell you more about hitchhikers in a moment. Among systems integrators, we wanted to highlight our deepening opportunities with folks like Accenture and Capgemini. We closed deals with each of them this past year.
They've welcomed us in with their top tier customers, and we have multimillion dollar opportunities in our pipeline to go after with them in fiscal twenty two. The Hitchhikers program is a self-service training platform. It enables our clients and our partners to become product experts, implementers, developers, and administrators. There are hours and hours of content on hitchhikers.yext.com to help them on their journey to become Yext experts and drive value, whether for their own companies or for their clients. We have forums, exclusive webinars, and office hours, and events to build and strengthen Yext's growing hitchhiker community.
This program is only six months old, but take a look at the progress. We've had 3,500 plus hitchhikers trained, 1,900 plus badges earned, and we have 14,000 plus modules completed. They have this huge force multiplier for our internal customer support, our service and our consulting teams because they're capable of implementing, deploying, administering and tuning Yext solutions within our clients and our partners' clients. We can grow more efficiently, we can scale more efficiently, and our internal resources are significantly enhanced by the hitchhiker community. In our SMB world, the best way to reach them is through our resellers.
Once upon a time, most of the x revenue came from direct sales to SMB customers, but we realized the most efficient way to serve that market was through the reseller channel. Our resellers are experts at selling to and supporting SMB customers, and they're able to bundle our products alongside other software tools that SMBs find helpful. We often have multiyear contracts with some of our largest resellers located both in North America and Europe, and we expect opportunities within that network to grow both domestically and internationally over time. What's really exciting is that until recently, our resellers only sold listings, But in January, announced we're enabling select resellers to sell Answers, and we expect that to be a nice addition to growth for the reseller program. If you look at our platform, it's innovated over time, and now we have a broad set of technologies and features on the platform.
The knowledge graph is the foundation of the platform. It's the foundation for all our offerings, and we build solutions on top of it. We're able to take these capabilities to create a diverse set of solutions and solve customers' unique problems. As we continue to increase the capabilities of the platform, we'll be able to build even more search solutions on top of it. We're solving our customers' problems, so increasingly, they're buying multiple solutions to address the digital transformation strategies and goals.
As a result of that, we've seen a steady growth in multiproduct customers. An increasing portion of our ARR is from customers who purchase solutions from two or more of our major products: Answers, Listings, and Pages. Four years ago, only 23% of our ARR came from multiproduct customers. Today, 45% of our ARR is from multiproduct customers. The addition of Answers in late fiscal twenty twenty accelerated this dynamic.
There's been a steady increase of customers with $100,000 more of ARR. It's really attributable to two things: the ability to cross sell additional products and the ability then to go back and upsell capacity, upsell usage, upsell the Knowledge Graph data to our customers. Our land with Answers sales motion quickly drives value in the form of a few things. One, there's higher conversion and lower support cost. Two, there's clear and measurable ROI, supported by our analytics.
Three, it's intuitive. It's easily explainable. There's an improvement you can see immediately from a prospective customer's existing site search solution. There's meaningful momentum in both customers' and search volume, and we expect to see continued strong growth in FY 'twenty two. In FY 'twenty one, new logo deals with Answers were nearly three times larger than the average deal size of new wins without Answers, three times larger.
We think this suggests the power and possibility of our land with Answers sales motion and our ability to use our whole platform to solve customers' problems. We also wanted to highlight for you the opportunity for us to upsell with additional capacity on Answers. Recall, we're a capacity based pricing model with Answers. Our customers buy based on an amount of search volume over the course of their contract. In this example that you see, one of our large CPG customers initially purchased the amount they felt was reasonable, but quickly discovered that their search volumes outstripped the purchase capacity by a meaningful amount.
And so, six months into the contract, the customer increased his purchase for a capacity to amount that met its needs. We see capacity upsell opportunities with a number of customers and believe as customers see the ROI from having a great site search experience, that we'll have continued opportunities to upsell in this way. Answers also opens up opportunities in verticals where we hadn't seen as much traction with listings and pages alone. In the past, we primarily served six major industries: retail, food services, hospitality, financial services, healthcare and communications. With Answers, we've seen increasing opportunity in a number of other verticals, including infotech, CPG, government, higher education and digitally native e commerce companies.
It's really encompassing every type of business. For our initial sales of Answers in 2021, we saw a notable shift towards financial services, healthcare and communications companies. These are areas which performed relatively better during the pandemic and away from retail and food services, which were more impacted. We've told you in previous earnings calls that retail and food services was 25% to 30% of ARR. We wanted to give you some more insight on our vertical mix today.
In the past, we had more significant exposure to those areas, particularly the retail. We've seen retail as a percentage of ARR decline by eight points over the past four years. As we've diversified our vertical mix away from retail and towards areas like healthcare, while the financial service industry continues to be a key and strong market for us. As we move forward with Answers, we do expect our opportunities to broaden, with verticals in that other category, like government, CPG, and digitally native. These are verticals that open their businesses post COVID.
We expect to see them start to grow again. Finally, I wanted to show you our strong penetration across a number of industries with well known, world class, top global brands. Our platform has become a critical part of their digital strategies and transformations. It has also improved their customers' experiences. What's exciting is that we're just getting started.
With that, I'll turn the presentation over to Steve. Thank you.
Hello, everyone. Hey, today I want to talk about three things: our growth, our key business drivers and our outlook that we have going forward. So regarding growth, as you could see, we've had strong revenue growth over the last five or six years. Even our CAGR with fiscal year 'twenty one still comes up in the 30s. And we're still focused on growing this business consistently over time with new products, new opportunities and new channels.
You'll see as well that the TAM has been growing and that's a result of the products that you saw today as well as our constant impact on trying to expand our TAM through customers, industry segments, new products and our international expansion. With that as well, we've had good strong cohort analysis and growth in cohorts over time as well. So we're happy that our customers remain with us and enjoy our products. I think that's because we keep adding new features and functions to our products as well, and we keep expanding the opportunity our customers have to explore the search information they get out of our solution. At the same time, net retention this year has been challenged, as we've talked numerous times on our earnings call, that upsells have been challenged for macroeconomic reasons, but we believe that as we bring new products back into the market, like you've seen that Mark and Howard brought today and economic recovery comes along and our expansion of our businesses, we'll see that retention get back to the 110% or on average where we want to be.
I'm most excited about our international expansion. It's 20% of our revenues and that's just in the European region primarily. So we have good growth opportunities there and being in 20% gives us a lot of room to go forward. Europe has been a powerhouse even in the macroeconomic times that we've struggled with. They've been able to keep their growth rates going and become a larger part of our revenue going forward.
Another opportunity has been our gross margins. As you can see, we've improved them 10% over the last five years, predominantly because of scaling with our publishers, but also more efficiencies in our delivery mechanisms as well. And our guide is 75% to 80% gross margin, and I'll suspect that we're going to continue to drive to get that to the higher end of our guide, if not a little higher beyond that. Now, let's talk about key business drivers, a very important area for us going forward. As you know, we're focused on two very broad areas, driving growth and driving productivity.
The main driver of our growth is product innovation. Over a decade, every year there's been new features and products come out, and this year is no exception. What you've seen Howard and Mark deliver is wonderful, and that's going to carry on, and it's a big driver for growth because it brings us into new TAMs, it gives us additional products to upsell to our customers and helps us enter new markets like search, a major new market for us and a great opportunity in a number of areas that we're just starting to touch. With this growth in products, allows us a chance to expand our delivery mechanisms. We've obviously always been in direct sales and reseller, and you've seen we've made big investments in the direct sales.
But we've also started to invest in services, so we make our customers successful and we get the feedback that we need to make our products more successful over time. But in addition, we've added another channel this year, strategic alliance and partnerships, another opportunity to grow the business, another opportunity to enter new markets, and another exciting chance to meet new customers in these particular arenas around strategic alliances. As we've said before, international has been a key part of our growth so far this year, and it will continue to be part of our growth opportunities going forward. In the future, we expect international revenues to be at least 50% of our business. That gives us a lot of headroom to grow our business simply internationally.
And it's not just in the France and Germany's and UK's and the Europe market, it's also in new markets, particularly in Asia where we've had limited operations primarily in Japan. But as we can get back to countries, we'll start to see us expand into additional countries as well. So international expansion is going to be a big part of our growth. And like I said, I expect it to be about 50% of our business going forward. On to the productivity drivers.
We've talked a lot about sales and marketing. We've made good progress over the last year and a half in improving sales and marketing through changes in how we sell. We don't send a bunch of people to an office anymore. We can send one or two and still be just as effective to the tenure of our sales organization as David talked about earlier and to the processes that we have and the new products that we have to make our sales executives more efficient. But it's not just sales.
We're working on all kinds of operational efficiencies throughout the company, new processes, new systems that are more integrated and more efficient, and new ways to address our customer and our own processes. One example is a continued improvement in G and A, but it's across the board where we're making investments to make ourselves more efficient over time, so we can scale with the growth we anticipate. Now, let's talk about our outlook and where we're going. As you know, there's three channels that we serve: direct sales, which is mid market and enterprise reseller, which is small business and then our services, which is directed at our customer. These combinations are going to help us continue to grow our business and we've got the focus in each of them now that we need to have to continue to help us grow across the spectrum of customers that we serve.
You can see here our investment over the last couple of years, while it looked high, has really paid off. Even in a pandemic year, direct grew 25% year over year in fiscal year twenty twenty one. So our investments are making sense and they're proving themselves to be successful over time, and we expect direct sales to carry on that growth rate. With regards to resellers, yes, obviously, it's a challenged year for small businesses around the world and we have resellers in Europe and North America predominantly. So all of them suffered through lockdowns and lockups, etcetera.
We're going to treat the reseller business fairly conservatively because we think it will take a little longer to come back. But it's still a major part of our business. We're excited about the opportunities we have. As you know, we introduced Answers into this channel and we expect that will start to bring the growth back over time. But we're going to look at this realistically as the economy start to open up in the near term.
And then lastly, as we said, we've invested in services and you've seen that channel grow tremendously. It's a big part of where we want to be with our customers. And like I said, the feedback you get is incredible. So, I think we've made the right investments in the direct channel to help that grow. We're clearly continuing to support our reseller business and we started our services business and all three of those we expect to grow in the future.
When you look at our model then in the near term, our direct channel should continue to grow in the 25% plus range over time. Again, we'll be adding quota carrying headcount as we see the economy turnaround. We'll be supporting the resellers with roughly a 5% growth through new Answers products and opportunities and the services business is just getting started. Now we don't expect to have services be a large part of this business, but like any SaaS company, services will be 10% to 15% of our revenue. So this growth is important and putting it in place to serve our customers and make them more successful is critical over the long term.
Our longer term model has us with gross margins at 75% to 80%. As I said before, we're right dead set in the middle of that and we expect to continue to improve those gross margins over time, But we like that range for now. Sales and marketing, 30% to 35%. That's a goal. We're on that trajectory to get there, but again, are longer term goals, but we believe that we can be much more efficient in sales and marketing over time.
R and D, 10% to 15%. Now this is where I think you might see us spend a little bit more in R and D and make sure as we get new products that we're still consistently driving product innovation over time. But there's a trade off between having a lot of R and D people and having an effective R and D team. And we think we have a very effective R and D team. So they can do the job.
They're bringing out a huge amount of new products this year and I'm sure they'll carry on in that area. But we're also looking to make sure that we're spending into our R and D over the foreseeable future. And then G and A goes to about 10% longer term and gets huge benefits from the systems and processes that we put in place and becomes more scalable as we grow our business. That will result in operating margins of around 20% and that's fairly traditional for a software company. We've had three tenets that we've been running this company by: grow revenue, get to operating cash flow breakeven and get to non GAAP net income breakeven.
Well, I'm here to say and you heard at Q4, for the full fiscal year, we were operating cash flow breakeven for fiscal year twenty twenty one. And as you can see on this chart, we've been cash flow breakeven or better two out of the last three years. What we said on the call and we believe is we will operate at cash flow breakeven for fiscal year twenty twenty two and beyond. The reason why is we will spend into our growth so long as we stay in the cash flow breakeven range. So we want to make sure that we are breakeven, but we're not going to shortchange our growth to make that goal.
We'll make sure we're growing, but we're going to grow smart. We're going to put sales reps in territories where we have leads already. We're going to make sure our processes support the new businesses that we get into. If you do all of that, we should be able to run this company at cash flow breakeven and beyond for a long time. Now with regards to non GAAP net income, of course, that's always been a goal.
We've been close. We've decided and we've looked at our business and believe that macroeconomic things change. We will get to non GAAP net income breakeven by fiscal year twenty twenty three on a full year basis and we can remain there as well on a full year basis. So, that's our next goal. We've got revenue growth and we're going to continue to push on our revenue growth.
We've made our cash flow breakeven goals and we're going to keep those. And the last one to fall is non GAAP net income breakeven and we think we can get there by fiscal year twenty twenty three and beyond. With that, I'll be glad to take questions with the rest of the Yext management team joining me. Thank you all very much for attending today.
Great. We're going to start our second Q and A session now. Joining me are CEO, Howard Luhrmann President and Chief Revenue Officer, David Rudnicki Chief Strategy Officer, Mark Ferentino and Chief Financial Officer, Steve Cakebread. As a reminder, we're taking questions both from the audio lines and from the Q and A chat window. For those of you on the webcast, please feel free to put in questions to that chat window at any time.
For those of you on the audio line, again, the instructions to ask a question, please press star and the number one on your touch tone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star and then 2. And please ensure you have muted all other audio lines on your computer or mobile devices to prevent audio feedback from the livestream. And if you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. So we'll start the session with a question from the chat window.
Can you double click on your $30,000,000,000 TAM? Does that include listings? Can that inflect your growth to grow?
Thanks, Yuka. Let me take that question. I know a number of people have asked that. As you remember, we started a company with a $10,000,000,000 TAM that looked at our listings business on a global basis. We've added Answers and when we did that, we expanded our TAM to on our estimates about $20,000,000,000 And as Howard said, we're estimating the growth in three to four years to bring that TAM to $30,000,000,000 But as I said in my remarks, and I continue to believe as we can bring out new products, as we expand our market entry into additional segments, you're going to see that TAM get bigger.
So this is just the start of the business that we see going forward. And as you know, TAMs are hard to estimate, but this is our best guess going forward right now. Listings at about $10,000,000,000 Answers at about 20,000,000,000 growing to $30,000,000,000 and our ability to expand new products will continue to expand that TAM.
Great. Thanks, Steve. Our next question will be from the audio line. Operator, can you please take the first question?
Got it.
Our next question comes from Brian MacDonald with Needham and Company. Please go ahead.
Hi, thanks for taking another question from me here. I guess this one is for Steve. As you outlined the medium term financial outlook and the growth targets there, what assumptions are you making to get to those targets in terms of a recovery in the listings business, continued momentum from Answers and some of the additional product functionality that you announced today in terms of the other areas of search? Thanks.
Ryan, thank you. That's a good question. We know that the SaaS model comes up slowly. It goes down slow in difficult times and it grows slowly. So we've taken into consideration clearly future expansion of listings.
As we said on our Q4 call though, we're not really able to call the timing of when things come back. And as Howard really described well, we all feel it, but we don't see it yet. But we do believe that over that two to three year period, you're going to see this company again with new products, international expansion and the recovery of listings business get back into the 20% growth range at the end of that period.
Okay, great. Thank you. Operator, we'll take another question from the audio line.
Our next question comes from Naved Khan with Truist Securities.
Yeah. Thanks a lot. Maybe just amongst the different opportunities that you guys outlined for Answers, if
I have
to think three to five years out, which is the one that makes you most excited about in terms of potential for growth?
No. That's like making me pick between my kids. I couldn't be more excited about site search. I couldn't be more excited about support search. Personally, I am over the moon about app search because I have seen startups put our natural language search into their app to create a magic experience.
I'm not sure if that's going to be the biggest revenue, but oh my goodness, the ability to see a well funded startup put our technology, bake it into their product from the ground up and provide natural language with knowledge graph, the creativity, it's just mind boggling. I think as these companies launch you will see Yext powered search in startups. So I guess maybe I am taking a child here though that might not be the biggest TAM. Personally, I am just really excited about app search, site search, support search, workplace search we're doing and talking about, e commerce search. They've all got a ton of potential.
What do
you guys think? What most excites you, Dave? Well, I think for me, it opens up new opportunities and we have continued conversations. So as we gain interest in site search and very quickly support search, all of a sudden new opportunities get created. And the idea that we leverage the exact same knowledge graph gives us a huge advantage.
So I'm super excited about it because I think those other three are going to exponentially take off once we get going on them.
Yeah, for me, I think really the thing I'm most excited about is the platform, the platform itself, the platform conversation. Search is one of those really interesting things where it is almost more of a horizontal. It is almost more of a piece of infrastructure at most organizations. And for us to become that that critical mission critical piece of infrastructure that can be leveraged across a number of use cases, a number of solutions. And all the solutions we talked about are all going to be possible on the platform.
But there's so many other variations of those solutions, so many other opportunities and so many other use cases that exist out there when you have a generalized platform. So the opportunity that I'm most excited about is to become that platform, that search platform for every single organization out there. Now, Ved, I think
what you saw in that answer is a little bit of our each of our own individual personalities. I love the startup stuff. Dave wants to sell the most solutions and Mark's talking about the technology. We're excited about all of them.
Yes. No, it's still great color and appreciate that answer. I have a quick follow-up for Steve. Steve, if I have to think about the opportunity with making alliances and through partnerships, I think you said 15% of revenues. Is that something that we can get to over the next three to five years?
How should we think about it? And then with respect to resellers, can you maybe just size that for us how big the exposure is? And you said Answers can drive 5% incremental growth, but what's the baseline growth we should assume there?
Sure. So a couple of questions there, Naved. One is we had said services would get to 10% to 15% of our business. I'm not sure strategic alliances, they can certainly get bigger, but they're going to be based on the fact that Dave's direct enterprise sales team is going to help that as well. So that will all be kind of into the direct enterprise sales numbers as much as anything.
With regards to our partner business, our reseller business, it's always been a big part of our business. And as you know, we've always broken out the growth rates of direct enterprise. What we do believe though is they've got great handle on our small business. Now the last year has clearly been tough on the small business segment and our resellers have done a great job of hanging in there. The slower growth expectations, so we're really baked around a conservative view that small business is going to be tough to come back in the near term.
But we've had and been very successful with a number of our resellers. They've been with us for multiple years. They commit on contracts. And so we're excited about that. We are and did just introduce Answers into some of those reseller channels.
So that will help the growth as well. But I think we've got to be a little bit cautious about how quick small business can recover and that's their target segment.
Got it. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Naved. We'll take the next question from the chat line. It is from Matt Cost from JPMorgan. And he asks for Steve.
How will you ensure your gross margin improves over time as you expand your professional services? Also, is there an approximate time frame on your long term target model?
Yes. So long term target model is a long term. But typically, you're going to look out ten to fifteen years. The way to measure the time frame on the long term model is when you see our growth rates start to drip into the low 20s and high teens, you'll know we've started to look at that long term model. And my belief is as growth rates slow, earnings and cash flow grow.
So no real time frame at that point, but look at that as kind of that challenge. With regards to margin growth, we're always looking for efficiencies. And I said in my presentation, it's not just a one and done here. We're going to continue to sort out and search for margin efficiencies, at the expense of growth, however, but as we grow, we need to scale. So I think you'll continue to see scale in the margin numbers that we get over time.
Great. Thanks, Steve. The next question we will take from the audio line. Operator, next question please.
The next question comes from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair. Please go ahead.
Hi, thank you. This is probably for Dave. I wanted to maybe touch on the relationships that you have with the GSIs a little bit more. I know you mentioned Accenture and Capgemini, but would love to hear the nature of those relationships, the work that they're doing with Yext. Are they actually doing the implementations?
Are they helping customers build site search solutions more on the listing side? If you could just maybe give us a little bit more color on the existing relationships and how large you think that GSI channel can get that would be very helpful. Thank you.
Sure. So Arjun, thanks for the question. I think we're just getting started with the GSIs like Accenture, Deloitte and CAP. I can tell you that we've spent a lot of time this past year getting ourselves aligned from the executive level on down and the field on up, and we've started to get a tremendous amount of momentum. So we've closed in every one of our major regions, we've closed significant size deals as a result of working with the teams on the ground for CAP, Deloitte and Accenture.
The exciting part about it is that they're starting to look at us as a platform and when you start to think about a platform, that translates into solutions, solutions translate into much larger opportunities. And that's really where we're starting to head on. Perfect example, there were two deals that we closed in Q4, one with a major financial services firm, one with a healthcare and we were brought in by the two different partners to participate in their day with that client as filling in a solution that they were building for them turned out to be a terrific opportunity for Yext. I've seen this movie before. I think we're right at that point now with the platform that it's a perfect time for us to continue to partner with them and continue to accelerate that.
All right. Thank you, Arjun. Next question we will take from the web. The question is Answers is a usage based pricing model and you are targeting a land and expand strategy. You also expect listings to come back at some point in the near future.
Could NRR be well above your 110% target if this plays out as expected?
Well, from my standpoint, it could very well. But also, there's a lot of moving pieces in this business for the next couple of years. So we're just going to be back to what we think are normal levels over time. And then, yes, clearly, we're more successful over time, the numbers can go up. But right now, our goal is to get back to where we were, and then we'll build on that base.
And that's going to take a little bit of time given the macroeconomic circumstances we're at.
Great. Thanks, Steve. Next question again from the chat window. Dave, do you need to make further changes to your sales motion as you expand into these other areas of search? Sales enablement and clarity of message is important to ensure execution without sales interruption.
All right, so I'll take it in. Part of it is, as Howard talked about earlier, our sales motion, whether we're selling site search or as we evolve into support search, is somewhat similar, a little bit of a different target audience, but I think our sales motion with a little bit of tuning, we could repurpose that playbook very quickly. There's no question about it though, we're going to have to evolve our playbook as we get into app search, e commerce search, workplace search. Different set of buyers, different set of requirements, at that point you start to look at scalability, reliability, security. We are starting to evolve with those.
So as part of us, our planning for that is that we have now set up a team, we call it the search innovation team, very much like any other enterprise company, whether you call it an overlay, a co prime, a product specialist, we have a team on the ground with us now as we start to dig in deeper to these other use cases. So we are preparing ourselves for that. I feel very comfortable the playbook will evolve over time. As far as enablement of Clarity Message, there's no question about it that we really started to have some terrific momentum with Answers. There's not going to be an interruption.
We constantly fine tune our sales enablement. We're pretty diligent about it every couple of weeks. We have updates to our sales enablement, our go to market strategy, the tactics, etcetera for our sales team. I feel really comfortable we're headed with it, but clearly there won't be any interruption in terms of our sales motion.
I'd like to add something to this question. I was really glad to hear you used the word playbook. You used the word playbook, I think, three times in your answer. I just finished Ask Your Developer by Jeff Lawson, Twilio founder and CEO. A wonderful book in many ways.
Yext are what we're becoming is the ability to just sort of add search and service to your application or your site or your support site or your app. And I was not surprised, but I was delighted to see on page two twelve in the book, Jeff's Lawson's fight with Dave Remitsky playbook. You didn't even know that was gonna happen.
I've never met Jeff.
Never met. So when Dave talks playbook, I I really do believe you with that and I'm really excited to partner with you as our president and CRO to make something big happen.
Yeah. Mean, listen, if you really want to evolve and you can see the rapid pace of innovation, when you look to what Mark presented to us, the only way you can address that innovation and take advantage of it is to evolve. How do you evolve? It's got to be pretty systematic. It's got to be repeatable.
It's got to be scalable. I don't know any other way than to have it in a playbook, continue to evolve it because as we start to grow our company, we've all got to be on the same page and take advantage of that innovation.
Great. Thanks, Dave. Next question from the chat window. This is from Elizabeth Elliott at Morgan Stanley. She asked, while it is early, how should we think about the expansion opportunity from opening answers to channel partners?
What do you need to see to expand it more broadly from select partners today?
Howard, do want to take that or you want me to take?
I'll take that. Remember our channel partners are selling to small businesses. That is the primary way that Yext addresses small businesses. We definitely see an opportunity there. Every small business has a website.
Every small business needs a presence. They need to be able to answer questions. And in addition to that, what we have seen our channel partners using our technology on their own sites. Many of them around the world, believe it or not, come from a legacy Yellow Pages background and handle consumer search traffic. They have these sort of keyword based what, where search engines in a random European country or Asian country, for example.
And it we have the opportunity to bring natural language to them if it's in one of the the seven languages that we support in German and French and Spanish and Italian and English, I'm sorry, six languages and Japanese. And so we both can sell them as an enterprise where they uniquely have a local or location search consumer experience and in addition they can sell through to their SMBs all in the same kind of capacity contract.
Great. Thanks, Howard. I'm going to remind everybody on the audio line if you have another question please press star and 1. We'll take another question from the chat window. And that question is, how does Yext capacity based pricing for Workplace Search compare to Elasticsearch pricing method?
How does the competitive market evolve between the two of you? It seems like you have coopetition.
Mark, you want to take that?
Yeah, sure. So as far as pricing, the pricing models are slightly different in that Elasticsearch model is more based on a number of servers. It's based on an infrastructure model versus ours is just based on straight up usage of number of searches and the amount of data that we're storing. So there's similar and they sort of they both get to a similar number or near a similar number, but there's sort of different methods to get there. As far as cooperation over the years, I think that each organization we're sort of focused on slightly different things.
Elastic is sort of the original company that made keyword search popular, and they use it not just for workplace search, they also use it for APM. They also use it for security and other areas. It's funny. Keyword search, while we believe that from a consumer standpoint, it's not the best experience, but keyword search does have applicability in other areas of computer science and other areas of technology. And that's where you can see Elastic has sort of expanded into.
There is a world where someone is maybe potentially leveraging Elastic for some of their search, but then leveraging the X natural language AI as as to to basically bring those two things together and create a single unified search experience for the customer that's leveraging the best of both technologies. That is definitely something that we're starting to see more and more of. We're starting to hear more and more of it, and that's one of the reasons why released our SDK, our APIs in the spring release, was to enable that to happen in a much bigger way going forward.
Great. Thanks, Mark. Next question from the chat is from Naved Khan from Truist Securities. And the question is, has rep retention been an issue given the slowdown in sales growth? That's for you, Dave.
Sure.
Naved. It hasn't and we've been pretty fortunate that even with a change in sales growth, our retention rates and our churn is no different than any SaaS company of equal size to us.
Great. Okay. Thanks, Dave. Next question. This is a long one.
Let me just What read it all are you doing to teach and build an ecosystem of SI and university developer programs in undergrad business schools, in grad business schools, in computer science departments, more broadly? How can Yext become a verb where people list knowing how to use it on their resumes and ask for it in their workplaces if it's not already there or ask for more of Yext products?
Well, first off, whoever asked this question, please send me an email at howard@yext.com. We'd love to hire you to help us build this program out. We are looking to build out our hitchhiker program, and we have a number of open positions. And clearly, you have a ton of ideas, and you've articulated what we would like to do. Our Hitchhiker program is something that we're really excited about.
We've evolved it a lot. We've now got developer personas and better documentation. We want folks to be able to instead of having to show up with your developer to build a search engine from scratch or on top of a Lucene powered search like Solar Elastic, our vision is to enable developers to easily add search to any application with a low code type of environment. So you're going to see us continue to build out our hitchhiker program, continue to expand on the developer first nature of our hitchhiker program. And my hope to the questioner here is that what the vision you've articulated is something that over time as Yext becomes the company that brings natural language search to the enterprise that you will see people talking about their Yext capabilities on their resumes too.
Send me an email. Let's talk about it.
Thanks, Howard. All right. Next, we will take a question from the audio line. Operator, next question please.
Our next question comes from Ryan MacDonald with Needham and Company. Please go ahead.
Yes, thanks again. I've got two questions. First one for Dave. You talked a lot about sort of sales capacity and maturation of reps and I think Yext did a really great job of sort of keeping the bench full during the pandemic. How are you feeling about sales coverage, sales capacity as things start to open up?
What would you need to see to move from, as you said, sort of the two fifty today to two fifty five and above? I guess I'm asking how are you feeling about your ability to service increasing demand with what you've already got in the sales organization?
So Ron, there are two things. One, we're going to get to the two fifty five. We're on track to get to that two fifty five. I think because my friend Steve Cakebread, I've been given permission as the business improves, more so the economic conditions, can continue to hire. One thing I learned a long time ago at Salesforce, you got to fill your capacity when you have it, and we will fill that capacity as the economy starts to open up and we see things turn, but we'll get to that two fifty five very quickly.
The other part of your question, what changes a little bit is we're just going to evolve in terms of the skill set and the type of folks we hire. As we start to look at opening up that platform for search, it will take yet another type of skill set, and that just evolves over time. It's like a sports analogy, if you hire a different type of athlete as the game starts to change over time, and that's what we plan on doing.
Excellent. And then my second question is probably a combination for Howard and Mark. As you move into these other areas of search, do you expect that you'll need to do the same sort of customer education that you had to do with Answers initially? And how do you think the best way to do that? Is it another ninety day free trial?
Or how are you starting to think about that? Thanks.
A lot of the education we had to do was simply educate our customers and prospects and generate awareness of this idea of natural language search. When you run a search, you see the box, you type something in. You don't know what's gonna come out of it. If you're using Google, you've been trained that you're likely to get a pretty good result. You're likely to get an answer.
If you're using an internal app, you probably kind of know how it works through trial and error. So we've had to educate folks on the fact that a, there is a difference in search, keywords versus answer search. We've also had and we're still in the process of doing that. And furthermore, we've had to educate companies and prospects and customers on the idea that Yext can actually, believe it or not, bring a Google like search to your website, to your app. Anywhere you want a Google, you can have that.
You can purchase that and it's really easy. You can turn it on and it's faster and it's better and it's cheaper than buying keyword search and building your own keyword search engine and trying to do it that way. So that has been a process. However, I don't once once we have educated some of the executives within a company that there's a different kind of search and that we are and have a better, faster, cheaper version of it that they can just turn on, those executives, their minds start to go and they see other applications for where we can go. So I don't see the need to this will not be as hard to launch new search categories as it was to put the company into the first search category on top of our listings in Knowledge Graph platform.
That said, there's still a lot of education, lot of opportunity to put out there. And I'd just like to note Ryan, you saw us over the past year do that, reeducate folks on our capability and prospects on our capabilities and at the same time do so while getting far more efficient. Look at the sales and marketing efficiency last year on a percentage basis over the previous year. I think in Q4 we saw a 7% improvement year over year. So not only do we do something really hard, we did it while introducing a set of tactics that were more efficient.
So kind of going forward, I think once we've landed with one line of business with search, we'll be able to expand with other lines of business in search and hopefully bring a Google like experience everywhere across the enterprise in and outside of the firewall.
Great. Thanks, Howard. This next one is from the chat window and it is for Steve. Steve, the question is, how much growth capital do you envision Yext to require to fund growth during the next three years? Will you be looking to capital markets to fund it?
Yes. The answer is not at this time. I mean, we are well positioned. Our balance sheet is strong. As you saw, we were cash flow breakeven this year.
Full year, as I said, we believe we'll be breakeven going forward on a cash operating cash basis. So at this point in time, we have plenty of operating cash, and we're really excited about making the investments to continue to grow the business. So no capital markets, But you never say never, things change and things opportunities come forward us. But in the near term, no going to the markets at this point in time.
Great. Thanks, Steve. We'll take the next question from the audio line. Operator, next question please.
The next question comes from Naved Khan with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.
Yeah, hi, thanks. Just had a follow-up on 02:45 or so customers that you have for Answers, how much of those are new versus people you might have upsold the existing listings customer into?
It's a combination of both. I think the best way to get a sense of kind of like what the percentages are and who we're signing up is to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is Yext and practically every day we tweet about a new Answers experience that's gone live on a brand. We can't do all of them because not everyone lets us do it. But there are two forty five at least Yext search boxes out there on websites and each day we tweet a kind of a new one that goes live.
You can see, Nivet, the different types of industries we've gone into. Dave had a great slide in his presentation that showed our classic verticals, finance, food, telco, retail. And then we showed some of the new verticals that Answers allows us to sell into, infotech, government, CPG. These are the kinds of new customers we can bring on. And given the fact that Yext has never sold into those types of industries before, when you see that kind of logo show up, you can almost be sure that that was a new logo.
The state of New Jersey doesn't buy listings from Yext, but they did buy answers from Yext. Companies like Slack don't buy listings from Yext, but they do use us for answers. So these are the kinds of new companies we can go into. And when you see those show up on our daily tweets at Yext, that's where you can kind of get a sense of the kinds of companies that are coming through. We'd like to just put them out there because they're just needing their fun experiences on the search side.
Understood. And maybe just a quick follow-up on sort of the opportunities between enterprise versus the midsize. I think just before the pandemic hit us you guys had sort of ramped up the midsize. So as we sort of come out of this and things start to pick up, is it clear that that midsize is going to be like a big driver? Or also things have changed in between, right, because Answers just seems a lot more relevant to a lot more people.
So how should we think about sort of the which one is going to be more of the engine as
things recover? Novett, if you've ever been to Yankee Stadium, in the seventh inning stretch, they always have the which subway is going to win and they have the I don't even know the red line and the blue line and the green line and there's a race and everyone is trying to figure out whether EMEA is the biggest or the EBU is the biggest or the CBU is the biggest. Quite frankly, it's not even obvious to us. We believe there are big opportunities in every segment. If you look in the mid sized segment, for example, what we call our CBU, the new economy companies in there are extraordinary.
We sign up Bitcoin companies. I see us talking to trading applications, cryptocurrency applications. We can't serve them, but there's a ton of CBD companies that contact us that want to work with us. There's a lot of questions out there in telehealth companies. So there's all these new categories.
And by the way, when you look at app search, that is from well funded tech startups that are looking to build search into their products. Those are not enterprises yet but they're backed in big ways and some of them have aspirations to become enterprise. So that said, at the enterprise level you see companies that need support search and workplace search. The opportunities for search are really big, really big. Search is not a winner take all market.
We believe we can be very competitive in all five categories of search and offer enterprise or a mid sized company or a company in Europe or in Japan, a search platform to serve any solution that they need and also puts their Smart Answers in Google and Apple and Facebook with our list of them.
Thank you, Howard.
Great. Thanks, Naved. Our next question is from the chat window. It's from Rohit Kulkarni from MKM Partners. And his question is, over the past twelve months, you have talked about federal, state and local government agencies.
What's the latest thinking about the opportunity in this segment? And do you need to hire more or different types of sales reps specifically for this segment?
Yes. So we are, Rohit, and we've thought a lot about it as well because the opportunity in federal in particular is enormous. We've had success in both federal actually federal, state and local. We are in the process of hiring someone to run that group for us that will have reps that have domain expertise. That is a very different market.
As you know, a lot of it is based on long term relationships, not only with customers, but with agencies and with affiliates that can sell into those agencies. And it's very much on our immediate product I shouldn't say our immediate go to market strategy. So it's very timely of your question.
Great. All right. Thanks, Dave. Second question from Rohe at MKM Partners. On the incremental TAM from new search categories, do you believe that early wins in these search categories would come at the expense of search advertising budgets at those companies?
Yeah. So a lot of the new search categories we're talking about are going to come from brand new budgets, brand new areas. So for example, when we talk about support search, that's coming from the customer experience or customer support budget. Workplace search is coming typically from IT or even a human resources budget. E commerce is coming from a completely different budget.
So these new search categories are really amazing for us because they bring us outside of the sort of classic consumer marketing world that we have been in traditionally as a company. While we'll still continue to obviously move the ball forward in that category, in the marketing category, these new ones are coming from completely different budgets and completely different parts of the company.
Great. Thanks, Mark. Another question from the chat window. Can you give a sense of what percentage of your product or R and D organization is now focused on building out Answers functionality versus Listings? How are you managing the potential disruption caused by the shift in focus?
Will you need to spend more? Your target model implies you would.
Mark, why don't you take that, but also maybe let's talk for just a second about our ML and AI capabilities as well.
Yes. So we've had to grow our r and d organization over the last few years, adding a ton of data science, machine learning machine learning engineers, not just machine not just data scientists. Everyone thinks it's always about data scientists, but you actually also need the ML engineers and the AI engineers to implement the algorithms that we create. All of our algorithms are created in house. They're all built by us.
We have many, many patents against a lot of the technology that we've created. We've had to definitely build up over the last few years new expertise and new parts of the organization. Those are net new parts of the organization. Now when you look at the overall R and D organization, remember, everything is we built a platform. So when we make enhancements to Knowledge Graph, we are enhancing the Answers experience, the Answers product.
When we're making enhancements to the core platform, we are making enhancements to Answers. Same thing with when we make it into pages and things of that nature. So when we talk about sort of the split of Answers versus Listings, it's not really thought of as Answers versus Listings. It's really that we have a generic platform with many different platform services, and those platform services can be pieced together to create a site search experience, to create SEO optimized pages, to potentially send data to endpoints like Google My Business, like Amazon, like our publisher network. And so that's kind of how we split it.
We kind of look at it. It's not exactly like the sort of like, here's the answers team and here's the listings team and they're sort of looking at each other and they they're not it's not adversarial at all. It's actually that it's by kind of moving away from having a set of point products or even a multiple set of point products and moving towards a platform, we've been able to, in essence, sort of expand and broaden the R and D capabilities of the organization and ultimately creating an incredible amount of leverage, which I don't think you guys have even seen yet, which we're excited to sort of show you as we can now create solutions on top of the platform as opposed to having to require our engineers to make changes to our products. So this will be really cool.
Maybe, Steve, if you could just comment around the long term model part of the question.
Yes. We had in the model around 15% R and D. Keep in mind, there's capitalization of new software in there. But as Mark said, as we need to bring on new people, we're going to be able to do that just like Dave can bring on quota bearing headcount. But there's also this efficiency where large R and D teams don't necessarily give you the most brilliant solutions.
And our team to date has been wonderful at that. And I think we're not hindered by being able to spend money in R and D, but we'll spend it wisely just like we're going to hire wisely into quota carrying sales reps.
Great. Thanks, Steve. And with that, we'll conclude our Q and A session, and we will conclude our Investor Day. Thanks so much for coming. Thanks for your time and attention.
Have a great day.
Thank you.