ZoomInfo Technologies Inc. Q3 FY2023 Earnings Call

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the ZoomInfo Third Quarter 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Operator instructions: Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jerry Sisitsky, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Welcome everyone to ZoomInfo’s financial results conference call for the third quarter 2023. With me on the call today are Henry Schuck, Founder and CEO of ZoomInfo; Cameron Hyzer, our CFO; and James Roth, our Chief Revenue Officer. After their remarks, we will open the call to Q&A. During this call, any forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of U.S. securities laws, expressions of future goals, including business outlook, expectations for future financial performance and similar items, including, without limitation, expressions using the terminology may, will, expect, anticipate and believe and expressions which reflect something other than historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including those discussed in the Risk Factors section of our SEC filings. Actual results may differ materially from any forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events that may arise after this conference call, except as required by law. For more information, please refer to the cautionary statement in the slides posted to our Investor Relations website at ir.zoominfo.com. All metrics on this call are non-GAAP, unless otherwise noted. A reconciliation can be found in the financial results press release or in the slides posted to our IR website. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Henry.

Great. Thank you, Jerry, and welcome, everyone. While the operating environment remains challenging, we delivered results that exceeded our Q3 guidance. Revenue for the quarter was $314 million and adjusted operating income was $126 million, a margin of 40%. During the quarter, we repurchased approximately 9 million shares of ZoomInfo stock for $160 million, representing an average purchase price of $18 per share. We are uniquely positioned to capitalize on a tremendous long-term market opportunity, which gives us confidence that buying ZoomInfo stock at these levels will drive a meaningful economic return for our shareholders. Since early last year, we have highlighted the challenges of this operating environment, which include fewer upsells, more seat downsells and elevated churn levels. As a platform that helps customers grow and one that serves some early cycle industries, we have seen net revenue retention and our overall growth rates come down, as customers have had to rebalance growth and profitability. This is a market phenomenon impacting companies across the spectrum of front office applications and not unique to ZoomInfo. When the cycle ends and we are in a more normalized operating environment, companies will be looking to drive growth and we will continue to be uniquely positioned to help them do just that. In this operating environment, we are committed to controlling the controllable and delivering industry-leading levels of profitability, while we invest in our customer success and improve the Company for the long-term. To that end, we are doubling down on product excellence and customer success, investing in improved ease-of-use and driving quicker time to value for our customers. These investments have driven a 20% increase in product engagement since the beginning of the year. Customers are using more of the platform more often. We are doing this while prioritizing investments in AI, data-as-a-service, and MarketingOS, and building our industry-leading data coverage and accuracy across the globe. We’ve rolled out new pricing and packaging at the low-end of the market, enabling us to capture more of the market efficiently, while simultaneously growing our contributors. And we announced a number of leadership changes that have flattened the organization and given me the opportunity to get closer to our customers and how we win them, serve them and grow them. As part of the leadership changes, James Roth, our Senior Vice President of Sales, leading our enterprise customer base, has been promoted to Chief Revenue Officer. Chris Hays, our Chief Operating Officer, transitioned into the new role of EVP of International Expansion, and Dave Justice transitioned into the new role of Chief Growth Officer. I am excited that James is here with us on the call today and wanted to give him the opportunity to share a few words. James?

Thanks, Henry. I’m glad to be here today. I joined the team in early 2022 because I’m passionate about the product, the vision, and the culture that Henry has built. We have the power to drive massive improvements in how businesses go-to-market with our best-in-class data, AI-powered customer insights and automated workflows. I was a ZoomInfo customer for 10 years prior to joining the leadership team and I have a deep understanding of what our customers want and need from the platform. Since joining, I’ve gotten to see the value that we are delivering to many of the largest and most sophisticated enterprises in the world. I’ve been in the room at Workday, Google, Amazon, Verizon, and so many others as we partnered with their revenue teams to build the foundation of data and insight that drive the future of go-to-market. I’ve been proud to offer that same foundation of go-to-market technology that drives revenue, growth at the world’s best companies to companies down market across the globe. Over the past two years, I’ve helped recruit a large portion of our sales leadership, and I am excited about the team we put together and the traction that we are seeing in the enterprise. I intend to build off that success, in particular, with our $1 million and $5 million plus accounts, while we look for efficiencies in our go-to-market motion through e-commerce and product-led growth.

Great. Thanks, James. This quarter, we closed transactions with a number of best-in-class enterprises, including Verizon, Walmart, Paramount CBS, Sage Hospitality, Steam Logistics, CDW, Tenet Health, The Washington Post, FranklinCovey, Lands’ End and Magellan Health. In Q3, we signed more than 200 deals with more than a $100,000 in ACV, including multiple seven-figure deals and a $15 million TCV deal. Some of the largest and most sophisticated companies in the world are going all-in on our data, insights and automation, integrating us directly into the way they go to market. While the software vertical and roughly half of the business services vertical has been impacted, we have seen strong growth in other verticals. In financial services, Wells Fargo further expanded their relationship with us with a seven-figure subscription to our intent and company data cubes. Today, the organization leverages our firmographic data for enhanced segmentation and prioritization and they use our intent data to identify and pursue additional relationship opportunities as well as to predict potential churn. By plugging ZoomInfo data directly into their go-to-market motion, they’re able to deliver more targeted services to their customers and support the retention of high-priority accounts. In telecommunications, a large global provider of mobility, network services and 5G signed a five-year, nearly eight-figure engagement with ZoomInfo, which is now the key data and insights source for their go-to-market teams, ensuring for years to come that they will have the highest quality data as they go to market. Another mid-market telecommunications firm who had left for a competitor 10 months earlier, boomeranged back and expanded with a multiyear, multi seven-figure engagement that encompasses the full array of our platform offering including SalesOS, MarketingOS, OperationsOS and DaaS, consolidating out multiple providers in the process. From a product perspective, we continue to focus on delivering customer success with easy-to-use features that drive quick time to value. These investments are paying dividends in the form of improved customer satisfaction and higher engagement. NPS rose 7 points year-over-year with growth every quarter. Our recent AI enhancements to Chorus have increased NPS for that product by 22 points year-over-year and overall product engagement has increased by more than 20% this year. We also continue to receive market recognition. Snowflake named ZoomInfo an enrichment data category leader in their 2023 modern marketing data stack report. ZoomInfo obtained an AWS competency relative to our expertise in digital customer experience. And we also stand in the top 0.01% of companies with the most number one rankings being awarded 101 number one rankings in G2’s Fall Reports. We’re leveraging new AI technologies and partners to create customer-facing insights and drive data collection and validation at scale. On the customer-facing side, we are now extracting strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and other insights from earnings calls and public filings which, when paired with our highly accurate data, scoops, intent and other insights provides sellers with the key insights they need to engage an account and close a deal. LOMs are also integrated into our existing profilers and data validation pipeline, helping us understand the validity of a human name, title and educational data listed on a profile and driving further improvements in our industry-leading accuracy, which sits at an all-time high coming out of Q3. We have also been incredibly focused on our international data offering, and following recent significant investments there, our customers now have access to over 200 million business contacts in markets outside of North America. In the last two years, we have grown the number of global companies in our data platform by more than 6x, while tripling the number of global contacts and the number of global mobile phone numbers available to our customers. In Continental Europe, specifically, we’ve expanded our mobile numbers by 13x, while growing mobiles in the UK by 6x. With this expanded coverage, global sales teams can count on ZoomInfo when targeting international markets while knowing that our commitment to ethical data collection and compliance remains front and center. As we continue to move up market, the pace of innovation accelerates, and we’ve been closely partnering with our customers to push the envelope on what modern go-to-market looks like. Cutting-edge go-to-market teams are no longer working in traditional sales systems such as the CRM. They deploy data analysts and data science teams to take a holistic look at their customers and market and then they use AI to drive sales planning, account prioritization models, next best actions and more. AI is only as good as the data powering it. So in the third quarter, we launched our integration with the Google Analytics Hub to help these data science teams unlock the value of ZoomInfo insights and models directly within Google’s Cloud data warehouse BigQuery. This reduces the time and resources needed to execute AI initiatives and more quickly make business decisions. In addition to accessing data in modern cloud systems, enterprises must understand a single 360-degree view of their customers to effectively go to market. Our new integration with Reltio, a data management solution, provides ZoomInfo’s B2B reference data directly within the master data management capabilities of Reltio, making ZoomInfo more integrated and actionable in the enterprise. Together, we are also launching a joint go-to-market solution for master data management. Our new partnership with The Trade Desk expands our customers’ ability to reach more premium publishers, enhance campaign fulfillment and opens display advertising opportunities around the world. This partnership supports the next generation of features for MarketingOS with international audiences and the ability to support new ad set types within our DSP. As a result, September was our highest monthly ad spend on record for MarketingOS. Down market, we’ve been investing in self-service e-commerce capabilities to ensure that companies of any size have the ability to access ZoomInfo data no matter their budget. We’ve built more robust trials, the ability to purchase a single SalesOS seat, improved pathways and paywalls for in-app upgrades and a streamlined technology-driven onboarding motion for our self-service users. Overall, we remain focused on improving our platform and delivering results for our customers. By investing to drive a simplified user experience, easier ways to transact with us, and building upon our data quality advantage, we are controlling the controllable. We’re confident that when the economic environment improves, these investments that we’re making today will position us for long-term growth and success. Before I turn the call over to Cameron, I want to acknowledge our team members in Israel. We have more than 400 employees in Israel with offices in Ra’anana and Tel Aviv, many of whom have been called up to active duty or a member of their family has been called up to serve. We stand with them during this incredibly difficult time, and our number one priority is to make sure that they and their families are safe. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Cameron.

Thank you, Henry. In Q3, we delivered revenue of $314 million, up 9% year-over-year and up 0.6% sequentially as adjusted for days of revenue recognition. We continue to believe that current momentum in the business is best measured by the sequential growth of annualized revenue, and we do not anticipate material improvements in the macroeconomic environment that could provide a tailwind to activity in the near term. Adjusted operating income was $126 million, a margin of 40%. GAAP net income was $30 million and GAAP EPS was $0.08 per share. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.26 per share. We continue to experience pressure with respect to renewals; we see customers renewing at lower rates despite improving utilization and engagement. Customers are upselling less and downselling more than we saw in the first part of the year. Additionally, our smallest customers continue to be challenged in their ability to pay, which drove another quarter of elevated write-offs. We continue to expect that this cycle of renewals will be challenging through at least the first quarter of 2024, impacting revenue growth through the first half of next year. Our greater than $100,000 ACV customer cohort declined modestly in the quarter as we saw continued pressure from mid-market technology companies reducing spend to levels below $100,000 while non-software customers over $100,000 continue to grow. We now have 1,869 customers with more than $100,000 in ACV. Our $1 million-plus customer cohort continued to grow year-over-year. And as Henry indicated, we signed multiple seven-figure deals and a $15 million TCV deal in the quarter. Our largest customers continue to expand with functionality, seats and data as we are increasingly integrating directly into their go-to-market motions. Advanced functionality contributed approximately a third of our overall ACV and continues to grow and provide incremental value to our customers. Within advanced functionality, we are seeing the highest levels of growth from MarketingOS, enrichment in DaaS offerings and automation capabilities. Our efficient and high-margin operating model with low capital requirements and upfront billing continues to drive substantial cash flow generation. Operating cash flow in Q3 was $81 million, which included approximately $18 million of interest payments. Unlevered free cash flow for the quarter was $95 million, representing 75% of adjusted operating income. As Q3 is typically a lower conversion quarter, we continue to expect annual unlevered free cash flow conversion in the ’90s as a percentage of adjusted operating income. We ended the third quarter with $568 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments. At the end of Q3, we carried approximately $1.25 billion in gross debt, all of which has fixed or hedged interest rates. We believe that the current environment provides us an opportunity to reduce our share count in a meaningful way, thereby giving remaining shareholders more ownership of the substantial compounding free cash flow growth that we are aiming for in the future. We have also adjusted our stock-based compensation strategy to include performance-based units that are only issued if growth targets for free cash flow per share are achieved. During the third quarter, we repurchased 8.8 million shares of ZoomInfo stock at an average purchase price of $18.19 per share. Through September 30th, we have deployed a total of $247 million of the $600 million share repurchase authorizations and have retired 12.7 million shares, representing over 3% of the total diluted shares outstanding. Given our strong free cash flow generation and healthy balance sheet, we expect to continue to opportunistically repurchase shares. Our net leverage ratio is 1.3 times trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA and 1.2 times trailing 12 months cash EBITDA, which is defined as consolidated EBITDA in our credit agreements, down from 1.9 times and 1.6 times, respectively, as of September 30, 2022. With respect to liabilities and future performance obligations, unearned revenue at the end of Q3 was $403 million, and remaining performance obligations, or RPO, were $1.1 billion, of which $795 million are expected to be delivered in the next 12 months. With that, let me turn to guidance. For Q4, we expect revenue in the range of $309 million to $312 million, adjusted operating income in the range of $122 million to $124 million, and non-GAAP net income in the range of $0.24 to $0.25 per share. For the full year 2023, we now expect revenue in the range of $1.232 billion to $1.235 billion and adjusted operating income in the range of $494 million to $496 million. We expect non-GAAP net income in the range of $0.99 to $1 per share based on 412 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding. We expect unlevered free cash flow in the range of $445 million to $455 million. Our adjusted full year guidance implies 12% revenue growth at the midpoint and an adjusted operating margin of 40%. With that, let me turn it over to the operator to open the call for questions.

Operator instructions: Our first question comes from Mark Murphy with JPMorgan.

Henry, I believe you mentioned a $15 million TCV deal that closed in Q3. And at such a rarity in this environment, I’m wondering if you could possibly shed a little light, first of all, on the contract duration, so we can try to annualize it. And also, just what vertical is it that’s moving forward with that scale of a commitment in this environment? And then, I have a quick follow-up.

Yes. So, it was a three-year agreement with a large software company. So the annualized revenue is about $5.3 million, it is actually $15.9 million total contract value. And what’s interesting about the deal itself is that it confirms the centralization of data strategy, they’ve consumed multiple contact cubes, company cubes, firmographic information and really just going all-in with ZoomInfo as the foundational data provider. And that’s where we landed it. We ended up growing it and locking it in for a three-year $5.3 million deal.

As a follow-up, Cameron, I don’t believe ZoomInfo’s revenue has ever declined sequentially into Q4. I’m wondering if we should sense some conservatism in that forecast, or should we figure that you experienced kind of a sufficient downsells toward the end of Q3, such that it would reduce the kind of top-line trend there and that potentially you do end up with a modest downtick?

So the environment does continue to be challenging, and we are expecting net retention for the year to be below 90%. As a result, in Q4, which is our highest period for renewals, that net retention below 100% creates a headwind that’s amplified by the higher concentration of renewals. So, as we’ve discussed, we believe that this renewal cycle will be challenging at least through the first quarter of 2024. I think if we look beyond that and you look at our renewal cycles, 90% of our ACV will have transacted between September 2022 and March 2024. So, we’re really focused on getting through this cycle. And while there is some tail of longer-term agreements after that, we’ll work through most of the space by the end of the first quarter.

Our next question comes from Tyler Radke with Citi.

Just curious what you’ve seen so far in the month of October. And specifically within the software and business services vertical, it sounded like that largely performed in line with your expectations, but just any updated thoughts if you’re seeing any green shoots emerging or if things are getting better or worse? Thank you.

October looks a lot like September and Q3 looked. So we haven’t seen any improvement in the environment. I think overall in the business, we continue to have more success outside of the software and business services verticals. And so, we’re seeing that in October as well, but nothing different than what we saw in Q3.

Our next question comes from Brad Zelnick with Deutsche Bank.

Henry, it’s clear you’re leaning in on AI and hearing the enhancements in Chorus driving your NPS score 22 points higher is really impressive. But in a world where Microsoft has Sales Copilot, Salesforce has SalesGPT, how do you ensure ZoomInfo is front and center as the interface sales professionals continue to use for the greatest insights and productivity and helping them hit their number?

I think this all comes down to the data and insights that we provide. And it’s one thing to be able to provide insights on data that exists in your CRM or data or insights that exist on the public web, but the vast amount of proprietary non-publicly available data and insights that we collect and are able to use AI and LLMs against, that’s what is making our product even more relevant for sales users. And without that proprietary data, without the information that sellers need to actually engage with their customers and know when to engage with their customers, any AI you put on top of just generic data doesn’t spit out relevant insights for a sales rep. And so, we’re really confident that the underlying foundation of data and insights that we have at ZoomInfo, which is proprietary and not available publicly, is what will drive that pane of glass for sales reps.

Maybe just for you, Cameron, with RPO and CRPO down sequentially amidst everything that’s going on, how much of that might be duration or anything else maybe to call out? And what needs to happen to see bookings stabilize?

Yes. So, as we mentioned, we do focus on sequential growth in annualized revenue as the primary metric to assessing period activity and momentum. That was down 0.6% in Q3, and so it is reflective of the challenges that we’re seeing from the environment. Other metrics can be influenced by other factors, including changes in the mix of contract lengths and billing terms and write-off assumptions. Probably the biggest one of those that showed some volatility was write-off assumptions, which have increased during the course of this year and specifically impact RPO in a negative way.

Our next question comes from Michael Turrin with Wells Fargo.

Cameron, I appreciate some of the color you’re making on retention rates and the impacts that you’re seeing. Is that comment you made around the challenges you’re seeing potentially lingering until the first half of next year mostly a function of getting through this heavier renewal period? And is it similar to what you’re assuming for what you’d expect for the first half from a retention or a sequential growth perspective, if that holds? And maybe just for Henry, as a complement to that question, are there certain processes you’re able to put in place to help with those renewal conversations as you’re having more of those and have had more time to build response, or maybe anything you’re doing on the go-to-market side just as you work through the renewal period at the end of the year. Thanks.

So I think I’ll kick off there. Thanks for your question. Again, I think we’ve talked with a number of people in the past that our view is that peak negativity, particularly with respect to layoffs and many other factors, kind of occurred earlier this year. Therefore, we do think we need to get through the renewals with our customers. As I mentioned before, between September 2022 and March 2024, we’ll have transacted with approximately 90% of our ACV. And I think we really need to get through that period of having renewed or sold ACV with those customers ahead of time. The assumptions really are very focused on renewals. New business continues to be relatively strong. Obviously, the environment impacts that as well. But the sales efficiency of our new business team and the demand that we see continue to be good out there, and we continue to bring on new customers to support that. So, we’re really focused much more on mitigating and getting through this renewal cycle that we’re in right now.

I think the big things we’re doing from a process perspective on renewals is, number one, we’re getting at them sooner. We’ve built a robust set of health scores for our customers that take into consideration product engagement, product usage, provisioning of user licenses, integrations and usage of specific products and functionality. We have a much clearer view of the health of an account, and we’re engaging with them. Our account managers and our CSMs are engaging with them based on those health scores. So, we’ve been proactively reaching out to those clients who come up for renewal in Q4 and Q1 throughout the back half of this year. We also have a really broad product portfolio, so we have opportunities within the customer base if one product got downsized or a customer had a big layoff and so they have fewer licenses that they need for SalesOS, we’re able to bring them into Chorus or OperationsOS or other parts of the product portfolio. We’ve been leveraging that in renewal conversations as well.

Our next question comes from Brent Bracelin with Piper Sandler.

Maybe we’ll start with Cameron, one quick follow-up for Henry. Cameron, you’re obviously talking about challenges here in Q4, guiding to a sequential decline in Q4, talking about continuation of challenges into the first half. Should we also think about small sequential declines into Q1, Q2 before you see a reacceleration? And then, one quick follow-up for Henry.

Yes. So, we’re not guiding to 2024 at this time. And frankly, I think for all software companies, it’s probably less visibility further out than there has been historically. We do continue to expect that this more challenging renewal environment will persist through at least Q1 of 2024 and will impact sequential revenue growth through the first half. Once we’re through this cohort of renewals, there is the opportunity to drive higher growth rates, but it remains a challenging operating environment. We certainly don’t want to get ahead of ourselves as to when exactly that reacceleration might occur.

And then, Henry, for you, obviously, clearly, a challenging environment, you’re still finding ways to close large deals. My question is on the boomerang deal. Surprised to hear a customer switched 10 months later, they’re coming back. Can you just give color around what drove the boomerang deal back to ZoomInfo and how should we think about that going forward? Thanks.

When I started this business 17 years ago, I started it with the premise that high-quality data made a major difference in the way companies go to market. There have been cheap alternatives to what we offer for the last 17 years. If you’re not doing your diligence and you’re not an incredibly sophisticated buyer, you can make a switch and then you realize almost instantly that high-quality data does, in fact, make a difference in your go-to-market motion. That’s what we saw here. We saw a customer who switched to a low-priced offering and then immediately came back and meaningfully increased their spend with ZoomInfo and did it across the platforms. We’ve always competed in a way that said, when you have high-quality data, whether you’re an account executive, an account manager, a sales development rep, marketing operations professional, CMO or CRO, that information makes a meaningful difference in the way that you acquire, find and grow your customer. And customers see that. So there are a lot of boomerang customers that we find who go try something new and then immediately come back. In this case, not only did they come back, but they meaningfully increased their spend with us.

Our next question comes from Koji Ikeda with Bank of America.

Maybe a question for Cameron here. You mentioned from September to March of 2024, you’d gone through about 90% of your ACV leaving 10% that still needs to be renewed. But the way I understand the comment was that of that 10%, some of them have already down sold in the second quarter of this year. So maybe could you help us describe the composition of that remaining 10% of ACV post March of next year?

Yes. So, to be super clear, about 90% are customers that we’ve transacted with from September of 2022 through March of 2024. Those are longer-term contracts that transacted sometime before September 2022, and therefore, we’re likely in a more constructive environment when they initially entered into that contract. So, that remaining 10% tends to be larger customers, but there is some risk for those customers that they would perceive a worse environment than when they transacted either in 2021 or the beginning of 2022 as they come up for renewal later in 2024 or potentially even later than that.

I wanted to ask a follow-up on the $100,000-plus ACV customers. As we look at that metric, this is the third straight quarter of sequential decline here. And if we continue to pull forward at a similar pace, it would actually imply a year-over-year decline in the fourth quarter. So maybe you could help us decompose this metric a little bit. Ex-technology, did this metric grow?

Yes. I think in every quarter this year, ex-technology, and honestly if you just strip out mid-market software—largely venture-backed software companies—if you strip out that group, this metric has grown every quarter this year quarter-on-quarter and would continue to show growth as a result.

Our next question comes from Alex Zukin with Wolfe Research.

I wanted to ask about NRR. Henry, you mentioned it was sub-90%. Are we at a bottom and now taking that rate over a larger cohort into Q4? Or could this get to the mid-80s or low-80s in Q4 and Q1? And then on margins, what’s the plan? It sounds like the first half will be challenged from a revenue growth perspective. Are you going to grow OpEx by more than or less than revenue growth during this period?

With respect to net retention, it continues to be a tough world out there. When we set up the guidance, we do assume that it continues to have a negative impact on net retention. With respect to margins, our goal right now is to maintain margins in that 40% level on an annual basis. Historically, if you look at seasonality of margins, we tend to have somewhat lower margins in Q1 and Q2 based on the way that revenue recognition sets up and typical merit cycles. So realistically, we’re aiming to keep the annual margin at that 40% level, but you should continue to think about seasonality and how historical seasonality of margins has played out.

Got it. And then a clarifying follow-up: I know you’re not guiding next year, but is the second half days-adjusted sales revenue growth or sales outstanding a reasonable way to conceptualize the first half of next year for modeling?

I think we’ve consistently said we see challenges with respect to the environment and will see challenges through at least Q1 of 2024. In my mind, the range of sequential growth that we’ve seen in 2023 is a good starting point for that period. Certainly, there’s an opportunity to accelerate after that, but I don’t want us to get ahead of ourselves on timing given market uncertainty.

Our next question comes from Morgan Stanley.

On sales efficiency, you mentioned in Q2 that trends ticked down slightly in June after showing signs of stabilization in Q1. Any update on how this metric performed in the quarter? And what steps can you take to help this into a better demand environment going forward? Also, you made a few recent changes at the leadership level. Any quick comments on any changes or impacts we should expect from these going forward?

The environment does continue to get more challenging. That particularly impacts sales efficiency, more so with existing customer sales efficiency than anything else. Efficiency with our existing customers continues to be challenged and is more challenged in Q3 relative to Q2. New sales efficiency continues to hold reasonably well. We do see a much higher concentration of our new sales with companies outside of technology, which has helped us go after customers where there is more demand right now.

Maybe just a quick follow-up on the leadership changes.

I think the big opportunity for me and for the business is a flattening of the organization that gets me closer to our customer base, closer to revenue and customer success and customer support. Over the last 60 days, I have met with over 200 of our account executives and account managers and roundtables across the Company. I’m constantly meeting with our customers. I don’t anticipate any meaningful disruptive changes from these leadership changes; it’s more about increasing focus and alignment across go-to-market and customer success.

Our next question comes from Kash Rangan with Goldman Sachs.

How seriously is the Company taking the attrition rates, which seem to have spiked, especially among the mid-market business? Some of it is not controllable if somebody is going out of business or cutting salespeople. But when you isolate those instances out, what are you learning from engagement with the product itself that you can make it a stickier proposition that integrates into a complete loop so it’s harder for customers to unhinge from your data source? It seems to me that attrition should be contained better than what you’re experiencing. What are you doing to fix this?

We think about this in a number of ways. From product and engineering, we’ve been working to simplify the user experience and make sure customers are not just using ZoomInfo as a lookup tool, but actually plugging it into ongoing workflows. NPS scores are up each quarter, our core SalesOS NPS is up over 20 points, and product engagement is up meaningfully. We’re focused on making the product easier to use and plugging it into ongoing sales or marketing workflows. On customer success, onboarding and implementation, we made changes in June to ensure customers see quicker time to value. Those changes are netting out positively—customers are using the product more quickly post-implementation. We’ve materially grown our customer success team to share best practices and solve support issues, and we’ll continue to invest across product, onboarding and customer success.

Given the divergence between retention of large customers versus the middle of the curve, how are you planning to win those mid-market customers back? You had a notable boomerang case; what’s the plan to bring back others who have defected?

It’s worth noting that churn rate has not significantly improved; it’s slightly worse than it was in 2022 and 2021. The biggest driver of the change in net retention is reduced upsell and more downsells. So the main difference is not that we are losing customers, it’s that they’re spending less with us. Much of that is due to lower seats and tighter budgeting. For the vast majority of cases, it’s a reduction in spend rather than a lost customer.

Our next question comes from D.J. Hynes with Canaccord Genuity.

Henry, you’ve talked more about data-as-a-service or enrichment of late and the potentially favorable economics there. How recurring are DaaS agreements generally? Do customers spend a lot up front and then less in maintenance later, or is there an ongoing commitment that makes those revenue streams more linear and recurring?

Those are recurring subscriptions to our data, living alongside customers’ CRM data, Snowflake or Databricks data. This data constantly changes; people change jobs, companies are incorporated, and we track these changes at scale and feed them in real time into customers’ systems of record, whether marketing systems, enterprise data warehouses, or CRM. So these are ongoing contracts. One key point is that customers telling us they want to drive generative AI use cases often find their existing data insufficient. When we provide high-quality, accurate data, we can drive their AI initiatives. That need for high-quality data gives our DaaS offering increased spotlight and demand across enterprise and mid-market customers and in SMB via our platform workflows.

Our next question comes from Joshua Reilly with Needham.

You mentioned the expanded international coverage. How are you prioritizing the expansion of the Company and contact database internationally? Are you going by geography or some other way of expanding that? And what inning are you in terms of getting the international database to where you want it to be to properly monetize it?

We are going where our customers go. We have tremendous telemetry in our platform that shows how customers search and what countries and sizes of companies they’re looking for. We also do user surveys to understand additional needs. Growth in contacts and mobile numbers is driven specifically by where we see customer demand. We’ve done this country by country and region by region. We believe our international solution is far and away better than competitive or native solutions, and we are monetizing it. There’s still opportunity to enhance the data asset, so I’d say we’re around the seventh-inning stretch.

With the stock price depressed, you bought back 8.8 million shares. How should we think about leaning further into the repurchase over the next several quarters given you still have a healthy amount left on the current authorization?

Our plan is to continue to opportunistically repurchase stock based on where it’s trading relative to what we perceive as long-term value. At these levels, we’ll continue to lean in. We do have a fair amount left on the authorization, and we’ve continued to buy stock in October and will continue to do that going forward.

Our next question comes from Taylor McGinnis with UBS.

Last quarter part of the hit was customers who had renewed lower in the past still renewing lower. Now that we’re in Q4 and coming up on lapping some of the bigger layoff activity, for those who did lay off at this time last year, can you comment on how those conversations are progressing? Are you still seeing them take down seats further? Is that trending better than expected?

Overall, it continues to be a tough environment. We continue to see customers that renewed at lower levels last year continuing to have pressure with respect to their purchases this year. Given that some customers’ layoffs happened later or had multiple rounds, it’s hard to say we’re lapping the easiest comparisons yet. We haven’t seen a broad recovery among those customers as of mid-October.

Our next question comes from Raimo Lenschow with Barclays.

Cameron, you talked last quarter about headwinds through Q1 next year. Compared to last quarter, has your sense changed? Is it about the same, or do you expect Q2 slightly better or worse? Second, if you think about a downturn, usually everyone focuses on cost cutting. At the later stages of a downturn, people usually start thinking about sales and growth again. Are you seeing those conversations at least at an early level yet?

In terms of where we were compared to last quarter, we did expect the environment to get worse than it had been. We don’t see current trends indicating the operating environment is improving, and in some instances people are more worried than they were at the end of last quarter. So overall, the view is roughly consistent and remains cautious.

If you’re in the boardrooms of private equity or venture-backed businesses today, there is not a push for companies to grow faster; there is a push to cut costs and pull profitability forward. I don’t think we have turned the corner where investors are pushing private companies to get back to growth. Many remain focused on maintaining or continuing cost cuts.

Our next question comes from Brian Peterson with Raymond James.

I think you mentioned non-software growing at the low-20s clip last quarter. Is that still the right ballpark? And for that non-software piece of the business, how would you categorize the NRR of that category versus the broader figure?

The operating environment continues to be challenging and, as expected, it was worse in Q3 than Q2. That weakness is not confined to software. Non-software growth did decline; it’s below 20% year-over-year this quarter. We continue to see demand in non-software industries, particularly on new business. Retention in non-software is well above the overall average, but there are challenges there as well.

Our next question comes from Rishi Jaluria with RBC Capital Markets.

Henry, you talked a bit about PLG and leaning more on self-service e-commerce capabilities. Can you expand on what you’re doing there, what the roadmap looks like, and how early traction or customer reception has been?

This year we’ve been building the infrastructure and testing self-service and e-commerce capabilities with our downmarket customer base. We’ve seen good traction; our ability to sell in a self-service e-commerce way down market has grown quarter-over-quarter every quarter this year. Today we’re focusing the offering on the lowest end of the market where we can drive efficiencies by taking a sales rep out of the motion. We’ve built technology onboarding so customers can onboard in a self-service way. We’ve noticed that technology-driven onboarding has meaningfully driven up usage and adoption post-implementation, and we’re confident this product can drive efficiencies and growth in the down market. We are in the early innings, but optimistic.

Our next question comes from Terry Tillman with Truist Securities.

Across the different OS solutions—SalesOS, MarketingOS, etc.—are you seeing any segments more resilient than others related to existing customer activity or new customer wins?

Within advanced functionality—functionality outside of SalesOS and the add-ons to SalesOS—MarketingOS has done really well and is growing. We also see a lot of growth in our DaaS and enrichment capabilities as well as automation capabilities. Those often land in OperationsOS or in automation areas of SalesOS, such as Workflows or Engage. We’re seeing more interest from customers in those areas, driven partly by data strategies related to AI and partly by efforts to drive efficiency and automation.

Our next question comes from Jack McShane with Stifel.

I’d be curious to ask James what some of your top priorities and changes are in the go-to-market at ZoomInfo and where you see the biggest opportunities as you step into the new role?

Thanks, Jack. The biggest opportunities we see include leaning into the DaaS-led motion that we’re seeing in the seven-figure upmarket cohort and taking that into the lower end of the enterprise and the mid-market. We need to ensure the customer success motion shows customers how to ingest data into their data lakes and how to activate it. When customers use the full breadth of our platform, we see continued success and growth. Over the last 18 months, we’ve built out a world-class enterprise team and are seeing success there; continuing to scale that is a top priority.

I’m showing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call over to Henry for closing remarks.

Thank you everybody for joining us. We really appreciate it.

And this concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.