Forrester Research, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Forrester's third quarter conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Vice President of Investor Relations, Tyson Seeley. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and hello, everyone. Thanks for joining today's call. Earlier this afternoon, we issued our press release for the third quarter of 2022. If you need a copy, you can find one on our website in the Investors section. I'm joined this afternoon by our Chairman of the Board and CEO, George Colony, and Forrester's Chief Financial Officer, Chris Fenn. George will open the call this afternoon, and Chris will follow with a financial update. We'll then go and take Q&A. We also have Kerry Johnson, Chief Product Officer, and our Interim Chief Sales Officer, Elizabeth Adelsberger, with us today for the Q&A portion of the call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this call will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as expects, believes, anticipates, intends, plans, estimates, or similar expressions are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements are based on the company's current plans and expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause future activities and results of operations to be materially different from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ are discussed in our reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information future events, or otherwise. Lastly, consistent with our previous calls, today we will be discussing our performance on an adjusted basis, which excludes items affecting comparability. While reporting on an adjusted basis is not in accordance with GAAP, we believe that reporting numbers on this adjusted basis provides a meaningful comparison and an appropriate basis for a discussion. You can find a detailed list of items excluded from these adjusted numbers in our press release. And with that, I'll hand it over to George.

Thank you, Tyson, and thanks to all of you for joining Forrester's Q3 Investor Call. Today, I want to cover two topics, our performance in Q3 and our continued transition to the Forrester Decisions Research Platform. Across our business, we saw good results in the quarter. We remain confident in our ability to deliver on our annual commitments to investors in a challenging macroeconomic and geopolitical environment. In the third quarter, Forrester's revenue grew 8% year-over-year, which was impacted by a 2-point foreign currency headwind. Margin increased, and earnings per share is up 39% year-over-year. Wallet and client retention are at 97% and 75%, respectively. Net contract value increase, or NCVI, is up 7% overall, down 3 percentage points compared to Q2. The Ukraine war and energy uncertainty have contributed to a slowdown in our European business. It may have the slowest NCVI growth of our three global regions. While overall NCVI growth has slowed, Forrester Decisions' CV continues to expand at healthy rates, driven partially by a strong off-cycle enrichment for this new product. We are reiterating our revenue guidance for 2022. Given ongoing expense management, we've raised margin and EPS guidance for the fourth quarter, and we continue to drive free cash flow. Chris will provide more details in a few moments. Turning to our products, Job 1 in 2022 has been transitioning clients to foreshore decisions, and this effort is on plan. The new platform has been available to our clients for 15 months, and it is on pace to be one-third of our CV by year-end. Now, there are four reasons why this transition is important. Number one, when clients move to Forrester Decisions, they graduate to larger contracts. Two, wall retention for Forrester Decisions is running higher than legacy products. With 16 different services, it is a powerful enrichment engine. Three, clients perceive enhanced value in forester decisions through embedded benchmarks, certification models, frameworks, and guidance sessions. And finally, four, forester decisions includes vision, strategy, and execution research. The latter will be highly relevant to companies if they look to sharpen their operations in uncertain economic times, making the product stickier. So as an example of the strong execution focus of foreshore decisions, we released planning guides in the third quarter. These are specific recommendations to help each of the 16 different executives we serve build their budgets for the upcoming year. And here's some highlights. Our surveys are showing that executives are overly optimistic about their proposed spending increases for 2023, and we are urging more restraint and financial discipline. While budgets will be generally curtailed, spending in customer insight technology, cybersecurity, and sales productivity tools should be protected. Tech executives should use this opportunity to optimize their software contracts, public cloud agreements, and digital innovation outsourcing contracts. And finally, companies should continue to spend on select emerging tech. Examples include Edge Intelligence, Turing Bots, which optimize software development, and Customer Privacy Technology. With the ongoing success of the new platform, we are accelerating transitions and will no longer be selling new legacy research contracts as of January 1, 2023. The product continues to attract important new companies. In the quarter, a leading U.S. sports brand, a global software provider, and a leading SaaS company all signed multi-million dollar, multi-year Forrester Decisions contracts. Turning now to our events business, Q3 was headlined by our flagship Technology and Innovation North American Forum, which reached record levels across all key metrics and was the largest technology event ever hosted by Forrester. Overall revenue for the event was up 120% year-over-year, and attendance was up 41%, including a tripling of our seat-level attendance numbers. Event sponsorship grew 162%, with strong renewals for the coming year. Forrester events continue to recover from the pandemic and are on track to beat 2019 revenue. So to conclude, over our decades of operation, Forrester has managed through many recessions and economic downturns. We are proven stewards of spending plans and assets in difficult economic times, and those disciplines will serve us well in this moment. I have confidence in our people to once again cope with macroeconomic adversity and emerge from these challenging times in a position of strength. Despite the market challenges, we will remain aggressive in the coming quarters. At present, we are ramping a record number of sales reps, which will grow CV in 2023 and 2024. As I mentioned earlier, Forrester Decisions is helping us push deeper with existing clients, and we believe that it will help us win new clients in our $80 billion total available market. I remain excited about the company's future, driven by the many opportunities opened up by Forrester Decisions. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Chris for a detailed financial update. Chris.