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spk03: Good afternoon and thank you for attending today's Momentive Q4 2022 earnings call. My name is Jason and I'll be the moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star followed by one in your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Gary Fugis, Vice President of Investor Relations.
spk06: Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Momentum Global's fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings call. Joining me on the call today are Priyanka Kaur, COO, Xander Lurie, CEO, and Rich Sullivan, CFO. After management's prepared remarks, we'll take your questions. Prior to this call, we issued a press release with our Q4 and full year 2022 financial results, which can be found on our investor relations website at investor.momentum.ai. During the course of this call, management will make forward-looking statements which are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including statements relating to our strategy, including the restructuring plan we just announced, financial outlook, investments, revenue, operating margin, and free cash flow. Actual results may differ materially from the results predicted, and reported results should not be considered an indication of future performance. A discussion of the risks and uncertainties related to our business is in our filings in the Securities and Exchange Commission, in particular in the section entitled Risk Factors, in our quarterly and annual reports, and we refer you to these filings. Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures unless otherwise stated. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not a substitute for or in isolation from our GAAP results. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results may be found in our earnings release, which is furnished with our 8-K file today with the SEC and may also be found on the Investor Relations website. Finally, please note that the growth rates cited in today's prepared remarks are on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Xander. Xander?
spk05: Thank you, Gary, and thank you all for joining us today. I'm going to walk you through some of the important changes to the business we announced today, including a decision to reduce the size of our workforce and our continued effort to drive profitable growth. Rich, then, will discuss our Q4 financial results and outlook. For Momentum, 2022 was all about resilience. We began repositioning the company in late February and ran the business with more operating rigor in the face of a more challenging macroeconomic environment. We delivered meaningful operating leverage during the year, culminating in Q4 results that included 19% non-GAAP operating margin in Q4 on $122.4 million in revenue. Both metrics exceeded the high end of our guidance ranges. As part of our repositioning, we streamlined our sales organization in October to make our customer acquisition and expansion motions more efficient. We believed this would be sufficient to help us both navigate a more challenging selling environment and achieve our long-term goal of delivering more profitable growth. However, it's become abundantly clear that we need to take more strategic actions to succeed in 2023 and beyond. After a thorough review of our business, we've concluded that our best path forward is to, one, Further lower our cost structure across the organization. Two, focus our resources on the products that win, retain, and expand with customers most effectively. And three, standardize our most important offerings onto our core platform and one pricing model. Our go-forward plan includes the following. Reducing our workforce by approximately 14%, which impacts all major functions of the organization. Shifting our customer experience product focus away from Get Feedback and making SurveyMonkey Enterprise our CX solution for new and expansion customers. Transitioning our market research sales-assisted products to a subscription model. And prioritizing free user engagement and paid user growth in self-serve by providing more features in our free offering and more affordable options in our paid plan. These are significant changes, and we do not undertake them lightly, but these decisions are supported by data and customer feedback. Since combining the CX and SurveyMonkey Enterprise sales teams in early 2022, we validated that SurveyMonkey Enterprise is a very competitive offering for CX use cases, with consistently stronger overall win rates and renewal rates than GetFeedback. Going forward, SurveyMonkey Enterprise will become our CX solution and we plan to build additional functionality into our core survey platform to better support CX customers, including leveraging some of GetFeedback's strengths in analytics and Salesforce integrations. We plan to maintain GetFeedback for existing customers as we make this transition. Ultimately, we believe this move will enable us to drive more expansion opportunities with SurveyMonkey Enterprise customers, our largest sales-assisted customer base. and allow us to deliver more innovation and customer value through products run on a single core platform. In market research, we've delivered awesome products and won blue-chip logos, but we've sold these products primarily on a credits basis, which makes customer engagement more project-oriented and RevRec less SaaS-like. We began rolling out subscription-based products with the successful launch of brand tracking in 2021. demonstrating that the subscription model can work here. In Q3, we began piloting broader subscription-based selling, and in Q4, we hit our stride. We closed over two dozen subscription deals in the fourth quarter that would have been project-based engagements under the prior model. And we doubled the mix of subscription business in market research from approximately 20% in Q3 to more than 40% in Q4. We believe we now have the right selling and packaging formula to transition market research to subscriptions in 2023. We believe this will result in higher quality, more sustainable revenue from our market research solutions. And in self-serve, our work in 2022 validates that getting back to the basics of product-led growth is the way to fully reinvigorate that channel. We make further progress in Q4, including driving sequential growth in free plan science, improving survey deployment rates, and improving conversion rates from responsible pricing and packaging. From here, we'll work to improve our ability to engage more users and capture more value from those who are willing to pay for the value we deliver. As we focus on these three priorities, we expect to expand margins further in 2023. The changes to the cost structure we announced today put us on a path to double non-GAAP operating margin in full year 2023 versus full year 2022. I take full responsibility for the decisions that led to today's announcement. In short, the investments we've made over the last few years are not delivering returns sufficient to justify the costs. We believe the changes we've announced today are the right strategic steps to manage the business through a tougher short-term environment and position the company for more profitable growth over time. 2022 was a challenging year. The board executive team and I are incredibly grateful for the dedication and hard work the momentum team delivers for our customers and their colleagues. For those who are leaving us, we will do our best to help them succeed in their next steps. For those who are staying on, we are committed to partnering with you to win as a team. I'll now turn the call over to Rich, who I want to formally welcome to our executive team. I'm looking forward to you getting to spend time with him, and I am confident you'll appreciate his strength as our new finance leader. He's a great addition to our culture, and he's already adding value to how we run the business.
spk01: Rich? Thanks, Xander. And I'm excited to join the exceptional team here at Momentum and be working with all of you. I also look forward to working with the people on the phone today and getting to know you all better. As Xander pointed out, we're making some significant changes to the business. And while there's a lot of work to do in the coming months, I believe the steps we are taking today best positions Momentum for sustainable long-term success. We continue to deliver valuable products that attract and retain loyal customers. as evidenced by our strong renewal rate. I believe we're making the necessary changes to these products and to our cost structure to come out of these challenging times a stronger company with a commitment to deliver profitable growth. As stated in today's press release in 8K, we announced plans to streamline our product offerings that simplify our go-to-market strategy and improve operating margins going forward. Unfortunately, the plans involved a reduction of the company's talented workforce by approximately 200 individuals or 14%. We estimate that we will incur approximately $7 to $9 million in charges related to employee severance and employee benefits in connection with today's announcement. We expect that the majority of these costs will be incurred and paid during the first quarter of 2023, and the execution of the plan, including cash payments, will be substantially complete by the end of the second quarter of this year. Turning now to the full year Q4 2022 financial results. Unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are year-over-year. For full year 2022, revenue increased 8% to $481 million. On a constant currency basis, revenue increased approximately 9%. The sales-assisted channel revenue increased 27% to $181 million, and self-service revenue to $300 million in the year, essentially flat. In 2022, we generated $7.9 non-GAAP operating margin, which exceeded the high end of the guidance range of 6% to 7% the company initially provided in May of 2022. Free cash flow is $0.2 million and reflects the impact of approximately $33 million in restructuring and deal-related cash outlays. As Xander pointed out, 2022 was a challenging year, both because of a failed deal and an increasingly difficult macro environment. Many of our customers have been part of cost-cutting initiatives at their own company, especially in the tech sector. Budgets are more limited, and potential new customers are putting every deal under greater scrutiny. This is clearly having an impact on our ability to grow new customer contracts. In the end, much of the investments we made to aggressively scale and grow the top line through sales to new customers did not yield the desired return and has led to many of the changes to our cost structure we announced earlier today. In the fourth quarter, as expected, we saw a continuation of the challenging selling environment, especially internationally. Q4 total revenue increased 4%, so $122.4 million, putting us above the high end of our guidance range. On a constant currency basis, revenue increased approximately 7%. U.S. revenue increased 8% to $81 million, and now accounts for approximately two-thirds of total revenue. Rest of the world declined 2%. primarily due to foreign exchange and additional challenging macro environment headwinds. Sales service revenue declined 6% to $73.1 million. As Xander mentioned, we continue to make progress in reinvigorating this channel in Q4, as evidenced by sequential growth in free plan sign-ups, improving survey deployment, and improved free-to-pay converse rates. While revenue for our sales-assisted channel increased 27%. While revenue for our sales assistant channel increased 23% to $49.3 million, we saw a continuation of a challenging selling environment. Existing customers, while not immune to economic issues, continue to be resilient as renewal rate and expansion success for our subscription products increase year over year. We ended the quarter with approximately 14,500 sales assistant customers, up 23%. Excluding team customers, average revenue for a sales assistant customer was up 13% year-over-year. And more than 2,200 customers are spending $25,000 or more with us annually, up 16%. Deferred revenue increased 3% to approximately $207 million. Remaining performance obligations, or RPO, which is a somewhat deferred revenue backlog, rose 5% to $239 million, partially driven by continued traction and winning multi-year customer commitments. Turning profitability, non-GAAP gross margin was 85%, a record level, and 138 basis points increased from a year ago today. Non-GAAP operating margin of 18.8 exceeded the high end of our 14% to 16% guidance range due to the previously mentioned gross margin strength, continued operating rigor, and the measures we began taking lower sales and marketing expense, and streamline our go-to-market motion. All operating expenses improve sequentially and year-over-year on both a dollar basis and as a percentage of revenue. Q4 operating margins benefited from bonus accrual reversals. Note that the full impact of the reversal is expected and included in the Q4 guidance range the company provided on our last call, but it's important to keep in mind when comparing sequentially to Q1 2023 margins. Net cash provided by operating activities was $8.2 million, and free cash flow was $6.6 million, with a free cash flow margin of 5.4%. Excluding the impact of 4.3% of restructuring-related expenses, Q4 free cash flow would have been approximately $11 million. The end of the year was $18 million in net cash and cash equivalents, which reflects the impact of $83.5 million of shared repurchases during the year. Our outstanding authorization of our share repurchase program was $116.5 million as of December 31, 2022. Turning to our outlook, for the first quarter of 2023, we expect total year-over-year revenue growth to be between 0% and 2%. In Q1, we expect to continue to see the impact of the steps we took in 2022 to reduce spend, resulting in a Q1 non-GAAP operating margin guidance of 6% to 8%. Note that Q1 operating expenses are seasonally higher than Q4 through the timing of employer-related accruals and taxes, as well as marketing spend, which is typically higher in the first half of the year. Based on the visibility due to these challenging macro environments, as well as potential short-term impact of the strategic changes we made today, we will not be providing full-year guidance. However, improving operating margin will remain a top priority in 2023. and the changes to the cost structure we announced today put us on a path to double non-GAAP operating margin on a full-year basis. Despite the uncertainty and macro headwinds, we are committed to continued cost discipline and controlling spending to deliver strong full-year margin improvements while still investing in the areas of business that will drive profitable growth. With that, I'll now turn it back to Daniel. Thanks, Rich. I'll turn it to the operator and have him take questions.
spk03: If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you'd like to remove that question, please press star followed by 2. Again, to ask a question, hit star 1. Our first question is from Ryan McDonald with Needham. Your line is now open.
spk04: Thanks for taking my questions and welcome, Rich. Great to have you on. Maybe, Xander, just starting out, as we think about the outlook for 2023, I understand you're not providing guidance for the full year, but maybe just in the context of first quarter, can you give us a sense of sort of what those expectations are in terms of the trajectory on both sales-assisted versus self-serve? And then, you know, in that context, you know, what maybe as a part of this transition is creating enough variability where you don't have that sort of visibility from a full-year perspective?
spk05: Well, I think I'm inspired by the product market fit and the satisfaction and joy our customers get from our products. So you can see the gross renewal rates both in the web channel as well as in the sales assistant channel are healthy. Clearly the new environment for demand on the web and in sales has deteriorated over the last year. And so I don't have bright visibility on when those new cohorts of customers will come back in stronger numbers. You know, I'll say we're inspired by the expansion efforts that our sales team has employed, and that's primarily selling market research and additional SurveyMonkey enterprise to existing customers. And so we've seen really good uptake there. And on the web, we continue to experiment, you know, with pricing, packaging, as I mentioned on the call, you know, unveiling some new, more affordable annual plans, and really just getting more users to try our products and see the full – value of our features before asking them to pay. So we're employing a whole bunch of different tests that we're excited about. I think you will continue to see really healthy renewal rates. But look, the current environment and macroeconomic environment where you see layoffs and droves every day, particularly in sectors where we have some customer concentration, do present headwinds. And frankly, you know, it's just not the best use of our time to provide visibility into Q3 and Q4 numbers right now. We know what we need to do to win, and then we'll come back each quarter and tell you how we did.
spk04: Okay. And then as you're sort of shifting focus and sort of de-emphasizing some offerings, emphasizing others, shifting to a new pricing strategy, I guess how is that being sort of relayed to customers and What's the risk here that we kind of have to go through some churn as you sort of shift to new pricing models and to new, I guess, branding models on some of these products here?
spk05: Yeah, I mean, there's always a risk of churn when you have either product changes, business model changes, pricing changes. The goal here is that CX has always been a primary use case of SurveyMonkey on the web and SurveyMonkey Enterprise. And in acquiring gift feedback and building out a new product offering, We were able to attract a new cohort of customers with a product that had particular strengths, and I'm proud of the work that team did. But in a world where we need to rationalize resources, drive incremental profitability, we recognize there's quite a bit of overlap in terms of what those products offer. And so what you'll see us do is just dial down investment in that arena, renew those customers as best we can while trying to track them over to our flagship SurveyMonkey Enterprise CX offering. And then on the web, of course, we're constantly iterating. We've got a terrific growth team that is data science driven and making sure the new features we offer, new plans, pricing, maximize both customer value but also bookings and revenue for us. So I've got a lot of confidence in this team as we both transition products and also pricing plans that we will be both business model focused as well as NPS focused.
spk04: All right. Thanks for the call. I'll hop back in the queue. Thanks, Ray.
spk03: Our next question comes from Robert Culveris with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.
spk08: Great. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to ask a little bit more about the decision to move away from Get Feedback for CX. Maybe some more context on how large the Get Feedback business is today, the size of the book of business, maybe how fast it's been growing. And if you could give us an update on any functional differences that remained in the products, certainly like Enterprise versus Get Feedback. And I guess just follow it on the last question, you know, maybe just give us a sense of your confidence in your ability to continue to serve those customer needs with SurveyMonkey Enterprise going forward. Thanks.
spk05: Sure. Thanks, Robert. I'll kick it off and then I'll hand it over to Pri. You know, yeah, I think we've said in the past that the standalone CX represents less than 10% of our total book of business. As I mentioned before, you know, SurveyMonkey Enterprise has a robust, set of features for CX and also a robots customer base. And so I'm confident that the folks who love GetFeedback will continue to renew GetFeedback while we build that bridge and maintain that bridge for GetFeedback customers to walk over to SurveyMonkey Enterprise. And so the team is hard at work on analytics capabilities, Salesforce integrations, so that we can deliver that customer delight across both product suites and ultimately steer our investments into SurveyMonkey Enterprise. Priya, what do you want to add to that?
spk09: Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I would just add that we're transitioning the GFC Get Feedback product, but not stepping away from CX. As Xander mentioned, CX is close to our top use case on SurveyMonkey Enterprise and that core platform. We have customers currently using it heavily for those CX use cases. We have very, very strong overlap on the capabilities with Get Feedback Direct. So we're confident that we can service those customers onto our SME platform. Our product innovation roadmap going forward is really focused on strengthening that CX use case, but on our core platform. So that includes the analytic capabilities, strengthening our integrations, making them more native, and the team that built us all of those great Get Feedback capabilities is the team that will be supporting that work going forward. So I have high confidence that the SurveyMonkey Enterprise product will serve the CX use case incredibly well. It already does so today, and the investments we're making and streamlining into a core platform will allow us to deliver even more value to those customers.
spk08: Great. Thank you.
spk03: Our next question comes from Chad Bennett with Craig Holland. Your line is now open.
spk05: Hey, Chad.
spk07: Hey, Xander. Thanks for taking my question. So just want to dig in a little bit on the self-serve side. You talked about, you know, seeing kind of green shoots there in terms of free plan sign-ups increasing sequentially, and I think you indicated increases in conversion rates. We also... kind of caught, and I just want you to confirm this, that I think on the Advantage plan, you implemented a pretty decent price increase on that plan in the quarter. Just trying to get a sense for, you know, obviously that business, you know, accelerated downward on a year-over-year basis in the fourth quarter. Do you have enough data? Do you have enough confidence where the rate of decline improves kind of, you know, throughout the year, or how should we think about that? Thanks.
spk05: Yeah, we are busy making a lot of changes to stabilize that business, and I am confident that we have arrested the fall. Clearly, we did not see the kind of uptick in Q3 and Q4 that we had modeled in and hoped, and so we're taking appropriate actions. Whether they be our own business model decisions or macroeconomic doesn't much matter. I think the team has got a speed on what we need to do, and we've deployed some of those. As I mentioned, this doesn't happen overnight. A lot of the work we do, whether it's in SEO or in product or in pricing and packaging, there's a funnel from a user coming to servemonkey.com the first time between that day and when she ultimately pays for a plan. We tried some things last year that didn't deliver the kind of success we had hoped. I think we've made a lot of progress, and we will do our best to deliver results this year that show Q4 was the low mark. Priya, anything you want to add?
spk09: Just specificity on that. You're correct. We did do a price increase on our Advantage customers, our existing ones, and that rolls into positive impact on the renewal basis. They renewed throughout this year in 2023. The green shoots that give us confidence are the ones Xander mentioned earlier. Our free plan sign-ups are growing positively in the U.S. Deployment rates for those user-sending surveys also grew. One of the strongest indicators of upcoming conversion. And we've taken action to optimize the conversion rates as well on that business. So a lot of positive indicators that give us confidence that We have a good trajectory forward, but also most importantly, continued testing and optimization in a challenging macroeconomic environment to make sure that we're pricing affordably to value and getting access to most customers throughout the year.
spk07: So you haven't seen any kind of incremental or outsized negative gross churn impact from the price increase on the Advantage plan is what I'm getting. Is that the correct take?
spk09: Did you see some churn increase? Sorry, go ahead.
spk05: No, you've got it.
spk09: I was just saying, we always optimize the price increase with the churn impact on it, and so any price increase does impact churn to some extent, but this is to a subset of our customers, and the net impact through our testing is net positive on booking.
spk07: Perfect. Okay, got it. And then maybe one clarification for me at least. Could be for Rich or Xander. Just on the sales-assisted customer count, just want to make sure I heard it right. Is it 14,500? That's correct, yeah. Okay, and that's comparable to 15,400 last quarter or not?
spk01: That's correct.
spk07: Okay, all right. And just real quick, maybe last one for me on... The sales, sorry, yeah, the sales assisted side of the business. I guess, did you notice anything in the quarter from a bookings or billing standpoint? I think he hinted towards international being tougher, but, you know, did you actually see, sorry, more scrutiny or pushouts or elongation of sales cycles in the fourth quarter on that side of the business?
spk05: Oh, for sure. Yeah, I mean, harder quarter all around. I think you see some of the customer churn on the sales assistant side of the house was obviously at the lower end, lower price points, because you saw that our overall kind of average revenue per customer was up nicely year over year. But the most sensitive enterprise customers had higher churn in the quarter. And sales cycles on new customers are just more challenging. You have folks that have more scrutiny on their budgets. You have buyers that were laid off. and just a more difficult selling environment in new.
spk07: Got it. Thanks for taking my question.
spk05: Thanks, Jeff.
spk03: Our last question comes from Parker Lane with Stifel. Your line is now open.
spk02: Hi, this is Matthew Kickert for Parker. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. First off, kind of on operating leverage for fiscal 23s, you're looking to gain leverage there. Are there any other areas that you're looking to cut costs this year outside of the restructuring plan that you announced today?
spk01: I appreciate the question. You know, I think we have multiple paths here to get to that operating margin target for 2023. As Deirdre pointed out, it's a challenging macro environment to predict, but what we do control is cost. And so I believe we have many levers to pull to make that operating margin in 2023. We'll continue to monitor the market and adjust accordingly. But on the cost side, driven by a lot of the changes we made today, we're on the path to have double margin year-over-year.
spk02: Okay, got it. And then as you're transitioning, focusing more on the enterprises and the sales motions there, what high-level investments are you still making in the self-service channel?
spk05: Bree, you want to take that?
spk09: Yes. In the self-service channel, we continue to invest in features on our product capabilities there that really improve usability of the product, covering of use cases that are common for our self-serve, smaller customers or smaller teams, and discoverability. A lot of our work as well, as we've alluded to before, is really optimizing the value we deliver to customers, how easily they can access that value, and the pricing that goes along with it. So we have a growth team, a data science team that is constantly optimizing that with a change in macroeconomic environment. So you should expect to see a lot of changes on that throughout the course of the year. that we keep delivering on. We're also building capabilities into the product that make it easier with AI for users to get to the value moment. So being able to send a survey and receive responses and get insights from that. Those capabilities extend both to our self-serve products and our enterprise capabilities and our enterprise products as well. So continued investment in this area, especially as it is a really important feeder of our sales-assisted enterprise businesses and strictly linked to the products that we sell on the sales-assisted side.
spk02: Okay, fantastic.
spk03: Thank you.
spk08: Thanks, Matthew.
spk03: And our final question is from Robert Kulbrith with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open. Thank you.
spk08: I just want to ask a couple of follow-ups. First on the sales-assisted customer count, could you remind us of the impact from the S&B sales force rationalization and sort of definitional change versus organic trends there? And then I wanted to ask, I think last quarter you pointed out that in terms of new business, maybe a little focus upmarket, thinking that the macro might drive some increased churn. among some of your larger competitors' customers. Just wondering if you can give us a sense of anything you're seeing in the market there, if that thesis is playing out so far. So those two. Thank you so much.
spk05: Yeah. So on the sales assistance side, our customer count was down about 900 customers Q4 over Q3. And that, as I mentioned, was mostly concentrated in the SMB area, so lower spending customers. And then on the new selling environment, as I mentioned, I would say that the vast majority of our investment time, people, energy, marketing demand for the last several years was focused on winning new business. And that has swung dramatically towards renewing and upselling existing customers, 14,500 customers where we have a relationship, we have a contract, we're delivering value, they're seeing the benefit of our deployment. So for every single one of those customers, there is more business to win and more value to deliver. And the ROI is just a lot better there than in the new area. We are competing for customers who are churning out some of our more expensive competitors. We are winning there. Now, the numbers won't overcompensate for losing some of the smaller SMB customers we have, so it will be difficult to derive those wins there. But we're seeing folks roll off of some of our more expensive competitors who are looking for an offering, and we deliver great value there. It's on us to make sure that our marketing and selling teams get in front of those So we'll keep you posted on progress. We have delivering product market fit, upsell. You saw that our $25,000 customers was about flat, down maybe two dozen to the tune of $2,700 in Q4. And obviously those are the customers that are buying bigger deployments, buying multiple products, and ones that are getting the disproportionate share of our attention.
spk08: Great. Thanks again.
spk05: I want to thank everybody for joining us today. We believe we're taking the right steps to navigate what is a pretty choppy short-term environment and position the company for more profitable growth over time. And once again, I just want to send my heartfelt appreciation to the Momentum team for all their dedication, folks who are staying with us, and folks who are departing as well. I want to wish you all a happy and healthy evening, and we'll look forward to chatting again soon.
spk08: That concludes the conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your
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