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spk00: First Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. The conference call will be recorded and simultaneously webcast at investor.uplandsoftware.com, and a replay will be available there for 12 months. By now, everyone should have access to the first quarter 2021 earnings release, which was distributed today at 4 p.m. Eastern Time. If you have not received the release, it's available on Upland's website. I'd now like to turn the call over to Jack McDonald, Chairman and CEO of Upland Software. Please go ahead.
spk05: Thank you, and welcome to our Q1 2021 earnings call. I'm joined today by Rod Favrone, our President and Chief Commercial Officer, and Mike Hill, our CFO. I'll summarize our results in recent sales, product, and operations. Following that, Mike will provide some insights on the Q1 numbers and our guidance. Then we'll open the call up for Q&A. But before we get started, Mike will read the Safe Harbor Statement. Thank you, Jack. During today's call, we will include statements that are considered forward-looking within meanings of securities laws. These statements are subject to risks, assumptions, and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially. A detailed discussion of these risks and uncertainties are contained in our annual report on Form 10-K, as periodically updated in our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. The forward-looking statements made today are based on our views and assumptions and on information currently available to Upland Management as of today. We do not intend or undertake any duty to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statement. On this call, Upland will refer to non-GAAP financial measures that, when used in combination with GAAP results, provide Upland Management with additional analytics to understand its operations. Upland has provided reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures in our press release announcing our first quarter 2021 results, which is available on the investor relations section of our website. Please note that we're unable to reconcile forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures to their directly comparable GAAP financial measures because the information which is needed to complete a reconciliation is unavailable at this time without unreasonable effort. And with that, I'll turn the call back over to Jack. Thanks, Mike. In the first quarter, we restarted our M&A engine. We completed two strategic and accretive acquisitions. Second Street blew then. And we did that while posting strong free cash flow of 12.5%. And that's even after... acquisition expenses. And while there can be no guarantees, our goal is to make 2021 a strong year for acquisitions. Our acquisition pipeline is robust and we are active in the market for additional opportunities. And as we've noted before, our acquisition program is now self-sustaining as our free cash flow and financial resources mean that we're no longer dependent on the equity capital markets. In the first quarter, we had 9% total revenue growth. As expected, adjusted EBITDA came in at 31%, reflecting our go-to-market investments. Our Q1 free cash flow was $12.2 million. We had 3% recurring growth in the organic side. Now, when you exclude political-related revenue from the first quarter of 2020, the comparison period, our recurring revenue organic growth was 6%. On the sales front in the first quarter, we expanded relationships with 283 customers, 45 of which were major expansions. We also welcomed 118 new customers to Upland in the first quarter, including 32 new major customers. Product side, we expanded security and collaboration capabilities across the Upland product portfolio with three major releases and five feature packs. In our project and IT management product suite, we delivered product integrations with key partners, Salesforce and Sage Intacct. And following the Upland and HP Hewlett Packard joint announcement in the fall, we released new capabilities in our document workflow product suite in support of HP WorkPath. And these apps will provide HP customers the ability to capture and digitize documents from multiple sources, for example, faxes, emails, scans, electronic content, to extract and index key content and then route documents for further action directly from their HP-specific devices. Again, on the acquisition front, as I mentioned, Q1 was an active quarter for M&A. We closed the acquisition of BlueVen, which is a leading customer data platform, anchoring Upland's customer experience management suite with a single view of the customer that will drive deeper engagement across email, SMS, mobile applications, and online. We also closed the acquisition of Second Street, another nice addition to our CXM suite. Second Street's interactive content and contest capabilities give our customers more ways to engage their consumers to drive revenue. As I mentioned, the M&A pipeline is strong, and again, while there could be no guarantees, It's our goal to make 2021 a very strong year for acquisitions. We are active in the market for additional opportunities. So with that, I'm going to turn the call back over to Mike. Thank you, Jack. I'll cover the financial highlights for the first quarter and our outlook for the second quarter and full year 2021. On the income statement, total revenue for the first quarter was $74 million, representing growth of 9%. Recurring revenue from subscription and support grew 11% year-over-year to $70.7 million. Professional services revenue was $3 million for the quarter, a 22% year-over-year decline, which was expected due to the COVID-19 travel impacts. Overall gross margin was 67% during the first quarter, and our product gross margin remained strong at 68%, or 72% when adding back depreciation and amortization, which we refer to as cash gross margin. Operating expenses, excluding acquisition-related expenses, depreciation, amortization, and stock compensation, were $30.4 million for the first quarter, or 41% of total revenue, all generally as expected. Also, acquisition-related expenses were approximately $9.6 million in the first quarter, and, of course, these acquisition-related expenses will continue as a result of our renewed acquisition activity. I will note that $1.2 million of this Q1 expense is related to an office lease exit from last year's acquisition. Acquisition-related expenses are generally 50% to 60% of acquired annual revenue run rate. and varies from acquisition to acquisition depending on uncontrollable factors such as geographic location. Generally, for each acquisition, 45% to 50% of these transaction and transformation expenses are incurred within the first three months and then taper down rapidly until complete by the acquisition's first anniversary. Our first quarter 2021 adjusted EBITDA was $22.8 million, or 31% of total revenue, down 7% compared to $24.6 million or 36% of total revenue for the first quarter of 2020. As expected, adjusted EBITDA was lower due to our increased go-to-market investments compared to last year. Now on the cash flow. For the first quarter of 2021, GAAP operating cash flow was $12.5 million and free cash flow was $12.2 million, even with $9.6 million of acquisition-related expenses in Q1. We also had some positive changes in some of the working capital accounts, like collections on accounts receivable. 2021 free cash flow should be over $30 million and possibly over $40 million, depending upon the size and timing of future acquisition. So we are focused on generating substantial gap operating cash flow and free cash flow even after acquisition-related expenses. So for the balance sheet, This ongoing free cash flow generation is in addition to our existing liquidity of $246.7 million, comprised of approximately $106.7 million of cash on our balance sheet as of March 31, 2021, and our $60 million undrawn revolver. This ongoing cash flow generation, available capital, and expanding our credit facility while maintaining net debt leverage of up to a maximum of around 4.0 times should allow for self-sustained growth without dependency on the equity markets. I should note that our net debt leverage is currently at around 3.5 times based on the midpoint of our 2021 adjusted EBITDA guide. With regard to income taxes, I will note that Upland currently has approximately $356 million of total tax NOL carry-forwards, and of these, we estimate that approximately $215 million will be available for utilization prior to expiration. As of March 31, 2021, we had outstanding net debt of approximately $345.2 million. After factoring in the $186.7 million of cash in our balance sheet, I will note that principal payments on our term debt are 1% per year or about $5.4 million per year, with the remaining balance in August of 2026. The interest rate on our outstanding term debt is locked at 5.4%, making our annual cash interest payments approximately $30 million at our current debt levels. Additionally, I will point out that our term debt has no financial covenants on current borrowings. Now for guidance. For the quarter ended June 30th, 2021, Upland expects reported total revenue to be between $73 and $77 million, including subscription and support revenue between 70.2% $3.2 million for growth and recurring revenue of 6% at the midpoint over the quarter into June 30, 2020. Second quarter 2021 adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $22 and $24 million for an adjusted EBITDA margin of 31% at the midpoint, representing a reduction of 3% at the midpoint over the quarter into June 30, 2020, reflecting our incremental investment in our go-to-market activities. For the full year ending December 31st, 2021, Upland expects reported total revenue to be between $299 and $311 million, including subscription and support revenue between $285.3 and $295.3 million for growth and recurring revenue of 5% at the midpoint over the year ended December 31st, 2020. Full year 2021 adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $94.4 and $100.4 million for an adjusted EBITDA margin of 32% at the midpoint, representing a reduction of 3% at the midpoint over the year into December 31, 2020, again reflecting our incremental investments in go-to-market activities. So with that, I'll pass the call back over to Jack. Thanks, Mike. And now we're ready to open the call up for Q&A. Please feel free to direct questions to Mike, Rod, or me.
spk00: We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the key. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. And our first question comes from Bavon Suri of William Blair. Please go ahead.
spk02: Hi, everyone. This is Jake on from Bavon. Congrats on the great quarter. Just first off, would love to hear how the Blue Ben and Second Street acquisitions are progressing. I know it's early, but just would love to hear about the initial interest from current customers.
spk05: Yeah, great. Thanks for the question. So very excited about both Blue Van and Second Street acquisitions, both accretive acquisitions, but also highly strategic. Both of them fit into our CXM product suite. and fulfill some key functions there. BlueBan is a CDP, customer data platform, and it enables us to maintain a centralized record on behalf of our customers, of their consumers. so that they can create automated marketing campaigns, which they can then execute across multiple digital channels, right? And we've already got those capabilities as part of our product portfolio around SMS and text delivery, in-app and push notification, email, and web. This adds a very powerful core platform to our CXM suite. On the Second Street side, a key challenge for our customers is to continue to build their database of consumers. And so Second Street brings to the table a number of proven technologies and interactive content and contexts that can be used to drive subscriber and user databases and thus increase the effectiveness of our customers' consumer marketing campaigns. Two great acquisitions. The integration is proceeding as planned on both of them. One of the things that we're doing differently today with Rod's leadership is beginning to drive cross-sell campaigns for these products much sooner than we would have before. Really looking at that product fit and how we bring acquired products into our existing sales distribution is now a core part of our pre-closing diligence, and we really like to hit the ground running now on that. So let me pass it over to Rod to give his thoughts on kind of early days of pushing those products through our channel, cross-sell, and early observations there.
spk06: Yeah, so building on that, obviously we started tucking Second Street in earlier in the quarter and Blue Bend a little bit later in the quarter. And as Jack said, those two products themselves can leverage each other as Second Street being that place to really gather audience data to decorate the database that we got from Blue Bin. So fairly crisply, it's very early in integrating both these companies, but fairly crisply we were able to get um our uh cxm customer experience management sales people um uh cross-selling those products with the second street and blue bin sales team so we we uh part of the playbook that really we really worked on last year was making that a much more crisp and quick process of getting those in front of our customers and so uh you know that we're excited about just sort of how quickly we were able to get that out there look it takes time to sell enterprise software to people and build pipeline But that got sucked in pretty quickly, and the sales cycles have already begun, and pipelines are getting generated for both of those products into our base.
spk02: Great. Thanks for the color. And then just a follow-up on the M&A funnel, where are you seeing the greatest opportunity? Do you think you'll continue to invest in CXM, or is it likely that you'll target a different segment with the next acquisition?
spk05: So we've got a very strong pipeline right now really across all four key product suites and, frankly, in some other use cases in the enterprise because there are really six or seven use cases or buying centers that we're addressing. So it's a pretty strong pipeline across those. My guess would be the next one will be outside of CXM. And, you know, there's a lot that we're looking at. on contact center. There are some opportunities in document workflow as well as in PITM. So I think you'll see activity in all of those areas as we move through the year. Great. Thanks for taking my questions.
spk00: The next question comes from Brent Phil of Jefferies. Please go ahead.
spk01: Hi, this is Love Soda on for Brent Hill. Congrats on the free cash flow number this quarter. Maybe the first question is for both Rod and Jack. I guess, you know, it's been a little bit over a year since Rod joined the team. And I know you mentioned it's still early, but wanted to ask, like, if we were to frame this in, like, baseball terminology,
spk06: what innings of the cross-sell journey are we in and maybe like when could we see that cross-sell motion really taking hold in terms of driving organic revenue growth yeah so this is rod i'll start and jack can color or commentate here um so i appreciate you pointing out that i've been here for a year um we have made a lot of progress over the last year in go-to-market infrastructure and the flying formation. Just sort of as a refresher, we've added new executive leadership in marketing sales, customer success, the head of global accounts. We hired his team of eight global account managers to manage our top 175 customers vertically. So those teams are now in place and ramping on their knowledge of the customers and building pipeline. And we like what we see there. The other thing we did was retooled demand gen bottom-up. So you'll see a new Upland website we launched in late January, really designed to drive pipeline, frankly. And then the other thing we did, which we set up late last year but built out and finished building out in Q1, is qualifying sales development rep team and SDR team. We now have a team of 15 SDRs centrally located there. really catching and qualifying all of our lead flow that the marketing team is focused on generating. So we've been doing a lot of foundational work to get the team in a place to continue to grow. As part of that demand gen machine, if you will, a lot of the proactive campaigns we're running now are very cross-sell specific. And the cross-sell pipeline is showing good growth. Again, these deals take time to convert. You know, a couple of things I'll point out. While we have made a lot of good progress on go-to-market, you know, remember our net dollar retention rate did decrease about 300 basis points last year due to COVID. And obviously, in a recurring revenue business, we have to wait until we fully lap that COVID impact in order to see and appreciate really the improvements and go to market. So I'll just sort of add to that. This is a, you know, multi-core journey into 22. And as we say, there are no guarantees on outcomes, but we think this work is definitely preparing us to scale to the next level as a company.
spk05: Yeah, and so – The only thing I would add is, you know, I think Rod has really catalyzed a different kind of go-to-market culture here at Upland, and he's walked through the key moves he's made on personnel and on process and now increasingly on product as well as the distribution piece. We couldn't be more excited about it. Consistent with what he said from the beginning and what Mike and I have said, it is a multi-quarter journey. And I think you start to see this really beginning to hit as you move into 22. And as Rod said, there can be no guarantees on outcomes. We've got a great suite of products here, a tremendous customer base, and we think the opportunity is there to really drive cross-sell and new logo acquisition as we go forward. So we're excited about where we can take it.
spk01: One quick follow-up, if I may, on the overall demand environment. Obviously, You know, as Rod pointed out last year, you did see some impact, although not the whole lot from COVID, but some impact. So as we see the economy open back up, you know, with folks coming back to work and stuff like that, are you seeing overall spend on thaw and, you know, going into the back half of the year, will that change? benefit you to a certain extent? Thank you.
spk05: Yeah, I think that's consistent with our outlook. Now, we'll see how the year plays out. And you're right, the business proved to be incredibly resilient last year in the face of COVID. And so the you know, net dollar retention rate was still, you know, mid-90s, even given the pandemic, which is impressive. And I think you're seeing the demand environment begin to move back toward a more normal pre-COVID environment. Our gut is that that takes a few more quarters to fully play out. So we're going to, you know, maintain a conservative outlook on that. But in terms of trend, you know, it seems to be positive.
spk01: Got it. Thank you.
spk00: The next question comes from Scott Berg of Natum. Please go ahead.
spk05: Hi, everyone. This is John. Good evening. I'm Scott. Thank you for taking my question. As far as the mobile messaging products go, and this has benefited a lot during the last election cycle, what are you seeing as far as usage rates for those products today relative to six months ago? Obviously, they're going to be going down a lot, but not zero. Is there anything you can quantify there as far as usage rates go? Thank you. Yeah, I know. Thanks for the question. So what we wanted to do when we talked about this last year was share with investors a transparent view of demand with and without the political revenue that we saw last year. Obviously, we had a spike in usage related to the presidential election cycle. So that's why we're breaking out that organic growth number And so that's coming in, you know, that organic growth number X politics, you know, mid-single digits, 6% this quarter, but right where we would have expected it. And then, you know, there are a lot of applications for messaging beyond politics, and obviously we're focused on growing that business and feel great about CXM as a long-term offering for Upland.
spk04: Great. Thanks, guys.
spk00: The next question comes from Jeff Vannery of Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.
spk07: Great. Thanks for taking my question. Several for me. I think, I guess this is also Ron and Jack. If I look at the bookings, I know we don't get a bookings report on the quarter, but quantitative or qualitatively, how did bookings come in for the quarter? You know, maybe a little more color in just describing them, in line with expectations, particular surprises in strength, and maybe challenges as well. And then also, you know, pipeline makeup. I know you referred to some early, you know, indicators of the cross-cell, but just any other color around the breadth and depth of pipeline would be helpful.
spk05: Yeah, so... Thanks, Jeff. Booking's in line, consistent with our expectations for this year, which I mentioned a moment ago, which is that the recovery will play out through the course of the year. It's not a sort of snap back on phenomenon, right? So in line with how we had those numbers budgeted until we feel good about that. In terms of pipeline growth, I want to kick that one to Rod because there's been a lot of great work that's been done in building a lead gen engine at Upland that we really didn't have before. And again, all in context, this is a multi-quarter journey, but there's some exciting stuff going on. Rod, speak directly to that.
spk06: Yeah, so happy to. One other color point on bookings, we did see a little more new versus expansion in the mix, which I think we'll see. We expect to see that as we kind of come out of COVID here. We talked last year about a little bit more expansion in the mix bookings, and we saw a little bit of movement on that where a little more new kind of got into the mix bookings. To Jack's point, the SDR team is kind of our new pipeline engine. We obviously generate multiple ways. Our customer success folks find expansion pipeline. Our salespeople find their own pipeline. We have partners we work with, like HP, we talked about a minute ago. We drive pipeline, but kind of that sort of inbound pipeline that we run through our SDRs is They had, frankly, a strong first quarter. They literally hit their seats January 4th with a new quota for pipeline creation, and our expectations were modest given that the team is new, and they got to those with a little bit of upside. The other dynamic of the pipeline, we saw a couple anecdotes, and we're watching for this. As we come out of COVID, we expect more. shorter sales cycles. There is some pent-up demand out there. It's not released yet. We don't know when that'll happen, but we saw a few what we call create and close. anecdotally during the quarter where you know the deal qualified in in january and closed in march um which you don't usually see we certainly didn't see during quota during covet and and we saw we only saw anecdotally in q1 so don't draw a line to that but it's it's just early indicators i think that both the legion engine that we put in place is going to start working um and again our sales cycles are not in weeks they're measured in months so and sometimes quarters So it's going to take a while to get on the other side of this and see bookings. And I did mention before, we track cross as a percent of our pipeline, and that's growing. So, you know, we know what we're doing there is starting to work.
spk07: Yep. Helpful. And maybe one, I guess maybe a two-part question, actually. But as I look at, I think the earliest efforts that you made, Rod, coming in were primarily around renewables. some of the low-hanging fruit. I know you put leadership and process in there. Any quantification of the impact of those early changes? And then last one for me, the churn. I know you give the overall number on an annual basis, but maybe some qualitative commentary on just, you know, kind of how that's ebbing and flowing right now.
spk06: So I think the customer success, leadership, and processes we put in place – really um sort of segmented the team on you know major accounts minor accounts we we have other names internally for them but our biggest customers and the next biggest customers you you could probably guess how we segment them that that work is is definitely bearing fruit i think we have we have more energy on our bigger customers uh both with the global account guys and with our customer success team so that was really the really the biggest shift in just making sure the product roadmaps are aligned and we're sort of treating the bigger customers with more energy, right? So I think that, you know, from a process perspective, that's working. Sorry, Jack, I think you had a thought.
spk05: Well, just on the churn question, again, I think – You know, from our perspective, it's sort of consistent with what we're seeing on bookings. You know, in line and consistent with our expectation that the recovery out of COVID is one that plays out through the course of the year. Not a one-quarter phenomenon, but that you're going to see that sort of net ARR improvement as we move through the course of the year.
spk07: Sounds good. Great. And great to see the cash flow. So thanks for taking my questions. Appreciate it, guys.
spk00: The next question comes from DJ Hines of Canaccord. Please go ahead.
spk05: Hey, guys. I'll start with one for Rod and then a follow-up for Jack. So, Rod, if you build out the sales muscle, how are you thinking about retaining acquired sales talent versus maybe going outside of the organization and bringing in reps with broader solution selling experience, right? How do you strike the right balance there?
spk06: Yeah, great question. So, look, when we acquire a product, Bluevin is a great example. That team has been selling that product for years. They know that specific competitive landscape. Ironically, they know our products because we had already integrated with Bluevin. for example, with our Destra email product, which they were reselling at some point. And so that's a team where we want to keep the best, right? And so we focus on keeping the best talent on the go-to-market side of these acquisitions. You know, not unlike, look, many years ago, I ran a company that IBM acquired, and they left us alone for a year to be the experts on what we do before we got integrated. We do the same thing. We let these guys bring their expertise in. We integrate them into our bigger sales organization, and really the leverage comes in. If I've got a small Blue Van team or a small Second Street team, I can give them access to a much bigger Upland team, and that Upland team is introducing them into accounts, and those guys are the product specialists. That's how we think about it. And we want to keep as many of the best sellers as we possibly can, so we work to do that. You know, if they have sellers who aren't as productive or maybe they're newer, right, it's not as big a loss if they don't stick around, those acquisitions.
spk05: best ones and again we let them focus on what they know how to do really well and we open up doors for them and then their job is to cross train our team so a year from now a few months from now we have lots of people who can sell that product yep that makes sense and then uh jack in in response to one of the first questions around m a you referenced opportunities in in document workflow just just curious along those lines if there's any update on what you're seeing with your hp relationship Well, you know, I mentioned this in the opening remarks, and we highlighted it in the earnings release as well, but a very exciting relationship that has been developing, really a longstanding with HP, but a new initiative around HP WorkPath. which is so consistent with the vision that we've had for a document workflow to create this integrated, you know, hybrid, deploy in the cloud, deploy on-prem as needed capability that can ingest and mine and distribute content you know, across multiple channels. So we're very excited. I'm going to let Rod, you know, chime in on this because he's been, you know, directly involved in building out the relationship. And so let me let Rod give you his views on that.
spk06: Yeah, so obviously we're excited about this, really the standing up the cloud part of this story with HP. WorkPath is a big strategic initiative for HP, as they said publicly. Obviously, a gigantic hardware vendor trying to bring more solutions to their customer base. um we did announce that relationship uh the cloud part of the relationship back in the fall um we've now their sales organization is trained you know it's uh it's in their bag and they're off and running um so and we're meeting regularly um starting to you know train and build pipelines so we're we're excited about this particular relationship um it's actually we've worked with hp for a long time we haven't worked with them relative to WorkPath and our cloud solutions from a document perspective. So a new set of products for us, a new set of go-to-market with them, and it's as strategic as I think they believe this is. We're paying close attention to it. We're investing in it, both product and go-to-market, and we're excited about what's possible.
spk04: Very good. Thank you, guys.
spk00: Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, then 1. And the next question comes from Alex Schuyler of Raymond James. Please go ahead.
spk04: Great. Thank you. One for Rod following up on some of the discussion on the cross-cell early pipeline strength. I wanted to ask about some of the changes you've made on the product side in terms of packaging and bundling and targeting some of the verticals in particular. Anything you can share with how that's resonating within the top 200 or so major accounts? And are those packages fairly set at this point, or do they constantly require some tweaking? Thanks.
spk06: Yeah, so great question. Yeah, I mean, look, we've got a couple of different ways that we cross out. And, you know, obviously the most successful is adjacencies. You know, you own one of our customer experience management products, and we're talking to a common buyer who would be interested in another one. So we offer standalone cross-sell opportunities, and then we will do things like bundle our SMS and our email or bundle our email and our CDP. We went to market with Second Street just recently, bundling it with – our CDP and our email products. Because you can imagine a big part of the email mission is to build your database and audience development tools are perfect for that. And so that's really what we try and do is focus on where we can package things together, where it's a common buyer. Jack mentioned earlier, we've really simplified the buyers we're going to market to. You can literally navigate to our website now and there's a There's sort of a buyer path where you can see all the products that are relevant for you and, in some cases, see a bundle, for example. So, yeah, that's how we think about it. These bundles are going to persist. They're generally not temporal. We think they're available for when customers are ready to make the move. So we go with them. We really create them, and we think we'll support them for a long, long time.
spk04: Okay, great. Thank you. Jack, on the BlueVent acquisition, I think when we spoke after you first closed on it, you suggested it might have been your most strategic to date. And now hearing Rod talk about how it was already integrated with Adestra on the product side as well and the go-to-market side, and then the early synergies in Second Street, those comments make a lot of sense. I'm curious when you look at the pipeline of opportunities now, how many other ones fit a kind of similar strategic mold or was this really kind of unique opportunity?
spk05: That's a great question. The strategic bar for our acquisitions has been going up through time, right? This is a process that really started a couple, three years ago. And so what we're trying to do is build cohesive suites that serve key buying centers because that is what's going to create the velocity in part. It's what's going to create the velocity for cross-sell. So build those compelling product suites and core buying centers in the enterprise and then build that sales distribution channel. So as I look at, you know, the opportunities we've got across other suites, I see acquisitions of great strategic value. And these are acquisitions that fit within our size and valuation criteria. And so, you know, these are going to be accretive deals as well as deals that build out the pipeline and I think set the predicate for cross-sell as we get the sales distribution going. up and going.
spk04: All right. Very helpful caller. Thank you.
spk00: The next question comes from Terry Tillman of Truist. Please go ahead.
spk05: Hey, everyone. This is Connor on for Terry. Thanks for taking my question. I just had a question around the contact center products. It seems like there's a lot of CX efforts being focused in this area. I just kind of wanted to hear what you guys are seeing in this market. Thank you. I'm sorry, I lost some of that with a static. Can you repeat that?
spk04: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
spk05: So I just wanted to ask a quick question around the contact center product. So it seems like we're seeing a lot of CX efforts focused in this area. I just kind of wanted to know what you're thinking, what you're kind of seeing in this market. Yeah, let me let Rod offer his thoughts on that.
spk06: Yeah, so that's a really good point. We actually have, you know, for example, one of our acquisitions from a few years back, a company called Ranray, which is a voice of customer value proposition. It actually sits in our CXM suite, but we sell it to contact centers, right? So you just sort of highlighted where the overlap happens between the buying group And our customer experience products either are bought by marketers or they're bought by people who are touching customers in contact centers. And so we see the contact center space or what others might call a service cloud area as really a rich area for us. We only have a few solutions there now. Obviously, we've got a really strong knowledge management position there. We've got some call center telephony that really connects, you know, the phone and voice with CRM, a business we bought called, which really connects Salesforce.com service cloud to telephony. I mentioned Ray and Ray, which is really more voice of customer. Ironically, voice of customer. also input into Bluevin. So if you're actually surveying your customers, it's structured data that we tuck into the CDP and append to you as a consumer. So these things all sort of fit together. But I think contact center, you know, when we look at M&A opportunities and look at pipeline, you know, we want to see things in that pipeline in that area because we think that's a growing market in general, and we certainly have interest in growing our solution suite out. Very helpful. Thank you.
spk00: The next question comes from Richard Baldry of Roth Capital. Please go ahead.
spk03: Thanks. Can you talk just from a high level about how the M&A pipeline has sort of reacted or altered given COVID conditions? Sort of curious at the Willingness to sell has changed on the side of the vendor, the price sensitivity. Maybe there's some desire to sort of normalize operations before you sell it. And then, I guess tied to that, does it skew the ability to really evaluate the quality of a target if their retention also had a challenging 2020, right, as you'd expect? How do you view those through a lens of trying to compensate for the year that they've had? Thanks.
spk05: Thanks, Richard. The COVID impacts on pipeline, I think the first one is that, you know, there were folks that wanted to transact last year and could not. And so those deals are coming to market now. And so you've got a little bit of two years of supply, if you will, coming to market in one year. So I think that's good news from a buyer's perspective. I think there are some trends in the market around digital transformation that, as we know, have been accelerated by COVID. And so I think you've got folks that are looking to team up and see the benefits of becoming part of a larger organization that can bring access to customers, that can bring adjacent product sets, that can bring sales distribution to the table. I think our fundamental message to sellers around speed and certainty to close, that we've been a dependable buyer, you know, that – over the course of our career across a couple of platforms, signed maybe 51, 52 letters of intent and closed north of 45 acquisitions. So we take the process seriously and that we represent a great home for customers and for product and for a subset of high-performing employees. So I think all of those kind of fundamental factors remain in place. In terms of the kind of final part of your question, it's actually a great lens to look at how these products did through COVID. So obviously you look at, you know, you're going to put a little bit more emphasis into a trailing two or trailing three-year trend, but it's nice to see, you know, how – net ARR for these prospective acquisitions held up under COVID. And so it's kind of a great test, right? It kind of weeds out some of the weaker players and I think leads to a better overall quality of pipeline.
spk03: Great.
spk05: Thanks.
spk00: This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Jack McDonald for any closing remarks.
spk05: Well, great. Thank you very much for your time this afternoon, and we look forward to seeing you on the next earnings call.
spk00: The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation, and you may now disconnect.
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