Good afternoon. Thank you for joining today's call. With me today are George Colony, Forrester's Chairman of the Board and CEO; Kelley Hippler, Forrester's Chief Sales Officer; and Mike Doyle, Forrester's Chief Financial Officer. George will open the call. Kelley Hippler will follow George to discuss sales. Mike Doyle will then follow Kelley Hippler to discuss our financials. We'll then open the call to Q&A. A replay of this call will be available until November 24th, 2017, and can be accessed by dialing 1-888-843-7419, or internationally 1-630-652-3042. Please reference the passcode 9333442#. 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. Some of the important factors that could cause actual results to differ as discussed in our reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. I'll now hand the call over to George Colony.

Welcome to Forrester's Q3 2017 Investor Call. I have several short updates on the business, then, I'm going to hand the call off to Kelley Hippler, the company's Chief Sales Officer. After Kelley's sales update, Mike Doyle, Forrester's CFO, will give a financial review of the quarter, and the three of us will then take questions. In the quarter, the company's revenue was at the upper end of guidance, and its operating margin and earnings per share exceeded company projection. Strong revenue performance in our Connect business, reprints, advisory, and events were the primary drivers of the better-than-expected revenue. Expenses were below targeted levels as we leveraged the customer engagement model to drive productivity in our selling organizations. On October 6, we announced that Forrester experienced a cybersecurity incident. The attack resulted in the theft of reports from a research database. Our systems were able to respond to the intrusion. This is now a reality of doing business for all companies. The test is how firms will respond and communicate following an incident. Our security and risk analyst guided us as we followed our research playbook on mitigating the effects of an incident. In addition, we continue to work with leading cyber technology providers, top forensic firms, and law enforcement to strength and protect the company assets. Turning back to the quarter, Kelley Hippler hit the ground running in Q3, and she continues to drive the new selling model forward. Almost all of the premier teams in the U.S. are now stood up, and the core selling team is nearly at full force. We have moved into our permanent Nashville office with expansion room for additional sales and operations personnel to be added over the next two years, and Kelley is going to give more detail in a few moments.…

Thank you, George. Q3 was an exciting quarter for the Forrester sales organization. We continued standing up teams in our customer engagement model, which has two selling motions Premier and Core. As a reminder, Core consists of our smaller clients who buy a limited set of the Forrester portfolio and are largely sold to and serviced by our inside sales team based in Nashville. In addition, we are maintaining a hub presence in both Cambridge and San Francisco for local clients. The Core segment continues to deliver strong results, and the team is very excited to be in our permanent office space in Nashville. Premier is comprised of our largest clients who deploy the more complex solutions that Forrester has to offer. We stood up our final four North American premier user teams in the customer engagement model this quarter. Now all North American premier user teams are operating with client executives who are driving the overall account strategy, customer success managers who are responsible for engaging our clients and ensuring that they are receiving value for their existing Forrester relationship, and solution partners who work with our client executives to drive enrichment across the Forrester portfolio. Three roles are working in concert, which is enabling us to deliver on our vision of helping business and technology leaders develop customer-obsessed strategies that drive growth. We are also seeing synergies across these roles that will lead to greater efficiencies in how we manage our territories. In addition, we had our first European user team enter the model, and based on the initial results and positive customer feedback, we're also piloting this model with two of our U.S-based premier vendor teams. We continue to be encouraged by the results on the engagement front when comparing the Q3 performance of the teams in the model as of April 1, versus prior year, we saw an increase in renewal rates of 10.2%, and a 3.6% increase in share of wallet. Underpinning the customer engagement model is the Ideal Client Profile or ICP that defines which industries we focus on, we are leveraging this information to optimize territory design and resource deployment, for example moving forward our new business teams will only sell to ICP targets as we know that these accounts will bring a higher lifetime value to Forrester than those that fall outside the ICP. As we work to finish the year out on a strong note, we are fine-tuning key processes and targeted headcount levels that will support our efforts to deliver consistent, predictable results in 2018 and beyond. With that, I will turn the call over to Mike Doyle to review our Q3 financial results.

Thanks, Kelley. I'll now begin my review of Forrester's financial performance for the third quarter of 2017, including a look at our financial results, the balance sheet at September 30, our third quarter metrics and the outlook for the fourth quarter and full year 2017. Please note that the income statement numbers I'm reporting are pro forma and exclude the following items, stock based compensation expense, amortization of intangibles, reorganization costs and net gains and losses from investments. Also for 2017, we continue to utilize an effective tax rate of 40% for pro forma purposes, for the third quarter of 2017, Forrester delivered revenue near the top end of our revenue guidance and exceeded pro-forma margin and earnings per share guidance. We experienced solid revenue growth in our content marketing, reprints, events and connect offerings. Our operating margin benefited mainly from lower than targeted headcount. We continue to exceed our targeted financial performance while we're working on significant initiatives within the company. Kelley updated you on the progress of our CEM initiatives, which is tracking ahead of our original schedule. We are beginning to see the benefits of our customer engagement model in our client retention rates. We continue to invest in product innovation with enhancements to our data products scheduled to roll out in the fourth quarter, in addition George spoke about our tap product and we have a number of digital improvements in the works for other products which we will have in the market in 2018. Now, let me turn to a more detailed review of third quarter results. Forrester's third quarter revenue increased by 4% to $80.4 million from $77.4 million in the third quarter of 2016 and increased 3% on a currency adjusted basis. Third quarter research services revenue increased by 3% to $54.2 million…

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Vincent Colicchio from Barrington Research. Please go ahead.

Yes, Kelley, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the regions you oversee in terms of ones that may have stood out or performed weakly versus expectations?

Sure, Vince. Thank you for the great question. I actually had the pleasure of visiting five of our different offices as we stood teams up over the course of Q3. We had several regions that performed very well in the quarter. Our premier vendor in U.S. government team continues to perform very well, our core team as I mentioned. And then what I would say is within some of our user teams we're seeing more sort of a bifurcation where those teams that have been in the model a little bit longer are outperforming those that have not, which leaves us very encouraged. So while we're not all the way where we want to be with some of our user teams, we are seeing improvement in terms of distribution across those teams.

And then you mentioned that you've got the first team on the new model in Europe. I'm wondering how that performance compares to what you've seen in the U.S.?

Sure. So we just stood up our premier European team at the beginning of September, so we'll have much more information on that on our next call because it is early days there. What I will say is the team was very excited and has embraced the model. And I think one of the things that we've seen as we've done these subsequent rollouts is by the time we get to a team at this point they've heard about the model, how it's working. And we're finding that teams are making that transition much more quickly. So I do expect to have some positive feedback on that when we get to our call after Q4.

And then, Mike, you'd mentioned that the consulting business continued to have some weak pieces and you'll see a residual effect. Are you confident that the areas of weakness or the strategy will get ironed out and we'll see good growth, say, next year?

Yes, I am, Vince. I think that we saw the backlog that was diminishing, and we highlighted in on the second quarter call. And I think it's a function of a couple of things. As we've moved into the new customer engagement model we have changed the way we sell our products and services; consulting is one of those. So I think we're seeing growing pains there. And we are continuing to refine the consulting value proposition and trying to look at where we best fit. We have strength in a number of areas, and we have some of our consulting practices that are doing exceptionally well. So I think we're going to continue refine and improve that. Yes, I do expect we'll see growth in that product next year.

Okay. I'll go in the queue. Thank you, guys.

And our next question comes from Allen Klee from Sidoti & Company. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi. So you talked that in as of April for the premier teams' renewals were up around 10%. Can you give us some perspective? I'm assuming not that many clients are renewing at this time of year. Maybe an idea of how much renews towards the end of the year or the beginning, so how much we can think about how that could provide an impact to next year. And then on the retention rates, kind of what we can think about to get improvements in renewals, and wallet share and enrichments. Thank you.

Sure. I'll tackle this first, and then I think that Kelley can add color. So the 10% improvement of renewal rate was for those deals that were renewing in quarter. So that metric was, we saw a 10-point improvement in our core research renewal, so that's encouraging. And I think overall, and Kelley can talk about it and give the color on improvement in retention of the team's in model. And on a year-to-date basis in our core user research, end-user research which was George referencing, we're up four points. So that's all good. Our biggest renewal quarter is still the fourth quarter. So we are coming into sort of the quarter that defines how we roll into next year. That said, we have moved a lot, I think we've talked about, into Q1. But it still remains our biggest quarter. In terms of tackling -- so I think to finish the point on retention, our goal is to rollout the customer engagement model to all appropriate teams. And we think that's going to have a really positive effect on retention as we move forward. As we get into enrichment, Allen, I think the bigger burden there falls to the product enhancements we're looking to do. And that -- we're adding some, which George mentioned, in Data, we're sort of doubling down in basically all five of our data products will see major enhancements in this quarter. And we're on version 2 of enhancement to the CX Index. We're also looking at a number of product digitizations across our research products. So we have a lot moving that way, and I think that's going to help us a lot to enriching the clients that we have. So I think that's going to be, as we progress through the years, steady improvement. And as a reminder, those metrics are rolling 12. So even as Kelley makes improvements, and we saw good improvement in this quarter, the impact on retention rates on a rolling basis is modified and tempered a bit because it's a rolling 12-month metric.

And just to add to that -- sorry. Our customer success management team has some predictive analytics. So they're working on leading indicators of things around engagement, around things like readership, enquiries, webinars, and event attendance. And month-over-month, we continue to see those metrics trending in the right direction. And I think as long as those continue to trend positively we'll continue to see that filter into the renewal retention results as we move forward. So we've been focused on leading indicators with the CSMs, and we'll expect to continue to see that filter into our renewal retention rates, especially in Q4 which is still our biggest quarter.

Thank you. And then strategies to sell more to your Chief Investment Officer type customers, could you comment on that?

Allen, we still don't have a formal to go after that market. That said, we do have some investment banking houses who buy our research. But we haven't designed a product to go after that segment specifically. And we don't have plans to do that…

I apologize. I meant CIO type customers. Sorry.

All right, well, that's different.

Sorry.

There we have products.

So, Allen, George here. I talked about this vendor, the new portfolio vendor artifacts. We were covering what we now call Now Tech extensively, we have 80 waves. But now we're extending the waves into what we call New Tech because as you see technologies accelerate companies have to move at very, very fast rates we're having to take risks on very, very new technologies and technology vendors. And so expanding the waves into the New Tech space we think is going to be a very, very big benefit for the CIOs. This part of it was actually designed with CIOs. They actually work with us around how to actually build that artifact. And the biggest risk for them is these small vendors, are they going to be here two years from now, are they well-funded, are they well staffed, who's behind them. So we think the vendor artifacts are really going to -- this is a very good new value for our CIO clients.

Okay. Thank you. Can you talk about how adding the new board members you think is changing the way you're running your business?

Yes, so we had a Board meeting yesterday. I think it's -- look we had a very good Board previously. But we're hearing new voices, I think new ides. They are younger. They're Silicon Valley. They're pushing the hell out of us around innovation, around speed. I mean they're just pushing hard on speed. And I will tell you, Allen, that we're not finished on this Board changeover. We're considering several other Board members as well. So I think this has been a very, very good move for us. Not only the Board meetings, but also in between Board meetings they're buddied up with members of the executive team, so they're -- new wisdom and new thinking is a new coaching from them. So that's my view. I don't know if you have any views on this, Mike?

I would say that I agree with you. I think that all of the Board members, that they've been nice addition. I agree the previous Board members were very good. I think this -- it's just a nice change. It's brining new and fresh thinking into our discussions. I agree their push for speed; I think they are challenging us more. And I think, yes, people with different backgrounds and perspectives that are helping us sort of change our thinking a little bit. So I'm very encouraged by it, Allen.

Allen, there are also new connections in the world they're making for us. They're making many more connections back into the West Coast, into startups, into venture. And that's all, I think, very good for us.

Okay. Okay, thank you very much.

Thanks, Allen.

And our next question comes from Tim McHugh from William Blair and Company. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks. Just kind of one question; I guess my other ones were asked, but the contrast I guess you talked possibly about retention, and I think it's rolling 12 months, but there's some improvement in that metric, yet client accounts were still weak. So, is the difference to kind of the new sales still lagging, or can you kind of bridge that gap and talk about the dynamic?

Yes, Tim, I think that what we -- there's an interesting phenomenon, I think this is the result of when Kelly came in, and I think she's taken an approach to a number of our smaller clients where we -- and by small I mean their dollar value with us not necessarily the size of client, which I plot. I think it was the right move where we're looking at their business is low engagement business and it cause -- it causes a lot of churn and we've made a conscious decision there like Kelley describe what she's done. That it's going to create a little bit of noise in client count over the next couple of quarters, but in terms of the long-term benefit in value to the business I think it's absolutely the right move. So, I'm to turn over to Kelly and let her tackle that one.

Thanks, Mike, and just to add to that this really is where the ITP strategy comes into play. We feel as though we can add a lot more value two clients that are within those key verticals that we serve and want to focus much more on deepening those relationships. And we're doing that in some cases at the expense of some of the smaller relationships we had with companies that were not a great fit for Forrester. We probably weren't adding a lot of value for them which was reflected in the low investment rate so, it really is about focusing our sellers time which is one of the most precious resources we have on those accounts where Forrester can do the most to help those companies.

And as we look at the data so 90 days in when Kelly made the decision what we saw Tim is that the amount of non renewals for clients that were less than 25K in terms of their dollar relationship with us drove a lot of that activity and we're okay with that going away and that's a conscious decision on Kelly's part. And makes she wants her team focused on where they can add the greatest value focusing on those verticals that we think have the greatest benefit to Forrester, so I think it's the right move for us. It's a more targeted and focused move from a sales perspective that I think is going to reap rewards forces we go as we work out over the next 12 months.

Okay, thanks.

And it looks like we have Allen Klee back on with a question. Please go ahead.

Yes, hi. Can you expand on your comment of how you better leverage the expenses during the quarter?

Yes, I mean, it primarily came in headcount Allen versus what we what we had targeted for the quarter so well it's up year-over-year if you look at key headcount in research and in sales we're down quarter-over-quarter. Some of that is very much by design and I think Kelly's been in 90 days shaken a hard look at it and I think her focus around aligning territories and reps to basically enhance rep productivity caused her to hit the pause button appropriately on one bringing a new headcount and let her describe what she's doing but I think this is a very good move for us. So, we reap the benefit in terms of expense I mean ideally where we're hoping to go what this is and where Kelly wants to go with it is better alignment and tighter territories reach which will yield greater productivity.

Great. And great question, Allen, and just to build on that, there are sort of two aspects to this; one of the things that we have discovered as we've moved into the model, quite frankly, it's how much time our sellers are actually spending servicing accounts and with more of their time freed up from the day-to-day because we now have the customer success managers taking care of that. We're finding that we're able to expand their portfolio and still and drive productivity at the same time. Another thing that we haven't really talked about but has been essential to this entire migration is we have an ongoing technology track internally here at Forrester that is designed towards sort of taking the stand out of the gears. Identifying those tasks and those activities that take a lot of time but aren't value add and we've been working to knock those down increase the automation for our sellers and those folks who engage our clients so, we are expecting that over time we are going to be able to drive up the productivity of the heads we have here moving forward and that's where we're going to focus first and that's why you might not see those numbers at the same rate that you've seen historically.

Okay. And lastly, so do I imply from this that the original target of 7% to 10% growth in sales force should be thought to be tempered back?

Yes, I think that's a fair assumption. I think that -- you know, I don't think we -- I think we will have more color certainly as it relates to next year on the February call, because Kelley is getting her arms around this right now and figuring out how she wants to best move forward to drive productivity and top line growth. And I think her view is that just continuing to add sales headcounts isn't necessarily the best formula for us to drive growth. At finish, we won't add sales headcount, but I think she is going to be measured in her approach. So, yes, for this year I think it's safe to say that we are not -- you're not going to see a big fourth quarter blitz to add headcount. That's not going to happen for us.

Thank you very much.

You are welcome.

Thanks, Allen.

And it looks like we have no further questions.

Okay, great. Thanks everyone for joining the call. We look forward to seeing folks in route on the road, and looking forward to very good fourth quarter. Thank you.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.