Good afternoon. Thank you for joining today's call. With me today are George Colony, Forrester's Chairman of the Board and CEO; Carrie Johnson, Forrester's Chief Research Officer and Scott Chouinard, Forrester's Interim Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. George will open the call. Carrie will follow George to provide a product update then Scott will discuss our financials. We will then open the call to Q&A. Kelley Hippler, Forrester's Chief Sales Officer will be joining the Q&A portion of the call. A replay of this call will be available until August 28, 2021, and can be accessed by dialing (855) 859-2056 or (404) 537-3406. Please reference the conference ID 7684089. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this call will contain forward-looking statements within the meanings 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 risk 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 are 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 like to hand the call over to George Colony.

Welcome to Forrester's 2021 Q2 Investor Call. I am here with Carrie Johnson, Forrester's Chief Research and Product Officer and Scott Chouinard Forrester's Interim CFO. The three of us will give brief remarks. We will then be joined by Kelley Hippler, Forrester's Chief Sales Officer, and the four of us will then take questions. The momentum of the last three quarters continued into Q2. Forrester's focused on growing contract value and its customer obsessed content is producing strong financial performance. In the second quarter contract value grew $26 million to $320 million and 9% year-over-year growth rate, Revenue accelerated across research, consulting and events. We have generated $70 million of cash in the first half of 2021. And that's more than the company has produced in any previous full year. We are into $0.66 in the quarter, beating the top end of guidance by $0.08 and revenue grew 30% to $128.7 million exceeding the top end of our guidance. Our clients count, wallet retention and client retention all showed strong growth as we continue to win back clients loss during the pandemic. As a result of our performance in Q2 in the first half of the year. We are raising guidance for the second time this year and Scott will go into more detail in his financial update. Forrester is building an economic model which will drive shareholder value. In this model, we are one increasing contract value, which two, generates more cash, which three, we then invest in sales, product and acquisitions. Improving our go-to-market structure and products will grow our contract value, repeating the cycle and driving the model forward. Now several factors are contributing to the growth of CV. Client retention rates are increasing moving up to 77% for the quarter. That's our third consecutive quarter of…

Thank you, George. I'm excited today to share the incredible value that our new product portfolio Forrester Decisions will deliver to clients, and then how we will accelerate our ability to deliver double-digit CV growth for Forrester. Forrester Decisions is designed for our customers and by our customers. Following the acquisition of SiriusDecisions, we spoke with hundreds of Forrester and Sirius clients. What we heard is that they wanted a simpler way of buying from an engaging with us as they chart their paths to customer obsession. As George mentioned, our clients want one product that brings together the vision research or Forrester and the execution frameworks of Sirius, as well as the valuable elements of Forrester’s other products like analytics and certification. These conversations led to the creation of Forrester Decisions an entirely new unified product offering. Forrester Decisions is a portfolio of 15 standardized research services tailored to the most critical priorities of senior leaders and their teams in technology, marketing, customer experience, sales and product functions. With each Forrester Decision service, customers get access to our bold vision research, curated tools and frameworks, and then extended time with our analysts to apply research to their context. The Forrester decisions services are packed with new, bold calls on the future frameworks and models to run functions, and also brand new benchmarking data. And we didn't stop there. We're also launching an entirely new digital platform for all Forester’s customers that will transform their ability to get personalized insights and increased speed to value from us. No other research firm delivers this combination of vision, strategy and execution together in this way. The product and the platform will save our clients time, money and empower them and their teams to deliver results. We believe this will transform the dynamics…

Thanks, Carrie. I'll never review Forrester’s financial performance for the second quarter, our quarterly metrics and our guidance for the third quarter and full year 2021. Please note that the income statement figures we review on this call are non-GAAP results, which we refer to as adjusted results. We have provided a reconciliation of our GAAP results to our adjusted results in our press release that we issued today. As George mentioned, we had a great quarter with CV growth of 9%. And we delivered revenue, operating margin and earnings per share that exceeded the upper end of our guidance. Revenue growth was strong versus Q2 of last year with overall revenues up 13% driven by strong revenue increases across research, which is our CV business consulting and events. Currency rates improved our revenue growth by about 2 percentage points compared to the prior year. We continue to see momentum in the business with demand for our research services showing in the 9% CV growth, consulting revenues outperforming expectations in the very successful execution of our two flagship events, the B2B Summit and CX North America during the quarter. We continue to generate significant cash flow with the operating cash flow of [$17 million] for the first six months of 2021 being a record for any period in Forrester’s history, and we use $2.7 million of this cash to start buying our shares during the quarter. Overall, we have seen the momentum in the business continue in the second quarter and are confident in our performance for the remainder of the year, resulting in us raising guidance for revenue, operating margin and EPS, which I will describe in a few minutes. And as we discussed on our last call, we are reporting a new set of metrics this year. And…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Andrew Nicholas with William Blair. You may proceed with your question.

Hi, thank you for taking my questions. And good afternoon. The first question I had was just with respect to Q2 results looking back sounds like consulting was the main area that surprised to the upside for you. But if you could maybe break that down a little bit further into where you're seeing strength specifically within that debt line item and maybe clarify if I misheard you in terms of what the upside was in the second quarter specifically?

Hey, Andrew, this is Scott. Thanks for the question. Yes you're right, we did surprise on the upside with consulting and what was good this quarter, as we saw strengthen both the content marketing, which has been strong for us for a while. And we also saw some nice strength with the strategy consultant -- consulting offering that we have, so is good kind of across the board from a geographic standpoint and also from an offering standpoint.

Got it. Thank you. And then maybe as a follow up to that. Looking at third quarter expectations, I guess I'm -- given what was really, really strong CV growth at least relative to what I had expected. I guess I'm curious what your expectations are for consulting and events in the third quarter because I guess I'm just surprised that the third quarter revenue guide is a little bit higher, given the sequential increase are the sixth sequential step up in CV. So if there's any other factors that you could kind of call out? I don't know if it's a sequential step down and consulting given the strong quarter or what but just breaking that down one step further would be helpful?

Sure, when you think about the revenue streams, events, as I was saying, the light quarter first, so minimal revenue there's the two events, they're two of our smaller events. So that revenue certainly stepped down significantly from Q2. And for consulting, during the summer months, it's always one of the lower quarters of revenue for us. So here we're seeing a potential step down in consulting revenue. And then on the research line, yes the CV growth is providing sequential revenue growth in the third quarter. But if you recall, a portion of our research revenue growth comes from the event entitlement in our subscription product. So that steps down, because there are fewer events in the third quarter.

Got it. You know that makes sense. And then maybe if I could just squeeze one more in on capital allocation plans, sounds like you were a little bit more active on the share repurchase front than you have been in some time. Could you help us size not only what the repurchase activity was in the quarter, because I missed that, but also, just how big of a percentage or portion of your capital allocation plans that will become going forward? That would be great. Thanks, again.

Sure. So we repurchase $2.7 million in the quarter. And as we said on the call, we plan to be opportunistic with future buys. You know, that being said, we had our Board Meeting yesterday, and there's still a fair amount of discussion on future capital allocation. But there is a commitment to certain level of repurchases going forward again being opportunistic with stock price. So, no firm commitment there, we still have over $50 million left on our repurchase authorization. So we have capacity there and we have capacity with our covenants. So, we have a few options for the second half. And we need to look at that strategically based upon what we want to do from an acquisition standpoint or debt pay down standpoint or kind of level of future purchases.

Andrew, George here. We think we're undervalued as a company. So we are going to be a [indiscernible] opportunistic in buybacks that's one. Two, the first place capital goes in our company is to build the business, especially to build the CV growth engine. So priority one will be internal investment. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. And our next question comes from Vincent Colicchio with Barrington Research. You may proceed with your question.

Congrats on a good quarter guys. Few for me, so did bookings on the CV side improve as the quarter progressed, [indiscernible] a sense for momentum, and then as the sales pipeline on the CV side, higher now than it was at the beginning of the quarter?

Thanks, Vincent. This is Kelley Hippler here. So in terms of bookings momentum, we actually had a strong quarter consistently across all three months of the quarter. So basically, we started seeing momentum pickup last December, and it's really continued to increase considerably and lead to the results we saw in Q2. And while we are early in the quarter, we're pleased with what we're seeing from a Q3 pipeline perspective, especially with the launch of Forrester Decisions, we do believe that that's going to lead to strong pipeline growth in the quarter for this quarter as well as Q4.

And George you had mentioned that some of the new clients that some of your old clients return in the quarter, how does that break down in terms of the client growth? The return of old clients versus new clients?

Yes I'll give an imprecise answer. And then Kelley will give you the [indiscernible] answer. It was basically it's really half Forrester and a half SiriusDecisions. We look probably a little bit more in the SiriusDecisions side. And with that, I'll give it back to Kelley.

Great, thank you, George. So we did have win back programs that are ongoing with both of our selling motions, our premier user organization, as well as our core selling organization. So definitely split 50/50 on the results side there. But what's great Vincent is we're seeing some of the larger retailers and automotive companies that we lost last year due to the pandemic coming back now that their businesses are starting to come back, which is very encouraging. And that premiere user program already hit its target that we gave them for the year. So we doubled it for the second half. And I think as momentum continues to pick up and with the new Forrester Decisions offering we'll continue to see more of our clients looking to reengage with us.

It looks like you're being impacted by the tight labor market, I think you mentioned will that change your initial goal for the salespeople you hope to have in place by the end of the year? And how will do you think wage inflation is going to be meaningful here in the second half?

Well, I would say Vincent, similar to other companies, we are facing some talent acquisition and retention challenges, but we are hiring very aggressively and actively working to backfill positions for -- so that we can be ramped up and ready to go for next year. One of the things that we've been doing is expanding the geographies within which we are seeking our employee population, which is helping to keep wages in line with our expectations. Right now, we did expect there to be a spike in attrition just based on pent up demand last year. So nothing that will impact our ability to get to our targets for 2021. But we do want to actively continue to hire so that we can hit our 2022 targets. But this is also getting us to continue to think about and invest in technologies that can help our existing sales force to be more productive as well. So I think as you've known, we sort of have done in parallel investing in the sales organization, but also building the infrastructure around our existing folks to help them to be more productive and to make it easier for them to get to their targets. And we'll continue to take that balanced approach as we head into 2022 as well.

Okay. I will go back in the queue. Again, nice quarter.

Thank you.

Thank you Vincent. [indiscernible] a little bit more than the last question we have two advantages. One is, our tech has been fantastic for people working anywhere. And so that's enabling as Kelley said today, we have to hire anywhere. And also we're going into a flex work. Our plan we [indiscernible] which means three days, flex in two days in the office. So a lot of flexibility there is helping us in the labor markets. But this is a crazy labor market. Thanks for the questions.

You’re welcome.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Please standby we compile the Q&A roster. And thank you, I'm not showing any further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Scott Chouinard and art for any further remarks.

Thank you. I want to thank everyone for joining us on the call today. And we look forward to updating everyone on our progress during our third quarter call. Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.