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 Chris Finn, Forrester's new Chief Financial Officer. George will open the call. Kelley will follow George to provide a sales update, then Chris will discuss our financials. We'll then open the call to Q&A. Carrie Johnson, Chief Research Officer; and Scott Chouinard, Chief Accounting Officer and Treasurer, will join us for the Q&A portion of the call. A replay of this call will be available until December 3rd, 2021, and can be accessed by dialing 855-859-2056 or 404-537-3406. Please reference the meeting conference ID 4698681. 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 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 will now hand the call over to George Colony.

Thanks for joining Forrester's 2021 Q3 investor call, and I want to welcome Kelley, Chris, Carrie and Scott. I'll let Chris introduce himself in a few moments, but I want to say that we're very excited to have him on our team. He is a highly sought after talent who has deep experience scaling global companies and building world-class finance teams. He is an expert at optimizing recurring revenue models, making him a perfect fit to help Forrester build and optimize its CV growth engine. He has worked with investors in his previous assignments, and he has a good understanding of what you will need to stay current with Forrester's story. So welcome, Chris. Forrester delivered another outstanding quarter and Q3 marks the fifth consecutive quarter of CV growth. The company is excelling on many levels, and we are excited about our expanding prospects and future. In Q3, we exceeded guidance for revenue, margin and EPS and are raising guidance for the third time this year. Contract value year-over-year increased 12% with a net contract value increase, or NCVI, of $35 million. Operating income is up 54%, and earnings per share grew 71% year-over-year. Wallet retention was at 99%, and client retention increased to 78%. So we're very pleased with our performance in 2021, and our laser focus on growing CV is yielding results. Now the broader economy is also working in our favor. Number one, the technology world has never been more dynamic with IPOs running at record numbers, maturing technologies like cryptocurrencies challenging large companies to increase their tech IQ and new models like edge computing, changing market structure. Two, buyers have new demands and requirements. Winning, serving and retaining them requires a higher level of customer obsession. Three, it's a digital or die moment, with laggard organizations…

Thank you, George. Forrester delivered another very strong quarter through our laser focus on targeting five key buying centers at client companies, technology, marketing, customer experience, sales and product. Our sales teams have been very successful in showing these functional leaders and their teams how Forrester's vision, strategy and execution research can help address their most pressing priorities. Clients trust Forrester to be on their side and by their side, helping to drive major business transformations and accelerate growth. This has resulted in our fifth consecutive quarter of CV bookings growth. We've grown through a healthy mix of new client acquisition, retention, cross-sell and upsell. Customer retention continues to improve coming out of the pandemic. Our trailing 12 month client retention rate has improved to 78%, and our wallet retention reached 99%. We're also continuing to build long-term client relationships. Our premier clients have an average tenure of 7 years. In addition, investments that we've made in our customer success organization over the last 18 months are paying off. Our latest CX Index scores have increased by 3 points, which is a statistically significant jump and is also a strong indicator of customer loyalty and satisfaction. I want to share highlights of our first 2 months selling the new Forrester Decisions portfolio. We spent Q2 ensuring our sales and support teams were ready when the product launched in August, which got us off to a fast start. While the product has only been available for a short time, we're seeing good signals that clients see the value in the new product and will upgrade to Forrester Decisions and will sign more two year contracts. Here are the top reasons we're hearing from our clients about why they selected Forrester Decisions. Number one, Forrester Decisions' outcome-oriented approach is resonating with clients.…

Thanks, Kelley. Before I review our financial performance in detail, I just want to say thank you to George for the introduction. I'm incredibly excited to join Forrester during what I believe is a truly transformational period in the history of the company, a transformation made possible by the strategic acquisition of SiriusDecisions, which resulted in the development of our new product platform, Forrester Decisions. Coming from a technology and SaaS background, I was attracted to Forrester for five key reasons. Number one, the massive market opportunity, number two, Forrester's attractive recurring revenue business, number three, the focus on double-digit CV and revenue growth, number four, the development and successful launch of Forrester Decisions, and finally, number five, a great leadership team focused on growth. During my first six weeks at the company, I've met with many of our employees across the organization, and it's clear we have tight alignment at all levels within the business around our strategy, and the evidence of that is manifesting itself in our performance. We are executing at a high level, and a critical part of my role will be to keep us focused on operational execution against our goals and continuing our momentum. I'll now review Forrester's financial performance for the third quarter, our quarterly metrics and our guidance for the fourth 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 another great quarter, which was headlined by the launch of our new flagship product, Forrester Decisions, and the fact that we grew CV by 12%, achieving our goal…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Andrew Nicholas with William Blair. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. And thank you for taking my questions. The first one I had was to follow up on one of your last comments, Chris, regarding margin pressures for next year, just wondering if you could flesh out or put any numbers around that comment. I recognize it looks like this year, it's about 150 basis points or so expansion, but you have higher headcount, maybe some T&E coming back online and some investment initiatives. Is there some number or ballpark you could give us to help quantify those items just as we think about the trajectory for next year?

Yeah, thanks. It's a good question. So yeah, look, we've made investments across sales, marketing, product and IT, as you know, to drive Q4 and achieve a strong start for the next year. Some of that you'll see roll over for sure into Q1, and we definitely expect to make further investments in our go-to-market, digital channels and product. We'll continue to invest to modernize the infrastructure in Forrester, areas like procurement, IR, data management, cloud enablement. As I noted in my remarks, we raised our operating margin guidance by about 200 basis points from the original guidance of the year. And some of that is due to stronger revenue, some due to lower costs from lower than planned headcount, virtually no T&E this year and reduced facility costs. So as you note - as I noted, there's definitely going to be margin pressure going in next year. And we're working through that as we develop the plan, but we're definitely committed to investing and growing the top line. So - but we expect margins to stay sort of flattish as we move forward or slightly decline in the near term. And we know there's operating leverage in the business, and we're definitely investing for growth for the long term. I think on the T&E front, we had relatively zero this year. We're not going to go back to T&E at the levels that were pre-pandemic. We're going to likely ramp into it as we go forward. So I expect T&E to be somewhere in the 50% range or kind of where we were pre-pandemic, and - but it's going to ramp through the year.

Great. Thank you. And then for my follow-up, actually another question for you, Chris, if you don't mind. Just kind of curious, bigger picture, you mentioned all the different reasons that brought you to Forrester, and that was helpful to hear. I'm just curious if you have a similar list or some set of bullets for maybe your major priorities in the new role. And any learnings from kind of being a part of the organization, investing in yourself in the organization over the first six plus weeks in the new job? Thank you.

Yeah. From a - thank you. From a prioritization standpoint, certainly, it's really helping the organization continue to focus on operational execution. I mean, I think that's number one. And I talked about the investments that we need to make. I really want to make sure that we're not missing out on the momentum that we have today in the business and we're investing in the right areas. And obviously, looking at internally from a systems process, people standpoint, we're looking across the business, especially in the finance, like I said, procurement areas as well, but across the broader business, too. And so as part of the planning process, we're definitely getting into the detail around where we can invest in order to drive growth. And that's really been kind of a big priority for me.

Andrew, a word that Chris uses a lot - has used a lot in the first six weeks is modernized.

Yes.

Yes. Good word.

Great. Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Vincent Colicchio with Barrington Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yeah, George, I think you mentioned that customer experience and B2B were the most popular areas for Forrester Decisions. Just curious in the pipeline, is that still the case or is there a broadening of interest?

Vince, it's Carrie Johnson. I'll answer that. There's actually very strong demand across the board for the 15 services, B2B. And as George indicated in CX did come out strong. They have incredibly strong value propositions, and we have also have, I think, a nice differentiation and unique offering in those spaces, specifically around customer obsession and the revenue engine. One of the areas we're seeing the interest rise right now is in tech services. As George mentioned, there's a lot of disruption in that field. But I would say, pretty unilaterally, there is demand across the board.

And I don't know about who it was, but you said that there was no discounting on the Forrester Decisions product. Was that in line with expectations going into the quarter?

Yes. Hi, this is Kelley. Absolutely, given all of the Unified offering that we are presenting and all the value that's been added into Forrester Decisions, we made it very clear from the onset that we were not going to be allowing discounting on this particular product set. That's also part of the reason why we're not force migrating clients into it right now, and the good news is the value is clearly resonating with our clients. They see the enhancements from getting the certifications, data, the new UX. So it has not been an issue because the value prop is really clear for our clients, which has made it great for our sellers to be able to explain the value.

Have you seen an impact on sales force turnover from the excitement around Forrester Decisions?

So as George mentioned, we've seen a little bit of a spike across the board in turnover, what I would say is not due to Forrester Decisions, but we did make a very strong pivot and change with our focus on contract value this year. And there were a limited number of folks who decided that, that wasn't for them. But by the same token, we are hiring aggressively right now, and we've also had some, what we call here, boomerangs, some folks that have rejoined our sales force recently. So excited to expand the sales force. The folks that are here are leaning in. Our existing sales force productivity for our ramped reps has improved double digits over the last year. So the good news is the bulk of our reps are leaning in and really excited about Forrester Decisions, and we're actively hiring to get the capacity we need for 2022.

Okay. Thank you. A nice quarter.

Thanks, Vince. And appreciate it.

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Anja Soderstrom with Sidoti. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thank you for taking my questions. And congratulations on the good quarter. First, I'm just curious about the 100 clients who you said you had achieved for Forrester Decision. Are those new clients? Or are they conversion from the legacy Forrester?

Those are a healthy mix, but a significant number of renewals that are in that number. So we've seen quite a large uptake of existing clients when we put the new product in front of them.

And Anja, and if you cut the 47% in CVI of those clients, so it's a really nice uptick.

Okay. Thank you. That sounds good. And then also I think on the - within the spring, I think, Kelley, you said that you had done a list of clients that you targeted that you wanted to get back from that fell off during the pandemic. How is that list coming along?

Yes, Anja. Thank you. So we've had concerted win-back programs both within our premier space, as well as our core organization. And in the premier user team, they actually doubled the goal that we had set for this year. So this is also a place where the new offering with Forrester Decisions has really helped us to go back to some of the clients that we lost during the pandemic and share the strong value proposition and a number of the wins that we've had in the Forrester Decision side have been win backs, which is really exciting.

Thank you. And then you're saying there, I mean you're making really good progress and putting up nice numbers. How should we think about the out-years in terms of keeping this up the pace of growth?

That's why Chris said he's focusing on execution. We have a great strategy, Anja. We know exactly what we have to do in improving our products and enlarging and driving the sales force. So it's - we think that this is very sustainable in the long-term. I don't know if you have a different view, Chris.

Yeah. No, that's it. Look, we've got really great momentum in the business right now, great alignment across the revenue engine with sales marketing and the product organization completely aligned around driving sustainable double-digit CV growth as we've discussed. We're aggressively hiring across the board. We're investing in our talent acquisition engine in order to do so. And to George's point around attrition, it's only up slightly, about 2% versus where we were in the same period in '19. But we're actually seeing sequential headcount growth in the business now from last quarter, so I think we're starting to get some momentum around the hiring as well. And so we're going to continue to drive that. And obviously, it's not just around increasing capacity for the sales organization, but also increasing productivity as well.

And Anja, I talked about the exogenous factors in the economy and technology, and it's just - it's - there will be more technology change in the next five years than there were in the last 10 years. So it's just an intensification. You see that in the IPO activity and definitely the challenges we see with our clients. It is a digital or die moment for them, and we're going to make sure they don't die.

Okay. That sounds good. And then just one last one for me, do you have anything to call out geographically?

Hi. It's Kelley. What I would say is we've seen good solid performance across all of our sales regions and sales motion. So the results have been pretty much uniform across the board in terms of getting to our desired double-digit CV growth. So we've been really pleased with both the North American as well as our international markets.

And Anja, we're now open in London, Paris, Beijing, Singapore and Amsterdam. So we're slowly opening up. We're operating up faster in Asia and Europe than in the US.

Okay, great. Thank you. That was all from me.

Thanks, Anja.

Thank you. And I'm showing no further questions at this time. And I would like to turn the conference over to the CFO, Chris Finn, for any further remarks.

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for being on the call today. As I noted during my prepared remarks, I'm excited to be here and look forward to working with you all. We're in the process of hiring a Head of Investor Relations to continue improving this process and the quality of our interactions overall with our investors and analysts. Thanks again for joining us today.

Thank you.

This concludes today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.