Henry Schuck
Analyst · Wolfe Research. Your line is now open
Thank you, Jerry, and welcome, everyone. ZoomInfo is making meaningful progress, and I believe we are better positioned today than ever before. In Q2, we took a number of steps to set up the company for long-term growth and success. In Q3, we stabilized the business, and in Q4, we drove growth across all of our key operating metrics, which resulted in better-than-expected financial results achieved faster than we had anticipated. As a result, GAAP revenue for the fourth quarter was $309 million, and adjusted operating income was $116 million, a margin of 37%, both above the high-end of guidance. The results in Q4 represent the culmination of changes to sales, product, and other operations that we enacted over the past 2 years. Our execution caught up to our innovation, leading to happier and more engaged customers. With our data and platform, our customers are winning in two key ways. They are winning with Copilot by leveraging the best go-to-market data, AI applications, and agents throughout their go-to-market teams. Copilot again exceeded expectations and now has over $150 million in ACV. And our customers are winning with ZoomInfo operations, the data foundation that enriches and strengthens their internal systems and powers their systems of records, data warehouses, and AI initiatives. Operations is the fastest growing area of our business, driving accelerating growth, and in Q4 was up 27% year-over-year. With the continued success and momentum of our data and operation solutions, we are well on our way to becoming the de facto provider of data and AI in the enterprise. We think of our market in two ways, upmarket and down-market. And this is the framework that we will be using to talk about the business consistently moving forward. Upmarket includes our enterprise and mid-market businesses, where we are resourcing against the large and growing opportunity of companies with greater than 100 employees. For our upmarket customer base, we continue to add more reps and develop more data sets, features, and functionality for the platform. We have also expanded our trial motion flexibility, rebalanced account loads, and doubled down on services to delight the customer and drive their success. Upmarket is more than two-thirds of our business, grew 2% in 2024, and is on a path to growing mid-single-digits, and has significant higher margins than down-market, primarily due to the difference in customer lifetime value. We expect our continued shift upmarket to drive profitability improvement as well. We define down-market as businesses with fewer than 100 employees. In this cohort, we are disqualifying more risky small business, requiring upfront prepayments, and up and onboarding customers efficiently through a digital-first approach. Down-market comprises less than one-third of our business, declined 9% in 2024 and show signs of stabilizing to a smaller and healthier portion of the business. We expect to report on this upmarket, down-market split going forward, while sharing relative size and growth rates. But, I think, it is important to reiterate that more than two-thirds of our business is upmarket and strong and growing. Our investments upmarket continue paying off, and we see opportunities to drive upside to our upmarket growth, while we are aggressively managing the contribution of the lower-end of the market. The lower end of the market is going to continue to decrease as a percentage of the business, and while it will be smaller, it will be healthier. And we will discount its contribution to guidance so that we can minimize the potential impact of this transition. And we are already seeing our investments upmarket paying off. We see it in our 100K customers, our $1 million plus customers, and in net revenue retention. We now have 1,867 customers with more than $100,000 in ACV, a sequential increase of 58 customers, and a year-over-year increase of 47 customers. We also drove sequential and year-over-year growth in both the ACV and the number of customers in our $1 million cohort. And net revenue retention increased to 87% in the fourth quarter, the first sequential increase in NRR since Q1 of 2022. Improving our customers’ perception of us and staying aligned with our customers’ go-to-market needs has been a key focus for us this year. As part of that effort, we recently conducted a brand survey of more than 400 marketing and sales leaders. The survey found that 99% of respondents said their perception of ZoomInfo has improved or stayed the same in the last 6 months, with the majority of those saying it improved. During the quarter, we closed transactions with CoStar, Athenahealth, CareerBuilder, Heidrick & Struggles, Cox Media, Getty Images, Highgate Hotels, and the AICPA. We partnered with Lumen Technologies, a global telecommunications company, to equip a thousand of their sales and customer support reps with Copilot to improve retention and upsell. Copilot is being deployed to drive sales productivity, combat competitive pressures, and drive revenue growth. The company also plans to leverage ZoomInfo Labs, our white glove services arm, to prioritize leads within their marketing team and deliver them directly to sellers within Copilot. We partnered with a leading digital marketing company to completely transform the way they go to market. As they transition from product-led growth to sales-led growth and move more upmarket, we are providing them with the complete ZoomInfo Go-To-Market Intelligence platform. From our marketing solution and call recording and transcription to enriching data and using Copilot, we are helping them execute account-based marketing strategies for new logo acquisition and driving cross-sell and upsell as they expand upmarket. We also used our newly released trial motion for Copilot to grow a 100-seat proof-of-concept at one of the largest job search engines, more than 10-fold. Our successful trial allowed us to prove that we could deliver more connects, build more pipeline, and drive better conversion for their reps. One of the key drivers of this quarter’s success started 2 years ago, when we embarked on a journey to up-level our product organization with AI and platform leaders, who have dramatically accelerated our pace of innovation. From listening to thousands of client calls and meeting with hundreds of customers, it is clear that go-to-market leaders are all looking for success across four key areas. They want to grow new logos, expand their customer base, improve rep productivity, and leverage AI so that they do not fall behind. To deliver on that for our clients, we start with the highest quality B2B data in the world. In Q4, we created new data products that get our customers in front of prospects precisely when they’re in market for their products and services. We enhanced our intent solution by introducing persona level website identification, allowing sellers to pinpoint high intent buyers within specific roles, expanding beyond account level indicators to person level data has led to a 15% lift in action rates. Our Copilot interface allowed us to activate this data innovation directly into the workflows of tens of thousands of users. In the quarter, we generated proprietary signals and accelerated deals for more than two-thirds of active opportunities for our upmarket customers. Those customers would have missed out on two-thirds of the deals in their pipeline without ZoomInfo. We continued our pace of innovation by expanding our Copilot AI agents that automate core parts of a seller’s workflow. By synthesizing live buyer interactions, our agents create dynamic, always up-to-date account plans that capture relevant signals the moment they surface. These AI agents automatically identify deal risks and recommend ways to expand buying groups. All of this runs on our enterprise-grade AI governance and customization framework, already deployed within some of the largest go-to-market organizations in the world, ensuring they can adapt these capabilities to highly complex and specialized sales motions. We’re also expanding key use cases beyond sales development representatives and other top of the funnel prospecting use cases. We’re now gaining traction among account executives, account managers, and customer success managers, a user base more than 3 times larger than SDR. Account executives and account management teams are adopting Copilot for automated account planning, account expansion, and deal acceleration. We have seen strong product market fit with Copilot activating the first cohorts of AEs and AMs at utilization levels comparable to our core SDR user base. I’m confident we’ll continue to automate and move an increasing share of mission-critical go-to-market workflows onto the ZoomInfo platform. I would also like to take a moment to thank, Ali Dasdan, our former Chief Technology Officer, who is transitioning engineering leadership to our Senior VP of Engineering, Filip Popovic. Ali played an important role in helping us build enterprise processes and infrastructure here and we wish him all the best in his next endeavors. We’re excited about Filip’s expanded role and are confident that he will continue to accelerate our pace of innovation and serve as a strong partner to our customers and his internal counterparts throughout the company. I also want to thank, Patrick McCarter, who after nearly 8 years of partnership and board directorship is moving on from the ZoomInfo board. Patrick is someone that I respect deeply and who has been at the table for every strategic decision over nearly a decade. His knowledge, engagement, and experience will be missed and we wish him the best as well. I’m also excited about the recent additions of Katie Rooney and Rob Giglio to our Board of Directors. Katie has decades of experience in finance, operations, strategy, and corporate development. She was recently named CFO at Maven, the world’s largest virtual health platform for women and families. Rob is currently Chief Customer Officer at Canva and previously was Chief Customer Officer at HubSpot and Chief Marketing Officer at DocuSign. At HubSpot, he oversaw the flywheel organization, the marketing, sales, services and revenue operations team. Rob also spent 11 years in senior marketing and sales leadership roles at Adobe. We are incredibly excited about the fresh perspective and long history of successful operating experience we add to the boardroom with these additions. In closing, we have always had a history of disciplined financial and operational execution. And now more than ever, our innovation engine is creating a tailwind on top of our data moat. We have taken the necessary steps to drive improved operating performance and set the company on a path to growth, while driving industry leading profitability, expanding free cash flow per share and defining the future of go-to-market with innovative solutions that drive customer delight. We have a large untapped addressable market, a strong innovation in data moat, and we are winning the opportunity to be the go-to-market data and AI partner for upmarket customers. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Graham.
Graham O’Brien: Thanks, Henry. In Q4, we delivered $309 million in revenue and adjusted operating income of $116 million, a margin of 37%. Our investments moving upmarket are yielding results as we deliver meaningfully better than expected performance, resulting in sequential revenue growth of 1.8%. The business risk model deployed in Q2 is working as intended, resulting in improving write-off and collection trends. With the new risk model in place and the additional operational improvements we’ve implemented, we are able to onboard better quality customers, continue our move upmarket, and focus more on delivering customer success and value, which resulted in a 2-point sequential improvement in net revenue retention, ending the year at 87%. With more and more companies realizing they need a strong data foundation to take advantage of AI, we saw demand for our operations business increase again. As a result, in the fourth quarter, our operations business increased 27% year-over-year, 5 points higher than last quarter. Taken together with our success driving Copilot, advanced functionality increased to 44% of the overall business, up more than 10 points since the start of the year. As of today, Copilot is more than $150 million in ACV, and we continue to see similar uplift levels on a per seat basis in Q4, as we have historically. The majority of Copilot ACV is coming from new to the franchise customers, though, with our recently released functionality that allows existing customers to trial Copilot on a team-by-team or user-by-user basis, we expect to drive a larger volume of migrations over the course of 2025 and 2026. Turning to share repurchases. For the full year, we retired 46.8 million shares at an average cost of $12, representing more than 12% of total shares outstanding. And as of year-end, there were 342 million shares outstanding. In Q1, the Board approved an additional $500 million share repurchase authorization on top of the $138 million remaining in existing authorizations entering 2025. We look at repurchases as a meaningful way to drive shareholder value, and we will continue to opportunistically take advantage of dislocations in share price balanced with our cash generation and cash on hand. Operating cash flow was $109 million in Q4, and unlevered free cash flow for the quarter was $94 million, a margin of 30%. We also remain committed to driving shareholder value by growing levered free cash flow per share. To that end, unlevered free cash flow for 2024 was $447 million, a margin of 37% and cash interest for 2024 was $44 million. We delivered significantly more than $1 in levered free cash flow per share for the full year based on 377 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding, and we expect to grow that meaningfully over the long-term. We ended the year with $140 million in cash and cash equivalents, and we carried $1.24 billion in gross debt. Our net leverage ratio is 2.4 times trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA and 2.2 times trailing 12 months’ cash EBITDA, which is defined as consolidated EBITDA in our credit agreements. With respect to liabilities and future performance obligations, unearned revenue at the end of the year was $478 million, and remaining performance obligations, or RPO, were $1.16 billion, of which $850 million are expected to be delivered in the next 12 months. Before I jump into guidance, let me share some additional context. Q1 2025 has two fewer days than Q4 2024 and one fewer day than Q1 2024, which should be considered when comparing sequential and year-over-year revenue growth and AOI margins. Also, Q1 margins are impacted by payroll tax and other benefit resets. Additionally, 2024 is not a good proxy for 2025 seasonality due to the operational improvements we introduced in Q2 2024 and the change in accounting estimates in that same period. In 2025, we expect adjusted operating income and AOI margins to increase sequentially as we move through the year. Q4 2024 was more weighted to upmarket customers, and we expect Q1 2025 to have a seasonally lower mix of upmarket expirations. We are discounting down-market contributions to our guidance. However, we are on a path back to durable growth faster than expected, and we are optimistic about our momentum heading into 2025. With that, let me turn to guidance for Q1. We expect GAAP revenue in the range of $294 million to $297 million. We expect adjusted operating income in the range of $96 million to $99 million and non-GAAP net income in the range of $0.22 to $0.23 per share. For the full year 2025, we expect to deliver GAAP revenue in the range of $1.185 billion to $1.205 billion, representing negative 1.6% annual growth at the midpoint of guidance, and adjusted operating income in the range of $426 million to $436 million, representing a 36 margin at the midpoint of guidance. We expect non-GAAP net income in the range of $0.95 to $0.97 per share, based on 362 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding. And we expect unlevered free cash flow in the range of $420 million to $440 million. And for modeling purposes for the year, we would expect CapEx in the range of 5% of revenue and the non-GAAP tax rate to be approximately 13%. Now, I will turn it over to the operator to open the call for questions.