Earnings Labs

Sprout Social, Inc. (SPT)

Q3 2025 Earnings Call· Thu, Nov 6, 2025

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Hello, and thank you for standing by. My name is Tiffany, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Sprout Social Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Alex Kurtz, Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development. Alex, please go ahead.

Alex Kurtz

Analyst

Thank you, and welcome to Sprout Social's Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after the market close today and have also released an updated investor presentation, which can be found on our website. With me are Sprout Social's CEO, Ryan Barretto; and CFO, Joe Del Preto. Today's call will contain forward-looking statements, which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking. These include, among others, statements concerning our expected future financial performance, including our Q4 and 2025 outlook, and business plans and objectives and can be identified by words such as expect, anticipate, intend, plan, believe, seek, opportunity or will. These statements reflect our views as of today only and should not be relied upon as representing our views at any subsequent date, and we do not undertake any duty to update these statements. Forward-looking statements address matters that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For a discussion of the risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024, as well as our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended September 30, 2025, to be filed with the SEC. During the call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Definitions of these non-GAAP financial measures, along with the reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in our third quarter earnings release, which has been furnished to the SEC and is available on our website at investors.sproutsocial.com. With that, let me turn the call over to Ryan. Ryan?

Ryan Barretto

Analyst

Thank you, Alex, and welcome to our third quarter earnings call for fiscal 2025. Sprout delivered another strong quarter with revenue of $115.6 million, representing 13% year-over-year growth, and non-GAAP operating margin expansion of almost 460 basis points; a record high for Sprout at nearly 12%. Our current remaining performance obligations grew 17% year-over-year to $258.5 million, reflecting consistent demand, strong enterprise execution and the addition of NewsWhip. And we continue to see improvements in gross retention across all customer segments with multiyear contracts now representing nearly half of our contract mix. This is a strong signal of customer commitment to the Sprout platform. Our go-to-market team continued to perform well, delivering 21% growth in our $50,000-plus ARR customer count. This progress was fueled by strong net additions and the inclusion of NewsWhip customers, which has added several of the largest global brands to our customer base. We're incredibly excited about the go-to-market progress we've made with NewsWhip, which has brought our strongest new product pipeline to date. During the quarter, we managed strategic wins with amazing global brands like Xerox, Bentley Motors, Valvoline, NYU, Becton Dickinson, Hallmark and the Royal family. These customers demonstrate our continued success serving the most socially sophisticated enterprise customers. We're pleased with our performance, particularly as demand trends have remained consistent with the first half of the year. Even more encouraging, despite the macro environment remaining unchanged, Q3 was Sprout's strongest non-Q4 quarter for large deals, driven by customer commitments above $200,000 in ARR and excluding any NewsWhip contribution. We also saw sustained pipeline strength with year-over-year growth that underscores continued enterprise demand. Our $50,000-plus ARR cohort continues to be our fastest-growing customer segment and is now approaching 2,000 customers, an increase of nearly 700 over the past 2 years. This cohort now accounts…

Joseph Del Preto

Analyst

Thanks, Ryan. I'll now run through our financial results and guidance. Our third quarter results were highlighted by quarterly non-GAAP operating margin of 11.9%, up nearly 460 basis points from the year ago period. This quarter marks Sprout's most profitable non-GAAP quarter in our history, a result of our consistent focus on strategic targeted investments and our revenue outperformance. I want to thank our employees for their focus and commitment to how we collectively invest in the business in a responsible manner. We generated $10.3 million in non-GAAP free cash flow during the quarter. And on a trailing 12-month basis, free cash flow is up over 80%. As we have commented before, expect our free cash flow margin for the fiscal year to closely track our non-GAAP operating margin. We remain committed to growing operating leverage on a fiscal year basis. On to a summary of the quarter. Total revenue was $115.6 million, representing 13% year-over-year growth. Subscription revenue was $114.7 million, up 13% year-over-year. The number of customers contributing more than $10,000 in ARR grew 7% from a year ago. The number of customers contributing more than $50,000 in ARR grew 21% from a year ago. Q3 ACV was up 15% year-over-year. As Ryan discussed earlier, our strategy to drive ACV growth remains focused on shifting to a higher enterprise mix and strengthening premium module attach rates such as Influencer Marketing, Customer Care, Premium Analytics and now NewsWhip. RPO totaled $357.1 million, up from $347.0 million as in Q2, representing growth of 15% year-over-year. We expect to recognize 72% or $258.5 million of total RPO as revenue over the next 12 months, representing cRPO growth of 17% year-over-year. Non-GAAP operating income totaled $13.7 million, which was ahead of the high end of our outlook. This was up from $7.5…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Raimo Lenschow with Barclays.

Raimo Lenschow

Analyst

Congrats on another kind of solid quarter. If I look at -- Ryan, if I listen to your large product wins, it really shows the momentum upmarket. I'm just trying to kind of marry that now, like you've been stable on the revenue growth side, which is kind of really good to see. Like how do you think about inflections or the next step from here? Because on the one hand, it does look like in the overall market, you're doing a lot better and you're moving nicely upmarket, but we haven't really fully seen it in the numbers yet. Like how do I marry these two?

Ryan Barretto

Analyst

Raimo, thanks for the question. I appreciate it. And yes, to your point, we're really excited about the progress that we've been making upmarket. And you could see that in the $50,000 growth, and just the execution, whether it's the big deals and logos we had a chance to talk about or just the acceleration within the number of customers within that segment. We certainly got a lot of conviction in the size of the market and the value that we're adding to customers as we continue to see social becoming the primary place for things like product discovery and brand awareness and customer care and commerce. And at the same time, we do have two distinct businesses with different dynamics. As we talked about this enterprise large business where we've seen a lot of success and higher ACV and great net dollar retention continues to grow. And then we have another side of the business where on the smaller side, continued pressure that we've seen with SMB and agency, again, mostly on the new business side. But as we know that, that part of the business tends to have less GRR than the other pieces. And that's been a drag on our overall growth rate. Having said that, as we look at that opportunity, we know that the market size is large, and we do see opportunities with pricing and packaging and now with AI to be able to evolve the way that we're serving that part of the market. So feeling good about the upmarket and the growth. And to your point, see opportunities here to continue pressing on that other side of the business to push on the growth rate.

Raimo Lenschow

Analyst

Okay. Perfect. And then Joe, for you, like profitability was the main highlight this quarter. Can you talk a little bit about the path here in terms of like was that timing? Was that like good underlying levels? Can you speak to that? Thank you and congrats from me.

Joseph Del Preto

Analyst

Yes. Thank you, Raimo. Yes, we're pretty happy about the performance there, 460 basis points year-over-year. I think there's a couple of things that drove that. One, the overperformance on revenue definitely helped and contributed that to the bottom line. We're definitely getting more efficient in parts of the business. We're using AI internally as well, and that's helping drive margin in the business. And also, we just had a little bit of push on the margin -- on the hiring side into Q4. And so we got a little bit of benefit in Q3, which is probably going to pick itself up in Q4. But overall, I feel really good about the momentum that we're seeing in the business on the margin side.

Operator

Operator

That concludes our question-and-answer session. I will now turn the call back over to Ryan Barretto for closing remarks.

Ryan Barretto

Analyst

Thank you, Tiffany. I appreciate it. I know tonight is a very busy night in software. So thanks for those joining us, and I know we're catching up with a bunch of others later tonight. I want to also just ask folks to join us on November 18 for Breaking Ground where we will be doing our customer webinar, and we'll have a chance to show off our new agent. So really excited to see a bunch of you there. And then I want to end by thanking our team for their continued dedication and effort. I am incredibly grateful for all the work that you're doing for our customers and our business, and we look forward to spending time with all of you later. Have a great night. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

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