Mike Cotoia
Analyst · Craig-Hallum
Great. Yes, in terms of when we’re talking to our customers, I mean, most of our customers understand that the enterprise IT market is competitive and it’s fairly healthy. And when a volatile market like we’ve seen right now happens, whether that’s a quarter or it’s near term. I think most of our customers understand their focus becomes on quality and ROI. Like there’s not -- you can have as many tools, platforms, whatever you want to do. And maybe when markets are screening, people are investing a lot -- across a lot of different tools and platforms and technologies. But when they start seeing things getting tightened up, they really want to focus on quality data and ROI and understanding where their buyers are, their existing customers too because they got to get really tight with them, as well as prospects and what those buying centers are doing. And if you think about our model for 23 years, when you think about the model that we’ve had with ESG and BrightTALK and Xtelligent. When you are producing and publishing relevant information that’s going to help assist buying teams make very key decisions for their respective organizations, have a permission-based audience and have access to first-party purchase intent insight. Especially during a time when Google is eliminating third-party cookies, that’s coming under scrutiny, privacy with non-permission based audience members, customers really honing in on that. So I mean I can’t predict the future. But the way we look at this and what we’re seeing is that this is a short-term volatile market, our customers understand quality and ROI, and we understand that. Those trends that we mentioned are not going away. When I talk about those trends, again, I just want to make sure the healthy and competitive IT market, modernizing sales and marketing departments, privacy and this whole shift in the digital transformation of face-to-face events; buyers want to sell service, they want information on their dime, on their time and how they want it, that bodes really well for us. As far as the sales use case, it has worked really well. Historically, as you all -- as you know, Jason, when we launched Priority Engine really focused on the marketing, the marketing use case. And it’s still -- we have -- our marketers are the key to what we’re doing because they’re the ones that absorb the data, will leverage ABM plays, will do with nurturing campaigns, competitive takeout campaigns, alliance campaigns and that’s been really critical. That data has got into the hands of sales and sales say, "Wow, this is really accurate stuff. I know these accounts, these are the active prospects." The fact that we can deliver account and prospect-level intelligence because of this permission-based audience is such a huge competitive advantage. And then we lay this into a different workflow for sales use cases, territory management, helping them to easily update into their CRM system, rank and stack their individual prospects, not just at the account level but at the prospect level. And we’ve seen really good adoption on that. And we see it by our usage and by also the numbers and the revenue. I will say we are spending a lot of investment on the marketing use case as well. Making sure we’re updating the integrations, through integration and Platform as a Service investment we’re making to get into tighter integrations, both on the marketing and sales, to make sure we have analytics, to show -- and dashboards, to show how our marketers are doing against their ABM strategy or against their competitive takeout strategy, with their partner alliance strategy. So having both of these investments working simultaneously should bode well because when you can bring marketing and sales together with the commonality of really quality data and you can get them on the same page, we’re doing a lot for our customers. And in turn, they’re doing a lot for their business.