Howard Lerman
Analyst · Oppenheimer. Please go ahead
Well, hello everyone and welcome to our earnings call. And I would like to especially thank Conrad. We are excited to have you onboard for the next major revolution of Yext and we thank you all for being here. We are pleased to report yet another record quarter for Yext. We are on track to achieving another record year. With these great results, there are a ton of highlights this quarter. Revenue grew 35% over the first quarter of last year. It exceeded the high end of our guidance. GAAP loss margins improved by nearly 600 basis points from the year ago quarter and non-GAAP loss margins improved by more than 900 basis points. And for the third time in the last five quarters, we generated positive operating cash flow. Recently, we unveiled The Yext Building, our global headquarters that's new, located in the tech-centric heart of New York City alongside Google and Apple store. This state-of-the-art facility provides us with space for about 1,000 employees and we expect to move in during 2020. The Yext Building also includes a world-class customer briefing center. We are going to help customers from around the globe understand how to build a single source of truth online for their consumers. And during the quarter, we signed contracts with leading brands like Daimler, Famous Brands, Rogers Communications, [indiscernible], Sephora, WH Smith. And we signed expansions and renewals with Choice Hotels, Jaguar, Land Rover, Allstate Insurance and Adidas and in German, that's Adidas. These brands recognize there is a massive paradigm shift happening in the world of search from keywords to questions. This shift has retrained consumers to simply ask for what they want. No longer do they have got to browse through websites to get answers to their most important questions. The consumer has moved from browsing to asking. And when they ask questions, they expect specific relevant answers about companies and products, professionals, locations, services. The fact is, today's customer journey starts with a question and consumers expect answers. But what happens to the customer journey when they get the wrong answer or chaotic results or missing info? Reputation is at stake and brands risk losing their business to succeed in this new world and answer customer demand. Brands must become what we call answers-ready. Let's take a step back. The Holy Grail in consumer marketing has always been to reach the right customer at the right time with the right information to incite an action that converts to a sale. For decades, companies have been learning more about our customers, their customer, starting with their demographics. We knew where they lived, their age and their gender, but not a lot. Then as technology progressed, we began to track specific purchases against specific customers and we gained insight to their buying patterns, their product usage, even their personalities. And then, we started to understand consumer behavior if they use keywords to search the web. We knew what they were doing in real-time, but we didn't know when they were going to do it or why they were going to do it. We have never been able to track true consumer intent, but now we can. As consumers continue to just ask for what they want, now they are displaying more and more intent. And as a result, marketers aren't just optimizing for keywords anymore, there are now new ways to optimize marketing around this new intent because consumers are asking questions. This change in consumer behavior is leading to a change in how marketers do their job. Now we can market to our customers based not on who they are, what we can guess about their psychology, but on literally what they just asked for. So we find ourselves at the dawn of a new age, intent marketing, where we can meet the customer at that exact moment of intent. Marketers who meet their customer at the moment of intent with accurate information sell more stuff. This leads to better brand reputation and increased revenue. And our friends at Conductor ran a study that proves this. They ran a study that showed a search that's multi-word. It's a multi-word question, which by the way, is a strong indicator of intent, converts at 2.5 times that of a single keyword search. So intent marketing means opportunity and opportunity leads to revenue. And that's where Yext comes in. Yext makes it possible to provide verified answers for consumers seeking the truth about brands. Our technology-enabled companies that take advantage of intent marketing by enabling them to implement brand- verified answers everywhere consumers search. So they can meet the customer at the moment of intent. Yext puts brands in the line of search with brand-verified answers and leading brands around the world are implementing brand-verified answers to become answers-ready. Now being answers-ready has three parts. First, they need to build a complete knowledge graph. This is a brain like database that stores all the data about a business. Second, they need to be able to answer questions themselves on their own website with intent pages and answer pages and a great site search. And third, they need to be able to answer questions everywhere, Google, Alexa, WeChat, anywhere people are asking in any language around the world. Our founding principle that the ultimate authority on a business should be the business itself is more relevant than ever and our continuing innovations in new technology are now enabling consumers to get brand-verified answers whenever they search with a question. Yext provides a single source of truth for companies online. Our customers have put more than 200 million authoritative facts into our platform. With our mission of perfect answers everywhere, Yext is leading brands into the future of search. We have been doing this for more than a decade. We always have and we always will. And speaking of that, I would love to now turn the call over to our President and Chief Revenue Officer, Jim Steele.