Momentive Global Inc. Price & Performance (MNTV)

Thank you. Good afternoon, and welcome to Momentum Global's 4th quarter and full year 2022 earnings call. Joining me on the call today are Priyanka Carr, COO Zander Lohrry, CEO and Rich Sullivan, CFO. After management's prepared remarks, we'll take your questions. Prior to this call, we issued a press release Our Q4 and full year 2022 financial results, which can be found on our Investor Relations website at investor. Momentum dotai. During the course of this call, management will make forward looking statements, which are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including statements relating to our strategy, including the restructuring plan we just announced, Financial outlook, investments, revenue, operating margin and free cash flow. Actual results may differ materially from the results predicted, and reported results should not be considered an indication of A discussion of the risks and uncertainties related to our business is contained in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in particular, in the section entitled Risk Factors in our quarterly and annual reports, and we refer you to these filings.

Our discussion today will include non GAAP financial measures unless otherwise stated. These non GAAP measures With our 8 ks filed today with the SEC, it may also be found on the Investor Relations website. Finally, please note that the growth rates Cited in today's prepared remarks are on a year over year basis unless otherwise noted. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Zander. Zander?

Thank you, Gary, and thank you all for joining us today. I'm going to walk you through some of the important changes to the business we announced today, including a decision to reduce the size of our workforce and our continued effort to drive profitable growth. Rich then will discuss our Q4 financial results and outlook. Well, Momentum 2022 is all about resilience. We began repositioning the company in late February and ran the business More operating rigor in the face of a more challenging macroeconomic environment. We delivered meaningful operating leverage during the year, Culminating in Q4 results that included 19% non GAAP operating margin in Q4 on $122,400,000 in revenue. Both metrics exceeded the high end of our guidance ranges. As part of our repositioning, we streamlined our sales organization in October to make our customer acquisition and expansion motions We believe this would be sufficient to help us both navigate a more challenging selling environment and achieve our long term goal of delivering more profitable growth. However, it's become abundantly clear that we need to take more strategic actions to succeed in 2023 and beyond. After a thorough review of our business, we've concluded that our best path forward is to 1, further lower our cost structure across the organization 2, focus our resources on the products that win, retain and expand with customers most effectively.

And 3, standardize our most important offerings Onto our core platform and one pricing model. Our go forward plan includes the following: reducing our workforce by approximately 14%, which impacts all major functions of the organization. Shifting our customer experience product focus away from Get Feedback and making SurveyMonkey Enterprise our CX solution for new and expansion customers transitioning our market research sales assistant products by providing more features in our free offering and more affordable options in our paid plans. These are significant changes, and we do not undertake them lightly. But these decisions are supported by data and customer feedback. Since combining the CX and SurveyMonkey Enterprise sales teams in Early 2022, we validated that SurveyMonkey Enterprise is a very competitive offering for CX use cases with consistently stronger overall win rates and renewal rates Going forward, SurveyMonkey Enterprise will become our CX solution and we plan to build additional functionality into our core survey platform to better support CX customers, including leveraging some of Get Feedback's strengths in analytics and sales force integrations. We plan to maintain Get Feedback for As we make this transition. Ultimately, we believe this move will enable us to drive more expansion opportunities with SurveyMonkey Enterprise customers, our largest sales assisted customer base, and allow us to deliver more innovation and customer value through products run on a single core platform.

In market research, we have delivered awesome products and won blue chip logos. But we've sold these products primarily on a credit basis, which makes customer engagement more project oriented and rev rec less SaaS like. We began rolling out subscription based products With the successful launch of brand tracking in 2021, demonstrating that the subscription model can work here. In Q3, we began piloting broader subscription based selling and in Q4, we hit our stride. We closed over 2 dozen subscription deals in the 4th quarter That would have been project based engagements under the prior model. And we doubled the mix of subscription business in market research from approximately 20% in Q3 to more than 40% in Q4. We believe we now have the right selling and packaging formula to transition market research to subscriptions in 2023. We believe this will result in higher quality, more sustainable revenue from our market research solutions. In self serve, our work in 2022 validates that getting back to the basics of product led growth is the way to fully reinvigorate that channel. We made further progress in Q4, including driving sequential growth in free plan sign ups, improving survey deployment rates and improving conversion rates from responsible pricing and packaging.

From here, we'll work to improve our ability to engage more users and Capture more value from those who are willing to pay for the value we deliver. As we focus on these three priorities, we expect to expand margins further in 2023. The changes to the cost structure we announced today put us on a path to double non GAAP operating margin in full year 2023 versus full year 2022. I take full responsibility for the decisions that led to today's announcement. In short, the investments we've made over the last few years are not delivering returns sufficient to justify the costs. We believe the changes we've announced today are the right strategic steps to manage the business through a tougher short term environment and position the company for more profitable growth over time. 2022 was a challenging year. The Board, executive team and I are incredibly grateful for the dedication and hard work The momentum team delivers for our customers and their colleagues. For those who are leaving us, we will do our best to help them succeed in their next steps. For those who are staying on, we are committed to partnering with you to win as a team.

I'll now turn the call over to Rich, who I want to formally welcome to our executive team. I'm looking forward to you getting to spend time with him, and I am confident he'll appreciate his strength as our new finance leader. He's a great addition to our culture, and he's already adding value to how we run the business. Rich?

Thanks, Andrew. I'm excited to join the exceptional team here at Momenta to be working with all of you. I also look forward to working with the people on the phone today and getting to know you all better. As Zander pointed out, we are making some significant changes to the business. And while there's a lot of work to do in the coming months, I believe the steps we are taking today BEST positions momentum for sustainable long term success. We continue to deliver valuable products that attract and retain loyal customers as evidenced by our strong renewal rates. I believe we're making the necessary changes to these products and to our cost structure To come out of these challenging times, a stronger company with commitment to deliver profitable growth. As stated in today's press release and 8 ks, We announced plans to streamline our product offerings that simplify our go to market strategy and improve operating margins going forward. Unfortunately, the plans involve a reduction of the company's talented workforce by approximately 200 individuals or 14%. We estimate that we will incur approximately $7,000,000 to $9,000,000 in charges related to employee severance and employee benefits in connection with today's announcement.

We expect that the majority of these costs will be incurred and paid during the Q1 of 2023, and the execution of the plan, including cash payments, We'll be substantially complete by the end of the Q2 of this year. Turning now to the full year Q4 2022 financial results. Unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are year over year. For full year 2022, revenue increased 8% $481,000,000 On a constant currency basis, revenue increased approximately 9%. The sales assisted channel revenue increased 27% to $181,000,000 and self-service revenue to $300,000,000 in the year, essentially flat. In 2022, we generated 7.9% non GAAP operating margin, which exceeded the high end of the guidance range of 6% to 7% the company initially provided in May of 2022. Free cash flow is $200,000 and reflects impact to approximately $33,000,000 of restructuring and deal related cash outlays. As Xander pointed out, 2022 was a challenging year, both because of a failed deal and an increasingly difficult macro environment. Many of our customers have It's part of cost cutting initiatives at their own company, especially in the tax sector. Budgets are more limited and potential new customers are putting every deal under greater scrutiny. This is clearly having an impact on our ability to grow new customer contracts.

In the end, much of the investments we made to aggressively scale and grow the top line through sales New customers did not yield their desired return and has led to many of the changes to our cost structure we announced earlier today. In the Q4, as expected, we saw a continuation of the challenging selling environment, especially internationally. Q4 total revenue increased 4% of $122,400,000 putting us above the high end of our guidance range. On a constant currency basis, revenue increased approximately 7%. US revenue increased 8% to $81,000,000 and now accounts for approximately 2 thirds of total revenue. Rest of World declined 2%, primarily due to foreign exchange and additional challenging macro environment headwinds. Self-service revenue declined 6% to $73,100,000 As Zander mentioned, we continue to make progress in reinvigorating this channel in Q4, As evidenced by sequential growth in free plan sign ups, improving survey deployments and improved free to pay conversion rates. While revenue for our sales assisted channel increased 23 percent to $49,300,000 was our continuation of a challenging selling environment. Existing customers, while not immune to economic issues, continue to be resilient as renewal rate and expansion success for our subscription products Increased year over year.

We ended the quarter with approximately 14,500 sales assisted customers, up 23%. Excluding team customers, average revenue per sales assisted customer was up 13% year over year. And more than 2,200 customers are spending 25,000 or more with us annually, up 16%. Deferred revenue increased 3% to approximately $207,000,000 Remaining performance obligations, or RPO, Which is the sum of deferred revenue backlog, rose 5% to $239,000,000 partially driven by continued traction in winning multiyear customer commitments. Turning to profitability, non GAAP gross margin was 85%, a record level and 138 basis points increase from a year ago today. Non GAAP operating margin of 18.8 Exceeded the high end of our 14% to 16% guidance range due to the previously mentioned gross margin strength, continued operating rigor and the measures we began taking in October to lower sales and marketing expense and streamline our go to market motion. All operating expenses improved sequentially and year over year on both a dollar basis and as a percentage of revenue. Q4 operating margin benefited from bonus accrual reversals. Note that the full impact of the reversal is expected and included in the Q4 guidance range The company provided on our last call, but it's important to keep in mind when comparing sequentially to Q1 2023 Margins.

Net cash provided by operating activities was $8,200,000 and free cash flow was 6,600,000 with a free cash flow margin of 5.4%. Excluding the impact of 4.3 Approximately $11,000,000 We ended the year with $18,000,000 in net cash and cash equivalents, which reflects the impact of $83,500,000 of share repurchases during the year. Our outstanding authorization of our share repurchase program was 116 $15,500,000 as of December 31, 2022. Turning to our outlook. For the Q1 of 2023, We expect total year over year revenue growth to be between 0% 2%. In Q1, we expect to continue to see the impact of the steps we took In 2022, to reduce spend, resulting in Q1 non GAAP operating margin guidance of 6% to 8%. Note that Q1 operating expenses are seasonally higher than Q4 due to the timing of employee related accruals and taxes as well as marketing spend, which is typically higher in the first half of the year. Based on the visibility due to these challenging macro environments As well as potential short term impact of the strategic changes we made today, we will not be providing full year guidance. However, improving operating margin will remain a top priority in 2023, and the changes to the cost structure we announced today Put us on a path to double non GAAP operating margin on a full year basis.

Despite the uncertainty and macro headwinds, we are committed to continued cost discipline And controlling spending to deliver strong full year margin improvement, while still investing in the areas of the business that will drive profitable growth. With that, I'll now turn it back to Dan.

Thanks, Rich. I'll turn it to the operator and happy to take questions.

Our first question is from Ryan MacDonald with Needham. Your line is now open.

Hi. Thanks for taking my questions and welcome Rich. Great to have you on. Maybe, Cassandra, just starting out, As we think about the outlook for 2023, I understand you're not providing guidance for the full year. But maybe just in the context of Q1, can you give us a sense of Sort of what those expectations are in terms of the trajectory on both sales assisted versus self serve? And then In that context, what may be as a part of this transition is creating enough variability where you don't have that sort of visibility from a full year perspective?

Well, I think I'm inspired by the product market fit and the satisfaction and joy our customers get from our products. You could see the gross renewal rates both in the web channel as well as in the sales assistant channel are healthy. Clearly, the new environment for demand On the web and in sales has deteriorated over the last year. And so I don't have bright visibility on when those new cohorts Customers will come back in stronger numbers. I'll say we're inspired by the expansion efforts that our sales team has employed, and that's primarily selling Market research and additional SurveyMonkey enterprise to existing customers. And so we've seen really good uptake there.

And on the web, we continue to experiment with pricing, packaging, as I mentioned on the call, Unveiling some new more affordable annual plans and really just getting more users to try our products and see the full The value of our features before asking them to pay. So we're employing a whole bunch of different tests that we're excited about. I think you will continue to see really healthy renewal rates. But look, the current environment and macroeconomic environment where you see layoffs in droves every day, particularly in sectors where we have some customer concentration, do present headwinds. And frankly, it's just not the best use of our time to Provide visibility into Q3 and Q4 numbers right now. We know what we need to do to win and then we'll come back each quarter and tell you how we did.

Okay. And then as you're sort of shifting focus and sort of deemphasizing some offerings, emphasizing others, Shifting to a new pricing strategy, I guess, how is that being sort of relayed to customers? And what's the risk here that we kind of go through some churn as you sort of shift to new pricing models and to new, I guess, branding models on some of these products here?

Yes. I mean, there's always a risk of churn when you have either product changes, business model changes, pricing changes. The goal here is that CX has always been a primary use case of SurveyMonkey on the web and SurveyMonkey Enterprise. And in acquiring Get Feedback and building out a new product offering, we were able to attract a new cohort of customers With a product that had particular strength and I'm proud of the work that team did. But in a world where we need to rationalize resources, drive incremental profitability, We recognize there's quite a bit of overlap in terms of what those products offer. And so what you'll see us do is just dial down investment in that arena, Renew those customers best we can while trying to attract them over to our flagship SurveyMonkey enterprise CX offering. And now on the web, of course, we're constantly iterating. We've got a terrific growth team that is data science driven, and making sure the new features we offer, New plans, pricing maximize both customer value, but also bookings and revenue for us. So I've got a lot of confidence in this team as we both transition products And also pricing plans that we will be both business model focused as well as NPS focused.

All right. Thanks for the color. I'll hop back in the queue.

Thanks, Ray.

Our next question comes from Robert Koolaburra with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.

Great. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to ask a little bit more about the decisions move away from Get Feedback for CX. Maybe some more context on how large the Get Feedback business is today, besides the book of business, maybe how fast it's been growing? And if you could give us an update on any functional differences that remained in the products, certainly like enterprise versus get feedback. And I guess just following on the last question, maybe just give us a sense of your confidence in your ability to continue to serve those customer needs with Sure. Thanks, Robert. I'll kick it off and then I'll hand it over to Preet. Yes, I think we said in the past that the standalone CX represents less than 10% of our total book of business. As I mentioned before, SurveyMonkey Enterprise has a robust set of features for CX and also a robust customer base. And so I'm confident that the folks who love Get Feedback will continue to renew Get Feedback, while we build that bridge and maintain that bridge for Get Feedback Customers to walk over to SurveyMonkey Enterprises. So the team is hard at work on analytics capabilities, sales force integrations, So that we can deliver that customer delight across both product suites and ultimately steer our investments into SurveyMonkey Enterprise.

Preeti, what do you want to add to that?

Yes, I completely agree with that. And I would just add that we're transitioning the GSD Get Feedback product, But not stepping away from CX, as Andrew mentioned, CX is our top is close to our top use case on SurveyMonkey Enterprise and that core platform. We have customers currently using it heavily for those CX use cases. We have very, very strong overlap On the capabilities, I would get feedback direct. So we're confident that we can service those customers onto our FME Our product innovation roadmap going forward is really focused on strengthening that CX use case, but on our core platform. So that includes the analytic capabilities, strengthening our integrations, making them more native and the team that built us all of those great get feedback capabilities It's the team that will be supporting that work going forward. So I have high confidence that the SurveyMonkey enterprise product We'll serve the CX use case incredibly well. It already does so today, and the investments we're making and streamlining it to a core platform Will allow us to deliver even more value to those customers.

Great. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Chad Bennett with Craig Hallum. Your line is now open.

Hey, Chad. Hey, Xander. Thanks for taking my questions. So just want to dig in a little bit on the self serve side. You talked about Seeing kind of green shoots there in terms of free plan sign ups increasing sequentially, and I think you indicated increases in conversion rates. We also kind of caught and I just want you to confirm this that I think on the Advantage plan, you implemented a pretty decent price increase on that plan in the quarter. Just trying to get a sense for Obviously, that business accelerated downward on a year over year basis in the Q4. Do you have enough data? Do you have enough confidence where The rate of decline improves kind of throughout the year? Or how should we think about that? Thanks.

Yes, I mean, we are busy making a lot of changes to stabilize that business, and I am confident that we have Arrested the fall. Clearly, we did not see the kind of uptick in Q3 and Q4 that we had modeled in and hoped. And We're taking appropriate actions and whether they be our own business model decisions or macroeconomic doesn't much matter. I think the team has got a speed on what we need to do. We've deployed some of those initiatives. As I mentioned, this doesn't happen overnight. A lot of the work We do whether it's in SEO or in product or in pricing and packaging, there's a funnel from a user coming to certimonkey.com The first time between that day when she ultimately pays for a plan. So, we tried some things last year that didn't deliver the kind of success we hoped. I think we've made a lot of progress and we will do our best to deliver results this year that show Q4 was the low mark. Priya, anything you want to add?

Just specificity on that, you're correct. We did do a price increase on our Advantage customers, All right. Just seeing ones and that rolls into positive impact on the renewal basis they renew throughout this year and at 2023. The green shoots that give us confidence are the ones, Sandra mentioned earlier, our free plan sign ups Are growing positively in the U. S. Deployment rates, so those user spending surveys also grew, one of the Strongest indicator of upcoming conversion and we've taken actions to optimize the conversion rates as well on that business. So a lot of positive indicators that give us confidence that we have a good trajectory forward, but also most importantly, continued Optimization in a challenging macroeconomic environment to make sure that we're pricing affordably to value and getting access to most customers throughout this year.

So you haven't seen any kind of incremental or outsized negative gross churn impact from the price increase on the advantage plan is What I'm getting, is that the correct take?

We do see some churn increase. Sorry, go ahead.

No, you've got it.

I was just saying, there will we always optimize the price increase with the churn impact On it, and so any pricing does impact churn to some extent, but this is through a subset of our customers. And the net impact Through our testing is net positive on bookings.

Perfect.

Okay. Got it. And then maybe one clarification for me at least, Could be for Rich or Zander. Just on the sales assisted customer count, just want to make sure I heard it right. Is it 14,500?

That's correct. Yes.

Okay. And that's Comparable to $15,400 last quarter or not?

That's correct.

Okay. All right. And then just real quick, maybe last one for me on The sales sorry, yes, the sales assisted side of the business, I guess, Did you notice anything in the quarter from a bookings or billing standpoint? I think you hinted towards international being tougher, but Did you actually see more scrutiny or push outs For elongation of sales cycles in the Q4 on that side of the business?

For sure. Yes, I mean, harder quarter all around. I think you See some of the customer churn on the sales assistant side of the house was obviously at the lower end, lower price points because you saw that our overall Kind of average revenue per customer was up nicely year over year, but the most sensitive enterprise customers had higher churn in the quarter And sales cycles on new customers are just more challenging. You have folks that have more scrutiny on their budgets. You have buyers that were laid off, And just a more difficult selling environment in new.

Got it. Thanks for taking my questions.

Thanks, Jeff.

Our last question comes from Parker Lane with Stifel. Your line is now open.

Hi, this is Matthew Kickert on for Parker. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. First off, kind of operating leverage for fiscal 'twenty three as you're looking to Gain leverage there. Are there any other areas that you're looking to cut costs this year outside of the restructuring plan that you announced today?

I appreciate the question. I think the we have multiple paths here to get to that operating margin target 2023. As Andrew pointed out, it's a challenging macro environment to predict, but what we do control is cost. And so we have I believe we have many levers to pull to make sure that we can remain on the path to double that operating margin in 2023. We'll continue to monitor the market and adjust accordingly. But on the cost side, driven by a lot of the changes we made today, We're on the path to have double margin year over year.

Okay, got it. And then kind of as you're transitioning, Focusing more on the enterprises and the sales motions there, what like high level investments are you still making in the self-service channel?

Yes. In the self-service channel, we continue to invest in features on our product capabilities there that really improve usability of the Product covering a few use cases that are common for our self serve smaller customers or smaller teams, and discoverability. A lot of our work as well as we've alluded to before is really optimizing the value we deliver to customers, How easily they can access that value and the pricing that goes along with it. So we have A growth team, a data science team that is constantly optimizing that with a changing macroeconomic environment. So you should expect to see A lot of changes on that throughout the course of the year that we keep delivering on. We're also building capabilities into the Product that make it easier with AI for users to get to the value moment. So being able to send a survey and receive responses and get insight Those capabilities extend both to our self serve products and our enterprise capabilities and our enterprise products as well. So continued investment in this area, especially as it is a really important feeder of our sales assisted enterprise businesses And inextricably linked to the products that we sell on the sales assistant side.

Okay, fantastic. Thank you.

Thanks, Matthew.

And our final question is from Robert Coolbrith with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.

Thank you. Just wanted to ask a couple of follow ups. First on the sales assisted customer count, could you remind us the impact from the Yes, and the sales force rationalization and sort of definition change versus organic trends there. And then I wanted to ask, I think last quarter you Point out that in terms of new business, maybe a little focused upmarket, thinking The macro might drive some increased churn among some of your larger competitors' customers. Just wondering if you can give us a sense of Anything you're seeing in the market there, if that thesis is playing out so far? So those 2. Thank you so much.

Yes. So on the sales and systems side, our customer count was down about 900 customers Q4 over Q3. And that, as I mentioned, was mostly concentrated in the SMB area, so lower spending customers. And then on the new selling environment, as I mentioned, I would say that the vast majority Of our investment time, people, energy, marketing demand for the last several years was focused on winning new business and that has swung dramatically towards renewing and upselling existing customers, 14,500 customers where we have a relationship, we have a contract, we're delivering value, they're seeing the benefit Of our deployment. So for every single one of those customers, there is more business to win and more value to deliver. And the ROI is just a lot better there than in the new area. We are competing for customers who are churning out some of our more expensive competitors. We are winning there. Now the numbers won't overcompensate For losing some of the smaller SMB customers we have, so it will be difficult to derive those wins there. But we're seeing folks Roll off of some of our more expensive competitors who are looking for an offering, and we deliver great value there.

It's on us to make sure that our marketing and selling teams get in front of those So we'll keep you posted on progress we have delivering product market fit, upsell. You saw that our 25,000 of our customers was about flat, down maybe 2,000 to the tune of 2,200 in Q4. And obviously, those are the customers that are buying bigger deployments, buying multiple products and ones that are getting the disproportionate I I want to thank everybody for joining us today. We believe we're taking the right steps to navigate what is a pretty choppy short term environment and position the company for more profitable growth over time. And And once again, I just want to send my heartfelt appreciation to the Momentum team for all their dedication, folks who are staying with us and folks who Are departing as well. I want to wish you all a happy and healthy evening, and we look forward to chatting again soon.

That concludes the conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your