Good afternoon, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Forrester’s Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I’d now like to turn the conference over to the Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations, Ed Bryce Morris. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and hello, everyone. Thanks for joining today’s call. Earlier this afternoon, we issued our press release for the fourth quarter and full year 2024. If you need a copy, you can find one on our website in the Investors section. Here with us today to discuss our results are George Colony, Forrester’s Chief Executive Officer and Chairman; and Chris Finn, Chief Financial Officer. Carrie Johnson, our Chief Product Officer; and Nate Swan, Chief Sales Officer, are also with us for the Q&A section of the call. Before we begin, I’d like to remind you that this call will contain certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as expects, believes, anticipates, intends, plans, estimates or similar expressions are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements are based on the company’s current plans and expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause future activities and results of operations to be materially different from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ are discussed in our reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the company undertakes no obligations to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Lastly, consistent with previous calls, today we will be discussing our performance on an unadjusted basis, which excludes items infecting comparability. While reporting on an adjusted basis is not in accordance with GAAP, we believe that reporting numbers on this adjusted basis provides a meaningful comparison and an appropriate basis for our discussion. You’ll find a detailed list of items excluded from these adjusted results in our press release. And with that, I’ll hand it over to George.

Thank you for joining Forrester’s 2024 Q4 and full year earnings call. With me is our Chief Financial Officer, Chris Finn, who will present a financial update following my remarks. I will be covering the following key themes: one, our progress in 2024; two, Q4 and 2024 fiscal year financial performance; and three, focus areas for 2025. 2024 was the final year of our transition to Forrester Decisions or FD. We embarked on this journey in 2021 and have worked through a number of challenges, all against the backdrop of a tech slowdown in an uncertain economic environment. As Christophe Favre, our Head of Sales in Europe and Asia observed, this wasn’t a transition to a new product, it was a transition to a new company. We have had to introduce all of our clients to a different value proposition and a new way of working with Forrester. We are pleased to report that our migration is essentially complete, with 80% of our contract value or CV now in our FD portfolio. The remaining 20% of CV is largely reprints, with a small portion remaining in our legacy product. As a result, after our multi-year migration, the entire organization is now 100% focused on selling and supporting FD. This will allow research and product to continue enhancing Forrester Decisions and go-to-market teams to focus on retention, enrichment, and adding new clients to the platform. While this period in the company’s history has been challenging, we remain confident that the changes we have made will generate long-term shareholder and client value. As discussed on previous calls, while we have been transitioning to Forrester Decisions, we’ve also been refocusing our consulting and events businesses to drive CV. By design, these businesses comprise a smaller portion of our overall revenue mix, now less…

Thanks, George, and good afternoon, everyone. As George discussed, our fourth quarter results fell short of our expectations. Despite this, we have made meaningful progress this year as a company, including materially completing the Forrester Decisions migration, completing the rollout of our generative AI tool, Izola, launching a new reprints platform, which allows for the capability to offer a newly launched subscription reprint product, and continuously improving the Forrester Decisions platform with ongoing updates. In addition, our fourth quarter and full year financial results were in line with or better than the midpoint of our guidance and consensus estimates. Furthermore, key metrics have stabilized or steadily improved throughout the year. These include wallet retention, client retention, contract value per client, and the portion of CV on multi-year contracts. On the topic of metrics, I wanted to highlight that we have recast our CV metric for a 2025 plan foreign currency rates. Furthermore, we corrected an insignificant error in the calculation which had no effect on prior CV trends. We have included the historical recast CV metrics in the investor presentation on our website. Also, because we have materially completed our product transformation, starting next quarter, we will only be commenting on a consolidated set of metrics going forward. For the quarter, overall revenue was $108 million, representing a 9% decline from Q4 2023 revenues of $118.1 million. Overall revenue for the year came in at $432.5 million, representing a 10% decline from the $480.8 million we generated in 2023. As we have outlined in January, we have taken actions to better align our cost structure with the decline in our revenue. I will now provide some additional details regarding the restructuring. We have reduced our workforce by approximately 6%. We expect to incur approximately $5.5 million to $5.7 million of…

Thank you, Chris. In conclusion, the company is excited to be focused on executing the new Forrester model. We are confident that we have the right product and the right go-to-market strategy to return to bookings growth and ultimately revenue growth. Thank you again for your support of the company and your belief in our important and valuable mission. I’m going to hand the call back to the operator and we will now take questions.

Thank you, sir. [Operator Instructions] And I show our first question comes from the line of Andrew Nicholas from William Blair. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. I wanted to start with the bookings commentary. George, I think you said that bookings growth attenuated a little bit late in the fourth quarter and I think you also noted that you’re still kind of dealing with some adjustments as you transition to sales motion and the culture. Can you just unpack a little bit more what kind of occurred over the course of November and December? Were there individual industries that were giving you more issues? Do you think it was more execution-driven or end market-driven? Any additional color there would be great.

Hey, Andrew. It’s Nate Swan, the Chief Sales Officer. I’m happy to jump in, and I’m sure George will give some comments as well. So Q4 was a challenging quarter for us across a couple of different segments. We had some challenges in the smaller high-tech field where we’ve continually seen some challenges. We’re meeting those pretty well, but we stepped backwards a little bit in Q4, I think, as a lot of small vendors were really struggling with budgets. The government sector was also a challenge in Q4 that was partly due to continuing resolution, as that did not get resolved until really the Christmas break for a lot of the government agencies was well in play. And then in India, we also had some challenges meeting our numbers. So it was really around execution, and I guess I would say going forward in 2025, execution is our main focus for the sales organization. We are not changing any of our strategies. We are staying on the same focus of developing pipelines, executing our retention lifecycle, and using our sales methodology that George refers to as FAST, and just getting better at it. We don’t need to introduce more. We’ve introduced plenty. And it’s about getting the sales team and the rest of Forrester on the same page and making sure that we’re delivering for our clients and getting to those senior level executives and delivering for them. That would be probably the biggest challenge area. So those were specific industries. I’d say the second area would be the focus at getting to a more senior economic buyer has been the area where we could be doing better as an organization.

Yeah, I’d say one last comment on Q4 is that one area of strength was we call it Premier high-tech, but it’s the large tech companies. That business has actually recovered pretty well in the second half of the year. I think Nate talked about small tech being very challenged, but big tech was a…

…big performer for the full year, yes.

Yeah. Good question.

Great. I guess maybe as a follow-up to that and thinking about the guidance for 2025 and your expectation that CV growth will improve as we kind of move into the second half. Do you need your small high-tech to kind of saw a little bit, I guess, I’m just trying to understand how much of a macro improvement you need versus execution to see that second half acceleration, and maybe more broadly any comments on overall visibility of the business now relative to this time last year?

Yeah, Andrew, good follow-up. The exposure on the smaller tech is not nearly as much as what we’ve had over the last few years. As Chris has said, we’re through most of the migration, very small amount with that group. We are also working on – we want to keep those clients. We’re not trying to move on from them. We have a different product set that we are trying to move them over to, and we’re working on glide path for those clients as well to move them on, but the exposure in that sector is not nearly as much as what it has been.

Yeah, as you know, we’ve been transitioning away from sub-$50 million tech vendors, and that’s really what’s happened over the last couple of years. We love them to death, but they would roll in on the tide of good times, and they would roll back out on the tide of more challenging times. So we’ve made a decision as a company to deemphasize the sub-$50 million and focus above that. So most of that transition is over at this point.

Understood. And if I could just squeeze one more in on the AI topic, I understand, Izola, you’re very optimistic about that and what it means for kind of the overall Forrester Decisions product offering. But on the efficiency side, have there been any developments there to help with cost management or productivity or anything that’s in the pipeline from an operational perspective that you could speak to? Thank you.

Sure. Hi. It’s Carrie Johnson, Chief Product Officer. As you noted, Izola is certainly our client facing tool, but we’re using, leveraging it quite a bit as well for internal efficiency. So primarily, tools like Izola plus some other enhancements that we’ve added are allowing our customer success team to find answers faster for clients. We’re also using some automation, which is part of, by the way, some of the outsourcing that we’re doing. And then we’re also using automation to decrease the time that it takes for analysts to conduct calls with our clients. So, we’re doing some auto summarization and then some GenAI to then update the records that then help us service clients faster. So certainly a big area of focus for us, both on the client side and using some of the same tools plus new tools on the backend.

Yeah, and some informal research here on Izola into Q4, again, informal, but heavy users of Izola were renewing at 20% higher rates. So it looks like an emerging correlation here with the companies who are focused on Izola recommitting to us. So it’s been a big help.

Thank you.

Good questions. Thank you.

Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of Anja Soderstrom from Sidoti. Please go ahead.

Hi, and thank you for taking my questions. I’m just curious, you mentioned you had some challenges in India. Can you just elaborate on that?

Yeah, sure. We had – with the small vendors in India, we were having a little bit more of a challenge. It was really the first time in the 2 years that I’ve been here that we had a miss. So we’re thinking it is more of a miss in quarter on execution as opposed to a broader trend. That we see challenges in that market. I’ll actually be there in 2 weeks and looking forward to being with the team and learning more about that market. But we don’t think it’s a long-term problem, just more of a Q4 execution on some growth and retention that we were expecting to come in.

Okay. It seems like you have some, you’re mentioning you have issues with smaller vendors and your focus is really to grow with the larger customers, right? So how is that going? You mentioned it’s been more challenging than you thought to get to the C-suite, but what are you doing to sort of improve that and expand with larger customers?

Yeah, great question. We are working on our Forrester agile selling technique, where we are educated for the last 3 quarters, our salespeople, on how to have those conversations. They’re really leaning in. Our management team really leaning in on coaching that. It’s a different sales motion than we had to do before. So they are working on that and practicing it, so we’re getting better all the time at doing that. And we’ve seen some great success where we have done that. So we run an early renewal program, and we’re seeing roughly 30% growth when we work with senior executives, show them where there’s an opportunity to improve the current contract with new members that could be utilizing those services and rewriting those for a new multi-year engagement. We’re seeing really, really good success when we do that. So it’s just broad-based execution across the sales organization, customer success, making sure we’re understanding the initiatives that our clients have, what outcomes they are trying to achieve, and making sure that we’re setting our analysts up for success so that they can deliver against them. When we do that, we do really well.

Okay. And you’re really some new products are much of a bribery start for engaging with the customers and what does the roadmap look like for the year?

Sure. So George mentioned a couple of products potentially in his comments as did Chris. I mean one was our reprints hub which is and the flexible reprints product and that’s, I think, as you know, that’s the sort of business where we allow customers to purchase the rights for reprints for some of our existing research, published research that has been very successful for us. It’s a much more as its name is a flexible product, less driven around engagement per se with Forrester Decisions. But certainly very helpful in our with our high-tech clients, and it’s a product that they’ve been asking for. So we believe that has a sort of net positive impact on those large vendor relationships in particular that we’ve been talking about. The other sort of from an enhancement perspective are things that essentially allow further customization and flexibility around Forrester Decisions. So George talked about the interactive wave as an example. What’s very critical about that kind of tool and Izola is really unlocking all of the great insights and research that we have already done and allowing customers to access it in a more personalized way. So, when you think about our product roadmap, much of it is in fact leveraging the insights that we already have and delivering it to customers faster. So you’ll see more features from Forrester like interactivity around data, which is again unlocking the rich dataset that we have and that type of service to allow customers to get insights faster and more personalized.

So I’d say a lot a Izola during the year, Izola upgrades and improvements during the year as well.

Okay. Thank you. That was all for me.

Thank you, Anja.

Thank you. I’m showing no further questions in the queue at this time. I’d like to turn the call back to Chris Finn, Chief Financial Officer for closing remarks.

Yeah, thanks everyone for joining the call today as always just reach out to myself or Ed for any follow-ups. Thanks.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.