Unidentified Analyst: Thanks. I just wanted to double quick quickly into the funding backdrop we saw a pretty fairly significant spike in the first quarter funding activity. I’m just wondering, are you surprised you aren’t seeing that inflecting yet? Or is this, I guess, relative to prior cycles you’ve experienced fairly normal in terms of what you think the timing will be between when funding picks up and when it might translate into bookings?
William Feehery: Yes. Thanks for the question. Yes. No, we didn’t expect to see an immediate increase in bookings from funding. It really started just from what we read kind of started in February and moved into March. We think it takes typically several months before that will typically start to get through to us, which is why we’ve indicated that we’re a little bit more optimistic for the second half and the first half.
John Gallagher: But to be clear, too, the – any tailwinds related to the funding environment are not in the not included in the guidance. We guided from a stability standpoint for the year.
Unidentified Analyst: Got it. Thanks. And then I guess just a follow-up on the sort of some of the investments. Can you give us a sense of on the sales force where it stands currently and kind of how much you want to scale that this year? And then I know you made some changes last year in terms of how you structure and organize the sales force. I’m wondering what some of the early returns are with those measures, whether it’s win rates or attach rates or anything else you’d like to call out? Thank you.
William Feehery: So last year, we – yes, we made some changes to our commercial organization so that we could sell products from across all of Certara to our customers who are typically buying more than one. So it’s a more efficient way of reaching them and our belief was that we would see more cross – effectively what you call cross-sell, but in terms of more customers buying a bigger range of products and also that we would become more efficient over time as well because we are – particularly in services, we still had a lot of the seller-doer model where we were taking fairly expensive technical people away from billable work and tasking them with the sales process. So I would say that we’re very pleased with how far we’ve gotten on this, but there’s still more to go.
We’re probably a bit further ahead in terms of what we’ve done on the software side just because we started that earlier. And there’s been an opportunity, I think that we’ve taken into account over the last two quarters to really do some solid training of the sales force of the entire range of Stars products. We’ve done a lot to professionalize just how we’re covering the world in terms of sales territories and assigning key accounts to the appropriate salespeople – and we started to see some benefits of that in the first quarter. But like I said, I don’t think we’re fully at full strength there. So we’re – we’ll see some further benefits as we move through the year and kind of pull that team together even more than it is right now.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Vikram Purohit at Morgan Stanley.
Unidentified Analyst: This is [indiscernible] on for Vikram. We have one question so that is with the 1Q behind you now, what do you think drives the bookend of revenue and EPS guidance for 2024.
John Gallagher: So the guidance on the year remains the same. Q1 played out in line with our expectations and our plan. So the guidance that we had laid out before, which was reported revenue growth of 9% to 13% on an organic basis, mid-single digit is – remains intact. The other piece of that, of course, we’ve talked about the margin a bit is that we’re committed to growing EBITDA dollars on the year and the margin would land in the 31% to 33% range. So nothing has really changed that from this point. If we were – I think what you’re saying is what takes you the higher, what takes you to the low end. To get to the lower end here, we would need some deterioration in the end markets. which we’re not seeing, to be clear.
So we talk about stability a lot in Q3, Q4 of last year and now through Q1 of 2024. We’ve continued to see that. So we’re not really seeing that as playing out, but to get to the bottom end of the range, that’s what would need to happen is we need to see some deterioration from the spot where we are now, meaning in Tier 2 and Tier 3 and Tier 1s for that matter as well. We’re not seeing that. To get to the high end of the range, then we would need to see some acceleration. As I mentioned, we have not baked into our guidance. the notion that – of any benefit related to the biotech funding environment, that’s not in our guidance. So obviously, if we start to get some benefit there, it would start to take us to the higher end of our range.
