Jason Kupferberg: Okay. Thanks again.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question will come from Peter Christiansen with Citi.
Peter Christiansen: Good morning. Thanks for the question. Nice execution here. John, Bob, I was just hoping if you could talk a little bit about balance of trade. Any trends that you’re noticing, particularly in the Management Solutions area? And then — and John, you also mentioned AI playing a part in the sales role. Just wondering if you could dig a little bit into that and give us a sense of where you’re making headway on that front? Appreciate the commentary. Happy holidays.
John Gibson: Yeah, thank you very much. No, look, I think relative to across the platforms in the mid-market, very pleased with the growth we have there. We’ve talked about the PEO already, very happy with where we are there. As I look across the small business, it’s a competitive market. I wouldn’t say there’s any major changes. And I would say I’ve talked about on the last call, our balance of trade metrics continue to look solid. I always say we’re entering the selling season, and the next 60 days is about — is all about that, and it’s a competitive market. So we’ll see. But as we sit here today, the known knowns, very happy with our progress, upmarket in the mid-market HCM, very pleased with where we are on PEO, upper end of the ASO market. And then, as I said, as we sit here today, I’m pleased with our balance of trade in the other areas. There was another question I missed something…
Peter Christiansen: On the AI front, I think you mentioned it…
John Gibson: Yeah, thanks. I can’t believe I passed up an opportunity to talk about AI. Look, AI is — I will tell you, we’ve been doing a lot around this for decades. And now it’s kind of out there in the public domain, but it’s really quite amazing. So, let’s talk about on the sales side, we talk about on the PEO side. We’re using it in our underwriting. We’re using it in our targeting, and we’re using it in the mining of our base. The productivity lift that we get in terms of being able to understand where we can add value, you’re almost getting to the point where you almost like have a pre-proposal because you almost know the client is going to be — is going to like what they see. So, we’re doing a lot of things there using AI models and our data models there.
Doing a lot of this — we talked a bit about pricing. And one of the things we now have is we have all of our major sales teams on one common platform in terms of proposal, proposal management and pricing management. And we’re actually building AI models, started to use that in the mid-market that actually then gives our sales reps in real time based upon numerous factors, what price and what level of discounting we would allow for a particular client based upon the value of the client, based on the competitive set, et cetera. And that’s actually allowing us to maximize both volume and rate. And we’re going to continue to refine those models and expand those across the teams. But what we’re getting from a sales productivity perspective, what we’re getting in terms of a marketing targeting perspective, what we’re getting in terms of the ability to set the right price and rate to get the biggest competitive advantage, all of those things are pretty impressive.
Then on top of that, we’re actually using it for analytics. We’re actually taking and using voice analytics on the conversations we’re having with prospects, and in real time, able to give coaching to our sales teams relative to what phrases are working, what messages are working, and we can dynamically change those things on the fly with our marketing message and sales scripts accordingly. So, just a ton of very interesting things that we’re doing. It was interesting as a lot of these changes to our go-to-market, we actually started piloting in the PEO back in the second half of the last quarter when we were having some challenges. We thought that was the best place to start and to see if we could get some lift. And some of what we’ve seen in the PEO, I think is a direct result of some of these tactics.
Peter Christiansen: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question will come from Kartik Mehta with Northcoast Research.
Kartik Mehta: Hey, good morning, John and Bob.
John Gibson: Kartik, good morning.
Kartik Mehta: Thanks. John, you talked about — a little bit about the key selling season, obviously, in the SMB. And I’m wondering if you’ve seen any kind of change in price competition or if you’re seeing anything that is a little different this time than last year?
John Gibson: Kartik, look, I don’t — look, it’s a competitive market, and it has been as long as I’ve been in the industry, 27 years. So look, I think there’s all kinds of tricks. There’s all kinds of marketing [indiscernible] using them. The fact of the matter is I think there’s a lot of offers out there when you get under the details of how long you have to be there, what are the strings attached. Really what it is, it’s basic. It’s the same kind of environment in terms of discounting. It is very aggressive. But I would say this. I mean, look, we continue to see that we have price value and pricing pressure — pricing power, both within our base and in the market. And that was very high in the last two years. I think we have been very able with the PPP and the ERTC to be able to really command very strong pricing power.
