Sprout Social, Inc. (NASDAQ:SPT) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Fiona Hynes: Hi, good afternoon. This is Fiona on for Elizabeth Porter. Thank you for taking the question. I wanted to ask on macro and understanding that you guys just put up a good quarter. I’m curious for your perspectives on how trends may have shifted in Q3, relative to Q2 and whether or not like understanding that execution was definitely a part of the performance. Just curious for any perspectives that you can share there. Thank you.

Justyn Howard: Yes. thank you for the question, Fiona. I think that execution, as well as getting a little further along with the some of the strategic changes that we made last year. The momentum that we continue to see in the enterprise, et cetera, is the bulk of the story for Q3. We’ve got a lot of tremendous work happening inside the organization and the team is across the board doing a phenomenal job. We haven’t seen some of the same macro impacts that we’re aware that others have seen. We’re cautious of it. We’re keeping an eye on it. We feel like we’re factoring it adequately. But something that we talked about on Investor Day, I think, continues to be a key trend, not only in this environment, but some of the others that we faced over the last couple of years, which is that social is still an emerging space.

It’s still a space that many companies are very early in their adoption of and their maturity through. Social teams continue to be generally understaffed. We see marketers from recent surveys expressing that they expect to maintain to increase 90% of them expect to maintain or increase headcount into 2024, despite the current conditions. And so, social is kind of over the last three years proven to be fairly all weather in that regard. We want to be mindful. Certainly, we want to make any adjustments that we need to make in as conditions continue to change, but the execution of the team is going to continue to be the main driver of our ability to outperform.

Fiona Hynes: Thank you. And then one follow-up to that on AI and the monetization strategy there. Appreciate that as early, I’m curious for your thoughts on how you expect those to layer into the model over time. Do you think about some of these AI features that you’re rolling out as drivers on more of the customer acquisition side, more on like the higher monetization per customer side, or potentially both? Thank you.

Justyn Howard: Yes. I think potentially, both is a likely answer. I think we’ve talked about this before. I think that there are certain things, capabilities that we’ve introduced today and we’ll continue to introduce that really fit nicely into the core jobs to be done. Within Sprout, it makes the user experience better. It makes the product stickier. It makes the customers more impactful. And I think for those, that’ll help us with conversion rates. It’ll help us with competitive advantage. It’ll help us with retention. But there are opportunities, including some of the things that we’re working on now, where we expect to deliver pretty outsized value to our customers, particularly when we start thinking about, customer specific modeling, when we start to think about some of the really powerful new capabilities that AI has got to unlock.

And I think that it’s going to make sense. It’s too early to put a line in the sand or make predictions here. but I think that it’s going to make sense that there’s some monetization involved in some of the more powerful AI capabilities. They could also be wrapped up into some other monetization opportunities, right. AI is going to certainly improve listening. it’s going to improve customer care capabilities et cetera. So, we’re kind of watching and starting to form some opinions around how that layers in from a monetization perspective across the board, particularly as we get more of these exciting things in our customer’s hands.

Fiona Hynes: Thank you.

Operator: Our next question comes from a line of Matthew VanVliet with BTIG. Please go ahead.

Matthew VanVliet: Hi. good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. I guess, first on the fact that we’re almost a year into the new pricing strategy, curious on a couple fronts what you’ve seen from a realization standpoint with your existing customer base through the renewals and potential upsell, cross-sell, how much pricing you’ve actually realized at this point. And then on the new customer front, any estimates on sort of where you’re landing there relative to maybe deals of similar scope and size in the past and how much uplift you’re actually realizing there as well, please.

Ryan Barretto: Sure. thanks, Matt. I’ll start, this is Ryan. I’ll start with the second one just in terms of new customers. And I think probably the best indication of the opportunity there is just the ACV growth, right? We’ve had a record ACV growth of 40%. The customers that we’re in front of today with the strategy shift and our focus, and on sophisticated customers, as well as the fit that they have with our premium modules can be seen in the growth of our larger size deals and the attach rates. And so, we continue to see great opportunities. We think that there’s a lot more opportunities like that as we continue to sell into these sophisticated customers and we continue to grow our attach rates. And certainly, now as we add in Tagger as another great solution for these customers.

And then on top of that, when we go back to the attach rates, when we think about our current customer base, we’re still sub-7% of our customers have more than the two products. And so we have a lot of opportunity to go back to that current customer base. Now, some of that will be making sure that we’re educating them on the products that we have and the problems that they solve. And some of it is just the maturity that’s happening within the marketplace, where they’re going to be ready for these products. So continuously, lots of great ACV opportunities today, and the ACV growth number, I think is probably the best indicator of that.

Joe Del Preto: Yes. And then Matt, the follow-up on your question around the impact of the price increases. When we talked about this over the last couple of quarters, I think it’s a combination of a couple of things. One is we, coming out of the first couple of quarters, we talked about the increased turn you saw in the lawn in the market and a part of that was related to moving around the resources. A part of that was the price-sensitive customers. We gave those price increases. And then when you think about when you get an upmarket in the mid-market and enterprise deals, we went to those customers, who have really successful renewal rates, but a lot of the times, it wasn’t about the price increase as it was about entering other conversations around maybe, adding listening, or maybe adding premium analytics, or adding another department in place of a price increase.

And so, net-net, when you factor all those things in, what we’ve kind of seen year-to-date, what we expect for this full-year, you’re probably looking at about a low single-digit increase or impact from the price increase. And we probably expect the same thing going forward. If you think about the Evergreen clause, we now have in our contract. So, we feel like that’ll be very similar impact in 2024.

Matthew VanVliet: Okay. Very helpful. And then when you look at none of the outlook for ’24, but even beyond that, especially as the Salesforce partnership ramps up some new opportunities that maybe weren’t done on your plate before, what’s the plan for headcount, maybe very specifically in the go-to-market team and sort of what you’re expanding there. But even if you zoom out from there on the other support roles and maybe more broadly, how are you thinking about headcount heading into ’24?