Ted Fernandez: I can’t really make many comments other than to simply say that on the financing side, obviously it’s a lot harder to finance a deal, it’s definitely more costly, so I think that that continues to be constrained. And yes, it’s going to take a little bit for people to really reconsider what normalized pricing is. It’s just part of the process. So, no, have we seen any difference in pricing? No, have we seen significantly less activity on the financial buyer side and financials and those who play in that space? Yes.
Unidentified Analyst: Yes. And final question for me, with respect to the Salesforce buildout for Market Intelligence, I believe in the past, you mentioned you wanted to grow that to about 30. How far along are you on that just from a headcount perspective?
Ted Fernandez: Well, we were in high 20s throughout this quarter, so the 30 number is still the target. So, unchanged, I think at this point, it’s around the conversion of the existing opportunities because we accelerated and built our team in that first-half of the year.
Unidentified Analyst: Great, thanks guys.
Operator: And our next caller is Vincent Colicchio with Barrington Research. You may go ahead.
Vincent Colicchio: Yes, Ted, on the Market Intelligence program side, has the performance been lower than expected because you rolled out less programs than expected as well as seeing less demand than expected?
Ted Fernandez: Well, first, I think I said this on the last earnings call, so let’s make sure that we understand the increase in the sales resources, we’re built to sell our existing executive advisory researchers with focus on our functional buyers. As you know, we’ve got, depending on how you count them, eight to 12 programs. That is where the overwhelming amount of our time has been. The time on market intelligence, as it’s taken us longer to make sure the programs have the kind of content and impact that we’d like, but they were never intended to be the sales or revenue producing effort in 2023. They are, and we’re expected to have the impact in 2024. We still believe we’re going to have several new programs out through the balance of the year and in early 2024, so we think that the complementary market intelligence programs will come out.
But just to make sure we’re clear, the 2023 projections were based on the sale of our executive advisory programs, not the market intelligence programs. We expected them to start contributing in an incremental basis, which they have. And, yes, we wanted to roll out more. That is as you may recall, we made a change from the market intelligence leader that we made at the middle of the year. I think it was the June timeframe. So, that led to some just a slowdown on approach and the effort we were making. However, it is back on full force with our effort to get out the targeted number as early in 2024 as we can.
Vincent Colicchio: Thanks for the clarification there. On the SBT, GSBT and Oracle businesses, looking for sequential growth here in Q4, curious what the sales pipelines look like there and to what degree do you feel that there’s enough pipeline to continue to grow sequentially into early next year?
Ted Fernandez: Well, the answer is you take the 10% less available dates that we have in the quarter when you consider the sequence from Q3 to Q4, and you look at our guidance, and you will see that with the exception of SAP, which our guidance includes, I’ll call it a more conservative number on the software sales out of the activity, the others are all expected to grow sequentially, including the 10% fewer available days that we’ve had.
Vincent Colicchio: Yes, got that, but I’m just curious. The sales pipeline of potential new clients, what does that look like for the GSBT and Oracle businesses?
Ted Fernandez: Again, other than extended decision-making, the activity with those clients remains unchanged. Interact with the clients remains strong. Gen AI conversations on virtually every conversation. So, no, that’s unchanged, but is it taking longer for people to make decisions or weigh some of those new initiatives against or as part of a broader Gen AI, opportunity? Yes, we’re seeing those kinds of, if you want to call it a extended decision-making.
