Veeva Systems Inc. (NYSE:VEEV) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Richard Poland: All right. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brian Peterson with Raymond James. Your line is open.

Brian Peterson: Hi, gentlemen. Congrats on the strong quarter. So, I wanted to double click on the Vault CRM. It was good to see the win this quarter. I’m curious, you did announce some other wins this quarter. As we progress towards GA, should we expect to hear more of the kind of net new CRM wins be Vault, or would they still kind of go with the Salesforce CRM? Any way to kind of level set expectations there?

Paul Shawah: Yeah, it’s a good question. And it will be customer specific. So, we’ll think very deeply and work very closely with our customers. We’re obviously very transparent about our direction. For some companies, Veeva CRM is the right thing to do, and that’s what we will sell to them and work with them. But I do think it’s a fair way to think about it as we get closer to that April date. And certainly after that April date, it’ll start to become more Vault CRM and eventually all and exclusively Vault CRM for new — so, that’s for new customers.

Brian Peterson: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Dylan Becker with William Blair. Your line is open.

Dylan Becker: Hey, gentlemen. I appreciate you taking the question here. Maybe for Peter too, you emphasized the multi-product kind of strategy effort. It seems like as you guys are going wider, you’re also going deeper functionally. I think you called out a number of new solutions that that have the potential to be larger markets than kind of what some of your respective offerings currently have. I guess, how do you think about that in context to the durability of kind of the growth equation and what Veeva can look like over time as you go deeper from a functional perspective?

Peter Gassner: Thanks, Dylan. Yeah, it’s really good way you said it. One of our special things is this multi-product company approach, our operating model that allows us to do that. So, excellence in an area like clinical or quality or safety, but because we have a lot of autonomy in those areas, we can go deep in those areas and provide the full suite of things, not just the surface level. So, if we look actually in clinical, there’s not been a company that has attempted to do the full broad suite of clinical applications such as Veeva is trying. Nobody has attempted that before, let alone succeeded at it. So, it is absolutely our strategy to go in each area with autonomy, deep in each area with excellent applications, the main ones that people need, and then have things aligned across areas on a common set of values, how we operate as a company, how we strive for product excellence, how we do controls, and so that we see if we have some customer success issues and catch that.

One of the reasons why we’re durable is we’re optimizing for the whole, and customers appreciate that. They know when we sell them, let’s say, our RTSM solution, we care deeply about that success, not only for the reputation of our RTSM business, but for the reputation of the overall Veeva, which is much more than the RTSM business. So, in other words, we have more to lose if we have an unhappy customer in an area. So, we will work harder to protect that, which is what the customers want. And that’s the beauty of our operating model.

Dylan Becker: Got it. That’s super helpful. And then maybe just kind of piggybacking off of that too. I think the R&D Summit coming up here in a handful of weeks to support all of these kind of maturing product offerings, 2,000 attendees. I guess, is it — maybe for Peter or Paul, highlight kind of the importance of what that event can mean as you build out that customer and product excellence into not only the existing platform set, but obviously some of these newer initiatives you guys are going after? Thank you.

Peter Gassner: Yeah. Customer summit in Boston for R&D in U.S. coming up here in a couple of weeks. And we’ll have about 2,000 people. It’s absolutely one of our key reference selling events. Now reference selling goes on all the time across the globe every day, people talking to other people. “Hey, what about those Veeva products? What do you think about that? Are you having a good experience? Not a good experience? I’m thinking about using it. What do you think?” That’s reference selling. But it happens really in a hurry in the customer summit, because there’s 2,000 people and they’re there. Their time is focused, and they have fortuitous run-ins with each other in the hallways, unplanned pollination, that’s a little bit difficult to get without a physical event.

And I think, you saw that, not just with Veeva, but with other companies. During the COVID crisis, there was initially a massive spread of information, everybody getting on zoom. But then after a while, you noticed the information didn’t spread as much because there weren’t these spontaneous interactions happening. So, you’re right to say it’s our massive cross-selling event.

Dylan Becker: Great. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Ryan MacDonald with Needham & Company. Your line is open.

Ryan MacDonald: Hi, thanks for taking my questions, and congrats on a nice quarter. Peter, maybe first for you. Great to see the continued success with Compass patient and starting to get more wins there. Can you just talk about how you’re sort of driving that success in an environment that seems to be quite tough in terms of data investment right now given the [tight] (ph) budgets?

Peter Gassner: Yeah. For Compass, I’m very excited about that. Now in terms of the wins, those wins are going to happen. When — there are a lot of companies wanting to buy a lot of data products, and sometimes they buy multiple data products. They might buy some data from Company A and some data from Company B and Company C, that’s going to happen. So, the wins itself, they don’t excite me that much, that’s relatively easy to happen. What excites me is our product vision and the product team needs put together and the goal we’re setting out. We’re setting out to have a unique, highly-integrated, highly-excellent suite of data products from Compass to Link to OpenData, and to be the leader in life sciences data. Nobody else has set out to do that over the last — as far as I know, over the last 20 years, because [IQVIA is unquestioned] (ph) leader.

So, we’re setting out to do that. And then, we have this product team in architecture that’s really clean. It’s making a clean new way thing. It’s sort of like there’s a client server and we’re coming out with cloud. We’re coming out with something fundamentally cleaner. And the real thing is getting the enthusiasm from the early customers, hearing not so much what they’re saying, but why they’re saying it. So the early intuition here is that it could be something great if we execute well.

Ryan MacDonald: Maybe just a quick follow-up on that. I mean, from the customers you’ve won so far, do you get the sense that they’re sort of committed and bought into the broader product strategy with the additional datasets coming out where you can start to have, take that multi-product adoption to sort of consolidate more on Veeva? Thanks.

Peter Gassner: No, I wouldn’t say the customer is rightly so or committed yet. I do think they see the potential. This might be really good. This could be very differentiated. There’s potential here, and I should keep my eyes on it. But I would — no one committed because we haven’t released these major products, which are Compass Prescriber and Compass National. So, we have to deliver those. Customers have to start working with them or to delivering them with quality month after month after month after month. That’s how people really get enthused about it.