ON24 Inc (ONTF) 2021 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good afternoon, and welcome.

Please note that the live interactive webcast of today's call may be accessed via the Investor Relations section of the company's website at www.investors.on24.com.

Upon completion of the prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions, which may be submitted via the webcast portal or the dial-in line.

Please note that this call is being recorded.

At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Maili Bergman with The Blueshirt Group.

Please go ahead.

Thank you.

Hello, and good afternoon, everyone.

Welcome to ON24's First Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call.

On the call with me today are Sharat Sharan, the Founder and CEO of ON24; and Chief Financial Officer, Steven Vattuone.

I would like to remind everyone that some information provided during this call may include forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements about ON24's future events, expected financial and operating results, business trends, global economic trends and the expected timing and benefit, if any, of such trends.

These forward-looking statements may contain such words as project, outlook, future, expect, will, anticipate, believe, intend or referred to as guidance.

These forward-looking statements reflect beliefs, estimates and predictions as of today, and ON24 expressly assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements.

These forward-looking statements are only predictions and are subject to substantial risks.

Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to, risks associated with our ability to attract new customers and expand to existing customers; fluctuation in our performance, competition in our markets and any decline in demand for our solution; our ability to expand our sales and marketing capabilities and otherwise manage our growth; the impact of COVID-19 pandemic; and other risks identified in the company's SEC filings.

For a detailed description of risks and uncertainties, which could impact these forward-looking statements, you should review ON24's periodic SEC filings, including the risks identified in today's financial press release.

We'd also like to point out that on today's call, we will report both GAAP and non-GAAP results.

We use these non-GAAP financial measures to evaluate our ongoing operations and for internal planning and forecasting purposes.

Non-GAAP financial measures are presented in addition to and not as a substitute for financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP.

To see the reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to today's financial press release.

I will now turn the call over to Sharat.

Sharat?

Thank you, Maili, and welcome, everyone, to ON24's First Quarter 2021 Financial Results Conference Call.

Thank you for joining us.

For our call today, I'll share a quick information of our financial results for Q1 2021 and then provide an update on our business momentum.

I'll finish with a recap of our annual conference and product announcements before turning it over to Steve to review our first quarter financials.

I'm pleased to report strong financial results for the first quarter of 2021, exceeding the high end of our guidance.

For the first quarter, we delivered revenue of $50.1 million, up 102% compared to the same period last year.

Our digital experience platform business grew 111% year-over-year to a total of $50 million, and ARR increased 90% year-over-year, ending our first quarter of 2021 with $163.1 million in ARR.

At the same time, we demonstrated significant leverage, which drove non-GAAP operating income of $2.8 million and $3.2 million in free cash flow in the first quarter.

As we have many listeners, who are just getting to know ON24, I plan to spend some time discussing the background of ON24.

ON24 delivers a digital experience platform that enables thousands of businesses to convert millions of prospects into customers.

These digital experiences, which include interactive webinar experiences, virtual conferences and always-on multimedia content experiences allow companies to deeply engage with their prospects at scale.

The ON24 platform takes that audience engagement, converts that into first-person data, personalizes that through our AI-driven platform and makes the data actionable by integrating that within our customers' sales and marketing ecosystem.

Today, we count some of the world's largest and most recognized businesses in the world as our customers, including 3 of the 5 largest global technology company, 4 of the 5 largest U.S. banks, 3 of the 5 largest global health care company, 3 of the 5 largest global industrial and manufacturing company.

We have a very large TAM that we currently estimate to be over $42 billion worldwide annually and expect this market opportunity to grow as digital is increasingly the norm.

Our platform is a system of engagement that delivers experiences purpose-built for marketing and sales.

A single ON24 live experience averages 50 minutes to audiences of more than 200 attendees, delivering over 20 data points of engagement for each attendee.

And that's just a single experience.

We don't provide seconds of engagement.

ON24 delivers hours of engagement with prospects.

Many of our customers deliver hundreds of thousands of experiences per year.

As prospects engage with these experiences, they provide their digital body language.

The deeper the engagement, the better the first-person data.

And with better data, our customers can further personalize the next experience for their prospects through our AI-driven engine, increasing the overall business impact.

That creates a flywheel effect, and that is what is at the core of our platform today.

We believe our cloud-based platform stands alone when it comes to driving engagement and delivering data.

This is the ON24 data-rich system of engagement.

Now let's talk more specifically about our platform and products.

There are 3 key components: ON24 Experiences, ON24 Intelligence and ON24 Connect.

First are the ON24 Experiences.

We are a suite of 4 products.

ON24 Elite, our flagship live Interactive Webinar Experience product; ON24 Virtual Conference, an immersive, scalable digital events product; ON24 Engagement Hub, a curated always-on multimedia content experience product; and ON24 Target, a personalized hyper-relevant rich media content experience product.

Every ON24 Experience product is backed by our analytics layer, ON24 Intelligence.

As customers engage with these experiences, they generate first-person data, which we run through the ON24 Intelligence module, and those insights fuel our AI engine.

We capture lifetime activity for every prospect.

Their history of business interest to automatically recommend relevant content and personalize the next experience.

This propels buyers forward, taking them from one relevant experience to the next, reducing friction and accelerating conversion and revenue.

Finally, through ON24 Connect, we make the data available in the sales and marketing ecosystem of our customers.

We have built near real-time deep integrations with many leading CRM, marketing automation and business intelligence tools.

It is our holistic platform approach, experiences, data, integrations that sets us apart.

We combine interactive multimedia experiences with rich customer intelligence and an AI-driven engine.

Enterprises who typically need multiple different providers do what we do.

Our platform provides a single integrated solution.

And we are delivering all of this while also supporting critical enterprise requirements on a global scale.

That puts our platform in the epicenter of customer engagement across the enterprise.

Now looking forward, we believe the future is all of our digital-first hybrid engagement.

While physical events will come back in some form, they will be used to complement and augment our digital-first strategy.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is no going back.

This is not just a new normal, it is a better way.

Our strong first quarter results are proof that our digital-first future is now the new normal for how we drive revenue today.

We just have to look at what our customers are telling us and the incredible results they are achieving.

One of the world's top CRM software company has been 100,000-plus ARR customer for several years and has engaged millions of their prospects and customers through our platform.

Currently, 25 teams across demand generation, product market, field marketing and more use ON24 Elite and virtual conferences to create and deliver thousands of digital webinar experiences and virtual events in 34 different languages.

The more digital experiences they do, the greater their ROI.

In 2020, their digital engagement strategy resulted in a 60% increase in deal size, a 135% increase in marketing source pipeline and almost a 200% increase in their average contract value.

Another long-term 100,000-plus ARR customer is a multinational industrial conglomerate.

We enabled multiple business units, including energy, health care and manufacturing to build thought leadership, provide channel enablement and drive direct sales pipeline through thousands of live and on-demand digital experiences powered by ON24 Elite and Engagement Hub.

For just one of their business units alone, we powered digital engagement with hundreds of thousands of their prospects and customers each month, which led to a 400% increase of leads moving into pipeline in 2020.

And our platform is how a leading biopharmaceutical company scales peer-to-peer scientific exchanges for the exploration of new medical innovation.

We needed to reimagine how the company could engage health care professionals in a digital-first world using ON24 Elite, Engagement Hub and Target.

They created digital experiences, including virtual conferences, seminars and on-demand content hubs to increase engagement with physicians by 200%.

As the pharmaceutical industry becomes increasingly digital, we see great momentum within this vertical.

And in our first quarter, we acquired new customers from various industries, like pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and even retail, where we are seeing new use cases emerge.

For example, one of our multi-product wins in Q1 comes from one of the nation's largest home improvement retailers, which is using our platform to educate and engage contractors and individual homeowners in a digital-first way.

This is an important part of the company's strategy to safeguard contractor and consumer revenue streams.

They're using ON24 Elite, Engagement Hub and Virtual Conference to deliver multimedia do-it-yourself content, home improvement tips and even deliver digital coupons for online and in-store purchases.

Another expansion in Q1 came from the chemical business unit of one of the largest global oil and gas company, which chose ON24 to accelerate traditionally long (inaudible).

They're using ON24 Elite, Engagement Hub and Target to create a system of engagement to target hard-to-reach audiences.

We had already been working with their technology and oil and gas divisions, giving us internal traction to land and expand.

And we are accelerating our international land and expand motion with greater sales capacity, 24/7 all of a sudden support, multilingual capabilities and more.

This quarter, we've grown our footprint within a leading Japan-based multinational IT equipment and services company, which uses ON24 Elite, Engagement Hub, Target and Virtual Conference, all 4, to power their digital channel enablement strategy in APAC, EMEA and North America.

Now let's shift to the topic of innovation.

At ON24, we are committed to continuously innovating across our plans.

We recently made announcements in 3 key areas: One, developing the next level of digital engagement to continue to truly capture audience attention and offer dynamic and effective experiences that drive deep engagement and first-person data; two, the powerful AI engine we built to power experiences and create unique personalized journeys for every individual audience member; and finally, we make all the first-person data and buying signals we collect available to the sales and marketing ecosystems of our customers.

We have built near real-time deep integrations with many leading CRM, marketing automation and business intelligence tools, and we have made several recent announcements in this area that add important new integrations and further expand our rich ecosystem.

Now let's take a look at our latest innovation and building, the next level of digital engagement.

We have been seeing growing demand for bidirectional video engagement between presenters and attendees, attendee to attendee and finally, between sales and attendees.

And that is why we created ON24 Breakouts.

With ON24 Breakouts available on ON24 Elite today, we are enabling our customers to have even more flexibility in audience engagement within and beyond the live webinar experience.

You can enable seamless entry into breakout rooms for attendees to do peer-to-peer networking.

You can have moderated sessions with truly interactive 2-way video Q&A sessions with subject matter experts, and you can enable immediate one-on-ones with sales reps, accelerating conversion.

This is a very exciting new capability that has a great deal of interest from our customer base.

Once again, ON24 is redefining engagement in a digital-first world, and we'll soon be delivering this product across additional experienced products, including our virtual conference offering.

Next, as our customers often use our platform as their primary system for sales and marketing to engage prospects and customers, we are seeing demand for integrations with conversational AI, Chatbot.

Our first integration of this kind is with the market leader in conversational AI Drift.

Now to our seamless integration.

Our customers can immediately connect live webinar and event prospects with their sales teams.

Another key product introduction is our Virtual Conference Pro, which complements our existing Virtual Conference Enterprise product.

Targeted for the commercial market, customers can quickly stand up online conferences, trade shows, group training or other multi-session events.

Audiences can create their own agendas, watch keynotes, visit sponsors, explore demo grounds and network with experts and other attendees.

With our introduction of Breakouts, Conversational AI and Virtual Conference Pro, we continue to deliver the next level of digital engagement.

The second area of innovation is around our powerful AI engine that creates unique personalized journeys for every individual audience member.

On April 23, we launched a new AI-based personalized recommendation engine.

The ON24 AI engine leverages the vast role of data, collected through millions of engagement points across ON24 Experiences to inform dynamic content delivery.

Based on a user's history of consuming content, our AI engine creates unique content recommendations, specifically tailored to their individual interest.

Our AI engine powered by first-person data will continue to take digital experiences to the next level and enable our customers to automatically generate journeys that are uniquely matched with each individual lead or (inaudible).

The third area of product enhancements is with our real-time data integration.

With ON24 Connect, we are delivering the most connected digital engagement platform ecosystem.

We made the deep engagement data available in the sales and marketing ecosystem of our customers, enabling customers to take near real-time actions.

We have built deep integrations with many leading CRM, marketing automation and business intelligence tools.

We recently announced 2 new and important integrations.

In the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries, we announced our new integration of Veeva CRM Events, the leading player in the market.

The integration enables life science marketers to capture every level of ON24 digital experience data from registration and their attendance to various points of engagement.

Together with Veeva, we will give customers a single view into audience and engagement information to better inform and trigger actions across marketing and sales.

Integrating ON24 Elite with Veeva CRM events, we will provide marketing and sales teams with an end-to-end solution for planning, executing and measuring the impact of digital events and engagement activities with health care professionals.

I'm also excited about the work we are doing to extend our ecosystem of these integrations to sales engagement tools.

Our 360-degree view of prospect engagement has become central to our customers' sales motions, providing critical insights for sales to prioritize and personalize lead formula.

This data is already integrated with leading CRM systems, and now we are partnering with Outreach, a leading sales engagement platform, to take it one step further.

With this integration, sales teams will be able to take immediate action on first-person data in near real-time, increasing the return on engagement.

This new integration joins others that ON24 supports today with ON24 Connect, including CRM and marketing automation tools such as Salesforce, SAP, Adobe Marketo, Oracle Eloqua and many others.

There's so much more we are working on as we increase our pace of innovation across the platform so we can remain true to our commitment to creating the most engaging data-rich, dynamic, scalable and enterprise-class digital experience platform.

We look forward to continuing to update you on our progress in this area.

Now let me share some information about our growth factor.

First, we are adding sales capacity to drive new customer acquisition, expansion and upsell.

Second, we are entering new international markets, including Japan and DAC.

And finally, we are investing in our R&D organization and continue to develop new products to add to our overall platform offering.

To wrap up, we are very excited about the customer momentum we are seeing for both new customer acquisition and existing customer expansion and upsell.

Our platform today enables thousands of companies convert millions of prospects to customers.

We just came off a very successful virtual conference, the ON24 Experience.

We had thousands of attendees joining.

It is available on demand, and I encourage all of you to watch.

You can find the link to the on-demand replay on our home page banner at on24.com.

We have also included the link in the earnings call webinar.

The highlight of the conference was the customer participation and the stories that they have shared on the results they are achieving using ON24.

The customers presenting concluded Salesforce, GE, Honeywell, SAP, Google Looker, Fidelity National Information Services and Zendesk.

The business benefits that our customers are achieving with our platform in generating sales and pipeline are impressive and undeniable.

As we move forward into our digital-first hybrid world, we believe that we are ideally positioned with a data-rich digital-first system of engagement that enables business growth for our customers.

With that, I'll hand it over to our CFO, Steve Vattuone, to walk you through our Q1 results in more detail.

Thank you.

Thank you, Sharat, and good afternoon, everyone.

As Sharat mentioned, we are very pleased with our first quarter results.

I'm going to start the discussion of our results with revenue.

The majority of our revenue is generated from subscriptions that we sell to our digital experience platform, which is delivered through cloud-based software.

We also generate revenue from professional services, which primarily consist of implementation and support services.

Digital experience platform revenue excludes revenue from our legacy product offering, which we stopped selling to new customers in 2018, and is 0.2% of our revenue in Q1 2021.

Total revenue for the first quarter was $50.1 million, an increase of 102% compared to Q1 of 2020.

Our digital experience platform revenue was $50 million, an increase of 111% year-over-year.

Subscription and other platform revenue for the first quarter 2021 was $42.9 million, an increase of 115% compared to the first quarter of 2020.

As a reminder, this includes overages, which are generally around 3% to 4% of our revenue, but can fluctuate depending on customer usage of our platform and seasonality.

Professional services revenue in the first quarter was $7.2 million, an increase of 49% year-over-year, representing 14% of total revenue.

As we mentioned last quarter, the first quarter is typically a seasonally low quarter for professional services for us.

We expect this revenue as a percentage of total revenue to be up in the mid-teens during Q2.

Moving on to ARR.

ARR represents the annualized value of all subscription contracts at the end of the period and excludes professional services and overages.

ARR growth reflects our ability to both land new customers and expand our footprint within existing customers as they add additional users, capacity and products, and our platform becomes more strategic across their businesses.

Total ARR at the end of Q1 2021 was $163.1 million, an increase of 90% year-over-year.

The growth of our ARR is underpinned by both new customer acquisition, which continued at a strong pace in Q1, as well as existing customers continuing to expand their usage of our products.

A key driver of our ARR is new customer acquisition.

We ended the first quarter of 2021 with 2,062 customers, representing growth of 37% year-over-year.

In addition, at the end of the first quarter, we had 325 customers with ARR of 100,000 or more, representing growth of 102% year-over-year.

This demonstrates our ongoing traction with larger enterprise customers.

We are confident we will continue to leverage our existing customer base to upsell our speed of experiences, providing a long runway for ongoing growth.

Before turning to expense items and profitability, I would like to point out that I will be discussing non-GAAP results going forward.

Our non-GAAP results exclude stock-based compensation as well as certain other items.

Our GAAP financial results, along with a reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP results, can be found in our earnings release.

Gross profit in the quarter was $39.7 million, representing a gross margin of 79% compared to 73% in the year ago period.

We intend to continue to invest in scaling the business throughout fiscal 2021.

And as a result, we expect this to reduce gross margins in the near term.

Turning now to operating expenses.

Sales and marketing expense in Q1 was $22.2 million compared to $11.9 million in Q1 last year.

This represents 44% of total revenue, an improvement compared to 48% in the first quarter last year.

We intend to continue investing in sales and marketing to support increased demand for our digital experience.

R&D expense in Q1 was $7.2 million compared to $4 million in Q1 last year.

This represents 14% of total revenue versus 16% in the same period last year.

We have increased our R&D spending in absolute dollars over the past year.

And as we move through 2021, we intend to continue to invest in R&D.

G&A expense was $7.5 million for the quarter compared to $3.3 million in the first quarter last year.

G&A was 15% of revenue versus 13% of revenue last year.

Our G&A expenses have increased as a percentage of our revenue due to the costs associated with being a publicly traded company.

Over time, we expect G&A expense to decrease as a percentage of our revenue.

Operating income for Q1 was $2.8 million or a 5.5% operating margin compared to an operating loss of $1.1 million or negative 4.5% during the same period last year.

Net income in Q1 was $2.2 million or $0.05 per diluted share based on approximately 42.2 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding.

This compares to a net loss of $1.7 million or $0.18 per share in Q1 last year, using 9.1 million basic and diluted shares outstanding.

Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow.

We ended the quarter with $392 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments.

Cash flow from operations in the first quarter was $3.7 million compared to $1.3 million in Q1 last year.

Free cash flow was $3.2 million in Q1 compared to $1.2 million in Q1 last year.

Free cash flow margin was 6% in the first quarter compared to 5% in Q1 last year.

In terms of headcount, as of March 31, 2021, we had 652 full-time employees, which reflects growth of 19% compared to the 547 full-time employees we had at the end of 2020.

This demonstrates the continued investments we're making in headcount as we scale the business.

And finally, turning now to guidance.

We are very pleased with the positive momentum in our business, especially our continued new customer growth in Q1 and high engagement from existing customers.

At the same time, it is early in the year and we are coming off a year of explosive expansion for a business with the peak of COVID-related renewals in Q2.

Balancing these factors for the second quarter of 2021, we expect revenue in the range of $50.5 million to $51.5 million, which represents year-over-year growth of approximately 39% to 42%.

Non-GAAP operating income in the range of $0 to $1 million or a margin of 0% to 2% and non-GAAP net loss per share of $0.01 per share, using 47 million basic and diluted shares outstanding to non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.01 per share, using 57 million diluted shares outstanding.

And for the full year 2021, we expect revenue in the range of $207.5 million to $210.5 million, which represents year-over-year growth of approximately 32% to 34%.

Non-GAAP operating income and loss, a range of a $2 million operating loss to operating income of $1 million or a margin of negative 1% to positive 0.5%.

And non-GAAP loss per share of $0.02 per share to $0.08 per share, using 44.4 million basic and diluted shares outstanding.

In summary, we are pleased with our Q1 results and are well positioned to benefit from the investments we have made in all functional areas of the company.

We expect to continue to benefit from the trends driving the need for our data-rich digital engagement platform.

With that, Sharat and I will open the call up for questions.

Operator?

(Operator Instructions)

And we'll take our first question today from Sterling Auty with JPMorgan.

I wanted to drill in on the new customers that you added during the quarter.

Can you give us a sense what industries do they represent and what size companies?

Because I think one of the questions we get is, boy, who is it already selling digitally, who are the late comers and who's left to come to the ON24 platform?

Yes, Sterling.

This is Steve.

I'll go ahead and start that one.

We had a really good quarter in Q1 in terms of customer growth.

We added 68 net new customers and ended with 2,062 customers, and our customers with ARR greater than 100,000 and more, that increased by 23 to 325 at the end of Q1.

So we're very pleased with the progress we continue to make in adding new customers.

In terms of forward-looking guidance, we don't really disclose that on customer count.

We'll obviously report that at the end of Q2, but we're seeing very good momentum.

We added a lot of large customers, and we're seeing it in multiple verticals.

Just to add to what Steve just said, Sterling, our ICP, we really focus on technology, we focus on manufacturing, life sciences, financial services, professional services, media and entertainment.

And we are seeing traction across the board.

Of course, you'd expect the technology guys to be leading in, but things like pharmaceutical, manufacturing.

I mean, we are seeing very, very good traction.

I'll give you an example of a company in the financial services space that we closed in last year in May and they increased their spend and spent significantly.

This is one of the top 5 largest banks in North America.

They were 100,000 ARR customer last year.

They came and worked us on the capital markets side.

They used Elite, Engagement Hub and Virtual Conferences.

They doubled their run rate, and they've increased their spend with us in Q1.

So we are seeing momentum across that.

We gave the example of integration with Veeva in the pharmaceutical space.

That's a very important category also that we are seeing on a global basis.

Great.

And then you mentioned your own virtual conference that you held.

What -- does this end up being a big lead generation and customer expansion event for you each year?

Just maybe some of the -- give us a little bit more color around the experience that you typically get coming out of your conference?

And what did you experience this year?

So generally, Sterling, in the past, we have done these experiences physically, and this is the first year we really did this digitally.

We'll probably do another one of the -- another one of this later this year.

Typically, they were 2, 2.5 years -- 2.5 days.

And we did this in North America.

We would do it in EMEA and APAC in -- so about 3 or 4 of these events at one time.

We had over 6,000 people who attended this.

It was a 1-day event.

It was done 24/7, started in APAC, EMEA and then North America.

About over 3,000 people attended, and we had about 14, 15 customer stories.

Because it was virtual, we kept it to 1 day.

And I think there are 2 key things that we are going to see.

This one is, of course, from new customers is -- is acquisition of new customers as people get more educated about the platform they can see it in action, they can see in all of their demos.

And the other thing is almost -- this has always been almost like a bear hug, right, for our existing customers to be able to see what their peers are doing and learn from that.

That's been -- always been a very important part of what the conference has been able to do.

Now that we are going to move to more of a hybrid situation going forward, we'll probably do this conference a little more frequently than we did previously.

Next we'll hear from Chris Merwin with Goldman Sachs.

You talked about some new product additions, I think, Breakouts and some others as well.

I know these are probably still very early and not contributing yet.

But can you just talk in general about how the cross-sell motion is going in?

I don't think I heard you speak to net dollar retention or multiproduct customers.

I might have missed it, but I don't think I heard that in the script.

So can you just please update us on those metrics, if you can?

And -- or maybe just comment in general on how the cross-sell motion is going?

So let me take the first part, and Steve, you can take the second part of the question.

So we are really excited, Chris, in terms of the expansion and upsell that we saw in Q1.

We are excited about how it has continued in Q2, specifically about Breakouts.

I mean there's a lot of excitement from our customer base for this product.

Now you cannot only reach 200 to 1000s of people who are interacting and engaging and buying signals and engagement data in a live experience, but now you can move into one-on-one interactions, peer-to-peer networking and group meeting.

So it takes you further down the funnel from marketing even sales to close that deal.

So there's a lot of excitement.

And yes, we expect this to provide an uplift, but it is early.

I mean we just launched it, Chris.

So it is early, but this is a major part of our expansion, and another part of our expansion and upsell cadence.

Steve?

Yes.

So Chris, you had also asked about NRR and, I think, the multiproduct metric we talked about last time.

So let me start with NRR.

We don't really report NRR on a quarterly basis.

But as expected, we had a very strong quarter for NRR.

Our average ARR per customer continued to go up in Q1 or the highest it's ever been.

We do expect our NRR to return to something closer to pre-COVID levels over time.

And our NRR was about 110% pre-COVID with our enterprise business typically being 5 to 7 points higher than that.

Enterprise is 70% of business.

In terms of the customers with multiple products and cross sells, we're really pleased with the increase from 17% to 30% we saw in 2020 for the customers with 2-plus products.

Now we don't expect it to increase at that rate this year.

It's probably a metric we're going to disclose quarterly, but I can say that the number of customers we have with 2 or more products did increase during Q1, and we're really pleased with our continued progress in that area.

Okay.

Great.

And maybe one other question.

It seems like another theme in the remarks was around integrations.

I think you mentioned a couple with Drift and Outreach.

I mean 2 companies within the CRM suite more broadly.

And can you talk a bit about, I guess, maybe -- I know again, probably early, but the impact that is having with your customers about increasing platform stickiness for you all?

And then just secondly, in terms of the data that's being captured, does that often go into like a database that the customer maintains separately or is this -- with the integrations is the data going directly from ON24 to these other platforms?

Just trying to understand the kind of the pain points that are being solved here for customers and how we think about improved platform stickiness over time?

So Chris, just -- this is Sharat.

Just overall, integrations within a customer sales and marketing ecosystem is extremely, extremely important for us.

And we've spent millions of hours kind of building one of the most robust third-party ecosystem through a deep integration of our engagement data and buying signals within these systems.

So whether it's Marketo from Adobe or whether it's Eloqua, whether it's Salesforce, SAP.

So that is a very important part.

60% of our ARR is integrated.

And we generally see much better, much more stickiness and others when that happens.

So we announced the integration with Veeva in the life sciences space.

That is very important to us.

But it's not only just basic integration.

We take all that 20, 30 different engagement data points, and we've created this almost near real-time engagement.

So when a sales person is -- when a prospect is ready to buy and they're saying, I'm ready to buy in 90 days, we want that information to go almost in close to real-time through the marketing and sales ecosystem that our customer uses.

So we are not trying to be -- make our data a silo.

We integrate our data within our customer sales and marketing ecosystem.

So if they've got Salesforce, if they've got Marketo, it's integrated in that so it's available to the sales and marketing people.

So clearly, it helps stickiness very significantly.

Now the example about Outreach.

Outreach is a sales enablement tool.

This is -- they enable SDRs and others.

And what we are trying to do in this, we provide something called prospect engagement profile.

It's a 360-degree view of a prospect and therefore -- and their engagement on our platform, everything that they have done.

What we are doing is we are integrating that within the profile of that particular prospect within Outreach.

So when the SDRs are following up, they know a lot more about that customer, again, adding value.

Things about Drift, Drift comes more in the direction of the engagement platform.

If people come into the engagement platform and then they want to go and converse one-on-one with sales and we are integrating that in that perspective so that people can move the funnel deeper into sales conversations.

So all these integrations -- one is the data integration.

Those are extremely, extremely important from a stickiness point of view, from our side, but also the value it brings to our customers and the other integrations that we are also doing on the engagement part of the platform, making sure it continues to transform sales and marketing for our customers.

Rob Oliver with Baird has our next question.

Great.

Sharat, I had one for you to start.

Just -- I know you guys are making some investments in both international on the go-to-market side as well as on the product side on language.

And I just wanted to touch on those and in particular, in your -- in the wake of your user event where we set some big companies, big multinationals like Honeywell, Valeo talk about how they're kind of redefining their dealer and distributor model using ON24.

So I'm curious as we talk about expansion within existing accounts, how you look at that the addition of new languages as a driver for expansion with some of these accounts that are already using you guys that are true multinational corporations?

And then I had a quick follow-up for Steve.

Yes.

I think, Rob, we have built this enterprise grade accessible, reliable, scalable, privacy compliant multilingual platform for global enterprise and commercial companies.

That's where we focus on.

And so the example of -- when we bring the customer we talked about the Japan-based customer in my prepared remarks, and once we bring that customer, our focus really is to expand that customer globally and -- because that's how these multinationals expand.

I want to give you an example of one of the largest industrial manufacturing companies.

They've been a customer of ours for a long time, but they brought in several divisions in multiple parts of Europe in 2020.

And as they expanded into those, the first -- one of the divisions for the first live experience with it, there were over 1,000 attendees.

And their audiences are also more engineering, supply chain oriented.

These people really gravitate more towards digital even more than physical.

So these guys are committed to more of a hybrid engagement going forward.

So when we talk about languages and others, our focus really is, we may bring somebody from DAC or Germany, but then our focus is expanding that across the world, that's a very key part, and that's what you also heard in the virtual conference.

So enterprise scale, multiple languages, privacy compliant, that's a very important part of what we provide our customers and take their headache out as they're trying to engage with their prospects at scale, and that's probably what you heard in the conference too.

Okay.

Great.

That's helpful, Sharat.

And then, Steve, just a quick one for you as you thought about the guidance for the rest of the year, just curious for any color on what assumptions you had embedded in there for return in the economy.

I know we're still at various stages globally in terms of lockdown and stuff.

And just curious for how you guys thought about the impact of COVID relative to the guidance?

Sure.

Our annual guidance reflects our best view as we see the business going forward at this point.

Our customers continue to engage with us quite well.

We're seeing a very high level of customer engagement across the board with our customers and that's reflected in our Q1 results and also the guidance that we've provided.

And Sharat, did you want to add anything to that?

No.

I think we are seeing very strong trends from a new customer wins to expansion and upsell.

I mean we do -- Rob, as we do look at Q2 and the year, if we are early in the year, we don't want to get ahead on our skis.

We did -- if you look at Q2, it is our toughest comp quarter by far.

The renewal base is -- in Q2 is largest by a significant magnitude, and so that's also something that we factored in our guidance because in Q2 we did see some COVID-related buying, but we always have factored that within -- in our guidance.

We'll now hear from Brent Bracelin with Piper Sandler.

I guess, Sharat, I want to drill down a little bit more on the peak renewal cycle.

How are customer conversations shifting as we get close to the reality of reopening?

How are some of the early renewal conversations going?

Are there any customers that are going to completely go physical and not virtual, it's going to be hybrid?

Just walk us through how you're engaging with some of these existing customers and how maybe the message is pivoting more heavily toward lead gen or something else?

Just trying to get an early view on what those existing customers and renewal conversations look like today?

Yes.

So let me answer in 2 parts, Brent.

So first of all, we are thrilled with the customer engagement that we saw in Q1 and that has continued in Q2 based on what our customers are telling us.

I mean the future is about hybrid engagement.

There has been a permanent change in behavior.

As a data point, I'll tell you, it's the time people spend, attendees spent on our platform in Q1 is up from Q4 last year.

It is 4%, 5% higher.

I'll give you the example of one of the largest HMOs in the country.

And in 2020, they moved their -- they accelerated to digital, their salespeople interacted with hospital.

That's what they did.

But in spite of their moving into more of a hybrid cadence this year, they increased their spend with us.

So those are the conversations that we are hearing again and again with many of our customers.

I mean in my prepared remarks I talked about one of the largest CRM companies that increased their deal size by 60%, marketing source by 135%, average contract value by 200%.

So with that kind of business impact, there is no going back for these companies.

That being said, I mean, we did know that in Q2 last year there was -- it was the peak of COVID-related buying and many of these accounts are of full renewals.

But we have -- we expected some churn and downsizing in a minority of those accounts and we've always factored that in our guidance.

So we are prepared for that, and that's what we've already factored in.

Good.

That's certainly helpful color there.

And then my last one really is just around just sales capacity.

If I look at sales and marketing investments, it's up, I think, 87% year-over-year into Q1.

You talked about heavily investing in adding capacity over the last couple of quarters.

How much more do you have to go here?

How are you feeling relative to kind of coverage, relative to kind of the plan at this point?

Just any additional color relative to additional investments in sales and marketing going forward here exiting kind of Q1?

Yes.

So that be -- so last year we were caught, we were really behind rather, right?

So part of that was -- and also the productivity numbers increased significantly and other stuff.

So this year, we are planning for -- we are trying to catch up and adding the capacity.

So we've added significant number of sales capacity this year.

We've added marketing, and we expect to add that more.

I think we are not done yet, but we should expect that the people we hired in the second part of last year because that's when we really started the ramp and generally assuming a 6- to 9-month ramp, that some of those people will start producing by the end of Q2.

And the areas that we've kind of focused on has been enterprise, commercial and international, including new markets.

I think we will continue to add more people on the commercial side.

I expect that we will continue to add more people on the international side.

Those are areas we are seeing good traction.

Totally makes sense.

And certainly, you're seeing a pretty good uptake in 100,000 new customer cohort numbers there.

So it sounds like a -- that strategy is working at least here in Q1.

We'll now hear from Arjun Bhatia with William Blair.

Yes.

Sharat, maybe I can follow-up on that last one on the commercial side of things with the Virtual Conference Pro.

Maybe just remind us if this is a newer part of the market that you're going after or it's something that you've had an established presence in?

And if you are moving a little bit more down market to a higher velocity sales model, what do you think needs to change in the go-to-market motion or the purchasing process to see results from this segment?

So I think, Arjun, you've got you 2 questions.

One is really related to commercial and the second is related to the Virtual Conference Pro.

So let me address both of them.

So on the commercial part of the market, we go up to 2,000 customers and down, so we break it into various categories.

And we see a very large TAM in the -- in what we call Commercial One, which is 200 people and down.

So we are investing in that market.

As we bring in now the Elite product with the Breakouts, I think that is also going to be an important product that we are going to take to that market.

So we see potential in our business using the data-rich system of engagement for not the SMB market per se, but a little higher than the SMB market.

So we see pretty strong potential there.

Now -- and we have a team and we are expanding that team on a global basis that sells all our products.

Now related to Virtual Conference Pro, our virtual enterprise -- our Virtual Conference overall business is about 10% of our business.

The Virtual Conference enterprise product did require a little more handholding than we wanted to do -- than I think is more palatable in the commercial market, also the price point a little lower.

So it's our version of making it not completely self-service but a lot more self-service compared to before and reduce the price point.

I'm not sure it's still a SMB kind of level price for, but it's somewhere in the middle, and it's a good entry point for the commercial market.

Perfect.

That's very helpful.

And then if I can touch on the Breakout announcement seemed very exciting and certainly seemed like something that would resonate in the market.

Just curious how you're pricing that?

Is that going to be part of the core platform?

Is that an add-on?

Is it a totally different offering that customers need to purchase?

Just help us understand the pricing model there.

Yes.

It's -- I can't disclose the pricing model.

But I think as we have taken it out in Elite, Arjun, we -- it's an uplift to their existing subscription.

So somebody has a $75,000 subscription, 1 workspace and 2 log-ins, it's an uplift to that subscription.

And it's early.

So we are still trying to kind of figure that thing out.

But we are selling that as a subscription as an add-on, okay?

Now as this thing launches in the virtual conferencing, you may take a different tack in the different products, but that is the approach we have.

So we are going to market with all of our customers from an upsell and expansion cadence as an uplift to this.

Our final question will come from Steve Enders with KeyBanc.

I wanted to follow-up on the earlier question about the renewal opportunity that you're seeing.

And I know that we're probably a couple of months into it at this point from the first big push from a year ago.

But I guess, how are those conversations progressing for either driving longer-term usage -- or long-term use of the platform in facilitating multiyear deals with these customers?

Steve, do you want to take that?

Yes, I can go ahead.

Yes, I can go ahead and take that.

Well, in terms of the -- it was kind of 2 questions you asked there.

Let me start with the multiyear deal question, then I'll pivot to the other one.

So in terms of multiyear deals, we're very pleased with how those are going.

We don't really provide guidance on that or report it quarterly, but it is trending in a similar fashion to what we saw in the second half of 2020 even with our customer count and ARR growing significantly.

So we're really pleased with how our customers continue to see the long-term strategic value in our offering, and we continue to sign multiyear deals with them.

In terms of the renewal opportunity, we're happy with where things are at, and that's reflected in our guidance.

As Sharat mentioned, Q2 of last year was the peak of COVID-related buying and many of these accounts are up for renewal.

We do expect some churn in downsizing in a minority of these accounts, and that was always factored into our guidance we provided both last quarter and again this quarter.

And we are guiding to a 40% plus year-over-year growth rate, and that's coming off a tough compare in 2020, which was the year of explosive growth for us.

So we're really excited about how that's going.

We're excited about our new customer wins in Q1 and the great level of engagement we continue to see with our customers.

Okay.

That's great to hear.

And just a quick follow-up.

I know you mentioned last quarter about some investments you did make in the agency channel and I'm just wondering how that's kind of progressing so far?

Yes.

I think, Steve, we are making the investment.

We hired another channel executive also in EMEA.

But these things take a little while, as you know, to kind of progress.

So our expectation is we're starting from a low base, so there's only upside here.

I mean the announcement with Veeva is an important one.

We hope will drive more ISV-related pipeline in the life sciences category.

So this has got a multi-quarter runway, Steve.

So we will keep you updated.

But this will take us a few quarters.

Because we are starting so low, I mean there's only upside here as we move forward.

That will conclude today's question-and-answer session.

I will now turn the call over to Sharat Sharan for any additional closing remarks.

Nope.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today.

See you next quarter.

Thank you.

This concludes today's call.

Thank you for your participation.

You may now disconnect.