ON24 Inc (ONTF) 2020 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good afternoon and welcome.

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

(Operator Instructions) 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 Fourth Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call.

On the call with me today are Sharat Sharan, the Founder and CEO of ON24; and Chief Financial Officer, Steve 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 of the benefits, if any, of such trends.

These forward-looking statements may contain such words as project, outlook, future expectations, will, anticipates, believes, intends or referred as to 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 sales to existing customers, fluctuation in our performance, competition in our markets and any decline in demand for such solutions, our ability to expand our sales and marketing capabilities and otherwise manage our growth, the impact of the 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 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 reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to today's financial press release.

With that, I will now turn the call over to Sharat.

Sharat?

Thank you, Maili, and welcome, everyone, to ON24's Fourth Quarter and Full year 2020 Financial Results Conference Call, our first as a publicly traded company.

Thank you for joining us.

I also want to thank all of our employees, customers, partners and investors for being a part of our great fourth quarter 2020 and successful IPO in February.

This has been a tremendous journey, and we are excited for the future.

Since this is our first call together, and we have many listeners who are just getting to know ON24, I'll first share a quick summary of our financial results for Q4 and 2020 and then spend a little more time than usual on our platform, key differentiators and vision for the future.

We had a very strong fourth quarter, which capped the year of tremendous growth for ON24.

In Q4, we delivered ARR growth of 100% year-over-year, ending our fiscal year 2020 with $153.4 million in ARR.

Our fourth quarter revenue for our Digital Experience Platform business grew 137% year-over-year to a total of $53.1 million.

At the same time, we demonstrated significant leverage, which drove non-GAAP operating income of $11 million and $10 million in free cash flow in the fourth quarter.

For the full fiscal year of 2020, for our Digital Experience Platform business, we achieved revenue growth of 92%, closing our year with $154.8 million in revenue.

Now I'd like to take a step back and share our story.

For people who don't know us, let me tell you how we got here.

7 years ago, I had an epiphany.

Social media and digital experience platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Instagram were transforming B2C marketing.

These platforms deliver highly engaging experiences, which is why consumers enjoy spending so much time on them.

As a result, these companies know so much about us that they're able to deliver highly personalized and effective advertising.

I'm sure all of you can relate to the experience of scrolling through your favorite social media feed and seeing ads for precisely the products in which you are most interested.

And seeing this emergence between highly engaging digital experiences and the ways in which platform companies could use data to understand consumer buying intent, I realize there was nothing like this in the B2B world.

And that's when we decided to go all in to build a digital experience platform that creates deep engagement, first-person data and AI-driven personalization for B2B companies.

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

These digital experiences that 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 companies, 4 of 5 largest U.S. banks, 3 of 5 largest global health care companies, 3 of the 5 largest global manufacturing and industrial companies.

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

We've been enabling digital transformation and digital engagement for our customers for several years.

And now the market has come to us.

Due in part to the global pandemic, companies have gone through 10 years of digital transformation in 10 months.

They have been able to see the reach, the engagement and the richness of the data to get through our platform.

And now it's clear to them and to us that there is no going back to business as usual.

There are other tectonic shifts also upending traditional sales and marketing strategies.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, almost 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will [appear] in digital channels.

In addition, the B2B buyer is self-educated just like our B2C lines.

When you shop for a car, you do all your research and choose a model and even colors and other options well before you ever speak to a salesperson.

This same transformation is happening in the B2B world, and companies are racing to adapt their go-to-market strategies to meet their prospective customers where they are.

The archaic and automated technologies B2B companies used in the past to engage these buyers, spamming them with endless e-mails and ad that lack personalization simply don't work and offer a poor return on their sales and marketing investment.

This is creating endless spam, click bait and junk.

Marketing at scale has become synonymous with automation and spam, so much so that countries are stepping into it to stop with regulations like GDPR.

At ON24, we believe it's time for a new era in B2B sales and marketing that is led by engagement.

The era of automation is over.

The era of engagement is here.

Our customers come to us to solve 2 problems, engagement and data.

If you look across different kinds of sales and marketing tactics, some are engaging.

Some provide data.

We don't believe there's a solution that can match our ability to do both.

Physical events are engaging, but they're expensive and provide almost no data about prospects.

E-mail marketing scales but creates endless spam.

A click, a view, a download, that is not engagement.

That is where ON24 comes in.

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

That's because we've designed a system of engagement that delivers experiences purpose-built for marketing and sales.

In 2020, our platform powered over 200,000 live digital experiences, totaling more than 2.5 billion minutes of engagement per year.

Over 4 million professionals engage on the ON24 network monthly, 170% increase year-over-year.

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

In today's world of short retention spans, if you can create a platform that engages prospects and customers for 50 minutes on average, you are doing something divine.

And that's just a single experience.

Most of our customers deliver hundreds or even thousands of experiences per year because the more experiences you do and the more people you engage, the more data you capture.

That creates a multiplier effect for every single one of our customers.

That also creates a multiplier effect across our entire network of experiences.

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

There are 3 components: the ON24 experiences, ON24 Intelligence and ON24 Connect.

First, are the ON24 experiences.

They are a suite of 4 products: On ON24 Elite, our flagship live interactive webinar experience product; ON24 Virtual Conference, 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.

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 analytics platform.

This is the secret sauce.

We develop a 360-degree view of every individual from the questions they ask to the polls they answer to the content they download, all clues that turn customer engagement into rich insights.

And those insights fuel our AI engine, recapture prospect's lifetime activity, the 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 all the leading CRM, marketing automation and business intelligence tools.

As an aside, some of you are using our platform right now, listening to our earnings webcast through our alliance with Q4 Systems.

It is important to note that investor relations and these type of calls are a small fraction of our revenues, and many of them do not demonstrate the true power of our platform.

Now looking forward, we believe the future is all about hybrid engagement.

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

Why will that be the case?

Listen to what our customers have learned over the last year.

One of the largest cloud networking and infrastructure companies is generating 5x more pipeline compared to in-person events.

Another Fortune 100 global software company is increasing their average deal size by 10%, incomparable to results from in-person events.

And a large professional services firm has increased its number of engaged prospects by 7x at just 1/3 of the cost.

Let me share some information about our growth vectors.

First, we're adding sales capacity to drive new customer acquisition and customer expansion.

Second, we are entering new international markets, including Japan and [DOC].

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

Now let me share with you a few customer wins from Q4.

One of our enterprise customers, a top global European pharmaceutical company, selected the ON24 Digital Experience platform as its worldwide solution to engage health care professionals through ongoing webinar series that share their scientific research.

We are being used by the organizations across the world from Europe to North America to South America to the Middle East.

A big differentiator for us in landing the customer was our purpose-built platform, global support and integration with the life sciences CRM.

This contract is over $100,000 in ARR to start, and there is tremendous growth potential as we continue to expand across geographies and product lines.

Another customer win in Q4 comes from Japan.

A top multinational venture capitalist and investment firm is using our platform to achieve global reach for multilingual digital events and webinars.

Our ability to support 50 plus languages and provide 24/7 support across multiple geographies is a big differentiator for us and winning factor with large multinational enterprises.

One of our customers, a top Fortune 500 insurance and financial services company, uses ON24 to power the go to market for every line of business across the globe from consumer insurance to commercial risk.

In the fourth quarter, we expanded from using our webinar solution to our full product portfolio and leverage our platform for multiple sales and marketing use cases.

This customer chose to make us their global standard because of our enterprise-grade holistic platform that provides the security, scale and data-driven engagement their entire organization needs.

As a result, the customer has increased their spend with us by 300% since originally landing their business in 2016 at a high 6-figure ARR level.

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

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 a 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.

Finally, I invite all of you to join us on April 28 for ON24's virtual conference, the ON24 experience, where you can learn more about our platform vision, hear from our customers and explore our product portfolio.

With that, I'll hand it over to our CFO, Steve Vattuone, to walk you through our Q4 results in more detail.

Thank you.

Thank you, Sharat, and good afternoon, everyone.

Before I get into our results for the fourth quarter, I would like to spend a minute discussing our financial model and key metrics that we look at to measure our business.

The majority of our revenues is generated from subscriptions that we sell through our Digital Experience Platform, which is delivered through cloud-based software.

We also recognized overage fees as part of this platform revenue, which are built in conjunction with our customers' usage of our platform.

Revenue on our subscriptions and related overage fees is recognized ratably over a customer's contract term.

Our contracts are generally 1 to 3 years in length, and the majority are billed annually in advance.

As is typical with SaaS businesses, many of our contracts have built in auto renewals and annual price increases.

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

The bulk of these services are sold as part of our subscription bundle and are often recurring in nature.

This revenue is recognized at the time services are performed.

Our professional services revenue is seasonal in nature, which I'll elaborate a bit more on in a moment.

Overall, we focus on Digital Experience Platform revenue, which includes subscription, professional services and other revenue associated with our software platform.

Digital Experience Platform revenue excludes our legacy revenue, which consists of revenue from fully managed events and associated services.

We stopped selling this offering to new customers in 2018, so it's a very small and shrinking portion of our revenue today.

And finally, we focus on annual recurring revenue, or ARR, as a key indicator of our business momentum and future revenue potential.

We believe our 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.

We also believe the growth in our ARR reflects our ability to win larger customers who are signing multiyear agreements with us.

As of December 31, 29% of ARR was from customers with multiyear agreements.

Now turning to our results.

As Sharat mentioned, we are very pleased with our fourth quarter results, which capped a year of very strong growth for ON24.

Total revenue for the fourth quarter was $53.3 million, an increase of 123% compared to Q4 2019.

Total Digital Experience Platform revenue was $53.1 million, an increase of 137% year-over-year.

Subscription and other platform revenue for the fourth quarter of 2020 was $41.2 million, an increase of 115% compared to the fourth quarter of 2019.

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

Professional services revenue for the fourth quarter was $12 million, an increase of 155% year-over-year, representing 23% of total revenue.

The fourth quarter is typically seasonally very strong for services revenue as our customers are utilizing our professional services more frequently with more usage of our platform.

We saw this materialize in the fourth quarter, particularly with the number of new customers we have using the platform, and we expect Q1 will be seasonably lighter for professional services revenue.

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.

Total ARR as of December 31 was $153.4 million, an increase of 100% year-over-year.

The growth of our ARR is underpinned by 4 primary drivers.

First is our expansion opportunity within our existing customer base as they increased usage of our platform with additional users and capacity.

Second is increasing number of customers we see purchasing more than one of our products.

As of the end of the fourth quarter, 30% of our customers purchased 2 or more products compared to 17% at the end of 2019.

Third is the increase in share of customers who are entering into multiyear agreements with us, which I discussed a moment ago.

And fourth, new customer acquisition is a key driver of ARR growth.

To that end, we finished the fourth quarter with approximately 2,000 customers, representing growth of 42% year-over-year.

In addition, we added 158 customers with ARR greater than $100,000, representing growth of 110% year-over-year, which demonstrates our ongoing traction with larger enterprise customers.

These factors give us confidence in our ability to upsell our suite of experiences to existing customers and demonstrates a significant runway we have within our existing customer base.

Moving on to net retention.

Our NRR as of Q4 2020 was 149% compared to 108% as of Q4 2019.

We saw an exceptionally high net retention rate to close out 2020 due to the rapid adoption and expansion of our platform amid the pandemic.

But we are pleased with the strong net retention expansion.

We expect to see some normalization in NRR as we wrap these COVID quarters over the course of 2021.

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

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

Gross margin in Q4 was 81%, up approximately 10 percentage points year-over-year.

In Q4 and throughout 2020, we experienced very rapid revenue growth, and our pace of hiring, headcount, customer success and services was much slower.

As a result, we demonstrated very high gross margin in 2020 and specifically in Q4.

As we scale our business to support our growth in the quarters ahead, we expect this to reduce gross margin in the near term.

Turning now to operating expenses.

Sales and marketing expense in Q4 was $19.5 million compared to $11.9 million in Q4 last year.

This represents 37% of total revenue, an improvement compared to 50% in the fourth quarter last year.

We intend to invest in sales and marketing as we expand our sales force to support increased demand for digital experiences post COVID.

R&D expense in Q4 was $5.8 million compared to $4.0 million in Q4 of last year.

This represents 11% of total revenue versus 17% in the same period last year.

Given that our R&D efforts drive our competitive advantage, we plan on increasing our current R&D spend relative to revenue versus what we invested in Q4.

G&A expense was $6.9 million for the quarter compared to $3.5 million in the fourth quarter last year.

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

Operating income in the quarter was $11.1 million compared to a loss of $2.3 million last year.

Operating margin was 21%, an improvement of more than 30 points compared to negative 10% in the same period last year.

Net income per share in Q4 was $0.57 per share using 19.1 million diluted shares outstanding.

This compares to a net loss in Q4 of last year of $0.31 per share using 8.9 million basic and diluted shares outstanding.

Free cash flow was $10.3 million in Q4 compared to negative $4.4 million last year.

Free cash flow margin was 19%, a 30-plus percent point improvement compared to negative 18% in Q4 last year.

Turning to the balance sheet.

We ended the year with $61.2 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments.

This bounce does not include the $348 million in net proceeds from our IPO, which occurred in the first quarter.

In terms of headcount, we ended the year with 547 full-time employees, which reflects growth of 49% compared to the 368 full-time employees we had at the end of 2019.

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

And finally, turning now to guidance.

As Sharat discussed, we feel extremely well positioned to continue benefiting from the trends driving the need for a data-rich digital management platform.

We are confident in our ability to drive sustainable growth in the quarters ahead.

At the same time, we are coming off a year of explosive expansion for our business and would like to offer some context on our guidance before getting into the numbers.

While we are already seeing strong momentum across our business at the beginning of 2020, COVID became an accelerant for us as more businesses turned to ON24 to engage with potential customers when physical meetings came to a halt.

We began adding new clients at a rapid pace and expanding our footprint with existing customers, driving exceptional growth in ARR and revenue.

Looking ahead of this year, we will begin lapping these quarters of exceptional growth at a more normalized rate.

While we continue to see fantastic engagement from our customers in the early stages of 2021, our guidance reflects our expectation that we will see some normalization in growth.

In addition, as I discussed earlier, we see meaningful seasonality in our professional services revenue.

Services revenue has historically been in the mid-teens as a percentage of total revenue versus 23% in Q4.

We expect to see a sequential decrease in our professional services revenue in the first quarter.

Looking at the first quarter specifically, we are providing guidance in a much tighter range than we will be going forward given the timing of this call relative to the end of the quarter.

With that background, for the first quarter of 2021, we expect revenue in the range of $48.5 million to $49 million, which represents year-over-year growth of approximately 96% to 98%; non-GAAP operating income in the range of $0.5 million to $1 million or a margin of 1% to 2%, and non-GAAP EPS of $0 to $0.01 using 43 million diluted shares outstanding.

And for the full year 2021, we expect revenue in the range of $205.5 million to $208.5 million, which represents year-over-year growth of approximately 31% to 33%; non-GAAP operating loss in the range of $2 million to $5 million or a margin of negative 1% to 2%; and non-GAAP loss per share of $0.07 per share to $0.14 per share using 44.4 million basic and diluted shares outstanding.

In summary, we are very pleased with our results in the fourth quarter and look forward to building on this momentum in our first year as a public company.

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

Operator?

(Operator Instructions) We'll take our first question from Sterling Auty with JPMorgan.

I'm curious, how would you characterize your new customer adoption during the quarter?

And what are your strategies to drive further new customer adoption, especially as you get post pandemic?

This is Sharat.

Our focus, Sterling, 90% of our business is in enterprise and commercial business, and we've got very focused teams on enterprise and commercial, Sterling.

So within the quarter, we significantly enhanced the number of people on those teams, and we saw tremendous momentum on new logos for both new and commercial, not only from North America but also from EMEA.

I'll give you one example.

One of the companies that we brought on was in the enterprise business, is a $3 billion consumer electronics company based out of Chicago.

And they bought 3 of our products: Elite, Engagement Hub and Target.

Their focus was really pipeline for 2021 but also to kind of expand the use of their products in their key accounts.

So again, strong momentum both on the new side of the business on the enterprise and commercial side and we generated close to 600 customers last year, Sterling, and these become really key expansion potential for us as we go into 2021.

We'll now take our next question from Chris Merwin with Goldman Sachs.

I just wanted to ask about existing customers.

And as you go through renewals, can you talk a bit about what you're seeing from these existing customers?

And with an eye towards 2021 and beyond, assuming there's some state of normalcy as it relates to the pandemic, how are your customers talking about any changes in their plans to host webinars versus conferences?

What does that strategy look like?

And ultimately, what does that mean for you all as they think about renewing their relationship?

Thank you, Chris.

And because -- just for everyone, Steve and I are in different locations, so I'll probably take some of the questions and move them to Steve also.

So Chris, why don't I take the first part of the question about how our engagement with the customers and all is doing?

And then I'll give it to Steve, who can talk about normalcy and like what -- the second part of the question that you asked.

So overall, we are very pleased with our continued momentum.

We are seeing fantastic engagement from our customers.

Based on what our customers are telling us, they see a future of -- future, which is about hybrid engagement.

This is a permanent change.

There is no going back.

Companies that are -- as I said, companies have gone through 10 years of transformation in 10 months.

Once they've seen the reach, the engagement, the rich data that they get out of this platform, it's hard to go back.

I'll give you an example of one of the CMOs of one of the largest software and cloud companies, a Fortune 100 company.

And he said to me, he said, "Sharat, we're generating more pipeline, more conversion of deals, and the deal sizes are also 10% higher.

And I'm spending 1/3 the money that I spent in physically max.

How do I go back?" So overall, we are continuing to see trends of customers signing multiyear deals with us.

At the end of Q4, it was 29% multiyear.

Expansion and upsell are doing well.

And we're also seeing pretty strong growth coming out of international markets.

With that, Steve, do you want to add any color to -- anything you want to add?

Yes.

Our NRR -- I'll point out, our NRR was very strong in Q4, 149%, and we expect our NRR in Q1 to be strong as well, and that's factored in the guidance that we provided.

We will see some volatility this year as we lap the COVID quarters.

But at this point, we really not see much of a reduction, and we're seeing very strong customer engagement continuing.

We'll move on to our next question from Rob Oliver with Baird.

Sharat, I had one for you and then a very quick follow-up for you, Steve.

Sharat, just you mentioned -- I thought that was helpful color because you mentioned how you guys see the world as hybrid and then in response to Chris Merwin's question there, you said that that's because your customers are talking to you about that.

I was curious -- I mean, 1 of the case studies that we love with Schneider Electric, where they talked about 30% conversion to quality leads from virtual attendees of hybrid events before the pandemic.

So I'm just curious, as you guys have gotten into more negotiations with current customers on expansion, how those ROI use cases are resonating and just how those customers are thinking about monetization of hybrid?

Rob, thank you for the question.

I mean if I was -- just want to make sure -- you mentioned Schneider Electric, their numbers before the pandemic, right?

Yes.

That really caught our attention because I -- if I recall, they said that they saw -- they were hosting these live events where they had virtual events on top of them, and they were getting these customer conversions on the virtual events to quality leads at a very, very high rate, which seemed quite encouraging to us because, obviously, that was pre-pandemic.

Yes.

And Rob, thank you for the question, and so let me take that.

As you know, Rob, I mean, we were doing very well, pre-pandemic.

In Q1 last year, we grew 31%.

We had 73% gross margins, and we were operating profitable.

And our -- the premise of -- the foundation of our business was we've been working with companies for years in working with them on their digital engagement strategy and their digital transformation.

So as this pandemic has hit, I mean, I'd break the customers into 2 different parts.

Those -- they are those who have been using the platform before and have been able to see the results, and then they are the new ones who are probably more doing the physical events.

I think the ones who were doing that in the past, they're doing a lot more because they know the reach, the engagement and the data that the new ones have now been exposed to.

And once you get exposed to the fact that you get -- like the example I gave, the cloud and networking company, once you get 5x more reach and you get 10x more -- or if you're 10% more deal size and you close more deals, there is no going back.

So that's why the people who are doing it are going to do more stuff as we move forward.

But also, we have a whole cohort of new customers, people who have really seen the value of the digital platform and are going to use it more.

I would also highlight one other thing.

There's a major trend here that I talked about in my remarks.

And the trend is, according to Gartner, by 2025, 80% of sales and marketing is going to be done over digital channels, and that was happening pre-pandemic.

Now that's only going to get accelerated.

So it's not that this was not happening before.

I think you'll see significant acceleration as the world moves towards more of a hybrid engagement.

That's really helpful.

And then, Steve, just a quick one for you.

You made a comment about, I guess, the cadence or trajectory of the normalization in NRR, and I missed it throughout 2021.

Could you talk about how that might like look throughout the year?

Yes.

Yes.

I mean we're not really giving specific NRR forward-looking guidance.

I will say as we developed our 2021 guidance we've provided, we were being, I'll call, conservative and prudent in our modeling.

And the way to think about it is pre-pandemic, our NRR was about 110% with a little more than 115% for our enterprise business, and 70% of our ARR is in the enterprise.

So this should give you some guideposts to think about it as we lap the COVID quarters and get through the year here.

And if there's upside to that and there's prudent modeling, that would be great for us.

And we'll then move on to our next question from Brent Bracelin with Piper Sandler.

And I guess one for Sharat if I could and then a follow-up for Steve.

Sharat, if you look at the pipeline, and if I look back in the last year, really, really strong net new logos, obviously, kind of post COVID.

But as you look at the pipeline going into this year, with only 30% of customers having 2 or more products, it seems like the bulk of the opportunity is getting the pipeline really tied to upsells of the installed base.

Could you just walk us through what the visibility is like there?

What's resonating with enterprises around additional products?

Is it engagement hub?

That's the real new opportunity to upsell existing customers?

And then if you could just touch on any sort of new customer logos and if the pipeline there is healthy as well.

Yes.

So that was Brent, right?

Brent, yes.

So Brent, we are seeing continued momentum in our pipeline.

Our -- both on the size of total pipeline for the quarter, and we track, of course, as you can imagine, the net new pipeline every week.

So we are seeing very strong momentum on that.

And one of the things that we did last year is we significantly focused on increasing capacity, sales capacity, both for our enterprise and for our commercial business.

At the same time, we also kind of added more sales capacity to our expansion and upsell business and added a lot in the leadership capability there, too.

As you said -- so we are attacking on all fronts.

We ended last year with close to 30% of our customers having multiple products.

As you know, Elite is about over 70% of our ARR.

I think it's followed by Engagement Hub and Virtual Conferences and almost around the same and followed by Target.

A lot of our focus this year is to continue to increase the expansion of the other products.

I mean just to provide you a perspective, when I talk about 70% plus Elite, last year, there was a 10% decrease in the -- in Elite as a percentage of total because the newer products took off pretty significantly.

And we expect the newer products will continue to increase.

They -- because they are newer, they're going to grow faster, but Elite is also doing very, very well.

I gave you an example of -- regarding multiple products.

Our acquisition team is really more and more focused in bringing multiple products.

I gave you the example of this consumer electronics company based out of Chicago that bought 3 products right off the gate.

There is another mid-market company that bought Elite and Engagement Hub right off the bat and within a month for virtual summits bought Virtual Conferences.

So we are seeing that kind of momentum.

At the same time, we are also basically attacking it through our expansion and upsell channel.

Is that helpful?

Got it.

So it sounds like those -- yes, absolutely helpful there.

It sounds like the capacity adds on the sales side are helping both sides of the business, both new logos and expand, which is certainly encouraging.

I guess, Steve, the follow-up for you is really around your ability to hire.

I mean you generated $24 million of operating profits this year.

You're guiding to kind of a slight operating loss as you make those investments.

And my question here is how difficult has it been in the hiring and onboarding new employees.

It sounds like you're having some good success on the sales side, but love to get an update just around your ability to hire.

And how aggressively are you hiring right now in the current environment?

Sure.

Yes.

As you can see from the headcount numbers, we've been very successful in growing the business and hiring this past year.

And Q1 is shaping up to be another successful quarter for us in terms of hiring and onboarding new employees, and we're really happy with how it's going and where we're at on that, if that's helpful.

Absolutely...

Just to add to what Steve -- Brent, what Steve was saying, we got on this thing pretty early about hiring both sales capacity and products as we saw the momentum last year, so we're doing quite well.

And the other thing that we also focus very heavily on was on enablement.

So so far, I know it's a challenge, but so far, we are quite pleased with what we are saying.

Great.

Well, that's good to hear, and I'm glad that the momentum here continues into Q1.

We'll now move on to our next question from Scott Berg with Needham.

Congrats on the good first quarter out of the shoots.

I guess, again, 2 for me.

Sharat, back to your pre-scripted remarks, you had highlighted 2 problems that you saw.

One is engagement, and obviously, the second is data.

On the engagement side, how do you look at engagement or measure engagement of newer customers on their platform or their usage on their platform?

And I guess what I'm specifically looking at is the engagement levels or usage levels of Q4, were they the same or better on a per customer basis as they were, say, in the first couple of months after the pandemic or if you notice any notable change?

Let me make sure I understand the question.

I think the question is compared to Q4, how do we see the engagement this quarter.

Correct.

So I think we are seeing significant momentum and continued strong engagement on the platform in both Q4 and Q1.

Q1 -- but just to call it, Q4 is generally our -- seasonally our strongest quarter as you would expect.

For many companies, it is because -- and Q1 is our weakest or seasonally the slowest quarter.

And the reason that is, is because people come back from January.

But we see people pretty ramped up and the engagement and the platform is going very, very strong.

So other than seasonality, it's business as usual and maintaining momentum.

I do want to make -- I also want to make one comment here, which I think is important.

There is generally a tendency -- when people think about the post pandemic, there's a tendency of thinking about the world being all physical events and physical trade shows going back to physical.

I just want to highlight that the virtual conferences or the virtual trade show are less than 12% of our ARR.

So that's a small portion of our business.

We have a much larger digital experience platform this [extends to] that has been doing very well pre-pandemic that we expect is going to continue to do well.

Got it.

Helpful.

And then from a follow-up perspective, Sharat, you talked about adding sales capacity this year.

Obviously, you've seen a big mass increase of demand here.

But on a nuanced -- more nuanced level outside of just blunt force, you got a big pipeline.

You may need to address it.

Are there kind of new opportunities or new channels?

You mentioned Japan a little bit.

But is there anything else to really call out from maybe a new sales opportunity this year that you're going to target that you did not last year?

I think let me talk about the 4, 5 areas that we are focused on, and we started focusing on last year.

You talked about international markets, so let me start with that.

Our international momentum in EMEA and APAC is good, but we also -- we entered Japan and Germany at the end of last year.

And this year -- early this year, we are also entering Southern Europe.

And we are seeing some really good momentum, some early deals.

I think we'll -- proof, of course, will be as we sustain that but really strong.

Second part of our focus is the new customer acquisition, really focusing on enterprise team, which is more land and expand; and commercial, which is more velocity.

So adding capacity there.

Expansion in upsells, I've talked about.

And then the fourth thing is we add -- we're significantly investing in our product and engineering organization, and we're very much focused on new product features, modules and others.

Just to give you an example, this quarter, we launched an enterprise addition for our Elite product, which is our flagship product.

What this does is it adds accessibility and advanced data insight.

So things like live and on-demand captioning plus advanced data and insight features, we've added that bundle for our enterprise customers on a global basis.

So those are the 3 or 4 areas that you're going to keep seeing us attack pretty aggressively.

We'll then move on to our next question from Bhavan Suri with William Blair.

Let me add my congrats on a really good quarter update here.

I want to touch on investment priorities.

So you've touched on sales and R&D.

But one of the things you've talked about in the past as we ramped was partners.

I'd love to understand how you think about partners today, which are de minimis, I feel like, in terms of contribution, in terms of where that plays out in the next, say, 3 to 5 years and the importance of the types of partners you might have as you look to scale the business across other product sets.

Bhavan, good to chat.

I think -- as you said, 98%, most of our business right now is direct, and that's -- frankly, it's a major area of focus for me.

It shows you the leverage in our business.

I think we are focused on 2 categories there, Bhavan.

The first category is the sales and marketing, the third-party integrations that we have.

We built very deep integrations, so -- with the Adobe Marketos, the Eloquas, and now we are adding the life sciences CRM.

We're very focused right now in driving more pipeline from that channel.

So that's one.

I've got a VP focused on just driving that.

So again, in its infancy but that's an area of focus on pipeline.

The other one is we are focused on building an agency channel.

As many companies are really looking for this virtual experience, virtual engagement platform, we want to basically get in and then expand that platform.

So whether they are smaller agencies or mid-level marketing and sales agencies, that's an increased area of focus.

Again, very early stages but at significant level as we move forward.

Yes.

No, Sharat, I certainly agree.

I think the [compatibility] of product into these much more complex virtual experiences will be amazing.

I think the partner approach is the way to do it.

I want to touch on customer count.

I know it's been brought up a couple of times.

But if I look at it -- and Steve, this is for you.

You added 66 -- 76 customers this quarter, [130] in last quarter.

Average adds last year were like 40.

How do you think about that going forward?

Do you think we'll trend towards the average of last year?

Now you've got more salespeople.

You've got more productivity.

You've got more focus on that.

But then what's a good number for us to think through or what's your level of expectation in terms of new customer adds?

Steve, do you want to take that [one]?

Yes.

I'll go ahead and take that.

I mean we haven't really disclosed forward-looking guidance on customer count per se.

We will report that at the end of Q1.

And I will say we're very pleased with how it's going, and it's trending in line with our expectations.

And then we'll move on to our next question from DJ Hynes with Canaccord.

Congrats on the results.

Sharat, Scott asked about engagement with the platform, right, which I took to mean kind of how many webinars are being run by our customers.

I want to ask if you've seen any change in webinar participation rates over the last 3 to 6 months.

I think some investors wonder if there's any virtual fatigue setting in and what that might mean for future spend among your customers.

So any color or thoughts there would be helpful.

Yes.

I think, DJ, good to chat with you.

I think if you look at last year, DJ, if you look at what happened in Q2 and Q3 last year, the physical world just stopped and people who were in panic mode and other stuff, right?

And so of course, you saw very high spikes in demand.

Now as Q4 happened, as Q1 happens, it's hard to sustain that level of intensity.

It's just not possible.

So if you had conversion, conversion changed at that time, in those Q2, Q3 ballpark.

If 100 people had registered as many as 60 and 65 people join, I think that's not a sustainable number.

On our platform, we certainly feel that about people -- based on registration, about 40% to 50%, somewhere around 45% is a really good conversion rate for people.

I think we are beginning to see that.

It's very clear, by the end of the year, people did have what people call the Zoom fatigue kind of a thing.

So some of that is there, but that -- we are not seeing any impact on the activity of things that people are doing.

The conversion rates, of course, have normalized a little compared to what it was in the peak of COVID.

Yes, yes.

Makes sense.

Helpful.

And then maybe a more strategic question.

So today, you guys integrate into all the leading marketing automation platforms out there.

Is there any aspiration to build out any of that workflow functionality in-house?

I mean how are you guys thinking about the evolution on that front?

We have not thought about it that much, DJ.

It's -- that business has become, I wouldn't say commodity, but that's kind of widely available a little.

I think more and more so, you will probably see us focus on more engagement platforms.

Strategically, they really add to the experience layer.

How can we drive more and more engagement, more buying signals, more -- and then you'll see us also invest in our -- in ON24 Intelligence layer, more in the data and artificial intelligence.

And also the more the platform, the more we are going to integrate -- for example, currently, we are integrating very deeply with the leading life sciences CRM.

That's going to be important for us as we close a lot more life sciences deals.

So from a marketing automation and CRM, our strategy there is to really integrate more and more deeply with them.

We're also focused on things like sales enablement platform.

You have companies like Outreach and SalesLoft and others.

We are providing our -- we are looking at integrating our customer profiles right into those platforms also.

So our focus really is wider integration, deeper integration of our engagement data in those platforms as opposed to going with our own there.

Yes.

Makes perfect sense, and I was hoping you would answer.

We'll now take our final question from Alex Kurtz with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Congrats on the quarter and the outlook.

Sharat, I just wanted to have you take a minute to talk about your data strategy.

It's obviously such a key differentiator in what you do relative to some of the other competitive products in the market.

What are the plans for this year's investments in data and which should investors expect to see it as you ramp up that key piece of functionality on the platform?

Alex, good to hear from you.

So 2 parts.

Let me talk about investments we are making and the area.

So first of all, we are significantly focused on adding more engineering headcount, data scientists on the ON24 intelligence.

And there are 2 key parts to it.

It's the analytics -- and I keep the integration separate, the analytics and the AI-driven platform.

So there are 2 or 3 things that we are doing there.

First of all, when we talk about just the experience platform, there are 4 platforms: Elite, Engagement Hub, Target, Virtual Conferences.

One thing that we are trying to do is, as we provide the profiles of people and others, one, we are trying to make sure that the profiles are across all the different platforms.

Right now, they may be a little more siloed.

So we are making sure there is one profile of Sharat Sharan across the engagement across all the platforms.

That's the first part.

Secondly, we are adding these buying signals across all our platform.

If you want to book a meeting directly with the customer, how can you book that meeting?

So we are -- that's a major area of focus for us.

Third is our AI layer, the machine learning.

With the explosion of data on our platform, I want to make sure that after every live experience or webinar, you go to -- you have recommended content to take based on your interest to take you to the next webinar, to take you to the part of the Engagement Hub and making sure that, that becomes ubiquitous in our platform.

So those 3 things, again, integrating the data across the different platforms, the buying signals and making sure that there are no dead ends, it goes from one recommendation to another to continue to enhance the engagement on the platform.

And that does conclude today's question-and-answer session.

I'd like to turn the conference back over to management for any additional or closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for being on the call today.

It has been, as you know, a transformative last 12 months for ON24, and I want to take the opportunity to personally thank all of our employees.

Thank you for your hard work and dedication; and to all of our customers, we really appreciate the trust you put in us and are going to continue to focus on earning that every day.

Thank you very much.

And that does conclude today's conference.

We thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.