Sprout Social Inc (SPT) 2021 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good day, and thank you for standing by.

Welcome to the Sprout Social Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Call.

(Operator Instructions) I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Jason Rechel, Investor Relations.

Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator.

And welcome to Sprout Social's Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Call.

We'll be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after market close today and have also released an updated investor presentation, which can be found on our website.

With me are Sprout Social's CEO, Justyn Howard; CFO, Joe Del Preto; and President, Ryan Barretto.

Today's call will contain forward-looking statements, which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

Forward-looking statements include statements concerning financial and business trends, our expected future business and financial performance and financial condition, our guidance for the third quarter of 2021 and the full year 2021 and can be identified by words such as expect, anticipate, intend, plan, believe, seek or will.

These statements reflect our views as of today only, should not be relied upon as representing our views at any subsequent date.

And we do not undertake any duty to update these statements.

Forward-looking statements address matters that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.

For a discussion of the risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 24, 2021, as well as any future quarterly and current reports that we file with the SEC.

During the call, we'll discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles.

Definitions of these non-GAAP financial measures, along with reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, are included in our earnings press release, which has been furnished to the SEC and is available on our website at investors.sproutsocial.com.

And with that, let me turn the call over to Justyn.

Justyn?

Thank you, Jason, and good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you for joining us.

Our company is executing at an exceptionally high level, and we're pleased to report our best quarterly metrics to date as a public company.

I want to hit our second quarter highlights before turning the call over to Ryan and Joe to cover the details.

Social continues to cement itself as the centerpiece of digital strategy.

As new secular tailwinds to our market begin to emerge, our momentum has never been stronger and our opportunity never greater.

Our growth rate has shifted into an even higher gear, which reinforces confidence in our opportunity, our strategy and the aggressive investments we continue to make in our future.

Yet again, we managed to break a series of our own records this quarter.

We added a record number of net new customers, added a record number of customers contributing more than $10,000 in ARR and further accelerated our ARR growth to 45% year-over-year.

We reported our first ever non-GAAP quarterly profit.

We achieved positive free cash flow for a second consecutive quarter.

And we eclipsed the rule of 50.

Simply put, our business is rapidly accelerating, while our growth is simultaneously becoming structurally more efficient.

All of this underscores the nascency of our market and the attractiveness of our unit economics.

We're pleased to raise our guidance forecast across the board.

During the quarter in which our sales momentum was exceptional, our product and development teams were hard at work, shaping the foundation for our future growth.

We brought to market multiple new capabilities, including a first of its kind social commerce solution, expanded access to Instagram messaging and expanded case functionality to our integrations with Microsoft, Salesforce, Zendesk and HubSpot.

We continue to innovate quickly to create new and differentiated value for our customers.

This focus enables us to fundamentally drive retention and growth higher over time while unlocking new pockets of addressable opportunity.

And one of the biggest opportunities we now have in front of us is the rapid convergence of social and commerce.

We've been speaking with you recently about the proliferation of use cases for our platform.

This trend continues, but we've seen a new use case emerge and begin to crystallize.

Social is becoming a true commerce platform.

We're able to move quickly and in June announced new and expanded integrations with Shopify and Facebook shops to enable brands to seamlessly manage their social commerce efforts within Sprout's unified platform.

Being first to market with this type of disruptive social commerce solution was exciting for our team and for our customers, but it's only the beginning because this use case is continuing to expand.

According to a study by the Harris Poll earlier this year, 93% of executives agreed businesses are increasingly moving their e-commerce strategies to social media as social becomes more ingrained in the buyer journey.

And about 8 in 10 businesses anticipate selling products via social commerce platforms in the next 3 years.

Consumer preferences and expectations are shifting.

We will now enable the extension of digital storefronts to social, where our customers can deliver engaging content, world-class customer care and personalized interactions throughout the entire purchasing journey.

The full buyer cycle from marketing to service will live within Sprout's platform and allow our customers to unite their commerce and social workflows and reduce friction in the buying process.

The functionality and partner integrations transform how our customers think about publishing and engagement.

And we've made the solution easily accessible for customers to adapt and leverage.

These capabilities are powerful, elegant and timely to the market, but we expect to deliver even greater value to our customers in the years ahead.

Not to be overshadowed by the commerce launch was our expanded rollout of the Messenger API support for Instagram.

This was one of our most requested features from our customers and will empower businesses to more efficiently utilize messaging at scale.

This also aligns well with what our network partners term conversational commerce.

We have worked for more than 6 months with the Instagram team on this release, and we're heavily involved in early beta programs, highlighting the depth of our partnership together and our ability to jointly move quickly to deliver value for our customers.

Behind the scenes, our teams are also doing some incredible things.

We continue to prioritize our DEI work, and during the quarter, expanded our technology-giving program, in which we donate more than $1 million in software annually to advance more than 75 global causes as part of our effort to broaden the social impact of our software.

We're working hard to provide more transparency to our ESG efforts overall and anticipate that we'll publish our first fully formed ESG disclosures later this year.

We've also used the past year to rethink the future of how our team will work.

Our offices in Chicago and Seattle officially reopened in a phased, voluntary approach last month.

But at Sprout, we know that the future is hybrid.

Our goal is to empower our people to work wherever and however they thrive and to adapt quickly to changing demands and habits.

We're committed to giving our employees the resources, support and freedom to grow and succeed at Sprout.

And we believe this approach will enable us to attract and retain a lead talent as we continue to grow.

To close, I want to revisit our core investment thesis.

Social media has fundamentally transformed the way consumers connect with brands, which has changed the entire customer experience across virtually every part of an organization.

Social cannot be compartmentalized.

Billions of consumers are driving businesses to adopt new use cases as the market becomes consistently more complex and more challenging to manage.

We've built, organically and on a single code base, the social system of record, intelligence and action in a platform to be horizontally leveraged across a business of any size.

From publishing an engagement to reputation, reporting and advocacy, to listening, analytics and all commerce, there is no business on the planet that can't benefit from either a more sophisticated social strategy or a business strategy that is sharpened by social data.

We're the industry's highest rated technology platform across every segment in the market according to G2 and others.

And while we're incredibly proud of the company we've built to date, we've also built a company that's inspired by and prepared to thrive in the future.

We look forward to meeting with many of you this quarter and digging deeper into this investment thesis at our first Investor Day in September.

With that, I will turn the call over to Ryan.

Thanks, Justyn.

I couldn't be more impressed by the work of our teams this quarter.

We're delivering for our customers today while strengthening the foundation for our future success.

The barriers to entry in our market are rising.

Our platform is becoming more differentiated.

And we're adding value to a growing list of stakeholders.

Our annual Sprout Social Index, which we released this quarter, really brought the current state of the market to light.

The report found that 71% of consumers are using social more than they were a year ago, and 88% of marketers believe their social media strategy positively influences their bottom line.

It's clear.

Social is more mission-critical today than ever before.

And Sprout's already efficient go-to-market motion is well aligned to software buyers that want to prove value for themselves before committing.

We've continued to hire aggressively across the company, and I remain incredibly impressed by the caliber of people that are choosing to join Sprout.

Our recruiting efforts have been propelled by recent awards like Fortune's Best Workplaces in Technology, Fortune's Best Workplaces for Millennials and Great Place to Work's Best Workplaces in Chicago.

Because of all this, we feel well positioned to capitalize on the many opportunities in front of us.

Justyn mentioned how our product teams, which along with our partner teams, are moving at a fast pace to take advantage of emerging new opportunities.

In our marketing efforts, we're seeing accelerating customer demand, resulting in an increase in the number of qualified trials and an improvement in our trial conversion rate.

Our new business and customer growth sales teams were on fire during Q2, while our increased investments in customer success and onboarding continue to pay off with structural improvements to retention.

A new record in customer additions, combined with our rising ACVs, underscores the incredible market opportunity we are seeing.

The metric that jumped out to me most this quarter was our $10,000 net additions, which set another record.

And our accelerated growth of the $10,000 customer cohort, which grew at 55% year-over-year.

Contributing to the success was the expansion of use cases, our momentum upmarket, especially in mid-market and enterprise, and our success in selling our premium modules across the entire customer base.

To that point, a sample of the brands that grew with us this quarter is a fantastic list that includes Kraft Heinz, the Department of Energy, Independence Blue Cross, Agrium, Franklin Electric, Levi's, Whatabruger, Sisense, BARK, The AARP and Kaplan Test Prep.

Now shifting to a few customer stories.

We are incredibly proud to partner this quarter with Penn National Gaming.

Jennifer Weissman, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, said, "We picked Sprout to unify our various unique social media accounts under one management platform that will enable us to cultivate the most engaging conversations and content for our guests.

Sprout was a natural choice to help us grow the social presence of our many locations because of its powerful, intuitive capabilities that our casinos will quickly harvest the benefits from.

Penn shares a commitment to diversity and inclusion with Sprout.

We are pleased that Sprout's capabilities helped us amplify recently launched efforts like Penn's Diversity Scholarship Program as well as the introduction of the mychoice, myheroes program, an exclusive set of benefits offered to members in the military, veterans and first responders."

We also executed an exciting addition to Nutanix's already expansive enterprise package with Sprout.

Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multi-cloud computing, recently expanded their social listening relationship with Sprout, and during Q2, added a number of new users to help scale and better manage their global secondary handles on social media.

By broadening their publishing and engagement requirements, they were able to level up the reporting systems and processes to build a more strategic and focused social strategy at scale.

As they head into their next fiscal year, Nutanix is also leveraging our professional services for reporting.

We are grateful to continue our work with Nutanix as they unlock insights from social data that will drive their strategy forward.

We also recently partnered on a case study with New Jersey Transit, which had 50 million Twitter impressions last year and served nearly 1 million daily riders across its trains, buses and light rail.

Customer care and experience are at the heart of the New Jersey Transit brand.

By leveraging the Sprout Smart Inbox, they were able to deliver 142% year-over-year increase in the reply rate and also reduced the average customer response times on social media to just 30 minutes.

Said Carol Mack, New Jersey Transit's Director of Events and Social Media, "When people think of transit, we don't want them to think of just equipment and stations.

So we use social to give our employees a voice and to humanize them to the public.

Where Sprout came out on top was understanding us and treating us as individuals.

Every time you reach out, Sprout gives us the same customer care that we were promised from the first time we spoke to them.

They really are 100% there for us.

Incredible stuff."

To bring it all together, we had another record-breaking quarter where our teams delivered and our customers saw tremendous value.

I'm really proud of the way our people are showing up for each other and our customers.

And because of that, we're heading into our third quarter with a tremendous amount of energy and momentum.

With that, I'll turn it over to Joe to run through the financials.

Joe?

Thanks, Ryan.

I'll now walk you through our second quarter results in detail before moving on to guidance for the third quarter and full year 2021.

Revenue for the second quarter was $44.7 million, representing 42% year-over-year growth.

ARR exiting Q2 was $189.1 million, up 45% year-over-year.

We are pleased to see record quarterly customer additions, healthy retention and very healthy expansion.

We added a record 1,490 net new customers in Q2 to finish the quarter with 29,612 customers, up 22% year-over-year.

This is a reflection of balanced and very strong performance in each of our segment.

We continue to be focused on high-quality revenue yield from our new customer cohort.

The number of customers contributing more than $10,000 in ARR reached 3,936, up 55% from a year ago and up from 3,514 in Q1 2021.

Our ACV was up 19% year-over-year.

The rising strategic importance of social, broadening use cases as customers operationalize social, rising attach rates of our premium modules and the momentum upmarket remain several sustainable growth levers for a 10,000 customer cohort in our billable medium-term ACV growth.

In discussing the remainder of the income statement, please note that unless otherwise stated, all references to our expenses, operating results and share count are on a non-GAAP basis and are reconciled in our GAAP results in the earnings press release that was issued just before this call.

In Q2, gross profit was $33.8 million, representing a gross margin of 75.6%.

This is up 160 basis points compared to gross margin of 74.0% a year ago.

We've seen a positive impact on gross margins as we lap the elimination of duplicate infrastructure hosting costs from legacy Simply Measured and from the natural efficiencies of scale in our business.

Sales and marketing expenses for Q2 were $17.1 million or 38% of revenue, down from 43% a year ago.

We are pleased with the quality of people that are choosing to join Sprout, and we are continuing to accelerate our pace of hiring across both our sales and marketing team.

Even as our total sales and marketing expense growth accelerated for the fourth quarter in a row, making a healthy trend line of investment, we were able to further improve efficiency.

Research and development expenses for Q2 were $8.1 million or 18% of revenue, down from 23% a year ago.

We continue to have aggressive R&D growth goals in 2021 as we address an expanding set of opportunity.

We had many key R&D hires start in June and many that are planned to begin throughout Q3 of 2021.

General and administrative expenses for Q2 were $8.5 million or 19% of revenue, down from 27% a year ago.

While we continue to expect G&A expenses to further decrease as a percentage of revenue as we scale, we do expect these annual margin gains to come at a much lower pace over the coming 12 to 18 months than they have been realized over the past 12 to 18 months.

Non-GAAP operating income for Q2 was $0.1 million for a positive 0.3% operating margin.

This compares with a negative 19% operating margin a year ago.

We are pleased with improving efficiency as we scale the company and outperformed our expectations due to higher revenue and the timing of many key hires.

Non-GAAP net income for Q2 was $0.0 million for net income of $0.00 per share based on 54.8 million weighted average shares of common stock outstanding compared to a net loss of $5.8 million and $0.11 a year ago.

Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statement.

We ended Q2 with $171.5 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, up from $167.8 million at the end of Q1 2021.

Deferred revenue at the end of the quarter was $54.5 million.

Looking at both our billed and unbilled contracts, our remaining performance obligations, or RPO, totaled approximately $81.2 million, up from $74.9 million exiting Q1 2021 and up from approximately 59% year-over-year.

We expect to recognize approximately 84% or $68.2 million of total RPO as revenue over the next 12 months.

Operating cash flow in Q2 was positive $4.4 million compared to negative $4.0 million a year ago.

Free cash flow was positive $4.1 million in Q2 for a positive 9% free cash flow margin compared to negative $4.5 million and a negative 14% free cash flow margin a year ago.

Our ongoing momentum into the mid-market and enterprise and mixed shift towards annual and multiyear contracts are having a positive impact on free cash flow as we grow.

We are pleased to report positive non-GAAP operating income for the first time in our history and positive free cash flow for the second consecutive quarter.

The combination of accelerating free cash flow margins and accelerating revenue growth puts us above the Rule of 50 benchmark this quarter, underscoring the attractiveness of our unit economics.

I do want to reiterate, as we continue to optimize our future growth, we do not expect to be sustainably profitable or free cash flow positive in all subsequent quarters.

We generally continue to expect free cash flow margins to be several hundred basis points better than operating margins throughout the remainder of 2021.

Shifting to formal guidance.

For the third quarter of fiscal 2021, we expect total revenue in the range of $47.3 million to $47.4 million or a growth rate of 41%.

We expect non-GAAP operating loss in the range of $4.3 million to $3.9 million.

This represents an anticipated operating margin of negative 8.7%, an improvement of more than 400 basis points year-over-year.

We are making aggressive growth investments across our company.

We are doing this while delivering improvement in our margins, highlighting the efficiencies in our business as we scale.

We expect a non-GAAP net loss per share of between $0.08 and $0.07, assuming approximately 53.9 million weighted average basic shares of common stock outstanding.

For the full year of fiscal 2021, we now expect total revenue in the range of $182 million to $182.6 million.

This is an expected overall reported growth rate of roughly 37% compared with our prior annual expected growth rate of 32% to 33%.

For 2021, we now expect non-GAAP operating loss in the range of $11.0 million to $10.6 million.

This implies a non-GAAP operating margin of negative 5.9%, more than 400 basis points better than our prior annual guidance and an improvement of roughly 1,000 basis points year-over-year.

We're pleased to see faster growth with greater efficiency.

We now expect the non-GAAP net loss per share of between $0.21 and $0.20, assuming approximately 53.8 million weighted average basic shares of common stock outstanding.

Of note, our offices in Chicago and Seattle did reopen in mid-July, and we continue to hire aggressively across the organization.

We have accounted for this office reopening in our expense forecast for the remainder of the year, which we expect will likely lead to moderation in the pace of G&A margin expansion over the next 12 to 18 months relative to the prior 12- to 18-month period.

In summary, we believe we are strongly positioned to capitalize on the opportunity for durable multiyear growth as social moves to the center of digital strategy.

Our accelerating growth rate, compelling financial leverage and strong free cash flow performance gives us confidence to make optimized investments that we believe will enable us to achieve our full potential in the quarters and years ahead.

With that, Justyn, Ryan and I are happy to take any of your questions.

Operator?

(Operator Instructions) And speakers, our first question is from Raimo Lenschow of Barclays.

This is Frank on for Raimo.

Congrats on another really great quarter here.

So you sold out strong performance of large cost customers.

What was the biggest contributor there?

Was it mostly the premium products like listening or analytics?

Or was it more by growing seats expanding across the departments?

Yes.

Thanks for the question.

Both were really important to the growth of our customer base.

But if I was to prioritize them, it continues to be user seats, additional use cases and individuals from different departments being involved, followed by the premium add-ons like listening and analytics.

As you might guess, depending on the specific company and their maturity within the market, it varies.

But definitely, we prioritize users and the use cases with the add-on modules.

Okay.

Very helpful.

And it was great to see you guys moving to social commerce.

I know that's on the horizon for a while.

Could you help to quantify the opportunity here?

And how do you see this as a potential area for further partnerships or M&A in the future?

Yes, great question.

So this initial launch back in June, really as we've indicated a small part of the total, what we think is the total opportunity and certainly, the totality of our plans there.

I think a lot of it is still developing.

We expect that the work that we do there will be a combination of -- certainly additional integrations are on the table there.

We wanted to start with the platforms that we felt would give the most reach and kind of early traction in the market.

We favored some existing relationships there, but extending into additional integrations there, but also a lot more on the capability side, right?

We started with what we thought were broadly applicable, very powerful capabilities to be bringing to a broad range of customers.

We've got a long road map to expand there.

Could be something that becomes an additional monetizable SKU, et cetera, as we build those out.

But we're really taking our time with it.

While the opportunity is still unfolding not only for us, but I think for the broader network partners in general, what this is going to look like, what the ultimate opportunity is, the important thing for us there was forming a thesis, getting in market, making sure that we've got those relationships pegged and that we've got the opportunity to learn and build from there.

So expect to see a lot more from us on the commerce side.

And our next question from Arjun Bhatia of William Blair.

Congrats on a great quarter.

I maybe wanted to touch a little bit more on the e-commerce opportunity.

It's great to see that out in the market.

Is there anything that you can say just in terms of initial customer reaction or adoption, usage, et cetera, that you're seeing from that?

I know it's relatively early, but any color there would be great.

And then just as you're thinking of customer adoption trends, should we think of this as primarily being adopted by existing customers?

Or is there an opportunity here to maybe attract the new customers from verticals that are maybe under-penetrated and to get them on to Sprout's platform?

Yes.

Yes.

Great question.

So to the first half of that, certainly, it's early for us to probably share much in terms of deal contribution and how that's shaping up in terms of adoption.

I will say that we've been excited to see many fantastic brands adopting that.

We'll have a better idea of what we want to share specifically in terms of metrics as we get a little further ahead.

Certainly, I think the initial release with the number of customers that we have, we see a great opportunity in the existing customer base.

But part of our thesis here was to the last point that you made, which is we want to make sure that for businesses that are either doing all or a significant part of their sales through e-commerce and now social commerce specifically, then it's an obvious choice that we can go out to market to any brand that is using the platforms that we're integrated with and be a very obvious solution for them to be able to make all of this strategy work together cohesively.

And so we definitely see this as an opportunity to expand our game overall, but more specifically, just take that to market and make some significant progress in the installed base of our partners.

And I'd just also add in there quickly.

I think the exciting part, I think, to your question about new customers versus existing, we've already seen some impact in helping new customers understand the benefit of Sprout because of our early entry within this market and the ability to make their workflow much easier, leveraging social commerce at Sprout with the integrations.

So I think that's a piece you'll hear from us in future quarters as well in terms of the impact for customers.

But we see it as both an existing customer and new customer benefit.

Got it.

That's very helpful.

And then, Ryan, this next one is actually probably for you.

But you're clearly seeing great momentum in the business, and I think I heard Joe mention that you're accelerating hiring across both sales and marketing.

Can you maybe just help us flesh out a little bit where you're hiring in the go-to-market?

Or is it inside sales?

Do you see more opportunity in the enterprise expansion reps?

Just how should we think about the go-to-market investments you're making?

Yes.

Absolutely.

Look, while everybody is sort of an inside sales rep right now, it's just the current state of things, but we're hiring across a variety of our segments, continuing the trends in terms of mid-market and enterprise growth and success there.

So you'll see that from a career perspective and roles that we're hiring for.

But I would say it's new business for mid-market and enterprise and then our growth teams as well are getting a lot of investment.

And then we've started to hire some more in our international markets as well.

So it's kind of across the board that we're seeing this opportunity right now.

And we just want to make sure that we have the right level of capacity and distribution in these areas that we're seeing it.

And our next question from Parker Lane of Stifel.

A lot of talk about social commerce.

I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about advocacy for a second, something we haven't heard about for a while.

Maybe give us an update on the demand environment for that particular use case and how some of the customers are thinking about the ROI in that area.

All right.

I was muted there for a moment.

Yes, so advocacy is an interesting space for us.

This is an area of impact for businesses that we recognized several years ago, maybe even a bit ahead of demand of the market, but had been building against this idea that social is not just an opportunity for external voices, but also for the ability for internal and related voices to be amplifying the message of brands, further create relationships between the brands and their employees with their audiences externally.

And Ryan shared a couple of examples of how that's taking shape in some of our existing customers.

But that is an area that we have seen increased demand.

It's an area where we see an opportunity to bring our same approach toward a unified platform that brings many capabilities related to social into one place and something that you'll probably hear us talking more about over the next couple of quarters.

Yes.

Got it.

And then maybe on the $10,000-plus ARR customer cohort, would it be fair to say that the majority of those solid net adds you've had recently have been from enterprise customers?

Are you really starting to see traction in SMB and mid-market customers as well that have leaned into the platform very heavily for social and have sort of eclipsed that $10,000 barrier?

Yes.

It definitely is a pretty healthy balance for us.

Certainly in the mid-market and enterprise, you're going to expect deals coming in at that, right, but we've seen the same sort of success and opportunity within our SMB and agency.

And if you think about some of these organizations, especially in SMB, many of them grow up digital, right?

They grow up social.

It's one of their most important modes of communication with customers.

It drives their marketing campaigns.

And oftentimes, an outsized amount of their budget is spent within this area.

So we continue to see success across mid-market and enterprise, but we think that there's plenty of opportunity in our SMB and agency segments there as well.

And they're certainly making up a good portion of those $10,000 adds.

And our next question from Matt VanVliet of BTIG.

I guess, first on the international side, you've really started to put in some management over the last couple of quarters to invest there.

And Ryan, you mentioned hiring really picking up on the go-to-market side.

But curious kind of where you feel like you're at in terms of the team building and their ability to be as efficient as their U.S. counterparts right now.

And just kind of what level of growth or contribution to the overall growth are you seeing so far in the first half?

Yes.

I think we're still really early on what the opportunity is going to ultimately look like for us.

We started that first office in Europe in 2019 and have been building there, and we're starting to see some amazing productivity from that group that's just starting to mature.

But it's still relatively new when you think about where we are today.

And then we've gone in and added some more resources and great people in the APAC region and LATAM as well and just worked on hiring a leader for APAC and a leader for LATAM.

And so we're seeing really good productivity from that entire group.

We've got the benefit in that because of our inbound model.

We get to see where the demand is before we make bets.

And so for us, we understand where we're seeing potential opportunity within the market.

And then we can go and make the right investments from a distribution perspective.

So I would say that it's contributed nicely to the business right now.

We think that we're pretty early in terms of what the ultimate opportunity will look like.

And we're complementing that opportunity right now with distribution from both an AE perspective as well as some localized marketing support.

And we'll be looking at more distribution channel opportunities in the future.

All right.

Very helpful.

And then as you look at the customer care opportunity, longer term, obviously, with Zoom writing a nice big check for Five9, it's pretty clear that, that area of the market is gaining a ton of spend and a ton of attention.

Is that something that you're going to come out with a very fully productized type of release of the social commerce?

Or does it have to take on a very different kind of amorphous form for each customer and maybe you're gaining more traction there than we're going to see with kind of one big press release?

Yes.

So the majority of the building blocks are there.

And as we've talked about in the past, a large number of our customers are leaning on Sprout for their customer care use case.

We do think that there's some roadmap opportunity as well as some integration opportunity to beef up those capabilities and possibly even put kind of tie-ball on it in terms of a specific offering.

But the benefit that we've got there, one, we've been serving the customer care use case for a decade.

The tools are there.

We're exceptionally good at it.

So the exercise of productizing that, adding some things that are more context-specific is something that we've done many times before and we're very good at.

So the ability to bring a product like that or a specific product like that to market is certainly possible and on the table.

A lot of it will just depend on our road map momentum toward that specific use case and relative to some of the others that we're working on.

And our next question from Clarke Jeffries of Piper Sandler.

Really encouraging to see ARR growth accelerate over 40%.

Net new ARR reached a record even for Q2.

And I think overall, as we look at it, year-to-date ARR is already at 75% the level of what was added in 2020.

So when you look at where the execution has been strong and where the pipeline is building, do you think it's possible for us to see the same seasonal first half-second half split in terms of net new ARR?

Or how should we think about the back half execution?

Yes.

I think COVID has kind of probably up-ended a bit of the typical seasonality that we would have seen.

I think, as you've seen from us in the past, the tail end of the year has been strong.

And we don't see that letting up in the back half of this year, hopefully is indicative -- or as indicated in the guidance we've provided.

It probably may look slightly different just based on where we are kind of in the closed cycle, but we're more focused on the sequential performance and just kind of the record-setting performances.

So not thinking so much of the comparable periods Q2 this year versus last year even, but looking more at the sequential growth and the fact that we've been able to deliver a record quarter relative to every other quarter.

Those are the kind of milestones that we're going to continue to look at and kind of measure the team by.

All right.

Perfect.

And then I know it's been some discussion on the capacity investments, but I was wondering, what are the top product-led growth initiatives for the rest of the year?

I can imagine hiring is certainly top of mind.

But as you think about developing inbound growth, what are the top investments there for the rest of the year?

Yes.

So a lot of the areas that we're looking at there from a product-led growth standpoint have to do with making the onboarding process, accessibility and visibility of some of our existing, more advanced capabilities more readily apparent to the customers, who are either coming into the trial funnel or who are existing customers.

So making sure that the product is doing as good of a job as our go-to-market teams are in exposing those capabilities and making onboarding into those capabilities really seamless for our customers.

So we're continuing to spend a lot of time there.

And then also just thinking about what does -- the product plays a big role in our sales process, given the amount of revenue that's driven through our trial funnel.

Just thinking of cohesively, what does that onboarding and first use experience look like, how are we optimizing that funnel, how are we adapting depending on where we're seeing that funnel developing, what sources, what regions of the world, et cetera?

So that's kind of a constant process of optimization.

It's continuing to get more and more investment from us as well.

And our next question from Stan Zlotsky of Morgan Stanley.

Congratulations on the very strong quarter.

From my end, I wanted to dig into the enterprise opportunity.

Obviously, you're hiring seasoned sales reps to really go after that.

How high up in the enterprise do you see yourself being able to go and really compete effectively right now with the product portfolio that you have?

And how aggressively are you really pursuing the enterprise opportunity more broadly?

Yes, this is Ryan.

I think there really isn't any ceiling on what we can do here.

We've closed deals with Fortune 500s, Fortune 10s with our current product set and are getting great feedback from those customers.

As we built out the enterprise organization and our outbound motion, we've certainly been targeting a lot of customers that we think are just a great fit for what we have to offer and have been seeing really nice success across all of our products.

So I think that there's plenty of headroom for us to continue to grow.

And as we're adding more folks to the team, we've seen really good productivity.

So you can definitely expect to see more from us there.

And I think as our road map continues to evolve as we're landing those customers, we'll just be able to continue to grow the footprint there as well.

Got it.

Got it.

And then a quick question for Joe on billings.

Very strong billings, and I apologize if this was addressed in a prior question, but anything onetime in the billings number that we need to be mindful of?

No, Stan.

No onetime items there.

That's just the natural progression.

As we get into these more mid-market enterprise deals, we're just seeing longer-term and bigger size deals.

But nothing onetime in there, Stan.

And our next question from DJ Hynes of Canaccord Genuity.

All the congrats, really great set of numbers here.

If we try to unpack the record customer adds you're putting up, and I'm sure it's a combination of both.

But if you had to rank it, like, does it feel like it's been more a function of top of funnel increasing, right?

So just a lot more shots on goal?

Or is it improving conversion?

And maybe there's a comment on win rates in there somewhere.

Yes.

Can I say both?

It's a great question.

I mean I want to give some credit to our folks across success in the product organization.

We've certainly seen structural improvements to our retention.

And Justyn mentioned a little bit ago just the investments we've made on onboarding.

But just the innovation that's coming in the road map means that we're adding more value than ever to our customers.

So I think there's just a huge lift there.

And then we have seen really great quality coming from the top of funnel.

And the conversion rates have been improving as well.

So from a new logo perspective, it felt really good across every segment about the execution and the customers that we're seeing globally.

So it's definitely both, but still overweighted on the new business side.

But both are really nice levers for us.

Yes.

Yes, that's helpful.

And then, Ryan, I'll ask you another one.

We will be talking, but Justyn, feel free to chime in.

But any way to give us a ballpark feel for what percent of seats are in social teams, what percent are in service and then what sits outside of those functions?

Like I know there's a huge opportunity in terms of cross-functional use of social data.

So just trying to think about where you are in terms of monetizing that interest?

Yes.

Really difficult to answer and difficult because organizations are really evolving right now where they may have a part of the social team that is dedicated to service versus having the actual service team.

There's usually an evolution depending on how sophisticated they are of when they move from sort of the center of excellence, the hub and spoke.

Many organizations are taking a different approach or different approaches there.

And so it does get pretty difficult to suss out.

I will tell you that it's certainly fair to say that the majority of the users still fall generally into marketing, while they may be handling customer service use cases or others.

But that's an area where not just those specific use cases like customer service or now maybe the folks responsible for commerce, but the additional departments and stakeholders that may be second order related to what's happening in social, where they've got skin in the game and a very vested interest in keeping an eye on it and being involved in it.

So yes, it's difficult to quantify exactly.

I would say we're moving toward definitely more seats in the specialized roles.

And particularly in the mid-market and enterprise, we're seeing more and more of those deals, inclusive of customer care as a good example, but even sales, other parts of the marketing org that may not have been involved before, et cetera.

So it's trending in that direction for sure.

And our next question from Rob Oliver of Baird.

A lot of talk about social commerce.

So I'll add a couple on that front.

Just on the new commerce integration product this quarter, seems like you guys have taken an accretive approach to how you're integrating that with a suite of products and maybe to kind of drive some upsell considerations within some of your customers.

So just would be curious for the early reads on that and whether customers are feeling the need to step up their plans in order to avail themselves of that.

And then since no one has asked about it yet, I figured I'd just ask about Twitter.

Because we also got announced this quarter about Twitter piloting social commerce.

And clearly, you guys have a very strong historic relationship with them.

So just would be curious to hear about both those things.

Yes.

Sure.

So I'll kind of work in reverse order here.

I think, yes, exciting news out of the Twitter team and something that we're looking forward to collaborating on and figuring out where we can add the most value.

I think they've got a pretty compelling proposition and certainly something that we're well positioned to be materially involved with, but TBD, nothing specific to mention on that front.

But exciting, right?

Because we've got all of the networks now are coming to the table with a little more clarity around their plans.

And I think that, that -- the indicators are there.

This is going to be a massive opportunity across the board.

And what all of our roles are, we're sorting that out and making those bets and building toward that road map now.

I think that -- to the question around the potentially stepping up plans around the commerce capabilities, I think what we're going to see early on is mostly additional user seats to fill those needs because we're not monetizing it as a separate SKU, and we haven't held it back to any particular plan.

So the capabilities that we have today are available to any customer of Sprout.

And we did that very intentionally.

As those capabilities get more sophisticated, you've seen us take a different approach in the past with feature sets that have become more robust.

So that's certainly an option for us on the commerce side as well.

Great.

And then, Ryan, I was just going to ask one follow-up for you just about kind of the nature of enterprise buying that you're seeing here, because I think clearly, the expansion numbers you guys are seeing in enterprise and the ARR and customer metrics are pretty staggering.

And I think they speak to maybe a real new appetite here for solutions like yours within the marketing department.

And since it seems like marketing is still predominantly where the land is, can you maybe touch on what you're seeing there in terms of changing and maybe that kind of bottoms-up buying model and the acceptance of that within even multinational tech companies?

Yes.

Thanks, Rob.

I mean I think there's a couple of things that are exciting for us.

One, that trial model continues to be really important.

There's so many of the logos that we talked about today came in from a trial, leveraged the product before they signed a contract, proved to themselves that Sprout was a perfect fit and really allowed us to differentiate from everybody else in the market that was trying to sell in a demo.

That continues to be really important.

And more and more, we're hearing customers set time aside to do this, realizing that this is a great way for them to mitigate risks as they make a decision.

So that's working really well.

The other thing I would say is that even in these large organizations, you're getting access to more executive decision-makers with these companies where social has become a bigger priority for them.

They are more interested in understanding the strategy and the technologies and platforms that they're going to have to support them.

They want to understand the best practices within the industry.

They want to understand benchmarking data.

And so you're having more of them involved in the conversation in the deals as well, which has provided a nice tailwind in keeping sales cycles moving quickly.

So we feel like we've got a couple of benefits there and that we get people in, as they're using the product, to partially implement it if not the entire way before they buy.

And then we've got more decision-makers getting involved in the process to really understand how we can help them.

And our next question from Scott Berg of Needham & Company.

I guess I have 2, let me make them brief.

On the first one, it's kind of a serious question, although it might not sound like it, are you guys actually investing enough right now, given what the business metrics have been in the last 2 or 3 quarters have been fantastic.

I just didn't know if there's an opportunity to maybe accelerate the growth even faster?

Yes.

No, it's a fair question and one that we take seriously as well.

I think one of the things that we're hyper-focused on and where Joe and Ryan and really most of the executive team are thinking about on a constant basis is just where should we be ramping up investments.

And you've heard us talk before about we've got great visibility into where the opportunities are, particularly given the volume of the inbound funnel, the free trial model, where we can understand what demand is going to look like in other markets, et cetera.

And so I think we've done a good job there.

But certainly something that we're always pressure-testing with ourselves is just where are we going to make increased investments.

And a theme from us that you've heard from us, hopefully, over the last couple of quarters is we're continuing to apply pressure.

So the pressure that we're applying to doing those investments now is more than the pressure that we talked about a quarter ago.

And we want to make sure that we're fully capitalizing on these opportunities.

We're always going to be thoughtful, right?

That's been the way that we've operated as a company, but not hesitate when we find those opportunities to make sure that we're applying enough pressure.

So as Joe said kind of in the prepared remarks, we've got a lot planned there.

We're accelerating hiring.

We're accelerating the investment in key parts of the org.

You'll continue to see us doing that.

So -- but we share your question.

It's one that we're asking every time we get together and continually finding new ways and new places that we're excited about growing that investment.

Awesome.

And I guess from a follow-up perspective is as you look at your customers using the platform today in the different ways, are there any like, I don't know, usage data or metrics that you can share for us, maybe how much more engaged some customers are and using the platform today than maybe, I don't know, 12 or 18 months ago?

I'm just trying to see if there's any influence that the pandemic is having outside of just the customer growth on your business.

Yes.

From a metrics perspective, not anything that we've shared or made available externally.

But what I will say directionally is that one consistent theme that we're seeing, and we talked about this dating back to what we started to see at the tail end of Q2 last year, which was this realization by organizations that social is the future.

This is an investment that they cannot kick the can on.

And what that means is that we're starting to see more and more -- it's taken them some time to maybe figure out how to operationalize that internally, but more and more where additional use cases, additional departments, additional seats are being involved.

And so when we think about the number of people involved in the organization, the amount of spend per customer, all of those are kind of apparent within the metrics that we do share.

And those are the ones that I would point to is we're just seeing greater involvement across the organization, additional departments, additional use cases and more and more need for the premium offerings that we brought to market.

(Operator Instructions) And our next question from Michael Turits of KeyBanc.

This is actually Rich Poland on for Michael.

Congrats on another strong quarter.

So in some of our conversations with the channel, we're hearing some indications of some softness as we move into the summer and SMB and mid-market for front office software relative to the really strong post COVID demand that we saw in 2H of last year and 1H of this year as people start to kind of return to office and take some vacation time.

So that doesn't seem to be the case for Sprout.

And just want to see if you could provide some color, what you guys are seeing from a brand perspective in 3Q so far and kind of how you expect this to trend for the remainder of the year?

Yes.

I appreciate the question, Rich.

I have not really seen that.

I can certainly understand with certain people now, some having the opportunity to get back out and take some vacations.

We'll see some of that.

It hasn't shown up yet in our funnel, and we feel pretty confident about the trend lines that we're seeing.

Our quality has actually been really great, and the execution from the team has been really great.

And we're seeing it across all segments.

And our SMB teams and our mid-market teams have continued to perform.

We continue to have the benefit from that inbound model where we know where to invest time.

And we're not necessarily chasing deals or accounts because so much of our revenue comes in from an inbound perspective.

And that's where we dedicate a good portion of our energy.

So I'm sure that there will be some seasonality in parts of the market, but we haven't seen any of those trend lines to date.

Yes.

And I'll just quickly add, I think anecdotally or as an observer on some of the other categories, where we saw some of that influx as COVID settled down a little bit, tended to be, I think, from parts of the market that had a longer trough, right?

When we talked about in Q2 and then into Q3 of last year the interruption to the funnel and to the revenue pipeline and performance really was fairly short.

And so I think just from a trend line perspective, I think we've kind of been one of the counter examples throughout COVID, and that seems to be -- continue to be the case.

Got it.

And then just one follow-up.

You guys have continued to have success moving upmarket, and you see that in the ACV growth.

And I think last reference, you guys said some of your larger customers were in the mid- to high 6-figure in terms of ACV.

Just wanted to get an update on that, see if we've kind of crossed over into that 7-figure ACV range yet?

And any color on that would be helpful.

Yes.

Our answer at this point will be similar to the one we gave last time.

We're seeing a lot of momentum in the $10,000 plus and up into the 6-figure deals.

We don't have any new high watermarks to share at the moment.

But the gravity around those large deals is definitely picking up and something we're excited about.

And speakers, that would be our question for this call.

I'll turn the call over to Mr. Justyn Howard for closing.

Yes.

Great.

Well, thanks, everyone, for the questions.

I know we're over time now, so I'll keep this quick.

Just thank you, thanks for the continued support.

And certainly, always thank you to the team for continuing to do a phenomenal job.

We're going to get back to work.

Thanks.

This concludes today's conference call.

Thank you all for participating.

You may now disconnect.