Awesome. Welcome, everyone, to this next session at the 28th Annual Needham & Company Growth Conference. I'm Ryan MacDonald, and I lead Needham & Company's healthcare IT efforts. With me in this session is Definitive Healthcare's CFO, Casey Heller. Casey, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me, Ryan. Absolutely. Glad to be here. Awesome. So this is a fireside chat format. We've got about 35 minutes. I'm going to run through questions for about 30 of it. We'll leave the last five for audience Q&A if there are any. But with that, we'll kick things off. So Casey, maybe to start, there might be some new faces in the crowd that are new to Definitive's story. Can you just give us a brief overview of the business? Absolutely. Definitive Healthcare is a leader in the healthcare market data and analytics space with a proprietary SaaS platform. We serve three groups of customers. We break up our end markets into life sciences, healthcare providers, and diversified, which for us is really anyone else looking to sell into the healthcare ecosystem. The use cases that our data helps enable and drive actionable insights on really focus around commercialization efforts as well as product and strategy, and we play in a pretty massive market, but anyone who knows healthcare data knows that it's complex, it's rapidly changing, and to make effective use of that data, you need it to be accurate, and you need to have depth, and that's where Definitive's solutions really come in. We have a very comprehensive, high-quality data set that is regularly refreshed, and with that, we're able to merge a number of data streams. We've got a longitudinal history of that as well. You're able to combine a lot of complex data sets over time, see those trends, and really understand what it means for the market. From a business model perspective, we've got a high recurring revenue base. About 95% of our revenue is recurring. We've got strong adjusted EBITDA margins in the high 20s. We convert the vast majority of our adjusted EBIT into cash flow. In short, we really have a play in an exciting space, and we've got a strong business model with great operating leverage. Awesome. That's great. We'll talk a lot more about that strong business model, but you've been officially in the CFO role now for about seven or eight months. It'd be great to hear your perspective on the progress that's been made in the business during that time frame, and what do you think Definitive is doing well as a company right now? What could be some opportunities for improvement, and what initiatives are you taking to reaccelerate the growth of the business? Absolutely. So yes, I've been in the seat for a little over seven months at this point. But I've been with the company for about two years. And over that time, I've seen us go through a number of shifts in response to the macro environment, as well as some of our own internal transformation initiatives. And I think that as we've continued to work to transform and reset the trajectory of the business, we've recognized there's been some missteps in the past, and we've taken corrective actions against those. But I would say that one of the biggest things that I think is making a difference right now is that under Kevin Coop, our CEO, as well as the Board, we've brought in a number of new leaders. And the new leaders that we've brought in know the data space, and they know how to operate businesses at scale. So when you pair that with a lot of the depth and the domain expertise within the organization, it becomes really powerful. And we've got a strong alignment across the company against our four strategic pillars. So our four strategic pillars are data differentiation, seamless integrations, customer success, and innovation. So when we've got the whole company aligned against these things and leaders who know how to operate a business and drive management systems and accountability for scale, we're just seeing so much more momentum. We're seeing greater alignment and greater speed of decision-making than we have in the past. And that, to me, is one of the most encouraging components about where we are in our journey. Awesome. Yeah, and I really want to dig in on some of these four strategic pillars, like you said, differentiated data, data management and seamless integrations, customer success, and digital partnerships and innovation. Starting with the differentiated data, you've continued to invest in bringing new data sets that continue to validate Definitive's data quality advantage that you have in the market. Can you discuss which of the new data sets you've seen have been most impactful in driving customer retention and expansion? Absolutely. As we think about our differentiated data, I have to start with our reference and affiliation data. So that, for us, is our crown jewel. It is the foundational component in understanding the mapping of the healthcare ecosystem and the complexity of it. And it really helps to map the affiliations, the relationships across the different hierarchies within the healthcare ecosystem at both a professional and a facility level. So there's a lot there that gets unpacked. And when you pair that, then, and those changes over time with healthcare claims data, you get a really solid view of what's going on in the market and what those changes look like over time. So for example, what systems may be acquiring more organizations than others, or how are we seeing shifts in referral activity among top physicians or just referrals in general? Those are really the key elements that help our customers understand this complex market that they're operating in. I think that there's a lot of areas that we've made investments in and put a lot of focus on, particularly over the last year. For example, one of the elements that we added into our data set this year was mobile phone numbers for some of our healthcare executives and healthcare providers. That's a new data element that we didn't have previously. We're getting really positive customer responses on that. Similarly, we've added in new claims data sources as well in response to the industry disruption from 2024. On that front, we brought in a new data source that went live in product at the end of Q3, early Q4. We've got another one that's ready to go online here in a couple of weeks. I think just broadly, data differentiation for us is so important that, again, bringing it into how we're operating and building management systems, we've got much more significant KPI tracking in place today that is measuring the volume, the quality, and the completeness across our data sets so that we can really understand where we want to invest in next and ensure that what we're putting out for our customers is of the highest quality that's most actionable for them. Awesome. And you and Kevin have also spoken about an increased focus on finding new ways to monetize selling the same data set with different use cases. Can you expand upon a bit with a few examples of some new use cases and how Definitive has been able to do this? And how is some of these new use cases here informing your investment strategy for 2026? Yes. That's the beauty and the scalability of our business model. We have these comprehensive data sets. And we're able to, as I mentioned earlier, deliver these data sets and these insights and these analytics to a very broad-based client set. So as we're looking at the existing data sets, we have the ability here to redefine how they're used and redefine specific use cases and restrictions. So a customer that wants much broader kind of access and reach, we have the ability to price that differently. Versus maybe a smaller customer has a very specific need, you can carve out what that use case looks like. So it's a different approach to the monetization, all based on our existing asset. That, for us, I think, is just a really interesting component as we think about how that can be applied across the three core use cases that we serve. From a strategy perspective, we support companies' ability to be able to do market sizing and segment analysis, looking at trends there from a product perspective. We can help customers map patient journeys as well as understanding who are the early influencers within a space. From commercialization, which is really our largest use case, it's territory mapping and account prioritization to understand where is there the most capacity within the market and how teams can prioritize their resources to get into those spaces. Interesting. And it doesn't seem like even with these new use cases that you really have to change who you're selling to within the organization at all, right? That's exactly it. It's more of a packaging and a value-based selling approach to really help to kind of structure the monetization of our existing data sets. That's excellent. It's very leverageable then. OK. Moving to the second pillar, which is data management, seamless integration. You've historically been pretty active in pursuing inorganic growth opportunities. You've acquired companies like Monocl, Analytical Wizards, Populi, and Carevoyance. These entities brought really exciting data to the platform and capabilities, but in many instances had remained siloed without a unified UX user interface. With the initiative to bring these all into a unified platform, how's the process gone so far? And what impact has the more seamless integration had on customer satisfaction, retention, pipeline conversion? Yeah. You're definitely right that over time, we've not necessarily done the best job as far as integrating these assets from a back-end perspective or a user experience component. We made a lot of strides on that in 2025 with the work on the back end and unifying data sources and driving some consistent experience there. So that's an element there that was overdue. We took action on, and we've made some great progress on. The other piece in terms of integrations for us is that it's important that it's easy for our customers to access our data through their channel of choice. So customers today have the option to access our data through our SaaS platform directly, through CRM integrations, or through link to link connections. For us, that focus on that integration is really important because we see retention rates of customers roughly 15 points higher in customers that are integrated versus not. So that's a significant focus for us. We certainly want to continue to shift more of our customer base to be integrated. We want our Definitive data directly into their workflows. That helps our customers extract that value quickly, more easily, and makes it stickier. So that's an important focus area for us. It's not only about just increasing the customer mix, but also making the investments that make it easier for our customers. In Q4, we launched HubSpot integrations as an option. Then we also are looking at what additional data sets can we add into existing integrations. We started piloting in Q4 additional physician data into our Salesforce integrations. That seems to be going well. We're on track to roll that out more broadly in the coming weeks. Awesome. That's really exciting. That's excellent. 15 points of improvement on that. 15 points. That's meaningful. Yeah, very meaningful. Moving to the third pillar, which is customer success. You've really improved that motion over the past year. And it's resulted in some encouraging signs of progress on the retention metrics. I think it was marked by, in third quarter of 2025, you had the highest return to improvement on that net retention rate. Can you just talk about where we are at in terms of have we gotten to a point with the customer success improvements that retention has troughed and that you can start to build off of that? Because obviously, fourth quarter, first quarter are obviously very big renewal quarters for the business. Yeah. As you mentioned, customer success has definitely been a big focus area for us over the last year. We've done end-to-end mapping to really understand the engagement and how we're working with our customers. Everything from presales through onboarding through the first renewals and beyond. And we've made changes there. And I'm sure that we'll still continue to make tweaks. But I think that there's learnings there, and we're continuing to get smarter in our approaches. One of the things we did in 2025 with a focus on stabilization of retention was we aligned all the customer success incentive plans focused on gross dollar retention. In 2026, we're planning to take that kind of a step further and now align it against net dollar retention as we move from that stabilization motion to an optimization motion. There's a key piece there as we're monitoring customer health scores, monitoring their engagement and their adoption levels that we feel a lot better positioned of knowing when to reach out to customers and when the discussion needs to be around stabilization, when it's about value realization, and when we've got the right opportunity to drive those expansion discussions. We've also recently moved our customer success team underneath commercial. We've got greater alignment there and are really fostering a culture of winning together across these functions. That's great. And you saw that a little bit translate into some customer win-backs over the past year. How do you think about that win-back opportunity? Do you view these as more of one-off instances? Or are you doing anything from a strategic motion or strategy to actually go out and target customers that you've previously lost and to win back those? Yeah, definitely not a one-off. And I think it's something that's just going to be embedded in how we operate. There's two components to that. Yes, there are customers who have left us over time, and there can be concerted efforts there. But there's a second component that's been more of a drag for us, particularly in the life sciences space, where we've seen downsell pressures over the last year and a half or so. And we pull that as part of our win-back strategy as well. Now, we think that a lot of the pressures that we've seen in life sciences have really been more of a reflection of their budgetary constraints rather than a lack of value from product. But that's a critical focus area for us. And right now, we're in the process of re-educating our entire sales team around value-based selling and around clearly articulating ROIs. We understand that customers don't buy features or functions. They invest in outcomes. So as we're building out that story, I think that that's a key component here, not only in winning back prior customers, but also expanding wallet share within those customers that we have maintained relationships with, but now it's just about reinforcing the value that they get from the Definitive data. Makes sense. Makes sense. So as we move to the last pillar, which is innovation and digital partnerships, we'll start on innovation. And you can't have any innovation conversation in 2026 without generative AI. So Gen AI hasn't gotten much airtime on Definitive earnings calls yet to date. But I'm curious, how prominent of a topic is generative AI in your customer conversations? And what areas in the product are you looking to leverage it or even internally that you're looking to leverage it? Yeah. Everyone is talking about generative AI. We certainly are with our customers, and we're talking about it internally as well. I think we break it down into starting with how we're using it internally. AI in particular has always been a component of our data and technology approach. So we use AI, machine learning, and our data aggregation and model building. And we're always looking for ways to kind of expand that. And we've got some exploratory things going on from that standpoint right now. And from a broader operations perspective, as we look to 2026, finding opportunities to deploy Gen AI across customer success and support is a key focus area for us. Now, when we get to product, nothing new to specifically announce today. But we do have work underway to modernize our flagship View platform with some Gen AI capabilities, all within the construct of wanting to make our platform easier for customers to use. So we think that there are some kind of quick wins there. I would say that as we think about that opportunity, I think the initial phase is more of kind of just table stakes and just letting our customers extract that value more easily. And then we're still kind of working through the next couple of phases that I think will result in some more monetization opportunities. And we've seen companies talk about how they monetize Gen AI in a number of different ways. In some instances, it's simply just adding more value to the platform, improves retention. Maybe it helps price discussions on renewals down the road. And then others, obviously, separate price SKUs. It seems like you're more looking at Gen AI in the former versus the latter, it seems like, from a monetization. For our early stage right now, I think that certainly is where we are. I think from a company perspective, we're still very much focused on driving further improvement in our retention rates. And I think that getting some Gen AI capabilities into our offering will help foster some of that component as well. Yeah, awesome. On the partnership side of the house, Definitive has made some great progress in augmenting its direct sales efforts with new strategic partnerships and building out the agency channel, which we've seen can be an effective go-to-market strategy in the space of building out these agency partnerships. I think you're up to about 23 agency partners or so now. How many are activating campaigns? And what sort of contribution can the agency channel make in 2026? Yeah. Digital activations for us is something we're really excited about. It's one of those areas that, from a growth perspective, is so adjacent to the work we were already doing that it just is a logical next step for us. So really, what we're doing in this space is we're moving from just being able to hand off the data to actually enable and create the audiences for consumption by both direct customers, agencies, as you mentioned, or to live in some of the always-on environments where different folks can have access to the audiences for different types of digital targeting. Now, we've continued to add additional agencies there. This is a newer piece of the business for us. It's grown from near nothing a year ago into what it is today. It still is small, but we're excited about the opportunity here and view it as a future growth driver for us. We're starting to see a good chunk of the agencies activate, but it's on a smaller scale right now, and frankly, from my perspective, I'm really looking forward to continuing to learn what those revenue curves look like across those first dozen or so agencies, because I think that's going to tell us a lot about the rate and pace and speed that we can kind of see here, but I think it's still a little bit early days, but definitely a key growth and focus area for us and something that we're really excited and feel that we're well-positioned to participate in. And of the end markets, where do you think agency channel can be most impactful? I think a lot of investors hear agency channel, and they think life sciences because so much of the market and industry focuses on that, selling that top 20, when there's obviously a long tail of very large companies that have active commercialization programs, and that can open that opportunity. But where do you think you're targeting there? Absolutely. I think that it's multifaceted, and because it plays in so cleanly to where we have the existing direct relationships with the large biopharmas, as you say, but a lot of the large biopharmas, they may not have that in-house. They may be working directly with an ad agency, so when we're contracting and working with the ad agencies, that's showing up more in the diversified space, but that's also opening us up to a number of the agency's customers that we may not have had a direct relationship with, so I think that there's a lot of opportunity here, and I think as we're focusing on the agency component, it's really about solidifying our footprint and our relationships there, helping them see the results off of it. I think that even some of the direct customers that have started activating, they're really happy with the level of results that they're seeing, and I think that for us, it's just something that we're really excited about, and we think of the ability to drive impact really across not only the direct channel across all of our end markets, but also directly with the agencies. Awesome. And maybe just to wrap up the discussion of the four-pillar strategy, as we kind of think about 2026 and the P&L of Definitive, what of the four pillars do you think is most impactful to that part of the business? Yeah, that's like picking a favorite child. Yeah, exactly. Listen, all of our four pillars, they're so important because they are all interrelated, and they're strengthened as they work together. So tighter integrations means that customers are getting greater value out of the data as we further differentiate our data and make that available. It all cyclically kind of works together, and it all kind of becomes fulfilling. So this is why we're so focused on these four elements. We really believe as a company that these are the four things we need to be focused on, executing well, and continuing to make progress on, because combined, they have the ability to reshape the performance trajectory. Yeah, makes sense. All right, so as we sit here in January, I'd love to get a sense of your sense of the demand environment in 2026 across your three market segments, life sciences, providers, and diversified. Obviously, you talked about execution is obviously a big focus for the company. But in past years, you've had to deal with a tough budgetary environment. So curious if you're starting to see any positive signs of budgetary improvement there? Yeah. So first, just to maybe break down a little bit on the relative mix of our business. So about 40% of our business today is in the life sciences space, about 10% provider, and the other half is in the diversified space, which is really, like I said, everyone else who sells into the healthcare ecosystem. As we've looked over the past year, the life sciences space has certainly seen more challenges. So I absolutely remain more cautious there. But I think that overall, the biggest thing for us is going to be continuing to drive improvement in retention rates. And we feel that we have the ability to do that across the board. So we feel good about the actions that we're taking in order to drive the improvements there. Those are going to be the core components that will eventually get us back to growth over time. That's really, frankly, where we're focused. I will say that we're continuing to kind of monitor for changes in the life sciences environment. Broadly, not even just only life sciences and the other end markets, we are seeing sales cycles start to tighten back up. So after going through some pretty elongated sales cycles for quite some time, the last two quarters, we've seen that start to shorten up a bit. So that's an encouraging sign that we're monitoring. As we think specifically about the life sciences space, continue to monitor the level of clinical activity and how that flows through, because once that gets to a commercialization stage, that will be where Definitive has the ability to kind of capture and pick up some of that demand. That's awesome. That's great to hear on some of the tightening of those sales cycles. But not so much a regulatory or macro, but an interesting topic in the marketplace within life sciences has been this CRM transition. I think earlier this week, Veeva and Salesforce were trading barbs as they are increasingly doing so in a public setting. But given that you talked about integrations with CRMs being an important part of the strategy and value proposition as well, what impacts have you seen over the last year? And obviously, this is a multi-year transition here, but it really looks like the market is going towards more of a data-informed CRM. So yeah, I'm just curious to get your thoughts on what impact it's had on the space. Yeah. From a Definitive perspective, I don't know that we've necessarily seen an impact because we are agnostic to how customers want to consume our data. Today, we support both Salesforce and Veeva integrations. So we really try to make it easy for our customers to engage and build our data into their workflows in any which way that they want, whether it be Veeva, Salesforce, or homegrown CRMs. Awesome. That makes sense. Maybe moving to the model. So obviously, the four-pillar strategy has certainly helped stabilize the business in many areas in 2025, and hopefully, it can help drive more of that growth in 2026. But how do you think longer term, structurally, about the balance between growth versus margin expansion within the business? Yeah. First, I think that if you look back at 2025, and obviously, we haven't reported on Q4 yet, but 2025, down revenue year, but we've been able to maintain an attractive margin profile with just a deeper margin than the high 20s%. So I think that that's an important component for us in terms of maintaining those margins. We've established a pretty prudent approach in terms of how we evaluate investment. The best way to get margin expansion out of this business is to return it to revenue growth, just given our cost structure. Our cost structure is largely data and people. So of course, there's always going to be some near-term efficiencies, and there's things that we look at in pockets. But I think this also comes back to kind of the strength of the existing management team of being very operational, tactical, and being able to drive a lot of these healthier discussions around where those investment priorities lie and making the right trade-off decisions for the business. So I think that over the last couple of years, we've demonstrated being able to prudently manage spend. But I think that that certainly is a focus. But we're also making sure that where we are investing dollars are in the areas that have the opportunity to return us to growth and have that ROI. And as you think about, you mentioned, obviously, data and people, the two biggest expenses. You're always looking to add new data sets to continue to drive that differentiation, improve the data quality. What's the environment like for buying new data sets or licensing new data sets? Is it becoming harder, whether it's to find that new data because you have such a large data set? Is it getting more expensive? Any commentary there? I think it's a little bit dynamic, and I think that's actually where, again, this operational discipline that we have today is helping to better inform those decisions, so even on our reference and affiliation data, which includes a lot of our own proprietary research, we're measuring over 100 KPIs on the volume, the quality, and the completeness of those data sets, and that's helping us to identify the gaps of, hey, this is an area of interest. Maybe we should focus more here, and maybe some of that's going to be done through our own organic work, and maybe it requires going out and purchasing something adjacent that we can build in. I think that I can't say what we're really seeing, any kind of shifts in the market or different kind of pricing dynamics there, because I think a lot of it right now is us just trying to get overly focused on where those next investments are and making sure that they're in the areas that are going to be most impactful to our customer base. And then on the people side, obviously, the great conversation right now is sort of all right. Enterprise organizations across the world are defining AI strategies, but they're also looking, and we hear great discussion of how AI will improve productivity. Are you seeing any areas internally where you're seeing productivity improvements that can just longer term help improve the structural profitability of the business? Yeah, I think that the biggest piece there that we're unlocking is where we can deploy tools to take some of the low-hanging fruit away and redeploy resources on the higher value work. So certainly, some of our near-term focus areas there for 2026 are around customer success and support. So whether it be helping to kind of automate summaries around business reviews for customers and creating some dashboarding that can clearly demonstrate to our customers the value that they're getting out of the offering and then drive the discussion about where they want to go next. Those are some of the key areas that we're focused on. We deploy a number of tools, including ones that help us summarize some of our customer engagements as well. I think this is all kind of ties back into that value-based selling motion that I touched on a bit earlier, because we're able to kind of deliberately work with our customers based on where they are in their journeys. I think that that has the opportunity for substantial impact. Excellent. And as you think about the P&L and across OpEx, where do you see maybe some of the low-hanging fruit for incremental leverage? Yeah. I think that there's certainly elements of efficiency that we can always be driving in the G&A functions. But similarly, I do think that if you just look at the face of our P&L, the SDRs from our sales and marketing spend are a little bit high. So that's where we've gotten really thoughtful in our approach there. There are certain areas where we absolutely want to invest in. We're seeing the returns. There's other areas that we've strategically pulled away from over time, like the smaller growth accounts within life sciences. Those really haven't been fruitful for us. So we're shifting resources around based on some of those investment profiles so that we're really being thoughtfully addressing maintaining solid margins and maintaining high margins relative to just trying to peanut butter spread for cuts. We're not looking for broad efficiency plays. We're looking for very targeted things that can drive the right outcomes for the business. Awesome. Maybe we have about five minutes left before I ask my final question. Any questions from the audience? Go ahead. You say about 40% of your revenue comes from life sciences, but life sciences is kind of broad. Can you break that down by the specific channels? And how many boots on the ground are you dedicated to your life sciences sector? Yeah. So the life sciences piece for us, the way we look at it internally is biopharma versus med tech or med device. Those are kind of the two key motions of that. It is definitely more heavily weighted towards biopharma than it is med device. Med device is maybe a little more than a third of that pool. And as we're thinking about how we kind of break down the resourcing, that comes back to the element that I just touched on. We've taken a hard look at the cost to serve accounts in these different spaces and where we want to make investments. So what we're finding, for example, within large biopharmas, they need more folks on those accounts because the type of work that they're looking for and the type of outcomes they're looking for require additional professional services wrapped around the data subscriptions. We're doing a lot of work there. The large biopharmas in particular want to get a lot more specific in their targeting. While our SaaS platform provides a great basis for that, we have a lot of subject matter experts that we can attach to these accounts as well to drive specific outcomes tied to specific things that a customer is looking for. That's where we're making certain investments is around where those pools of opportunities are. I wanted to finish about talking about capital allocation strategy. You've got some outstanding debt, but plenty of free cash flow to service that debt. You've got over $185 million of cash on the balance sheet. I guess, how are you prioritizing uses of capital in terms of organic investment in the business? Is M&A continuing to going to be a supporting growth strategy moving forward? Yeah. Capital allocation is a very active discussion among management and the board on a very regular basis. We do have net zero leverage, so that does give us a lot of optionality. But whether we're looking at investments on an organic or inorganic basis, we kind of are holding it up against two key things. One, does it strengthen our core? And when we think about strengthening the core, it's about data differentiation as well as does it make the offering easier for customers to use and get value from? The second piece is in a growth area that we feel is adjacent. We're not looking to go and invest in a space that we really don't have a solid footprint in. We're looking to expand into the natural areas that are the right extension for us in our business, like digital activations. I would say that as we're looking at all of these elements, we're spending a lot of time on what is the ROI, what is the impact, and being really kind of thoughtful and prudent from that perspective. It's been probably about two years since we've done any M&A. So I would say right now the bar is pretty high from that perspective. But really where we are today, we spent a lot of 2025 really restarting that organic innovation engine. And that's an area that we're really excited about. Of course, we're always going to be kind of revisiting what the right opportunities for capital allocation are for the company. But in the near term, I think we're excited about some of the stuff that we're working on organically at the moment. Awesome. Casey, thanks for taking the time today. Absolutely. Enjoyed the conversation. Yeah. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Thanks, everyone. Awesome. All right.