Thanks for joining us. Great to have you on our session, Graham. Hey, thanks for being here with us. You've been at ZoomInfo for a while, but it's like now on the CFO kind of function. Like, from your perspective, so what are your priorities here? Yeah, thanks, Samuel. You know, in the interim CFO role, I'm really focused on stabilization. Mm-hmm. So, you know, that means showing up, not having surprises in our results, starting to string together several quarters of, you know, consistent results, and starting to really focus on rebuilding credibility internally. I'm focused on being an operational partner to our sales and product teams and making sure that they're, you know, from a resource perspective, from a forecasting perspective, supported to go and continue the positive operating momentum that we had in Q2 and Q3. And then, I mean, it's the issues we had the last few years, like. I mean, it wasn't just ZoomInfo. It's like the whole industry. Like, maybe talk a little bit about, like, in, you know, if you wanted to talk about ZoomInfo a little bit, but it doesn't need to, like, how did we get here? Like, what, from your observations, like, what happened? Yeah, I think, you know, we went from a world in 2020 and 2021 where in many verticals there was a growth-at-all-costs kind of approach to performance. And I think that changed pretty quickly in late 2021, heading into 2022, where a lot of those companies that had, you know, large sales teams that were expecting to double, triple those sales efforts, were putting a lot of investment behind growth, were asked overnight or, you know, decided pretty quickly to reduce that, you know, the investment behind that growth, reposition kind of their trajectory to get to profitability faster, which made sense. But I think that, you know, certainly across a spectrum of industries, that was a pretty fractious moment. We went from a, you know, really growth-focused role to one that was more profitability, and potentially now we're getting back to a more efficient growth focus. Yeah. And then, if you think about it, like, you as a management team, like, you know, and I felt kind of sorry for Cameron as well because, like, how do you guide when there's so many kind of changes going on in the industry? Like, nothing really is ZoomInfo, it's like more the industry. Like, if you think about, like, from you as a management team, like, what were the surprises or the learnings that you had, like, over the last couple of years? Yeah, it was tough. I think the ultimate one is focus on delighting the customer, right? Mm-hmm. That's what leads to better retention outcomes. You know, we're pretty excited that we've seen retention stabilize now for three quarters in a row. Yeah. We're focused on getting that point to, you know, back to a place where it can improve. But if we're focused on delivering value to customers, you know, helping them articulate the value that they're getting from ZoomInfo, then really everything else kind of falls into place. Is that in a way, like, you know, your answer sounds like, you know, you focus on what you can focus yourself on, and then the market is the market. But, I mean, how do you guys think about, like, we basically had, like, you know, the overinvestment in, like, 2020, 2021. I mean, now we're thinking of talking about 2025. This is like four years later. Do you think there is, like, at some point, or do you see, like, early signs that there's some point that the people realized, like, "Hey, well, I've done the optimization," and initially it was like people had pre-bought seats, but then they didn't kind of hire the sales guys, then they kind of sales force got reduced, they got reduced again. But now kind of how do you feel talking to customers in terms of, like, where we are on that kind of optimization of sales again? Yeah, I think our general feeling is things aren't getting worse. Yeah. Now. Let's just kind of start, you know. You know, I don't think we've actually seen things get better yet. I know there's probably, you know, some level of narrative on sentiment and outlook out there, and that'd be great if there was a, you know, potential macro tailwind. But kind of going back to the, we're really focused on controlling what we can control, improving our execution, except kind of the macro opportunity out there. So, you know, what that looks like is, you know, we had sequential improvements in our enterprise retention. We got mid-market retention back to a place of stabilization in Q2. Sequential improvement in Q3. Mid-market's where we saw a lot of that right-sizing or downsell pressure over the last two years. You know, that went from a segment that had well over 100% retention to a segment that dropped well below 100% retention. So we're excited to see the, you know, the early signs of improvement there again. And, you know, in that, in that segment, that was a lot of software tech companies where we did downsell with them. We kept the logo. We went through one or two downsell cycles with the hope and intent of getting back to a place where we can grow those customers again, and we're focused on getting back to that spot. Yeah. Okay. And then I mean the last area that seems to kind of cause problems is like the low-end. Can you speak to, like, what's going on there? Yeah. So, you know, in kind of the longer tail of potentially this economic cycle, we've seen that our SMB customer base has become more challenged. You know, retention and growth there has gotten a little bit worse in 2024 relative to year-to-date in 2023. So, you know, we're focused on two things there. One is making sure that the business that we're putting into our SMB segment that we're selling on the front end of new sales, that we're getting them in at the right price point, that we're qualifying them, that we're getting cash upfront. In fact, we're disqualifying some level of business where we're not able to get cash upfront. That creates a near-term headwind, but we'll lap that in 2025. And our long-, mid-, and longer-term focus is taking our SMB business, you know, essentially moving our up-market business to be a greater mix of our total business. So enterprise is 41% of our business. You know, we have a path to increasing that. We're focused on increasing that mix. Mid-market is 28%. We'd like to see that get back up closer to 30%. And then SMB is 31% right now. You know, I expect that to go below 30% as part of this initiative. And then we get to a future where we've got two-thirds plus of the business either growing or on a path back to growth. And then we have a smaller mix in SMB that is now a healthier version of SMB. Yeah. And then can you talk a little. You talked a little bit about how you stabilized the attrition, etc. Like, can you talk a little bit about some of the action you took? Because, like, you could also argue it's like, "Well, look, they went down, and at some point they don't go down anymore." So you kind of but what were the action then you took to kind of, you know, and I'm asking because, like, efficiency gains are more, like, you know, running the organization better is kind of also like a good thing for being a better company going forward. Yeah. It's, it's, you know, it goes back to focusing on delighting the customer and customer value. Yeah. So we wanted to make sure that for everything that we could control, if there were just fewer seats or a really rough economic cycle, that, you know, outside of that, we were controlling the outcomes where we could. So that means really understanding the health and the value of our customers, if there's, you know, lapses in utilization or pockets of engagement that we wanted to address going in and really understanding why. So what in the products could be better, what parts of the product are actually driving the type of, you know, conversion, engagement, and usage that we want to see, and then investing behind that. And, you know, part of that was the development of Copilot in 2023 and the release of it in Q2 of this year. Yeah. Okay. And then the, just to, last question, I wanted to finish it up. You partly answered this, but, like, how do you if you think about the market at the moment, like on our side, like, sorry, on our side, we, we saw, like, Salesforce kind of talking a little bit better last quarter. I don't know how much material these changes really were. Then we saw, like, Trump winning the election, so the SMB, you know, sentiment is kind of picking up. Is that something that you follow as well and, and has that kind of translated into something, or is it just way too early? Yeah, I think it's similar to what I said earlier. Like, we feel pretty good that things have stopped getting worse, and that was largely that downsell pressure that you know we've experienced in the software vertical. Some of that lingers with our SMB customers and will you know potentially linger into the first half of 2025. Yeah. We're cognizant that, like, you know, there is potential for things to get better in 2025, but we're going to be really prudent about taking any kind of credit for that. Yeah. In the expectations that we go out and set. So really, it's, you know, continue to execute up-market, make sure that we're managing SMB to a healthier place longer term. And then if we get, you know, any kind of additional tailwind from macro, that's just upside. And then, how much lead time do you get or, and maybe what are you looking at and how much lead time do you get from that if things are getting better in terms of, like, what do you look at the top of the funnel or, like, what are the things that you as a CFO can do or kind of to get yourself more comfortable? Yeah, I think it's three things. One is top of funnel from a new business perspective. And then you start to look at actual conversion down to opportunity and wins and pricing around that. And then in the customer base, like, again, we really focus on that stabilizing retention. You got to get a stabilization before you get back to growth. We've gotten to that stabilization point. Yeah. So to get back to growth, it's one: are we truly past the downsell pressure? Do we have a more stable basis at which to kind of go and grow with our customers to migrate them onto Copilot? And really, what does that kind of upsell and migration opportunity and pipeline look like? Those are kind of our leading indicators that we look at. And then, on that, on that note a little bit, like, you as a, as an organization, you obviously haven't been standing still from a product development perspective. So there's a lot, like, you know, like, what you can offer is a lot broader than what it was like, you know, two, three, four years ago. Can you talk a little bit about some of the initiatives there and how they're kind of feeding into that now? Yeah. You know, Copilot's the really big one that we're very proud of that we launched at the end of May this year, and we really started to focus behind building ZoomInfo Copilot. In the second half of 2023. Not only are we think it's a great product, it's getting great traction, but it really, you know, helped our product and sales and G&A teams coalesce, you know, behind a singular focus in 2023. Maybe just, because like, Copilot gets kind of like everyone thinks like, and look, Salesforce is doing like, oh, we're doing Agentforce and Copilot are old generation. Maybe talk a little bit about what Copilot does, compared to like, because everyone thinks about Microsoft Copilot. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. You know, Copilot is kind of our AI supercharged version of ZoomInfo. Yeah. So, you know, if you think about, kind of the predecessor to Copilot, our sales offering, that was, you know, a best-in-class third-party data asset that we're able to marry into first-party data. There's an application on top of that. You could customize, filter campaigns that would help with, you know, certainly outreach and prospecting, lead to better productivity and better efficiency. You know, what we're able to do with Copilot is if in the past it was kind of everyone gets a similar version of ZoomInfo, and then you're able to filter and customize it some, this is much more of everyone gets their own version of ZoomInfo. So it's much more bespoke to each individual customer. What we do is we, you know, they once they migrate onto Copilot, Copilot's able to really start to understand who is this customer, what is their ideal customer profile, what is their total addressable market, and then start to take their, you know, their first-party customer data, blend it together with our third-party data, bring in signals from, you know, earnings transcripts, you know, employee moves, podcasts, marry all that to data to really start to surface these are the 10 or the 100 best opportunities for you to go prospect against, or these are the 10 or 100, best next actions for your current book of business. Yeah. That's very specific to each individual company rather than what was, you know, less of a bespoke experience before. And then how do you achieve that? Like, in terms of, like, do you have, like, a LLM model for everyone or, like, how, you know, how do you go about it? Yeah. You know, it's a pretty scientific process. Yeah. You know, we rely on several different LLMs for different use cases and at different cost levels. Then we've basically just been testing and optimizing through the product development phase. You know, there's still a pretty aggressive roadmap out there for Copilot. While we're really excited about the adoption and our ability to sell it so far, we really are excited about the product roadmap and migrating, you know, most, if not all, of our customer base to a Copilot experience over the next three years. How does it work from a customer perspective? Do I kind of need to sign up for it and pay more? Do you automatically upgrade them? But you know, they need more data to, you know, like, there's you know, work that needs to be done. Like, how do I have to think about it? Yeah. There's certainly from a customer perspective, there's a few vectors to it. One is an off-cycle upsell. So your current customer, maybe your renewal or your sorry, your contract's up for expiration in 2025. Yeah. So you're interested in Copilot. We demo it for you. You want it now. We're able to actually let's say you have 1,000 current seats. We're able to go carve out some portion of that, 100 seats, 50 seats, let you trial Copilot, understand kind of the incremental value there, and then move that whole team over upon migration. We generally get, you know, double-digit price increase per seat when we're migrating the customer base. But as we kind of progress in time, we have a lot more opportunity to move that customer base over, whether it's on what I mentioned is kind of the off-cycle. Or at kind of the more natural time when a renewal occurs. And then when you say double-digit price increase, when they do that, is that just for those per seat per those customers that are moving, or is it because, like, 10% of the base are moving, and that's kind of where you look at a double-digit from? It's basically of the customers that have already moved to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To Copilot. Yeah. And then how do you see the double like, because it's so exciting, is that like 100% if people are in, it's 100%, or do you still see like, you know, 50% of the seats get it and 50 not, and then they kind of do? Yeah. Like, I think when it's national migration, usually most of it's going to move. I think that there's a time dynamic here that's pretty exciting, right? When we launch Copilot at the end of May, if you're renewing in June, it might not be the best time to introduce that to a renewal cycle. So there's some dynamic here where we can get started. We've started to get ahead of December, January, February renewals in Q3. So that opportunity and that readiness for our existing customers to move to a Copilot, that essentially tandem within our existing customer base, it's going to increase and certainly, you know, get way bigger as we get into 2025. Then, how should we think about, like, obviously, like, look, it's not that you're the only one that discovered GenAI? How are you fitting your Copilot into what the rest of the industry is doing? Like, now everyone is selling Copilot, or are you a little bit unique, or is, like, the breadth of what you do with Copilot more than the other guys? How do you compare yourself there? Yeah. I think, you know, I think GenAI and specifically some of the use cases for it really emphasizes and highlights the importance of data quality, and if you're doing kind of anything, you know, outside of support or inbound use cases, having really high quality and fresh third-party data is really important to have any kind of intelligent GenAI for complex account management and outbound prospecting use cases, you know. We view that there's going to be a go-to-market AI platform and that that is, you know, the space and that we are the leader in that space. Yeah. I mean, what are you seeing in the industry evolving? Like, a lot of your competitors were, like, private and smaller. How is behavior there? Because, like, you know, like, maybe I'll start with the open question. Yeah. Yeah. I think that, you know, we don't have that many direct public comps. And I think that, you know, going back to the first question or the second question, like, there was a lot of growth demand in that time. Then, you know, specifically in the software vertical, where I think a lot of those, you know, competitors or kind of adjacent companies sold to, they saw that demand, you know, slow down. So, you know, what we're really focused on is, sure, we saw deceleration in growth. We wanted to make sure that our margin stayed, you know, in a solid place and that, you know, as we think about the future, that we have a few different levers to continue to grow lever or levered free cash lever share and continue to provide value to shareholders. I mean, is there, like, I mean, what's the investment needed from your perspective as well in terms of, GenAI kind of infrastructure, GPU capacity, etc.? Is that kind of like a gating factor at some point? for us specifically? Yeah. Like, if you run Copilot, or is that something where you can kind of you can secure more capacity and so you can compete better against some of the smaller guys? Like, the investments we've made behind Copilot are basically in our run rate. We had a step up there in the back half of 2023. Some of that is in R&D investments. Some of that is cost of service, processing infrastructure. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. AI consumption. You know, we're sort of scientific about, you know, use case testing, moving around and finding the right price for the right use case. Costs have come down to some extent, but you know, we've baked that into our cost level or resource level right now. We continue to believe that we are resourced to return to growth and that there's not, like, another step up in investment needed to get there. Like, I mean, what's the impact on gross margins? Like, you know, if you have a Copilot customer versus a normal customer? It's not significant yet. Yeah. You know, one of the interesting things there is that to the extent that we do have consumption or variable expenses for Copilot usage, like, we want to drive that usage, right? We, like, usage is going to increase revenue. Yeah. There's a small increase to cost of service that comes along with it. Okay. Yeah. Is there an idea to have the customer participate more, or it's like that price, you know, the fixed price that you have for that, it's going to cover it? Or is there at some point, like, a wake-up moment? I think. That usage goes crazy? It's an interesting longer-term question that, you know, we're thinking about. But right now, I think the kind of fit with fair use policy, not, you know, being really restrictive around consumption and trying to find ways to drive usage is what we're focused on. Yeah. And then, you mentioned AI obviously requires a good data set, and you are kind of one of the best data assets in town. And, you know, we have, like, you know, Salesforce doing a lot more stuff, etc., in there. How do you think about that, that data asset and kind of letting it, you know, leveraging it more as you go into, like, a broader AI world and other people want to kind of work with you more? Yeah. Again, I think, you know, generative AI really highlighted the value of data accuracy. You know, we've been able to build this data asset via our contributory network to scale. You know, we're, in many cases, data originators. And I, and I think really understanding the data landscape, having some of the best minds in the space that work for ZoomInfo. And be able to go into a lot of these, you know, larger customers that want to understand data origination. They want to understand privacy and regulatory issues. They want to understand security and AI. And we're, you know, we have the sophistication level to do that. Yeah. Okay. Changing gear a little bit, like, if you think about, like, you know, obviously growth has slowed down a little bit, but you're, you know, you still were a very kind of cash flow-generated, profitable company. How do you think about that balance now, and how do you see yourself there? Yeah. You know, I think that balance, what we'll continue to optimize. We've talked about levered free cash flow per share. We had 37% margins in Q3. We've guided to 35%. I think there's more timing there than trajectory. I want to reiterate, you know, the seasonality in 2025 will be different than 2024, both from a revenue and margin perspective. So as we said before, we recognize revenue ratably on a daily basis. With no leap year in 2025, Q1 of 2025 will have two fewer days than Q4. Yeah. So, you know, fewer revenue days, our typical resets with payroll taxes and retirement benefits means that we're going to expect, you know, several points lower margin in Q1 2025, several points higher in the back half of 2025 relative to the 36%-37% AOI margin that we view as our kind of annual baseline right now. Yeah. Yeah. And then, if you think about if times should get better, like, how do you think about that, think about rebuilding capacity, etc., and to kind of drive the future growth? Because you don't want to kind of save yourself to death either, you know? Yeah. like, how, how do you kind of go about that? Yeah. I think we're resourced to get back to growth, you know, and to, you know, when, if and when we get back to growth in that schedule, I don't think there's a lot of resourcing that needs to go back into the business from either an R&D or sales and marketing perspective. We're really focused on optimizing the balance of it. So, you know, what that means is ramping and hiring and refocusing our sales resources into the enterprise, into mid-market, making sure that we're really prescriptive and efficient in SMB and that we're bringing, you know, we have the right amount of resources there aimed at customer acquisition, that we're bringing in, you know, customers at the right price point and right packaging. All of this aims at better retention outcomes, better customer value. Because that's, you know, improving taking a stable net retention, which again is a good story, and finding a way to get improvement there is, you know, the most important step back to growth. Where are we on sales productivity at the moment? Because that's another thing where people don't think, like, if the productivity is not like, you know, where kind of totally you want to, there's a lot of buffer initially there to kind of start growing with that rather than just having to hire people again. Where are you on that productivity kind of curve? Yeah. You know, I think we went through a period where we were kind of reorienting and restructuring our sales to be more segment-focused, and there was kind of a ramp time there. So if you think about, you know, high-velocity SMB sales where your sales cycles are like less than a month, and then you take some of those resources and, you know, you either find replacements or you move them up market, like that kind of sales cycle, the approach there leads to some gap in productivity. We think we've done that already. So right now, I feel like we feel like we're set up well. Like, we've got Copilot internally, so. Yeah. We've got, you know, a lot of productivity potential there. We've got efficiency, certainly, from, you know, our adoption of Copilot. You know, interestingly enough, when you look at our kind of the greatest gains from using Copilot internally, it's been in our account management team, and when we look at that internally, we see a lot of opportunity in our customer base across teams that we haven't historically penetrated. Yeah. Okay. And last thing is, if you think about growth as well, can you talk a little bit about international? Sure. Yeah. You know, I think international also has gone through a bit of a tougher macro over the last few years. Yeah. You know, I think what you've seen is that potentially the outlook domestically is a little bit better. We're still really focused on, you know, being the best when it comes to international data. We have international sales presence. We feel like we've made strides there during this kind of, you know, tougher period. Yeah. And when we talk about getting back to growth, that's a domestic statement. That's also an international statement. Yeah. Okay. But do you, like, if you think the initial focus will be you, like, because you're at domestic, sounds like it's further, so it's probably more domestic focus than international focus? Yeah. And like I said, I think we are, you know, I think we can do both, honestly. Yeah. I think we've, during this two-year tough period, we've been able to, like, really behind the scenes set ourselves up to be ready for, you know, one, to be able to execute about, you know, around what we can control. And then when, if and when kind of the opportunity, the macro really starts to improve instead of just stabilize, that both in the U.S. and internationally, that we're, you know, well-positioned. Yeah. Okay. And then, last question for me is, or last couple of questions, like, how do you think capital. I mean, you're very cash generative. How do you think capital structure from here? Yeah. You know, we've bought back 17% of the company. Yeah. Since we initiated our repurchasing, we were aggressive in Q3 as well. We'll continue to be opportunistic buying back shares as long as we see a you know a gap between what we view as the intrinsic value of a share of ZoomInfo versus the market price. We actually you know have used more cash than we generated in 2024 doing so. So our cash balance has come down. We'll continue to be cognizant of our leverage ratios, which I think have gone up some, but we're comfortable with. And then we'll just continue to balance the you know the portion that we want to allocate towards share repurchases versus any M&A opportunities versus you know longer-term whether we want to start paying down any debt. And then, you mentioned M&A, like, as a one-way. Obviously, there has been a lot of disruption in the market, which basically means there's just potentially some very interesting technology assets out there that kind of might have suffered. How do you think about M&A from here? Yeah. You know, I think we are always surveying the landscape, whether, you know, it's things that we find to just going to be, like, little plug-ins or carve-outs that can help our current offerings, whether there's more strategic opportunities there. Like, we're always, you know, out there having those discussions and surveying the landscape. I do think, you know, with our success releasing and, you know, driving adoption of Copilot, we want to make sure that we're prioritizing that internally, but, you know, we're always going to be out there and always be considering that. Yeah. I mean, like, if you look at where you are in the market, is there, like, a big adjacency possible, or is it just actually it does feel more like, you know, tuck-ins? Yeah. I think, you know, tuck-ins are especially when we're really happy about the product we have internally and there's little gaps that we're able to fill. Yeah. Yeah. The tuck-ins are, you know, something that we'll probably lean in on focusing on. And then on the greater adjacencies, you know, I think that as we kind of seek stability, like, it's our due diligence to make sure that we're out there and surveying it. At the same time, you know, we feel good about our prospects without, you know, necessarily needing to do anything new. Is it more like a data, if you think about it, like, you know, there's some certain data assets versus, like, software assets, like? The full spectrum. So it's, it could be, you know, kind of more application-heavy software. There's interesting data assets out there. Yeah. There's kind of AI technologies that kind of fit well within, you know, a Copilot framework. So we're paying attention to all of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Good. Okay. Hey, actually, I really enjoyed our conversation. Excellent. Thanks for joining us here. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.