George Colony - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Michael Doyle - Chief Financial Officer Michael Morhardt - Chief Sales Officer.

Timothy McHugh - William Blair & Company LLC Bill Sutherland - Emerging Growth Equities.

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining today’s call. With me today are George Colony, Forrester’s Chairman of the Board and CEO; Michael Morhardt, Forrester’s Chief Sales Officer; and Michael Doyle, Forrester’s Chief Financial Officer. George will open the call. Michael Morhardt will follow George to discuss sales.

Michael Doyle will then follow Michael Morhardt to discuss our financials. We will then open the call to Q&A. A replay of this call will be available until August 28, 2015 and can be accessed by dialing 1-888-843-7419 or internationally 1-630-652-3042. Please reference the pass code 7320030#.

Before we begin, I’d like to remind you that this call will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as expects, believes, anticipates, intend, plans, estimates, or similar expressions are intended to identify these forward-looking statements.

These statements are also based on the company’s current plans and expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause future activities and results of operations to be materially different from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.

Some of the important factors that could cause actual results to differ are discussed in our reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

I’ll now hand the call over to George Colony..

one, building and understanding of their customers; two, working with marketing and strategy executives to win those customers; and three, working with technology management executives to develop systems for winning, serving and retaining those customers and this is what we call business technology.

This is a major opportunity for Forrester and more importantly it is an opportunity that will widen over time. We have released two reports that outline the global technology market outlook for 2016 and two conclusions stood out. First, spending on BT projects will comprise 31% of total global tech purchases in 2016.

However, BT will comprise 54% of new project spending. And second, while BT spending is a third of the size of IT spending, it is growing at twice the rate of IT. So all of this poses a question.

If the opportunity is so large and the relevancy is so high, why is it not translating into improved results for Forrester faster? And there are answers to this question. Number one, our strategy is relatively new. We are 18 months into executing and there are still parts of our client base and operations that are in transition.

Two, it’s early days in the age of the customer. More advanced companies like USAA, L’Oreal and Delta Airlines are actively embracing business technology and focusing on customer experience, but they remain in the minority. The majority of companies are still examining and considering.

And this has put Forrester at the forefront in this, by the way, a very good harbinger for our future business, but it means that some clients are not yet ready. And finally, three, as Forrester has shifted the research conversation from IT to BT, some IT-centric clients have lagged and that is reflected in BT role view renewal rates.

We have always believed that we would be out ahead of some of our clients and we continue to work on those transitions. But given the opportunity I just described and the challenges we are overcoming, I want to outline what parts of our business are not on pace and those that are. Our leadership board business remains challenged.

While six boards grew at double digits, the business overall is not growing at planned rates. We have taken several actions to move FLBs forward, including transforming our sales enablement board into a B2B marketer board and moving our marketing leadership board to become a B2C marketer board.

We’re also launching a board for small to medium-sized technology venders. And finally, we are preparing to launch two high-end executive programs focused on CIOs and CMOs in enterprises with more than $5 billion in revenue. Turning to events, this business has not performed to our plan in the first half of the year.

While attendee numbers are down only 2%, sponsorship revenue was off driven by changes we made late in 2014 to the events sales team. This team is now rebuilt with a new sales head and an expanded staff.

Turning now to those products which are on track, the research organization led by Cliff Condon continues to its strong pivot, producing a consistent and rich portfolio of research for customer-obsessed companies. Playbooks, reports and briefs are now 100% focused on age of the customer.

Marketing and strategy role view and technology industry role view are growing double digits with historically high renewal rates. BT role view growth is flat, driven by the transition factors I outlined above. We’re working primarily through new packaging options to move BT role view into growth in the second half of the year.

Our data business remains on pace. Forrester’s customer experience index, our newest syndicated data product, is tracking to plan in its first year of availability. As I described during last quarter’s call, the CX index measures the brand experiences of 950 companies and governmental organizations across 18 industries in the US, Europe and Asia.

Companies are using the index to pinpoint what parts of the experience to improve and to benchmark themselves against competitors and high performers. Forrester’s consulting business includes four components; strategy, strategy consulting, contract negotiation, content marketing and advisory.

As a portfolio, the consulting business is tracking through the first half of the year. We still may have more work to do perfecting our consulting operations, particularly in the strategy space, but it is becoming an integrated part of Forrester’s overall business.

The full picture at midyear is mixed, with 40% of our product revenue lagging our plan and 60% growing at healthy double digits. Our work over the second half of the year is to drive the changes I outlined above to move all of our products back on pace, with special attention devoted to leadership boards, events and BT role view.

In addition, we will continue to double down on our strategy to aggressively lay claim to the unique market position of helping large companies win, serve and retain their customers. As the largest shareholder of Forrester, I am as impatient as you are to see more consistent results.

What encourages me is the company’s clear and resonant go to market strategy. The place where we have chosen to focus holds great potential and Forrester’s heritage and skills make us uniquely prepared to deliver high value to our clients.

So yes, it is taking time, but I remain confident that our strategy is the best path to sustained double-digit growth and operating margin in the 17% to 19% range. I want to end my remarks with a story. At our Tech Management Forum Europe which was held in Lisbon in June, I met with the CIO of the largest life insurance company in Portugal.

At the end of the meeting, he said, George, great to see you, but we don’t use Forrester anymore and I’m not really sure why we are meeting. And I said, let me spend 15 minutes describing who we are now and then let’s talk. After I had outlined our pivot and our strategy, Eduardo said, I didn’t know this change had happened.

I can now see that we need Forrester on three fronts. One, to improve our customer experience; two, to help us build out our BT agenda; and three, to help me collaborate more broadly with our CMO. Our job now is to translate those positive market signals into more consistently expanding business results.

So now, I’m going to turn the call over to Mike Morhardt, Forrester’s Head of Sales.

Mike?.

consulting, data and research, they want them combined all into one solution. This has led to more and improved cross selling percentages and an increase in average deal size.

We also saw a large percentage of our pipeline push from Q2 into Q3 as these larger deals across many of the functions within our client organizations and in some cases are more complex. Finally, in an effort to improve productivity, we launched a new sales booking application along with a new simplified pricing model.

The entire sales organization was trained on the new application and the pricing models at the end of Q1 and over the course of Q2. So at the midpoint of 2015, we’re seeing good progress across the sales organization. We continue to drive for improved productivity, focus on improved client retention rate and expanding our sales organization.

With that, I’ll turn it over to Mike Doyle for the financial update..

total revenues of approximately $310 million to $318 million; pro forma operating margins of approximately 9.5% to 10.5%; pro forma effective tax rate of 38%; and pro forma diluted earnings per share of approximately $1 to $1.08. We provided guidance on a GAAP basis for the third quarter and full year 2015 in our press release and 8-K filed today.

Thanks very much. And I’m now going to turn the call back over to the operator for the Q&A portion of the call..

[Operator Instructions] And we have a question from [indiscernible]..

It’s Tim McHugh. I guess first on just the 40% of the business that’s not growing like you would like.

One, what’s the math on – what pace is that growing or even declining? And can we walk through, I know you gave pieces of this throughout, but to summarize it, what makes up that 40%? I know, leadership boards, events, I guess, can you break out the relative size of each of those pieces..

This is 60% and 40% on bookings for the first half, just to give you some color, not revenue. Essentially, the 40% is declining and obviously that’s offset by what’s growing here. The largest single component is our board business, FLB. That’s the biggest piece of it, Tim.

Of that 40% bucket, I won’t necessarily give specifics, but that represents slightly under 40% of the 40% bucket. So it’s the biggest piece. The next largest piece is advisory. Some of that advisory is by design. We expected it to be slower growth as we ramped up project consulting, but there’s still opportunities to grow bookings on the advisory side.

That’s the next biggest bucket. That’s probably more in the 30% range of that bucket. Then you have, what we call, BT role view. And George sort of hinted it that the challenge there which is clients transitioning as we take the research agenda from an IT one to a BT one, our clients transition. And that’s probably more in the line of the 25%.

And then you have events, which smaller numbers, but bigger variances. In terms of percentage declines, it’s the biggest decline. So that’s the remainder of the bucket. So those are the components, Tim..

And did you say what was events down for this quarter?.

For the quarter, on the revenue side, Tim, percentage wise, we were down about 20%..

And in terms of leadership boards, I guess the role view comment, it’s just a function of the shift in focus in advisory, there’s a little bit, that’s just a function of the shift in focus.

But leadership boards, is there an answer to how you turn that around?.

I’m not going to get too details here, the marketing and leadership board was a board that was diminishing and that’s the one that we’ve now transitioned over to be B2C marketer board. And I think, I’m looking at Mike here, we’re getting good early feedback on that.

And then the sales enablement forum which also was dropping in size and that will transition over to be the B2B marketer board. So we feel like that’s going to turn around two boards that were really in trouble and this is going to turn that around..

If you combine that two, Tim, as George mentioned, we’re launching two executive leadership boards to target CMOs and CIOs, which is something that sales organization has been looking for. That will help as well.

And I think over the course of the past year, we have pushed on the value proposition of pure networking and we’ve worked through our client base to make sure that they understand the value proposition within the Forrester leadership board.

It’s focused on the pure networking aspect and so I think Mike had mentioned this and George had mentioned that, that means different things to different geographies. And so we’re being much more focused in how we sell this in say Asia-Pac, or in Europe versus in North America..

And just some financial color on it, Tim. Our internal plan had the board business declining in the first half of the year, but it was a low single digit number, because we knew there was a transition. Because we did a reorganization in the first quarter where we eliminated some European councils, we expected noise.

I think we’ve had a little bit more noise, to George’s point, we didn’t transition into those other areas as quickly as we would have liked. So I think the solution is we continue to move forward and execute well on the transition and get momentum back in that business. But we did expect a modest decline in that business in the first half.

And in reality, it’s a low double digit decline and that’s, I think to George’s point, more a function of transition and execution and we’ve got to get after that..

Just to give you one more detail here, Tim, as Mike alluded to, but in Europe, we were serving eight to nine boards in Europe and it was just too many. And the actions we took at the early part of the year was to move to four boards in Europe, so that we have focus in four.

So fewer boards in Europe, so that’s why the transition to a lower growth number in the first part of the year..

Our next question is from Bill Sutherland..

The FX impact, Mike, was it meaningfully greater than what you were penciling in with the guidance?.

Not in the quarter, Bill. I would attribute the second quarter, it’s a headwind, but we captured most of that in our second quarter guidance. I think we’re seeing it more for the full year. We’ve now brought down our thinking about FX for the back half of the year, but it had, I’d say, a very modest impact on our second quarter.

Our second quarter miss was really more driven by some event slippage and a couple of those things. It was more, what I would call, performance oriented and FX driven. For the full year, though, we look at FX as being about 20% of the reason for us bringing down guidance on revenue. So that’s a piece of the story for the back part of the year.

The remainder is really around [indiscernible] events and FLB based on first half performance. That’s how we’re thinking about the back half of the year guidance..

So at the midpoint, you’re guiding now to revenue for the year of little under 1 point.

What would that be FX neutral?.

FX neutral, it’s probably [take on] little more than 3 points on top of that. So I would say for the year we’re about 4%. Clearly, our intent is to try and drive more out of that, but right now, sort of where we are, that’s how we’re pulling it out..

Well, you do look like a thumbs-up in the fourth quarter, I don’t know if part of that is some of the FX impact getting alleviated or whether you’re thinking that’s more of a turn in the business by them?.

I think it’s a little bit of a turn and then typically we should get a bump up as we roll into the fourth quarter, you should get some bump up in advisory and project consulting. So that’s how we’re looking at it. So we’re looking to get an uplift and then just some normal trend movement there too, Bill..

And the turnover in the sponsorship sales organization, can you just give us a little color on what happened?.

So the sponsorship sales organization was closely partnered with the field research and consulting sales organization a couple of years ago.

And over the course of last couple of years, we migrated the sponsorship sales organization into – they were kind of in an order-taking role and we wanted truly to have hunters and somebody who is an account manager with these types of sponsorship opportunity.

And so over the course of the last six to seven months, we’ve moved out these more junior individuals and brought in a more senior team. We had lost our sponsorship sales leader at the second part of last year. We’ve replaced that individual with a more seasoned individual and she has rebuilt the team..

So essentially, Bill, we were depending on the field sales force to do a lot of the sponsorship sales and we transitioned away from the field sales force to a dedicated sales force. But that was inelegant transition..

I think that’s it for me. I think you guys gave us the – yeah, you gave us the quota bearing reps for the quarter..

We did, yeah..

We have no further questions at this time. I’ll now turn the call over to Michael Doyle for closing remarks..

Okay. Thanks very much everyone for joining the call. George and I are going to be on the road, actually doing bit of Midwest tour, but also trying to get out and see as many investors as possible. So we look forward to seeing you over the next months in our travel. Thanks very much..

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today’s conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect..