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

Carrie Johnson, Forrester’s Chief Research Officer, will then join the presenters, and we will then open the call to Q&A. A replay of this call will be available until August 30, 2020 and can be accessed by dialing 855-859-2056 or 404-537-3406. Please reference the conference ID 7428859.

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

These statements are 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 will now turn the call over to George Colony..

one, revenue in our events business has been greatly reduced due to travel restrictions; two, 10% of Forrester’s clients are in industries that are directly impacted by the pandemic, hotel, airline, retail and automotive; and finally, general macroeconomic headwinds.

So to conclude, I wanted to reiterate my earlier points, we will find a way to manage our way through this recession. Companies are accelerating digital transformation, and this is in Forrester’s sweet spot and we will come out of this recession in a stronger position. In particular, we will look to expand our contract value in 2021.

Now none of this would be possible without the amazing people of Forrester, who have courageously adapted to working at home, juggling family care in their jobs and staying client connected using every channel available.

And I’m very glad to report that our tech stack has been phenomenal, enabling all of us to work seamlessly and effectively, we all feel very fortunate that we can do our jobs even though we are all working from home. So I hope that you are all staying well and that your families are safe.

I am now going to pass the call over to Kelley Hippler, Forrester’s Chief Sales Officer.

Kelley?.

Thank you, George. Q2 was one of the most challenging quarters for the Forrester sales organization in company history given the macroeconomic conditions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. With that said, we performed better than forecasted with a relatively strong close in June.

I want to reiterate George’s sentiment in expressing our gratitude to Forresterites across the globe who have continued to put our clients first and have focused on helping them to navigate in these uncertain times.

Not unexpectedly, we are seeing increased selling challenges in industries like retail, travel and hospitality that are the hardest hit by the pandemic. Smaller high-tech clients are also struggling financially.

In addition to these industries in the U.S., we have seen some softness in some geographies like India, while others, including China, Singapore, Hong Kong, UK and Ireland and the Nordics are all performing in line with expectations.

Given this challenging environment, we pivoted quickly in the following 4 ways that contributed to our relatively stronger close in Q2. Number one, we shifted focus to strongest market opportunities. In late March, we pivoted to shift new business and cross-sell focus, resources and headcount to markets and industries that are less impacted.

High-tech and government are two examples that are performing stronger than other industries. We helped one of our premier high-tech clients build a lead generation program, using digital Forrester and SiriusDecisions content to replace pipeline that they had lost due to the cancellation of a major industry event.

We continue to partner with multiple government agencies to assist with the modernization of their IT stack. In Q2, we won a consulting project to help support 1 of our government clients with its cybersecurity strategy. Number two, move to all virtual events. George has addressed the great success we had with moving our events to all virtual.

Not only did this enable us to run profitable events in Q2, but it also gave us a platform to increase client engagement during these unprecedented times. Events play a central role in strengthening the overall relationship that clients have with Forrester.

Our Q2 virtual events gave us the opportunity to connect with clients and showcase our thought leadership with positive results. Our events are accelerating pipeline building and helping to secure renewals. Number three, conducted more sales training.

During Q2, we took advantage of the fact that our sales teams were not traveling to provide more training. We hosted best practice sessions twice a week for both new and existing sales team members.

The result is that our teams are increasingly more sophisticated and their ability to demonstrate how the Forrester and SiriusDecisions portfolios deliver value to serve client needs is demonstrated by an increase in the number of deals cross-sold in Q2. And then finally, number four, we drank our own champagne.

We have been making a concerted effort to leverage our research and frameworks to improve alignment across our organization. Aligned with our own models, Forrester has shifted to become more audience centric and has identified a number of key buying centers of personas that we serve.

This has driven tighter alignment across sales, product and marketing, and it will make it easier to enable our sales force and to ramp new hires as we move forward. We have just conducted the SiriusDecisions sales activity study, which will provide insights into how we can make our sellers more productive and efficient.

We are also leveraging the SiriusDecisions sales planning methodology as we begin to turn our attention to 2021 and have built a bottoms-up capacity model and are calculating lifetime value and client acquisition costs to guide us as we make future investments.

Looking ahead to the remainder of the year, our key priority is client retention and protecting the base. Our core value proposition of helping business and technology leaders create customer-obsessed organizations that drive growth continues to resonate in this environment.

Our own research shows that customer experience differentiation is the key to post-pandemic success, and we are helping our clients to build strategies and execute programs to differentiate their brands based on customer experience. With that, I will turn the call over to Mike Doyle..

revenues of $420 million to $430 million; operating margin of 8.5% to 10.5%; an effective tax rate of 31%; and diluted earnings per share of $1.15 to $1.40. Thanks very much. I am now going to turn the call over to the operator for the Q&A portion of the call..

[Operator Instructions] Our first question or comment comes from the line of Anja Soderstrom from Sidoti. Your line is open..

Hi, everyone.

Can you hear me? Hello?.

Yes, madam..

Okay. Congratulations on a good quarter amidst a challenging backdrop. So the first question is to Kelley, you alluded to June being sort of the strongest month, I believe. What are you seeing going into July as COVID is flaring up in a lot of regions.

Is that noticeable in your business or it’s not really coming through yet?.

Thank you for the question, Anja. So as of right now, we have not seen some of the recent spikes impacting Q3 pipeline, and we see some of the momentum from Q2 carrying over. However, we do continue to watch this on a daily basis as things are shifting quite a bit.

But thus far, we are seeing that momentum for June continue, which is very encouraging, but certainly something we are keeping a very close eye on..

Okay, thank you.

And in terms of the client drops, can you give some color on that? Is it predominantly in the 10% bucket of the more hard hit sectors? Or is there anything else to note there?.

Sure. That’s a great question. I would say the two main areas that we are seeing are some of those industries. So to your point, retail, travel, and then we also, from a number of client perspective, we did lose some smaller vendor clients, who tend to be cash constrained during these types of economic situations.

We do expect to win some of that business back as things start to improve, but I would say those are the two buckets..

Okay. And then just one last one, so this virtual events, you are getting a lot – much wider reach or attendance for. So – and I think alluded to that helping your pipeline.

Can you maybe give some more color on that? And how that might be helpful in terms of selling other services to these people that might be new to you?.

Sure. I think part of what’s been great and different about the virtual events than the physical. And of course, it’s always great to have a physical event where you can meet with folks, and they can go down to the marketplace. But with the virtual events, we have a number of different ways that we can interact with clients.

What’s also great is that clients can go back and they can review the content. So if they have multiple track sessions going on at the same time that they want to attend. In the past, they used to have to choose where they were going to go.

Now they have options to still go back 90 days after and leverage that content, which is leading to some really great follow-up conversations and discussions that we see happening post-event more so than maybe we would have with face-to-face.

So it’s definitely opening up more opportunities for us to engage with our clients and to expose them to more of the IP that we are conveying at the event than we have been able to do with a strictly physical event..

Okay, great. Thank you. That was informative. And that was all for me. Thank you..

Great. Thank you..

Thank you. Our next question or comment comes from the line of Vincent Colicchio from Barrington Research. Your line is open..

Yes. I was curious, I don’t know if this is for George or Mike, reprints and consulting were a strong spot in the quarter.

Can you talk to maybe what the outlook is – for those businesses is in the second half?.

Yes, Vince, good question. And I think both reprints and content and marketing are tremendous vehicles in the midst of this pandemic, right? It’s – people are looking for ways to market and present their story, and it’s something that this can move quickly it’s a good use of marketing dollars. It tends to have a great ROI for our clients.

And when other avenues of marketing are limited, it works really well. I think that right now, our outlook for the balance of the year is still looking at these businesses as continuing to be strong. So that’s good news. Reprints, in particular, is very high-margin for us, so we are pretty excited about it. And it’s what we expected.

We just didn’t expect it to be that strong. So that’s a good thing..

And then consulting, what are your thoughts, if any, on that business?.

I will give you my perspective. Kelley can jump in. We – particularly, in North America, we had a really performance up versus a year ago, which we are pretty excited about. I think there’s very real need out there, and I credit the consulting organization to be able to do a lot of their work virtually. Right now, we have a pretty good backlog.

So I think we are feeling good about the balance of the year. I think the challenge is when are people going to do the work? And that’s just a little bit of the variable that we don’t control 100%. But I will let Kelley give her view. She’s much closer to sort of what’s going on out there..

Yes. No, Mike, I would concur with your points there.

I think we are definitely seeing strong demand on the end user side and some of the areas around digital transformation, customer experience and loyalty programs as well as some of our clients who are trying to figure out how to get out of some of the old technologies they have and pay down that technical debt so they can pivot to more customer-focused technology.

So we are still seeing a lot of energy there as well as for the content marketing products that are leveraged for the lead generation on the high-tech side..

And how would you compare overall client sentiment and sales cycles now versus where we were in the last earnings call?.

Sure. What’s really interesting is a lot of the timing around the sales cycle really depends upon who we are working with within an organization. So in many cases, when a C-level sponsor is involved in a project, we are actually seeing a reduction in our days to close.

Interestingly, our conversion rates of our pipeline in Q2 were just down 1 point over prior year, which was very encouraging for us that overall, our conversion rates are holding and cycle time is pretty much in line with what we have experienced historically, but definitely more outliers.

Some going more quickly, others perhaps taking a little bit longer if we are not high enough within the organization or how the CFOs are sometimes getting involved in the buying process and slowing things down?.

We tend to be thoughtful and methodical, Vince. We eventually get to the right answer..

Got it. Thank you..

Okay..

Thank you..

[Operator Instructions] I am showing no additional questions in the queue at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Mike Doyle for any closing comments..

Yes. First, thanks, everyone, for joining the call, and hopefully everyone is staying healthy. We are going to be presenting at a couple of virtual events in the third quarter, and we will also be looking to schedule a number of virtual roadshow calls.

So we will work with everyone to get that on track, but looking forward, frankly, to an exciting third quarter and an exciting balance of the year. Thanks again everyone and we will sign off..

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today’s conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a wonderful day. Stay safe..