Commerce.com, Inc. (CMRC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Great to have you at our next session. Really happy to have the team from BigCommerce here. Daniel, I'm really sorry, I need to apologize to you, but like we've been overlapping for quite a while, but Travis is kind of more new to the team. So to get investors kind of all more grounded, Travis, can maybe kind of talk a little bit about -- introduce yourself a little bit first for those people that didn't make it up to the Analyst Day to meet you, and then we'll take it from there.

Sure. Well, thank you for having me. And yes, so Travis Hess, I've been in the commerce space for about 20 years, pretty exclusively on the services side of the business. So have run large agencies and consultancies in the space and I'm certainly very familiar with BigCommerce. I think the last -- one of the last deals I did when I ran LiveArea was a BigCommerce deal where I was kind of introduced to the product, but a long admirer of the business from afar. And then obviously, the last 4, 5 years in the Shopify ecosystem prior to that, pretty much across every top kind of commerce provider starting back in the ATG days, which were sold to Oracle into Hybris that was bought by SAP and then Demandware by Salesforce, et cetera, et cetera. Long admirer of the product and the business and just a really unique opportunity to come in and make some -- what we feel are material changes around go-to-market messaging and create a bit more focus on authenticity and just an unbelievable opportunity for me to come in and really take a product that I felt was materially underrepresented in our core markets and kind of restore it to growth, particularly top line growth, profitably growth. So...

I mean, you didn't come in as a CEO. So when you kind of joined and did your due diligence, like, okay, I want to go join a team here. Talk me a little bit about like you mentioned like you kind of you like the assets, but like what kind of excited you at the time?

So my original remit as President was really more oriented to the go-to-market side of the business. And I think that was the lowest hanging fruit. Certainly, I didn't have the intimate knowledge of the intricacies of the business, particularly around the product and engineering side. So for me, it was to come in, kind of reshape the orientation of who it is we are and who it is that we're for. An opportunity to integrate the go-to-market side of that business on some acquired assets between Makeswift and Feedonomics, combine that with BigCommerce and just create a new chapter in verse as to who it is that we are, who it is that we're for, how to differentiate in market and just create a bit more authenticity, both internally and externally about what it is that we represented. And I think like most products that came out of originally out of F&B and went through some M&A, a bit unintentional compartmentalization within the business of who it is that we're for. And I think able to create a new narrative there and then mapping that organizationally to a model that I felt was going to allow us to go to market much more effectively and efficiently. So that's kind of a 4-month head start on that exclusively. And then in the new remit, we're in execution mode on go-to-market, which was nice and now kind of aligning that with the rest of the business has been pretty organic and nice.

The -- I mean on that point, like a little bit, you mentioned like M&A, but like if I look at the M&A wasn't like crazy big. So is there anything you also observed on like the core product or the core kind of offering for BigCommerce that kind of wanted to work on after like a couple of months in the original job?

I think the M&A for me, I think, compartmentalizing it, I think Feedonomics certainly from a product positioning perspective, plays pretty exclusively upmarket. So think of what was traditionally considered the Internet retailer 500. So they're doing business with the Nikes and the Tapestries and large, really large global multi-brand retailers and branded manufacturers. And so I thought that was a unique opportunity to kind of by proxy as we bring BigCommerce as a product upmarket association there and really for Feedo, really optimizing revenue across non-owned channels and BigCommerce being more on optimizing revenue on owned channels. Makeswift, it really was enhancing primarily the BigCommerce product from a business user-facing perspective around visual editing and things like that around agility, the business for business users to create really immersive experiences really quickly without the need of developers and being able to do that very quickly and very timely. But more broadly, with BigCommerce, I think a couple of key markets that I felt like we have -- we deserve and have a right to win. B2B, in particular, was something that I felt needed to be treated more than just additional features and functions. It was kind of bifurcating our entire approach there. That tends to be a very cost savings model, taking out FTE labor and automating it versus direct-to-consumer, which tends to be more conversion and experience oriented. So really treating that as its own thing as an offering. And then really on the B2C side, leaning more into business outcome orientation as opposed to this arms race around feature and function. I don't think us or anyone else is going to come up with a feature function that is a silver bullet that unlocks all of these things. This stuff has been done for a long time. It's more the application of such features and functions and the ability to accelerate digital transformation and organizational agility for the end users and entities than, say, a certain feature function. So a really interesting and obvious opportunity for me to go do that very, very quickly.

And then the -- if you think about it, like the -- let's stay on the B2C side a little bit. Like obviously, you kind of worked with kind of Shopify, which is kind of below kind of BigCommerce. There's a couple of bigger players that you mentioned that are above. How do you think that -- how do you think about the positioning for BigCommerce in that respect?

Yes. I mean I think if we do what we should be doing, we shouldn't legitimately be competing with Shopify. I think with who we're for, both B2C and B2B is not really Shopify's ICP. I think in earnings, I use the term discerning. You can pick whatever word you want. But I think the customers that choose us, choose us for a couple of different reasons. One is just the need for additional customization or just bespoke or unique requirements that just can't be served by a Shopify type model or to the extent you would make Shopify work, you're creating a lot of superfluous code and tech debt and things like that, that just would be deleterious to the approach. And then two, I think admitting internally that we're not for everyone, like we don't have the best product in the industry for everyone. Nobody does. And I think just divorcing ourselves of that fact and really focusing in on who it is that we are for and why and then amplifying that message will drive greater efficacy around how it is that we talk about ourselves, how it is that we market ourselves, who it is that we partner with, like it's just a giant unlock to create this identity that everyone's kind of tethered to and through that focused identity, by proxy creates authenticity that has to exist internally. You've got to believe it yourself before you take it external. And I think that was the disjointment, right? We're saying one thing externally, believing something else internally unintentionally and then what ends up happening is everyone becomes confused. And you just, you dilute the message in its entirety. So I think that unlock is probably the biggest.

And then I don't know if you want to share it already or if you can, like -- so where do you see that? Is that -- and how do you define that what you kind of -- the segment that you -- or the market that you want to be? Is that on a size per customer? Is it per like complexity of the e-commerce solution of the customer? Like how do you think about like where is your fit?

I think it's a couple of different things. So I think -- let's talk about enterprise for a second. Historically, we've defined it by the contract that someone's bought, not by characteristics of a business that would determine an enterprise or not. I think people -- there's a couple of different inputs there. Obviously, GMV is an input. But there are plenty of large GMV customers serviced by Shopify that I would not define as enterprise customers by requirement size. Dollar Shave Club is not a complicated business. They manufacture razors and sell blades. They do a lot of revenue. As an example, big GMV, but I would not describe it as complicated or enterprise. I think overall company size is another input you could look at. So you look at big CPG and things like that, individual brand level, smaller, but larger and more transformative in what we would provide, certainly more enterprise. I think the biggest determinant, though, is the use cases and requirements of a particular organization independent of size that lend itself, in my opinion, to more enterprise-type requirements. That could be in the front office, it could be in the back office or both. And I think that's really where we're leaning into both from a B2B and a B2C perspective and knowing that those that are leaning more enterprise doesn't necessarily mean GMV. It could be unique bespoke requirements and use cases that we feel we have a better advantage over the rest of the competition.

One thing I would just add to build on this a little bit, too, from a business focus point of view, that also means that we have outstanding customers that we're targeting that are both in the upper end of small business and mid-market and moving up into enterprise as well. And I think that the way that we've been approaching this, I think, has been so focused on new logos and moving upmarket. I don't think that we've really capitalized on the full opportunity that we have with our existing base of customers. We have tens of thousands of customers in the upper end of small business and mid-market that fit exactly the use case description that Travis just gave, that there are a lot of opportunities for us to improve how we monetize that, the efficiency in which we grow those customers. And if you look at what we're doing over the course of the next year, 1.5 years, what I just want to make sure is really clear for investors is it is not solely necessary for us to continue to move upmarket in order for us to unlock better revenue growth. There's a lot of ways that we can get there. It's about the type of customer we're after, e-commerce professionals and practitioners, right? Launching a business is hard, scaling it is even harder. We're after those folks that are scaling those businesses. And by focusing on that type of customer, it doesn't mean that they have to be large businesses. It means that they need to have sophisticated use cases, I think, to really take advantage of the product. And there's a lot of ways that we can be monetizing that better and more efficiently that can unlock growth that we need to...

And just to clarify, are those customers of yours already? So then is that kind of selling the whole, making sure you sell the whole suite, revisiting the customer for upsell, cross-sell? Is that kind of like the idea?

Yes. I think the thesis behind wanting to integrate both Makeswift and Feedo now was, a, to create a bigger, broader story and narrative around the portfolio of brands that we have now and maybe others we build or acquire in the future, like what's the synthesis around all of it? And I would argue it's really around optimizing revenue and scaling brands in a profitable capacity, but also a more deliberate motion in cross-selling, upselling, creating greater wallet share with our existing installed base and more stickiness, obviously, in an effort to address if we needed to, churn and things like that or just drive more value to our installed base. And I think almost as importantly, having different wedge strategies to penetrate new customers, net new logos in ways that wasn't just as we know in the platform industry, we're not going to go make that market next year. There's a set number of people that are going to replatform. I don't think any marketing message we put out in the universe is going to say, well, geez, I didn't think about replatforming thanks for bringing that up. So that was really the traditional way we went to market, and we're kind of aligned to that number is that number. Feedonomics has been an unbelievable wedge strategy for us, not just upmarket, but we'll release a self-service model later next year, which is really exciting mid-market and down market, which unlocks even broader TAM there to wedge in, in ways that we've never been able to do before. So a lot of goodness in a couple of different areas.

And then like more on the practicality there, like if you think about it, like bringing them together, is that just how deep is the product bringing together? So do you have to kind of bring the 2 platforms from a technical level together? Or is it just more -- there's more APIs that kind of need to kind of connect between those 2?

A little bit together. But like as of now, I mean, 80% of Feedo's clients don't run on BigCommerce. We'd like to see that percentage go up certainly, but that product still needs to go to market in and of itself. I think more operationally, a lot of duplicative efforts around sales, marketing, client services, operations. Obviously, in earnings, we restructured, put out -- notice we took out 20% of the cost. That integration allowed us to do that very quite effectively to go then reinvest, not just dropping the bottom line, but also reinvest half that back into quota-carrying capacity, knowing that we didn't have enough quota carriers to go map to the growth goals that we wanted to hit next year. So just a lot of duplicative efforts like obvious things and redundancy that allowed us to kind of transform ourselves. That integration kind of opened that up above and beyond the strategic positioning and the synergy.

And then the -- you also mentioned like going back to the installed base and doing a better job there. Is that -- how is your sales model set up for that? So like classic, if someone gets bigger, it's going to be farmers and hunters, et cetera. Like how are you kind of set up? And do you need to change that?

We're now set up as farmers and hunters. I would say previously, we had folks -- we had an upgrade team. We had a retention team and things like that you would normally see in these sorts of business. But there was no deliberate KPIs behaviorally to incentivize people to upsell, cross-sell because what were they really upselling and cross-selling, the businesses weren't integrated. When I interviewed at BigCommerce, I didn't even know we owned Feedonomics. And I've been in the space for 20 years. So -- and new of both organizations. To use a sports analogy, I think we play more defense than offense. And I think going forward, we're playing more offense than defense. And I think that's deliberate. That's -- those are changes that have already been made. And I think that's another just kind of getting out of our own way sort of thing. This isn't macroeconomic orientation. This isn't disruptive. This is like -- this is obvious. And here is an environment and a framework that's going to make that a little bit more frictionless and easier.

Yes. I'd say, broadly speaking, what we're doing in go-to-market has -- and I'll just hit them briefly, 3 different kind of big buckets of things that we're doing from a go-to-market side of things, and that excludes the branding type stuff that Travis is talking about. One is we're organizing around offerings. I think we've been going to market as products than talking about products. I think that's a very -- it's a good message when you're primarily talking to a CIO. I don't think it's as effective when you're talking to a CFO or a CMO. And so we're organizing the business around B2B, B2C and small business. That's the whole market. We're talking about for the audience that we're trying to talk to subsets within each. So that will make it to where it's a company-first offering first message rather than product. That's one. The second is the bifurcation between hunters and farmers, which is really on the higher end when you have accounts that you can expand with sales effort. The third is also, I'd say, more of a deliberate effort towards product-led growth and how we're actually building out the product so that you have more ways to organically grow with BigCommerce once you've landed on our platform and not needing to talk to a sales rep, which is better from a cost of acquisition and growth. I think some of our competitors, to be frank, have been really good at this. I think they've done a better job in some ways than we have in finding ways to just have better net revenue retention so that the floor of revenue growth is raised. And so it's not just about investing in sales reps to chase bigger and larger opportunities, it's also finding ways to reorient the way that we're building the product. So we look a lot more like a normal enterprise SaaS business and growing organically with those accounts once we land them.

Okay. Perfect. And then I want to switch over to B2B. Like B2C, we kind of all kind of know B2B, like does that change the competitive field? Or like what do we have to think about what's different there then?

It does slightly. I think just to clarify, and I tried to tease this out at earnings. B2B to us is manufacturers and distributors, right? Manufacturers that sell through distributors and by definition, have pre-contractual arrangements and pricing complexities, even catalog complexities, distributor by distributor requires a fair amount of sophistication to service those folks. And then you've got on the back office, the payment side of that, you've got most of these folks buying on PO or terms and things like that. You've got permissioning workflows, all sorts of hair kind of on the back end that we feel our product sets up really, really well to support. I think some of our competitors, the elephant in the room, Shopify defines B2B as wholesale, which I would say was...

We support those businesses, too. We like those businesses. That's not it...

Yes. But that's not differentiating. I mean EDI took care of that a long time ago. And for those that are smaller, it's just setting up a separate instance to go service whomever. I think the competitive landscape still has the same sort of legacy players. I think it would over-index more on SAP per se with B2B than B2C, the B2C installed base is smaller. But again, I think we've got to be honest with ourselves, too. What broadens that TAM upmarket with SAP is going to be our ability to widen our CPQ capabilities. B2B, by definition, is a completely different business model. It is to take cost out of the business and particularly FTE labor, right? So folks are not going through call centers. They're not going through selling belly to belly. We're driving them through a portal. Conversion is not an issue. Experience is not an issue, right? People want to be -- you want people to be able to find their stuff, check out, make that frictionless, but conversion is 99%, 100%. This is all about driving systematic transformation organizationally, taking FTE labor out. And then you've got a lot of these organizations that have grown through acquisitions. So you've got multiple sources of truth synthesizing all of that stuff and really driving a transformation. Legacy SAP is certainly the biggest installed base there, legacy Adobe, primarily Magento is another installed base that we're going after that we've had a lot of success with. And you've got different niche players in markets. We think we're head and shoulders above where Shopify is in these capabilities. I don't think I know because I lived in that space. And we think it's a real opportunity for us to win right now and in the future. And I think you're going to see us, to Daniel's point around the offerings, B2B, B2C, small business, really accelerate what we're doing around the B2B side. We feel like that's a really obvious narrative and a place for us to win. But -- so there's some overlap with competition, but it's a different model.

And then last question on product. If you think about the -- so Feedonomics gives you kind of an add-on like -- but how do you think about other areas? Because historically, like if you think Shopify kind of kept building out more and more kind of areas, kind of payment, fulfillment, et cetera. How do you think about that you set at the moment and where you want to go with that?

I think philosophically, we're taking less of a monolithic approach to our solutions. I think by being composable and leaning into that, by definition, we're making the statement that we feel there will be more innovation and best practice in many capacities coming from third-party ISVs to enhance capabilities as opposed to building them natively in the platform. I think Shopify, I don't want to speak for them. But historically, they've had an app ecosystem, but they're starting to build more and more stuff natively in the platform itself. So again, what we feel maps to our ICP, customers that want best-in-class, they have unique bespoke requirements, need the ability to ingest best-in-class at any given time. Our job is to make the best APIs out there, make this as tangible as standardized and as fast as humanly possible. I think we're going to continue with that approach. And then we can talk a little bit on the payment side, something that historically we would not have looked at. But I think given circumstances and where we feel there's opportunities to play, something that we're certainly open minded to and we're evaluating.

Evaluating, yes. And if you think about it, like historically, you've done a little bit of M&A like and then broaden it out. How do you think about that kind of -- because starting payment, for example, or doing a little bit of payment, that's kind of a big effort and a lot of expertise.

Let me take that one. I would just say for -- whenever we look at where we want to be partner-centric or we want to do something ourselves, I think there's 2 things that have to stay true. Number one, we are and will remain a partner-first company. We by design, by ethos, the way we think, it maps to our ICP. It's also a financial requirement because we are smaller and we're not -- we're never going to be able to reach the scale that we're going to out-innovate Google or some of these others, you partner with them and market with them. So I think as we look at our product suite, we're always going to be making sure that whatever we're doing gives customers freedom of choice. But where there are opportunities to do that in a way that we remain providing choice, but also deepening our relationship with customers that makes us more sticky as a partner, not just as a product, I think that's a good thing, and we'll continue to look at that. With respect to M&A, a lot -- I would say 1 year, 1.5 years from now, we'll probably be in a better position to be potentially have a wider aperture on what we would want to do with M&A. We need to get all of our sales organizations into one CRM. We need to get everybody into one instance from a marketing automation software point of view. We need to get to a point where we have the branding strategy put together where you can ingest kind of tuck-in acquisitions that can broaden the sellable portfolio. And in the meantime, we're still focused on delevering. I mean, so I think based on where we're trading from a share price perspective, not really interested in issuing equity to do that type of thing. We still are focused on delevering. And to be very frank about it right now, what we're really focused on is execution. There's a lot of things we're trying to get fixed that we need to get fixed. We're doing them all, and we're doing them all with urgency. We're trying to be transparent with investors about what we're tackling and why. My opinion, now is not the time for us to be I'm looking at inorganic growth. Let's talk about it in a year once we get the back office set up in order to be able to ingest that and then get ourselves in a position where we can be a lot more -- looking a lot more broadly at that.

Makes a lot more sense. I mean the other thing that could potentially help, obviously, and is like what's the economy doing? A quick question there, like so how is, for example, Cyber Monday, et cetera, like how was the last holiday season for you guys?

It was great. I mean, year-over-year, I think, against the competition, certainly skewed better. But I think that's one indicator. I don't look at that as the barometer of what's to come in next year, back to the kind of the platform comment I made earlier, I don't think that's going to determine how many folks are going to replatform or not. I think it's great that folks are spending money. I don't view it as the end-all optic of where. I don't know if you have anything to add....

Yes, I'd just say we've said a lot. There's kind of 2 demand signals that we look at in thinking about future spending levels or revenue growth. One of it, obviously, is just consumer spending, consumer confidence. That's a very good long-term indicator. What we've seen so far through the holiday period through Cyber 5 was good. I think it was a really, really good start. The second indicator from my perspective is actually, in some ways, more important, and that is just what does the business investment climate look like? Like our other CFOs like myself leaning in on replatforming and modernization? If yes, then I think that's actually a better leading indicator. And I'd say for the past couple of years, it's been okay, but I'd say the consumer has been more resilient than the CFO putting money in. It's certainly how I've been behaving as well. So I'd say I would describe us as cautiously optimistic. But given the amount of change that we're metabolizing next year, I mean we're really excited. That's why we're leaning in to invest even as we take cost out. But we're going to be cautious and prudent. 5 days doesn't a trend make, but it's certainly a good signal.

Yes, yes. Okay. Perfect. That makes sense. And you talked already about like kind of being more prudent, et cetera. Like talk a little bit about your journey on controlling the operation, controlling the cost. Where are we on that journey? And then as a follow-on question, what's the implications then for the business? Because like there's like the savings and then you can start the business crazy or they're saving to kind of run better? Like talk about that.

Great question. We went into this year saying we're aiming for margin expansion in the mid-single digits. Based on our latest call, I think we're on track for a 700 basis point expansion on a full year basis. We did that despite the fact we've been very open with the market about the fact that we didn't get to the top line growth goals that we wanted to get to this year. So we kind of got where we wanted to be and better, the hardest way possible. It's a lot easier when you got an 80% gross margin business to top line your way to a better bottom line. That's not how we're operating. We're operating with discipline to say we're going to do the hard part really well. And when we get growth where the business should be, then I think we can see an outsized improvement in profit margins. Going into next year, we've said we're aiming for another mid-single-digit expansion in margins. I don't know if it will be quite as high as it was this year because of some of the systems changes that we're talking about and consolidating CRMs and a lot of those things. I would rather accelerate that initiative and get us fully not just into the go-to-market model with the people and the leaders but also in the systems, given a choice between leaning in a little bit there versus not, I'd rather lean in a little bit there, even if it means it's truly mid versus leaning towards upper, we'll see when we get into next year. What was your follow-up questions?

And so if you think about it, like where are we on that? Like you changed a lot of things, but like how impactful was the business from a kind of growth go-to-market perspective that way?

Yes. What I would add then on that is I think a fundamental question that we talk about a lot is how can we continue to expand margins while not starving the business based on the fact that we see tremendous opportunity for top line growth. If we were growing at the rate that we're growing, while looking at the way we're running and feeling like it's best-in-class running efficiently, then maybe we wouldn't be leaning in like we are. But I mean for every dollar that we took out in our restructuring, $0.50 we're taking to profit and cash, the other $0.50 we're actually moving internally to increase quota-carrying capacity. And so I would say we're really trying to strike a balance here of big change with urgency quickly on what we can do on the go-to-market side because we think we can run a lot more efficiently, and we should be and can be growing much faster than we are. And I think if you just look at what we've seen over the last 2 years from a sales and marketing efficiency basis, it's just not acceptable. Given the amount of dollars that we've been putting in, we haven't been seeing the growth that we need to see. And I could give you 25 reasons why that's true, all of which we're trying to address almost all at the same time. And so I think the best that we can do is just to be very transparent with investors about what we're doing, try to set really clear expectations of what we think that means for next year. Even when we don't even have an internal accrued financial plan, we're trying to lean in on the communication side and be transparent about that. But we think there's huge opportunity to grow, but we need to do it in a more efficient way to happen.

I mean how does it feel for you for Travis as someone with a fresh pair of eyes coming in there looking at the sales organization?

We've been in our own way, which is very opportunistic for me. I mean if it was outside influences, we didn't have control over, I think that'd be more daunting. I think everything well intended. But I think back to the M&A comment Daniel made earlier, M&A, 1 plus 1 rarely equals 3. You're lucky if it equals 1.5. And I think the challenge in that is not so much buying things, it's ingesting them. And to me, that was a material thing that needed to be done. It's been 3 years since we bought Feedonomics. I think going forward, if we were to inorganically try to grow by buying, I think we've got a much better framework now by which to ingest it. I think for us, this is just self-inflicted, unintentional inefficiency. I mean, to Daniel's point on the marketing side, I mean, accountability is the core theme internally and externally, accountability to our shareholders, accountability to the rest of the organization, starting with senior leadership. And I think some of the transformation we've gone through has really created our own internal operational agility where I don't feel like we're running the business in arrears anymore, meaning we're waiting to the end of the quarter to understand that our marketing efforts weren't terribly efficient, right? We're set up now to be able to go do things very quickly and pivot if need be or double or triple down if need be. And I think that's a pretty exciting place to be in such a short period of time.

And we could say the same about so many functions internally. Naming one, I could name 8. I can name 10, But it doesn't matter. I mean...

Yes. I mean on the other hand for you must be exciting because like it's -- I mean I actually want to start it after at the very beginning. It does feel as fixable. This is not work of science.

It's all upside. I mean it's the most appealing sort of scenario for me. This is a sprain, not a compound fracture. Yes, it needs to be treated. And yes, it starts with acknowledging that it's sprained in the first place. And I think that was part of the challenge. I think it was what we...

Go-to-market, the product...

Correct. The go-to-market. Just admit that it hasn't been effective until you admit that there's a challenge, it's hard to go create the solution. And I think there's been a giant sense of relief, I think, organizationally and appreciation not only with the integration of the acquired entities, but having everything kind of synthesized and in a framework that everybody understands, anchoring everything across those 3 offerings. As basic as that sounds, B2B, B2C and small business, we've got a tip of the spear across each one of those. That's also serving as our prioritization framework internally. So as it relates to marketing, product and engineering, the offering group is the one determining what it is, is being prioritized, whereas before, without going down a rabbit hole, you might have had 8 different inputs influencing product at any given time. It just -- and it lended itself to just inefficiency by definition. So I think the unlock that everybody made on the same page is going to be. [indiscernible] if nothing else, but certainly nothing but upside.

I mean it's also a good closing statement. Hey, that was -- thanks for joining us. That was really insightful, and I'm looking forward to the progress. Thank you.

Thank you.