ZoomInfo Technologies Inc. (GTM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. I think we can get started here. So my name is Chris Quintero. I'm one of the software analysts here at Morgan Stanley. Stepping here from my colleague, Elizabeth Porter. I'm really excited to be joined here by Graham O'Brien, CFO of ZoomInfo. Thanks for being here, Graham.

Chris. Great to be back.

So for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative.

So Graham, maybe to kick things off, for investors that are a bit newer to the ZoomInfo story, could you give us an overview of your business, what you guys do, the key products, who your customers are?

Yes. ZoomInfo provides data, software and AI solutions to go-to-market professionals. So think like sales reps, account executives, account managers, SDRs, marketing professionals, data practitioners, anyone who sells products and services to other businesses. So our data foundation begins with 100 million companies, 500 million business professionals and then billions of signals that are layered on top of that proprietary data asset that alerts these go-to-market professionals as to what their next best customer might look like, when to engage with that next best customer, how to manage and grow their existing customer base and equips them with that context to go take those GTM actions.

Got it. Let's just jump right into AI. It's the hot topic. Clearly, a lot of investors think that software is a displacement risk from large language models, AI start-ups. So -- from your perspective, can you elaborate what you view as the core competitive moat for ZoomInfo?

Yes. I think AI is changing the way that people do their day-to-day work, and it's changing the way that software is built. Our competitive moat really stems from our proprietary data asset. You can think about that as largely coming from our contributory networks. We have 2 primary contributory networks. One is our customer contributory network where our customers will opt in to share business data with us. We're able to cleanse and enrich that data and refer to it back into our data asset. And then we have our community contributory network, which is where noncustomers come in and for access to a limited version of ZoomInfo, they contribute their business data as well. Those multiple sources are then complemented with kind of bespoke partnerships that we have with upstream data providers. And then those multiple sources combined to essentially corroborate all of those data points, and we use our kind of back-end intelligence engine to kind of to create that data asset at scale.

Got it. Okay. So it's the data you guys have built from both the customer angle that contributes, but then also the larger community that also contribute and some of the data enrichment you do with some of these upstream partnerships. On the opportunity side, like why do you all think ZoomInfo is well positioned to bring AI capabilities to your customers?

Yes. I think that we see that we have the right to win to be the de facto go-to-market provider for essentially our -- anyone who sells to other businesses. And whether that's essentially on the application end with the Copilot Workspace for orchestration use cases with the Go-To-Market Studio, which we're broadly bringing to market right now in Q1 or essentially as the GTM context layer with our operations business. Our operations business is our fastest-growing business at scale. It's over $200 million of ARR. It's not a seat-based model, essentially a consumption and data access model. And we essentially have this full spectrum of solutions where we can show up and be mission-critical to however companies want to go to market.

Got it. You all described GTM Studio as one of the most innovative solutions you all have built at ZoomInfo. Help us understand what that product exactly is and how differentiated it is in the marketplace.

Yes. You could think of Go-To-Market Studio as almost a control tower for a RevOps leader or a go-to-market strategy leader to take ZoomInfo's data, to take different data from their first-party data footprint, so things like CRM data, marketing and engagement data, data that live in Snowflake or other data silos, bring all of that in and holistically marry it together in one interface and then enrich it using our AI to create talking points to rank and score row by row and design whether it's intelligent campaigns or territory planning and then activate and push that out to the front lines in the ZoomInfo Copilot or a ZoomInfo Workspace.

Got it. So you're pulling all this data from multiple sources, put it in one place so that your users can also use that to take intelligent actions on the go-to-market front.

Yes.

Let's talk about another product there, GTM Workspace. You launched that in October 2025. How does that product fit into the broader portfolio? And what's your vision for that product ultimately with your customers?

Yes. GTM Workspace has been the next evolution of ZoomInfo Copilot. It's highly synchronistic to GTM Studio. So they integrate very tightly. And GTM Workspace is effectively incrementally designed to help account executive and account manager use cases. So these are reps that traditionally are pivoting from different contexts multiple times a day, tab to tab, screen to screen. Go-To-Market Workspace is a more flexible one-stop shop for them to do all of their go-to-market work in one place, have effectively next best action served up and then write all of that back to systems of record.

Got it. You all have just started to kind of roll out Studio Workspace with a new platform fee plus some prepaid AI actions credit models. I know it's still early in the broad monetization of these products, but how should investors think about the monetization potential or the revenue potential longer term?

Yes, we see upside in the monetization and revenue potential long term. I think our guiding principles as we've rolled out these newer pricing models that have an AI action consumption side to them is, one, make it simple for the customer to understand; and two, make it so that we are driving adoption quicker and we can actually learn earlier on what those trends look like without artificial barriers. And I'm really excited about our -- the progress we've made diversifying our pricing model over the last few years. Around 2022, we were probably at the peak of the seat contribution into our revenue base. And over that period with operations growing so fast with our opportunity in Go-To-Market Studio, our opportunity with our API products, with our MCP plug-ins, we have an opportunity to progressively continue to blend and diversify the pricing model.

Got it. How are you guys thinking about the adoption? What are you seeing right now in terms of adoption from customers from these products? And any expectations like where that could be a year or 2 years from now?

Yes. It's really going to be focused on what do the sequential consumption or engagement or usage trends look like. So the history of Studio is similar to Workspace as we were building it with customers, a set of early access customers in Q2 and Q3 last year. We kind of rolled it out to a select group of customers in Q4 on paid proof of concepts, and now we're more broadly taking it to market in Q1. So the way we're going to probably track this is looking at those consumption trends of those AI action credits as inventory data credits, cohort that and understand what those curves look like over time.

Got it. As you introduce more of these like consumption-based credits into the model here with customers, how do you think about the education part of that, the governance structures, the dashboard you all might have built to help those customers kind of not be surprised by a bill getting showed up at month end and realizing your credits have gone through the roof.

Yes. I mean this comes back to being a good partner. We're learning what these trends look like, too. And so I think what that giving them the comfort that, hey, we're going to give you this feeling or a flexible feeling. And then if you -- one rep burns through a lot of this or you use more than expected, that we will -- you're not going to get -- send a bill to true all this up that first time. We will work with you to make sure that you can kind of get the value that you're seeking to get, use all the consumption you want and make sure that you're getting a fair price for it.

Yes. You mentioned like 2022, that peak kind of like seat-based exposure. Any color you can provide on kind of where you are today and where you think about that mix shifting over the next 2 to 3 years?

Yes, it's significantly lower today than where it was in 2022. And I do think with the continued growth of the operations business, Go-To-Market Studio will be part of that operations business, really like Go-To-Market Studio, you work backwards to that data foundation. None of that is really seat-based. So adding that as a complementary functionality in operations. We have an opportunity to continue to grow that solidly in the 20s year-over-year. And with kind of more and more consumption opportunities, whether it's plugging in MCP into cloud or our API products, we have an opportunity to show up to be the full spectrum solution for folks who are doing Go-To-Market. So that's data foundation with operations, orchestration with Go-To-Market Studio and then activation on the front lines with a Copilot or Workspace or we can plug in where they want us. And I think that, that gives us an opportunity to really blend the model here and provide kind of promising economics going forward.

Yes. How do you all maintain pricing power as you go through this transition, right? Like obviously, we've seen some seat compression in the industry more broadly. So curious how you think about that kind of netting equation, seats coming down, credit coming up. What's the kind of net impact of that?

Yes, it's a balance. I think we've -- with our margins, we have options on that front, and we can kind of dial up acquisition or engagement or adoption or flex more to pricing. But I do think this is like we are still in this kind of experimental phase where we want customers to accelerate adoption. And we are essentially going to learn what pricing models work best, but we also want to move fast. So I'm happy to take some risk on the front end from a processing or cost perspective to get our customers further and deeper into ZoomInfo's products.

Yes. Is that the kind of gross margin coming down and wanting to invest in growth and have them adopt those?

Yes. With Go-To-Market Studio, with Workspace, with some of these more consumption style products, we will bear some processing costs that we have been historically borne. And we expect that, that could drive a point or two of gross margin pressure in 2026 and beyond. We continue to be confident that we can more than offset that with the efficiencies that we've already realized in sales and marketing and G&A, and then we still have some opportunities to continue to be more efficient in those areas of the business.

Yes. I wanted to ask about the expansion from SDRs into those AEs, AMs. What was the kind of traction you saw with those extended personas last year? And how do you think about that momentum continuing into this year? And does that require a different go-to-market strategy at all from you?

Yes. I think the go-to-market strategy is already in place. But if you think of kind of our legacy SalesOS product, it was very focused on SDR and prospecting use cases. We have a lot of customers and had a lot of customers where we sold into the SDR orgs, but we didn't penetrate into the account management and account executive population. So we have this kind of existing population that are already customers that we have -- we can go and kind of sell those seats with these newer products. If I think about what an SDR does in a given day versus what like an enterprise account manager does, it's very different, right? A SDR has got a very regimented high velocity day that is served up from a prospect, go outreach, rinse and repeat. For an account manager, if you think about like what is their default tech stack, it kind of varies. Like if you're thinking about they're maybe doing -- they have an account listing workbook and then they might have some version of a dialer, but it's very disparate. And we designed Copilot and more so with Workspace to take all of that very disparate work and put it in one place.

Got it. I want to go back to the data mode here. On the more kind of like positive side, how are you all leveraging large language models, AI to kind of further enrich that data model and compound that advantage for you all?

Yes. I mean AI is good at tagging and categorizing data. It's not most of our -- the data and our asset is not publicly available and AI is not great at originating data. And this is where our moat continues to be strong and expand and the scale that we have begets scale. And it really comes back to that kind of organic synthesis of the contributory networks, the often exclusive agreements with bespoke data providers and then our intelligence engine on the back end, bringing it all together.

Let's talk a little bit about competition. Maybe first on the upmarket enterprise side of things. You guys said you had record win backs in 2025 in that segment. So -- how is the competitive landscape evolved in the enterprise side of things? And what are you ensuring that you continue to drive measurable gains at the high end of the market?

Yes. We don't see a lot of direct competition in the upmarket business, especially in the enterprise. Occasionally, we'll see a company data provider or a legacy company data provider. There's a few marketing ABM solutions. But a lot of times, we're either selling someone a go-to-market solution for the first time or we've just been in with that customer for a long time, and we're expanding the use case. So the competitive environment has not changed significantly upmarket. And then downmarket, especially at the lower end of downmarket, and we define downmarket as fewer than 100 employees at the customer. We see half a dozen or a dozen lower cost, lower quality providers. That's almost always existed in one form or the other downmarket. With the downmarket business, we continue to focus on making it smaller and healthier. We value that business. They are valuable contributors to our contributory data network. But we are going to continue to qualify the business that we let into our revenue population at a rigorous level down there.

Yes. And how are you guys thinking about the low-end customers that you do have today? Like are you still trying to maintain those or limit the kind of churn down there?

Yes. I think we want to make it as frictionless as possible for those customers to come in and use ZoomInfo at a fair price point. I do think that the kind of retention outcomes are structurally challenged for a lot of those smaller customers regardless of vendor. So we want them to be ZoomInfo customers. We want them to get value from ZoomInfo, but we're not going to rely on a lot of revenue contribution to our longer-term growth plans.

Got it. Let's talk a little bit about the guidance. You exited 2025 ahead of guidance on both revenue and operating income. As you enter 2026, how would you describe the kind of health of the business, the demand backdrop? And what are the biggest drivers -- what are the biggest drivers of your outperformance in '25?

Yes. The biggest driver of the outperformance in 2025 was the growth of the upmarket or the acceleration of growth in the upmarket business. The upmarket business is now 74% of our total mix. That was up 4 points alone in 2025 and almost 10 points over the last 2 years. It's growing 6%. It was growing 2% at that time a year ago. And it's more profitable than the downmarket business by a wide margin. The downmarket business is 26% of our total mix, and it's declining 10% year-over-year.

Got it. NRR, that also improved meaningfully in 2025. Upmarket, that was above 100%. What drove that improvement? Was it the mix, the gross retention piece, the expansion? And ultimately, what are you embedding in terms of expansion rate for 2026 guidance?

Yes. Our overall net revenue retention was 90% in 2025. The upmarket business in period, the last few quarters was back at or above 100%, and that was an improvement. So we were improving within the segment. We have better gross retention, and we had -- did a good job with the expansion opportunities as well. Downmarket, retention got a little bit better as we started going through renewal cycles with customers that have been qualified at a more rigorous level. As we look forward, I don't -- I'm always hesitant to kind of call or rely on improvement downmarket. But I think the next step in our growth phase upmarket will be how do we bridge from 100% net retention right now to closer to 105%. I think that comes from stickier, deeper products and kind of the growth retention benefit that we get from that and then also bringing Go-To-Market Studio and Workspace and some of our consumption products to market here in 2026 and getting that expansion opportunity.

Yes. You all surpassed your expectations on the kind of mix between upmarket and downmarket this past year. So how do you think about that longer term? Where do you think you can ultimately get to from that mix perspective?

Yes. The -- when I -- we first started really focusing on this mix shift, the idea was upmarket healthier, much more profitable, returning to growth, downmarket, we're going to deliberately make it smaller, and we're not going to rely on it for the longer-term growth of the business. Back then, it was closer to 70-30 mix, and we laid out an initial estimate that maybe we get to 75-25 over 2 or 3 years and to 80-20 over 4 or 5 years. We're almost at 75-25, 1.5 years into that. So I feel really good about getting to an 80-20 mix potentially by the end of 2027. If you do that and you've got an upmarket business that's growing high single digits or low double digits at 80%. You've got a downmarket business that is -- maybe it's 0%, maybe it's down negative 5% or so, but you've got a much kind of healthier business in aggregate and the downmarket business becomes less dilutive to overall growth and overall profitability.

Let's talk a little bit about new logo. -- especially in the enterprise side of things, like are land sizes increasing for you all? And what are you seeing in terms of the repositioning of the business and the win rates you're ultimately able to get now?

Yes. We really -- we resegmented our new business account executive organization about, I think, 1.5 years or 2 years ago. So that meant taking account executives and forcing them into selling to only enterprise customers, training them on that, going and getting enterprise-grade talent. And what that looked like logistically for about a year there was we were okay with longer sales cycles. We wanted to get -- build relationships with the buying committee at these larger customers. Generally, that would lead to a better initial ASP and then usually a path, whether it's 3 months or 6 months or 12 months to expand their investment with us. I think you can see the kind of the fruit of this in our $100,000 cohort. So these are customers who spends at least $100,000 with us annually. We have 1,921 of these customers as of Q4. That's almost back to record highs. And we continue to grow that through net kind of initial sale logo acquisition. So they come in and their initial spend level is $100,000 or more. We continue to have success upselling customers from $50,000 to $150,000. We've seen less downsell in that cohort, which is a really great sign and that we're not seeing as many customers drop from spending $150,000 down to $50,000. And we generally don't see that many customers totally churn if they're a 6-figure customer. So that continues to remain very low. I think we'll continue to have success growing the logos in that cohort. But I do think the lion's share of the ACV or the growth in that cohort is going to start to come from customers that are already spending $100,000 or more spending more. That's where we've seen really promising growth where we've got 1 or 2 departments in an org spending $200,000 in aggregate, and we get the full company or other leaders in the company to come together under an ELA, they combine budgets, and we do a good job getting kind of that longer-term investment with them, and we get a lot more ACV from someone who's already spending 6 figures.

Yes. So those customers that already had a pretty big ZoomInfo presence just kind of tripling down on you all [indiscernible].

Generally, yes, the more they're investing, in many cases, the more value that they see, and that's a great opportunity for us to go in. And effectively, if we're doing an ELA, we can kind of clear out some of the red tape of what they're using and where and give them access -- less restrictive access to our full product suite.

For the 2026 revenue guidance, what are you all embedding in terms of the assumptions there in terms of downmarket impact, macro, some of the migrations you all have? How do you think about the assumptions baked in there?

Yes. I think upmarket kind of in the guidance stays the same and maybe gets a little bit worse and downmarket gets worse. I think the assumption is the macro is consistent with where it was in 2025.

You all delivered 36% adjusted operating margin in '25, guiding to 37% in '26, while you're still getting -- absorbing some of that gross margin impact that we talked about earlier. How do you think about the ability to kind of invest for growth, protecting those margins? Is this kind of the kind of temporary margin profile we should kind of think about in longer term, back to kind of greater margin expansion?

Yes. I think we're on a path to continue to improve margins and 2025 was kind of the first step on that path. Our guidance for 2026 is almost a point better than 2025. And if you look at it kind of function by function in the financial statements, we've talked about cost of service maybe coming up some and driving gross margin down. In R&D, we are already smaller than we were historically a few years ago. I'd characterize us as having kind of a smaller but more productive team. A lot of that's coming from reliance on AI coding tools and essentially more talent density. So I think R&D is effectively for fully loaded for the products that we are built or are building. There's no real incremental investment needed there. And then in sales and marketing, sales and marketing as we move upmarket, we have an opportunity to continue to get more efficient there with the upmarket LTV to CAC being significantly better than the downmarket LTV to CAC. That transition generally means lower sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue over time. And then in G&A, I think we've been pretty forward on the curve of adopting AI to automate or eliminate manual tasks. I think we've done a good job of that in finance, in HR, in legal, in IT, and I continue to see opportunity to do that in '26 and beyond.

I know he's not here, but Henry got awarded a new compensation plan pretty recently. So maybe talk about it through the lens of the executive team. Like what are you all -- what are your specific milestones that you're most focused on in achieving over the next 3-plus years?

Yes. I think that, that grant really highlights the continuing push to align executive compensation with shareholder outcomes. So we're very, very focused on driving free cash flow per share growth. And I think that, that grants shares evidence of what we think the long-term kind of milestones of this company could be.

Got it. Strategically, within the next 2 to 3 years as well as 2026, like what do you view as your key most important priorities? What are you most focused on?

Yes. I think what we're seeing is that the surface area of where go-to-market professionals and companies do go-to-market work is expanding. And we are uniquely positioned with our full spectrum solution, but most specifically our data -- our proprietary data assets to be that go-to-market context or tool provider to any company out there that sells to other businesses and going out and capturing that opportunity in a diversified way is like a really promising opportunity for us. And I think that's what we are hyper focused on.

Yes. Let's go back to capital allocation. How do you think about that between share buybacks, M&A, investing in growth of the business?

Yes. I'll start with buybacks. Generally, we've been allocating the majority of our free cash flow to buybacks. We continue to view a share of ZoomInfo as disconnected from what we think the intrinsic value of the shares of ZoomInfo should be. So we generate around $400 million of free cash flow per year. We have $1.2 billion remaining on our buyback authorization. The Board approved a $1 billion incremental on top of the $200 million that existed last quarter. So we were pleased to see that. And that gives me options on how we want to allocate capital going forward. I'm still going to take a risk-adjusted view on this. We talk -- we monitor this on a pretty frequent basis. When we look at M&A opportunities, we look at opportunities to pay down debt. On the M&A front, we've been very successful with doing small things. We've done several acqui-hires over the last few years where we can go and hire a founder, a couple of founders who built something really compelling, where we don't have to do much capital outlay and they're just -- they come on as an employee and we accelerate something on our road map. But we'll continue to monitor the M&A landscape out there. I think that -- and I find data opportunities and kind of early AI feature opportunities pretty interesting.

All right. Before I open it up to questions here from the audience, as you reflect back on 2025, what were some of the key lessons you learned on what worked well? And what are some areas that you're still looking to improve on?

Yes. I think the progress building products in 2025 is really promising. I think we're excited to take those products to market in 2026. I was pleased with the improvement in the upmarket growth that we saw in 2026, 4 points of improvement from 2 to 6. We continue to see SEO disruption in our -- primarily in our downmarket business. That means we have less inbound traffic to go sell on the new business front and some of them on the upsell front. And I wish that would have gone better. I think we've done a good job of trying to identify strategic fixes there, but we're not going to realize the benefit of those until at least the back half of this year.

Any questions from the audience?

You mentioned a little bit on the gross margin impact of AI. Just maybe a little bit more color or flavor on sort of expenses that you're incurring that you weren't incurring in the past to elaborate on that a bit.

Yes. We're introducing this concept of AI action credits where folks are actually performing or using AI to do go-to-market work. So whether that's enriching a campaign list or writing an e-mail, we are performing that task on their behalf. That means we actually have an AI processing cost, and we're effectively passing that cost back through with the margin. But that is -- that margin, depending on what we choose for that margin, depending on the action and kind of the cost of each task means that we actually -- historically, we've had closer to 90% adjusted gross margins. With those specific actions, we're going to have lower gross -- lower gross margins. So as that potentially ramps, it puts pressure on the overall number.

[indiscernible].

I mean, I think the mid-80s is kind of where like I'd say, midterm. I do think that more gross margin pressure potentially comes with gross profit upside. So I'm not going to restrict it if we've got a lot of revenue opportunity there.

Anyone else? All right. Let's talk about operations and Data as a Service that benefit a lot from enterprises building their own AI agents. So curious like where was that growth from? Was it mostly expansion within existing customers? Or is it more on the new logo side? And how durable do you think that growth can be for ZoomInfo as you continue to get more embedded in some of these workflows?

Yes. We're really excited -- continue to be very excited about the growth of the operations business. This is a place where we see increasing demand from customers that are looking for actionable AI data and kind of that bedrock for their AI GTM work. The -- most of the growth there doesn't come from new customer acquisition yet. A lot of that ACV in there actually comes from probably a smaller logo population than you would expect, which is great. That means once someone buys operations, they tend to buy more and more features or more and more data sets. or consume it at increasing levels. So what that means is within our existing logo population, I should mention, it's almost exclusively in upmarket population, that we have a lot of logos that are ZoomInfo customers upmarket that aren't using operations yet. That's a great kind of not frictionless, but low friction customer acquisition or product customer acquisition opportunity for us as we go forward. Operations is over $200 million of ARR. It's growing solidly in the 20s. It's not seat-based. It's a consumption and data access model, and it's highly profitable. It's got a profitability profile that's very similar to our, if not better, than our upmarket business in aggregate.

I want to go back to Copilot. That ACV more than doubled in 2025, about 20% of overall total ACV now. So -- what does Copilot enable that the legacy platform couldn't? And how should we think about the continued trajectory of these upgrades?

Yes. Really happy with the progress on Copilot, crossing well over 20% of our ACV, doubling in total ACV in the year. We're selling a lot of new business on Copilot. We're migrating a lot of the existing customer base on to Copilot. And Copilot is much more focused on essentially AI-powered actions and workflows for those AM and AE use cases. The -- one of the promising metrics we saw in Copilot is that for customers that came in new to ZoomInfo on Copilot, their renewal outcomes on that first year renewal were mid-single digits better than our legacy products.

And how do you guys think about the uplift as you guys migrate some of these customers over?

Yes. I think we'll continue to see some uplift there. It kind of depends on the size and the timing of the customer, but we still have -- I kind of view this as a 3-year migration story that started 1.5 years ago. And whether it's Copilot or Workspace or different kind of feature or tiers within there, we have a lot of opportunity to continue pushing some of the legacy users into our AI-powered activation products.

Got it. Maybe last question here. You've integrated ZoomInfo data into environments like cloud, MCP. You've also deepened CRM integrations. So how do you think about balancing that kind of ubiquitous distribution, getting the product out into more and more people versus like your pricing power?

Yes. I think I'm going to lean -- we're going to lean more into the distribution and try to get more and more customers using ZoomInfo in a variety of ways.

Awesome. Well, I think we can end it there. Thanks so much, Graham.

Thanks, Chris.