As you know, NCVI and CV growth are a function of the combination of new business and retention. And as we talked about in our prepared remarks and also in response to Jeff’s question, there’s still a lot of pressure and Gene alluded to this as well. Still a lot of pressure on retention in the small tech vendor part of the market. And we still have a lot of renewals that haven’t been touched or coming renewals that haven’t been touched since the tech sector really started to recalibrate, call it third, fourth quarter of 2022. So still a little bit of retention pressure. However, new business, we definitely view as a leading indicator. Again, that’s part of what gives us confidence to say that we expect CV to bottom during 2024 and start to reaccelerate during 2024 as well.
Toni Kaplan: Makes a lot of sense. And then just for a follow-up, I wanted to ask about headcount. The – I guess, what are your expectations for headcount growth in ’24? And just wanted to understand a little bit more about – it seems like headcount growth has been slowing the last two quarters to like below normal levels. I know there was a catch-up in sort of the prior year and earlier in ’23. So I guess, is the slower headcount sort of helping manage margin? Or is it, I guess, an indicator that there’s – I don’t think you’re saying there’s less opportunity, but just wanted to understand the sort of below normal headcount growth levels that we’re seeing now?
Gene Hall: So Toni, we look at it as there’s a very enormous market opportunity. We intend to capture that market opportunity over the next many years. Part of our core strategy to protect that opportunity is growing our headcount to capture it. But headcount growth is going to be faster or slower depending on the actual kind of selling capacity of the team we have. And right now, we believe we have a lot of selling capacity embedded actually in the capacity we have today. Over time, though, that’s going to grow as we grow our business.
Craig Safian: And as we mentioned during our prepared remarks, we’ve actually got dialed into our plan, combination GTS, GBS, quarter-bearing headcount growth of mid to high single digits. And as always, we’re prepared to go faster. As both Gene and I mentioned, we have recruitment capacity to go faster if we want to. And so we’ve got dialed in mid to high single-digit growth in GTS and GBS, quota-bearing head count, and we can go faster if we see that rebound coming faster as well.
Toni Kaplan: Terrific. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Heather Balsky with Bank of America. Your line is now open. Heather, your line is open. Please check your mute button.
Heather Balsky: Hi. I was muted. Sorry about that. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to go back to the renewals on the tech vendor side and just ask you, are there any – I mean, obviously, if companies are going under, there’s nothing you can control there. But what you can do on that front? And can you help us put in perspective how material the wave of renewals are? I know that something investors have been curious about.
Gene Hall: Again, if you look at the larger companies in the market, renewals are going kind of normally – it’s a little slower than usual because, again, they’re laying off tens of thousands of people. We expect that will change. There’s plenty of demand. Again, we expect global IT spending issue to grow by 7% to almost $5 trillion. So there’s plenty of demand there. We expect over time that will normalize. And so the real issue on retention is these very small tech vendors which are, over time, a great market for us, but there’s a shift going on now from what used to get funding through now. What does get funding is, as I mentioned, there’s a real focus on AI. And so those companies that are in less popular segments for funding these days can’t get funding and if they haven’t as successful commercially, they either get acquired or go out of business, in which case our retention affects our retention.
Craig Safian: And the other thing I’d add, Heather, just on the larger tech clients, typically, what we see is a combination of maybe modestly less growth than we would normally buy or normally see through renewal cycles or modest cuts reduction to spend, but they maintain a pretty significant Gartner presence always. And what we then do is make sure that we are there to win back that business and it actually does help drive the growth coming out of tougher macro environment. And that’s sort of what we’ve always seen in some macro environments, tech vendor or otherwise, where we’ll take some mix from a retention perspective, but stay embedded, still delivering huge value to our clients and then win back and grow that business over the long term.
Heather Balsky: And then just kind of asking another version of probably something you’ve already said and the same question, but you were talking about CV on the tech vendor side normalizing. Last quarter, you talked about normalizing over 12 to 18 months. Is that still your outlook based on what you saw in the fourth quarter, how are you thinking about that?
Gene Hall: So our long-term view on this segment of the business is unchanged. We believe it can grow in line with our medium-term objectives. We still believe that we are going to see reacceleration of this business over time. Whether it’s 9 to 15 months or 12 to 18 or 24, it will be in that range that we actually see that reacceleration. But we – the market here is still really strong. Our offerings still drive really huge value for our clients in this segment. And over the medium term, there’s no reason why this can’t get back to 12% to 16% growth, consistent with our medium-term objective for the strong [ph] business.
Heather Balsky: Got it. Thanks.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Seth Weber with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.
