Upland Software, Inc. (NASDAQ:UPLD) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So really across the board in terms of marketing demand gen, in terms of product marketing and sales enablement, in terms of adding a new inside sales capacity, in terms of radically expanding our SDR capacity. And in terms of providing our field sales force with a full complement of tools and training and collateral that they need to successfully execute. It’s really a completely different organization. Now in addition to that, the third leg of our growth plan is really centered around our Indian COE, Center of Excellence for development. And while we will continue to have some portion of our product development onshore, we are expanding aggressively the size of our India COE. And this enables us to not only we believe expand margins through time, but also increase our product investment.

So you’ll see the pace of our product, investment and product innovation in those — particularly in those growth products increase here as we move through the end of this year and into next year. So let me stop there as a kind of summary overview and I’d be happy to take any other questions from me on that topic.

Jeff Van Rhee: Yeah. No that’s great. Very helpful. Thanks, Jack. And then one other, obviously with roughly the 15 core growth products about three-fourth of revenue and then the other products that make up the 25% altogether kind of the go-forward suite excluding the sunset products. In terms of the retention on those products, obviously there’s the growth factor but also the retention vector. How is retention trending? And have there been any changes in terms of how you’re approaching or attacking the retention issue?

Jack McDonald: So retention has been tracking in accordance with plan. So the target remains what it was, which is we focus on an NDRR KPI that we report publicly on an annual basis. And so the target is to get to 95% or better for this year as reported as of December 31. And so I would say at this point Jeff no significant changes. Now in terms of the groundwork that we are laying in to improve retention rates through time there are a number of significant initiatives underway. One of them of course is the — on the development side and on the product management side, and so part of the process of better positioning our products to compete in the market to drive more organic growth. And by the way I would say to you that what’s been heartening as we’ve gone through this is the strength of a number of our products.

And really we just need to do a better job of putting them in the marketplace and positioning them appropriately. But part of the visibility that we have as a result of that process on competitive intelligence I think is leading to some targeted investments in product innovation that we think are going to drive higher retention through time. Secondly, on the customer success side we have promoted a new customer success leader. We have built out a centralized customer success shared service organization that we did not have previously. We have adopted a new approach to the customer success function and will be adopting in the second half of the year a new customer success software platform. Again with the goal to get our exceptional CSMs we have really a great team of CSMs but to enable them to add to their great customer care responsibilities a more strategic mindset on both monitoring customer health and also being able to engage with a longer-term view on increasing retention rates.