Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Michael Meltz – JP Morgan.
Michael Meltz – JP Morgan
I think I have three questions, I appreciate everything you said there during the prepared script, presumably the macro environment is better today than three months ago and certainly six months ago. Can you just walk through a little bit more as to when you sense things were weakening? I don’t know if it is different in risk management versus sales and marketing, I just want to understand why the guidance cut is coming now? Then, I have two follow ups.
Steven W. Alesio
Why don’t you give us the two follow ups and then we’ll try and piece them together if they connect.
Michael Meltz – JP Morgan
One would be just to Sara’s point, what do you actually expect sales and marketing to decline in 2009?
Steven W. Alesio
Let me touch on the first one is what I took away Michael what’s kind of the macroeconomic context, how do we see that relating to the second half of 2009? So, I’m going to touch on that and Sara will touch on the specifics of sales and marketing but do I have the first question correct?
Michael Meltz – JP Morgan
Yes.
Steven W. Alesio
I think what we’ve said, I’m going to put international aside because that business is doing very well as we described so I think your question is really relative to North America. In the context of North America I think what we’ve said is the expectations that we see relative to customer behaviors is just worse than we believe almost three to four months ago now and that has all to do with them slowing down relative to transactional behavior and less activity on the sales and marketing side.
That specific customer behavior, as much as we can see it going in to the back half of the year, still looks like it is with us. We do expect when the economy turns around, and again, we have to measure that by when our customer behavior turns around that we will benefit from that with transactions and RMS improving, sales and marketing improving but that will be a function of us seeing our customers’ behavior change. At this moment, we don’t see that yet as we look in to the back half.
The flip side of that is we’re trying to stay in control of what we can and what you’ve heard from us is we’re focused on improving our value proposition, we’re focused on the efficiency of how do we go to market. Those are the things that we’re trying to stay in control of so that when our customer behavior changes, we will benefit from that. That’s my response to your first question. Is that sufficient?
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