FORRESTER RESEARCH, INC. (FORR) Business

Item 1. Business

General

Forrester Research, Inc. is a global independent research and advisory firm. We empower leaders in technology, customer experience, digital, marketing, sales, and product functions to accelerate growth through customer obsession. Forrester’s unique research and continuance guidance model helps executives and their teams achieve their initiatives and outcomes faster and with confidence.

Our common stock is listed on Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol "FORR".

Market Overview

We believe that market dynamics — from empowered customers and changing business-to-business buying behaviors to rapid advancements in AI — have fundamentally changed the business and technology landscape. These dynamics demand that leaders architect change rather than react to disruption.

In this era of continuous disruption, AI and public large language models ("LLMs") are increasingly positioned as decision support partners, despite lacking the accuracy, the human judgment, and the reliability needed to make confident business decisions. To win, serve, and retain customers in this environment, we believe that organizations and their leaders have an increasing need for trusted guidance and insights grounded in objective sources, and rigorous data and research analysis, to help them make confident decisions that put customer value first. We believe that Forrester is well positioned to address this need through its complementary combination of trusted human intelligence ("HI") and AI.

Forrester’s Strategy and Business Model

The foundation of our business model is our ability to help business and technology leaders and their teams tackle their most pressing priorities and drive growth through customer obsession. Forrester’s offerings are rooted in rigorous methodologies, extensive surveys, proprietary data, and trusted human insights. Our proprietary research, consulting, and events portfolio, combined with our generative AI capabilities, equip clients with trusted insights and advice to help them to go faster, to win, serve and retain customers, and to reduce risk and costs. This, in turn, creates a system to expand contract value (“CV”), which we view as our most significant business metric.

Generally speaking, we define CV products as those services that our clients use over a year’s time and that are renewable periodically, usually on an annual basis. Our CV products primarily consist of our subscription research products, while our non-CV businesses, consulting and events, play critical complementary roles in driving our CV growth.

With respect to our clients, multi-year CV product relationships enable us to help our clients formulate their vision for the future and then translate those plans into implementation and outcomes over time. For our investors, we believe that CV growth will result in predictable and profitable revenue streams.

Our business model is built on the premise that an increase in CV generates more cash which can then be invested in improving our go-to-market structure (activities including sales, product, and marketing) and creating CV products that clients renew year after year—repeating the cycle and driving the model forward. We refer to this model as our "CV growth engine" and to the difference in CV between two points in time as net contract value increase, or "NCVI."

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Our Products and Services

We strive to be an indispensable source that business and technology leaders and their teams across functions, including technology, customer experience, digital, marketing, sales, and product, worldwide turn to for ongoing guidance to plan and operate more effectively.

We deliver our products and services globally through three business segments – Research, Consulting and Events.

Research

For more than 40 years, Forrester has been providing objective, independent and data-driven research insights utilizing both qualitative and quantitative data. We adhere to rigorous, unbiased research methodologies that are transparent and publicly accessible to ensure consistent research quality across markets, technologies, and geographies.

Our primary subscription research service is Forrester Decisions. This portfolio of research services is designed to provide business and technology leaders with a proven path to growth through customer obsession. Key content available via online access includes:

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future trends, predictions, and market forecasts;

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deep consumer and business buyer data and insights;

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curated best practice models and tools to run business functions;

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operational and performance benchmarking data; and

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technology and service market landscapes and vendor evaluations.

Our research is available to clients through our proprietary generative AI tool, Forrester AI, to provide immediate, trusted guidance. Our research services also include on-going support from, and time with, Forrester analysts who provide guidance on how to apply Forrester research insights, best practices, tools, frameworks and data to advance key business initiatives.

Consulting

Forrester Consulting helps clients implement customer obsessed strategies that drive growth. Our consulting business includes consulting projects, content marketing, and advisory services.

Events

We host multiple events across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region throughout the year. Forrester Events are thoughtfully designed and curated experiences to provide clients with insights and actionable advice to achieve accelerated business growth. Forrester Events focus on business imperatives of significant interest to clients, including business-to-business marketing, sales and product leadership, customer experience, security and risk, and technology and innovation. One of the primary purposes of our Events business is to help drive our CV growth, and we have found that clients that have attended one of our events renew their contracts with us at higher rates compared to those that have not attended an event. Additionally, we have found that prospects that attend our events become clients at higher rates than those that do not attend events.

Sales and Marketing

We believe we have a strong alignment across our sales, marketing and product functions.

We sell our products and services through our direct sales force across North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region. Our sales organization is organized into groups based on industry, geography, and account potential. Our Hi-Tech groups focus on North American technology vendors, segmented into global, strategic, and mid-size companies, and our North American End User group focuses on companies in five industries, as well as federal, state and local U.S. government clients. Our European and Asia Pacific groups focus on both end user and vendor clients in their respective geographies. Our International Business Development group sells our products and services through independent sales representatives in select international locations. We also have teams focused on new business, revenue development, and event sales.

We employed 553 sales personnel as of December 31, 2025 compared to 580 sales personnel employed as of December 31, 2024.

We also sell select Research products directly online through our website.

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Our marketing activities are designed to elevate the Forrester brand, differentiate and promote Forrester’s products and services, improve the client experience, and drive growth. We achieve these outcomes by combining the value of reputation, demand generation, customer engagement, and sales and customer success enablement programs to deliver multichannel campaigns and high-quality digital experiences. Our customer success organization conducts post-sale engagement activities that are designed to align to client outcomes, accelerate time to value, and drive higher retention.

As of December 31, 2025, our products and services were delivered to more than 1,700 client companies. No single client company accounted for more than 3% of our 2025 revenues.

Pricing and Contracts

We report our revenue from client contracts in three categories of revenue: (1) research, (2) consulting, and (3) events. We classify revenue from subscriptions to, and licenses of, our research products and services as research revenue. We classify revenue from our consulting projects and standalone advisory services as consulting revenue. We classify revenue from tickets to, and sponsorships of, events as events revenue.

Contract pricing for annual subscription-based products is principally a function of the number of licensed users at the client. Pricing of contracts is a fixed fee for the consulting project or shorter-term advisory service. We periodically review and increase the list prices for our products and services.

We track contract value as a significant business indicator. Contract value is defined as the value attributable to all of our recurring research-related contracts. Contract value is calculated as the annualized value of all contracts in effect at a specific point in time, without regard to how much revenue has already been recognized. Contract value decreased 6% to $292.4 million at December 31, 2025 from $311.9 million at December 31, 2024.

Competition

We believe our focus on helping business and technology leaders use customer obsession to drive growth sets us apart from our competition. In addition, we believe we compete favorably due to:

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our ability to offer forward-looking research, tools and frameworks as well as hands-on guidance;

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our focus on providing teams within our clients' organizations with the confidence to execute effectively with end-to-end guidance, valuable knowledge, know-how, and a shared vocabulary;

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our use of rigorous research methodologies to offer objective insights; and

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our brand promise to be “on your side and by your side,” meaning that we strive to be obsessed about our clients' needs and priorities and aligned to their strategies.

Our principal direct competitors include other independent providers of research and advisory services, such as Gartner, as well as marketing agencies, general business consulting firms, and survey-based general market research firms. In addition, our indirect competitors include the internal planning and marketing staffs of our current and prospective clients, as well as other information providers such as electronic and print publishing companies. We also face competition from free sources of information available on the Internet, such as Google and artificial intelligence services (including LLMs). Our indirect competitors could choose to compete directly against us in the future. In addition, there are relatively few barriers to entry into certain segments of our market, and new competitors could readily seek to compete against us in one or more of these market segments. Increased competition could adversely affect our operating results through pricing pressure and loss of market share. There can be no assurance that we will be able to continue to compete successfully against existing or new competitors.

Intellectual Property

Our proprietary research, methodologies and other intellectual property play a significant role in the success of our business. We rely on a combination of copyright, trademark, trade secret, confidentiality, and other contractual provisions to protect our intellectual property. We actively monitor compliance by our employees, clients and third parties with our policies and agreements relating to confidentiality, ownership, and the use and protection of Forrester’s intellectual property.

Employees

Attracting, retaining, and developing the best and brightest talent around the globe is critical to the ongoing success of our company. As of December 31, 2025, we employed a total of 1,474 persons. Of these employees, 1,034 were in the United States and Canada; 224 in Europe, Middle East and Africa (“EMEA”); and 216 in the Asia Pacific region.

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Our culture emphasizes certain key values — including client, courage, collaboration, integrity, and quality — that we believe are critical to deliver Forrester’s unique value proposition of helping business and technology leaders use customer obsession to drive growth. In addition, we seek to foster a culture where employees can be creative, feel supported and empowered, and are encouraged to think boldly about new ideas.

We focus on attracting and the hiring of all backgrounds and perspectives, with the goals of improving employee retention and engagement, strengthening the quality of our research, and improving client retention and customer experience. We field regular all-employee surveys to measure our progress against our goals. We have a robust learning and development program and celebrate and enrich the Forrester culture through frequent recognition of achievements.

Available Information

Forrester Research Inc. was incorporated in Massachusetts on July 7, 1983 and reincorporated in Delaware on February 16, 1996. Forrester’s corporate offices are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Our Internet address is www.forrester.com. We make available free of charge, on or through the investor information section of our website, annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC. The SEC maintains an internet site (http://www.sec.gov) that contains reports, proxy and information statements and other information regarding issuers that file documents electronically.