MNTN Q3 2026 Earnings Call: Sales Disruption Drives Guidance Cut

Mountain (MNTN) reported third-quarter 2026 revenue and adjusted EBITDA below its own guidance and reduced its fourth-quarter and full-year outlook. Newly appointed CEO Tony Weisman attributed the slowdown primarily to sales execution problems rather than weaker customer demand or competitive pressure.

Key Takeaways

• Q3 2026 revenue rose 15% year over year to $80.3 million, below the company’s $86 million to $89 million guidance range.
• Adjusted EBITDA increased 24% to $19.9 million, also below guidance of $22 million to $25 million. Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded 200 basis points to 24.8%.
• The company lost about 40% of its experienced quota-carrying sellers after rapidly implementing changes to sales compensation, incentives and organizational structure.
• Existing-customer spending remained resilient: the customer expansion rate stayed well above 115%. Management said the disruption overwhelmingly affected new-customer acquisition.
• For Q4 2026, management expects revenue of $75 million to $78 million and adjusted EBITDA of $8 million to $10 million.
• Tony Weisman became CEO effective November 2. He plans to increase operational discipline, rebuild sales capacity and provide a 2027 operating plan with the fourth-quarter results.

Key Financial Data

The sequential decline in operating expenses reflected lower personnel costs following the second-quarter workforce reduction and the absence of a one-time stock-based compensation award recorded in Q2.

Business and Operating Performance

Management identified go-to-market execution as the principal cause of the quarter’s weaker performance. Sales changes included a poorly and rapidly deployed vertical structure, a shift in incentives from revenue to activity, and changes to how frequently sellers were paid. These measures were communicated in late Q2 and implemented at the beginning of Q3.

The resulting attrition reduced MNTN’s capacity to generate new business. Management said approximately 40% of experienced quota-carrying sellers left the company. The compensation plans have since been corrected, and MNTN has hired 16 new sellers, with its first new-hire class scheduled to begin later in November.

The company also appointed Lynn Knaak, formerly of Salesforce, to lead direct sales to marketers and Frank Lee, formerly of Snap, to lead agency sales. Anna Sayre, who previously led marketing at The Trade Desk for seven years, joined as chief marketing officer.

Existing customers continued to expand spending, with the expansion rate remaining well above 115%. Management said customer retention, satisfaction and performance remained strong, while the shortfall was concentrated in net-new customers.

CEO Tony Weisman said head-to-head competitive win rates were consistent with prior levels, but MNTN generated too few new opportunities. The company plans to maintain both self-service and sales-led customer acquisition channels.

Management Guidance

The midpoint of the revised full-year revenue range represents 10% year-over-year growth, excluding the impact of the Maximum Effort divestiture.

Management’s Q4 outlook assumes the sales disruption experienced in Q3 will continue as newly hired sellers require time to become fully productive. The Q4 adjusted EBITDA forecast also includes additional non-recurring general and administrative expenses related to executive personnel changes.

Sales and marketing expenses are expected to increase approximately 10% sequentially as the company hires qualified salespeople. Management plans to present its 2027 operating plan, outlook and progress measures when it reports fourth-quarter and full-year results.

Risks and Areas to Watch

• Rebuilding sales capacity may take time because newly hired sellers must complete onboarding and ramp to full productivity.
• The loss of experienced sellers has constrained new-customer acquisition and is expected to continue affecting Q4 results.
• Higher planned sales and marketing spending could pressure near-term profitability as the company rebuilds its go-to-market organization.
• Small-business customers continue to churn at a higher rate than midsized customers, which remain MNTN’s core market.
• Execution of the new leadership structure, compensation plans and accountability measures remains central to restoring growth.

Analyst Q&A Highlights

Analysts focused on whether weaker results reflected sales execution, customer demand or competition. Weisman said MNTN’s product-market fit and customer value remained intact, citing continued existing-customer expansion and unchanged win rates in competitive pitches. He maintained that insufficient new sales opportunities—not lower conversion in head-to-head competition—was the key issue.

Management said the sales disruption predominantly affected new customers because frontline sellers experienced the highest attrition. Existing customers continued to retain and expand their spending.

On strategy, Weisman clarified that the new direct-sales and agency-sales leadership does not signal a shift away from performance advertising. His stated priority is to position MNTN as a reliable performance partner while improving pipeline growth, demo-to-customer conversion, starting budgets and sustained customer spending.

Full Earnings Call Transcript

Complete Earnings Call Transcript

Management Remarks

Operator

Hello, and welcome to Mountain's Third Quarter 2026 Results Webcast. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Brinlea Johnson. Please go ahead.

Brinlea Johnson

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us for Mountain's Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. With me today are Joe Kaiser, Mountain's Lead Independent Director; Tony Weisman, CEO; and Patrick Pohlen, CFO. Just to remind everyone, today's call includes forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results could materially differ from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements. For the risks and uncertainties that may affect future results, please see our most recently filed periodic report, which is also available on our website. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures on today's call. Reconciliations of these measures are available in our earnings materials on our website. With that, I will turn the call over to Joe. Please go ahead.

Joseph Kaiser

Thank you for joining us. I'm Mountain's Lead Independent Director. As you surely saw in the press release we issued a little while ago, Tony Weisman has been appointed Mountain's new CEO effective November 2. The Board determined it was time to bring more operational rigor to the business and asked Tony to step in as CEO. Tony joined Mountain's Board earlier this year, and he has the unwavering support of Mountain's Board to lead the company at this time. As a career marketer, Tony brings the voice of the customer to Mountain. From his time leading Digitas and serving as Chief Marketing Officer of Dunkin', Tony understands the decisions our customers make about where to spend their advertising dollars. With that, please join me in welcoming our new CEO, Tony Weisman.

Tony Weisman

Thanks, Joe. Let's start with the numbers. Third quarter revenue was $80.3 million compared with the company's guidance of $86 million to $89 million. Adjusted EBITDA was $19.9 million compared with guidance of $22 million to $25 million. For the fourth quarter, we expect revenue to be between $75 million and $78 million and adjusted EBITDA to be between $8 million and $10 million. Our Q3 results and outlook are disappointing. We have much higher expectations at Mountain. Before accepting this role, I reviewed the business, including product market fit, customer demand, our technology, and our sales motion. I wanted to understand what had changed and whether we had a practical path to address it. I concluded the issue was exclusively go-to-market execution.

The company recently made significant changes in the sales team that did not work out, most notably a new compensation structure modeled after the biggest platforms in our industry like Google and Meta. They were implemented too quickly, resulting in sales force attrition. We lost about 40% of our experienced quota-carrying sellers, reducing our ability to bring in new business. We've since corrected the compensation plans. We've also since hired 16 new sellers, and our first new hire class starts later this month. Additionally, we've added two proven executives, Lynn Knaak from Salesforce, leading brand sales and Frank Lee from Snap leading agency sales. They both report to me. It will take time for these sellers to fully ramp, and our updated outlook assumes that the disruption we saw in Q3 will continue into Q4.

Our new leaders have instilled more discipline around hiring, training and supervision, resulting in increased new starting budgets. We've changed the leadership behind the decisions that got us here. Chris Innes and Garland Hill are no longer with Mountain. I have spent my career on the advertiser side of the table. Mountain does what marketers have always wanted - reach the right people and measure the return on their advertising spend. In a category full of complexity, I love how Mountain keeps it simple. We provide one frictionless platform that allows customers to invest in CTV channel with clarity, simplicity, and accountability. Our technology, experience and data help them decide which messages to run, how to allocate their budgets, and how to measure results all in one place as easily as they buy on Meta or Google.

And we give them the attribution they've come to expect, tying their TV spend to site visits and sales. I believe our opportunity for growth remains strong. Mountain is a performance channel like search and social. Combined with the power of television, it is the ultimate business-driving platform. What Mountain needs is operational rigor to achieve our goals. I plan to take a three-fold approach. One, identify the opportunities and the weaknesses early and address them quickly. Two, get the right leaders in charge of each team. Three, make sure everyone is aligned on common metrics and working together for measurable results. I'll rigorously review pipeline growth, conversion of demos into paying customers, and starting budgets with the team. I plan to judge our progress by whether those improvements translate into sustained customer spending and revenue.

I plan to move quickly and decisively. I've also begun to make changes to our leadership team. I'm pleased to announce that Anna Sayre, who led marketing at The Trade Desk for seven years, joined us this week as Mountain's Chief Marketing Officer. She'll make our offering salient to generate new customer growth. Finally, I excel at building cultures of accountability where the teams are focused on execution. I've been delighted to learn that some of the best industry talent is already inside our company, and I'm committed to giving them the support and guidance to perform at their best.

Let me wrap up by saying that I know we have to earn back your confidence. While we're hiring and onboarding salespeople now, it will take time for these sellers to fully ramp. Our outlook reflects this. When we report fourth quarter results, I'll lay out our 2027 operating plan and outlook, the measures we use to assess progress, and what our changes have delivered to that point. Patrick, over to you to walk through the numbers and the outlook, and then we will take your questions.

Patrick Pohlen

Thank you, Tony. Our third quarter revenue increased to $80.3 million, up 15% year-over-year. Revenue growth this quarter was impacted by unforeseen execution disruption in our go-to-market organization. Third quarter gross margins remained consistent at 79%, flat with the prior year period. Our expansion rate, which measures the spend of our current customers as compared to those same customer spend a year ago, remains quite healthy and is still well north of 115%. Total operating expenses for the third quarter decreased by $4.7 million sequentially to $54.5 million. This was primarily driven by a decrease in personnel costs as a result of the reduction in force in the second quarter and a one-time stock-based compensation award that also occurred in the second quarter.

For the third quarter, we achieved positive net income of $7.7 million for a GAAP EPS of $0.10 compared to a net income of $6.4 million and GAAP EPS of $0.09 in the prior year period. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter increased to $19.9 million, up from $16 million in Q3 of 2025, an increase of 24%. The company's adjusted EBITDA margin grew to 24.8%, up 200 basis points compared to 22.8% in Q3 of 2025. We plan on continuing to make disciplined investments in sales and marketing, specifically in experienced hires to drive broader customer adoption. We expect sales and marketing expenses to increase approximately 10% sequentially as we add qualified salespeople. Our balance sheet remains strong, and we ended the quarter with $252 million in cash and cash equivalents with no borrowings outstanding.

We ended the quarter with 75.8 million shares outstanding. We are reducing our fourth quarter and full year outlook to reflect ongoing changes to our go-to-market organization. It will take time for sellers to fully ramp, and our guidance assumes that the disruption we saw in Q3 will continue into the fourth quarter. For Q4, we expect revenue to be between $75 million and $78 million. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $8 million and $10 million. Our fourth quarter guidance includes additional non-recurring general and administrative expenses related to our executive personnel changes. For the full year 2026, we are lowering our revenue guidance range to $311 million to $314 million, representing 10% year-over-year growth at the midpoint, excluding the impact of the Maximum Effort divestiture.

We expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $66 million and $68 million. We are basing the revised outlook on our expectation for how the business will perform as we realign the go-to-market organization around our priorities. We'll provide more detail on the operating plan and the outlook for 2027 when we announce our fourth quarter and fiscal year results. With that said, we'll open the line for questions.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Matthew Weber with Canaccord.

Question-and-Answer Session

Matthew Weber

I guess just to start off, you've seen the business from the Board, so you've had a view from the inside. What gives you the confidence that this is an execution problem rather than a demand or a competitive one? And then I have a follow-up.

Tony Weisman

I've studied this business for quite some time, and I know that it's delivering value to our customers, many of whom have been with us for a very long time. And it has proven to be one of the most effective ROAS channels. And of course, the growth in the market underscores the overall interest in this space. I'm confident that Mountain has terrific product market fit, a terrific team, a great brand, and certainly the heritage of having essentially invented this space. The more I dug, the more I realized that it was decisions that were made in our own sales organization, primarily leading to attrition that caused this slowdown. And those strike me as problems that are and are being fixed and can be addressed quickly so that we can get back to the historical growth we've seen.

Matthew Weber

And then just..., is there any incremental color that you can share with us just in terms of what specifically those changes were to the compensation structure and sort of what the thought process was going into them and sort of how you've corrected today?

Tony Weisman

Sure. I mean when Garland joined the company from TikTok, there was a desire to move the sales organization to models that are underway at bigger platforms like TikTok, Google, Meta. Those had things to do. There was a verticalization that was deployed poorly and too quickly. There was a change in incentives from revenue to activity, and there was a change in the frequency with which sellers were paid. These were told to the team in late Q2, but implemented at the beginning of Q3, and it just didn't work for most of the -- for many of the sellers who felt disaffected and they felt like their opportunity for earning had been diminished, and that's what led to the attrition.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Marok with Raymond James.

Andrew Marok

Two, if I could. So maybe again on the kind of culture reset and the operational rigor that you were talking about. Is there anything else beyond kind of the sales force compensation structure that you were alluding to that you wanted to kind of put your stamp on the business in a particular way? And then I have a follow-up after that.

Tony Weisman

My analysis has determined that that is the #1 issue and the first thing that needs to get addressed and the thing I'm most focused on most immediate. Across the board, I believe there is an opportunity for the company to operate with greater focus on outcomes, a higher level of accountability, and more transparency across the company on the metrics that matter and they're all going in the same direction. So I started to put some of those in place so that we have common dashboards reporting real-time insights that are relevant to the growth of the business. I think that just sort of falls in general under an approach of accountability, transparency, and holding people responsible.

Andrew Marok

And then one more, if I could. Just kind of on some of these sales force issues, is there any way to kind of disaggregate what you were seeing in terms of new customers versus existing customer spend, and kind of the shortfalls that each of those buckets attributed?

Tony Weisman

The overwhelming impact was on new customers. And that's because the frontline sellers were the ones where the attrition was. By contrast, many of our current customers retained and continue to expand, and we continue to see very high levels of satisfaction and performance in that group. So it was predominantly in the net new.

Operator

And your next question comes from the line of Robert Coolbrith with Evercore ISI.

Robert Coolbrith

So just a couple here. So maybe, Patrick, first, can we just talk about the gross expansion rate versus the net? It sounds like the gross remains quite healthy. But have you seen any changes in the net expansion rate, any uptick in churn that maybe speaks to the issues that we're seeing maybe in the Q4 guide in particular? And then, Tony, in your review, it sounds like you did some diligence maybe before taking on the role. Just wondering if you could maybe give us your assessment of the evolving competitive set? There are a couple of small players in the space who were recently acquired by much larger organizations. And so just wondering if that is at all weighing on the company's results or affects the way that you think Mountain has to grow and respond to sort of market dynamics going forward?

Patrick Pohlen

Robert, so the expansion rate, which, as you recall, measures customers in a 12-month period, so in this case, ending September 30, 2026, going back 12 months, finding a customer in the prior 12-month period and seeing how much they've expanded their spend. That has been well north of 115% and continues to be well north of 115%. We don't really use NRR internally because we went down market to the small businesses, but they continue to churn more than the midsized market, which is the core of our business.

Tony Weisman

Robert, thanks for the question. On the competitive front, I do not believe that that has been a factor. In head-to-head pitches, we are winning at the same rate that we were in the past. The issue is there weren't enough opportunities. There were not enough new opportunities. I think the dynamics in the industry that you referred to, some of our competitors being acquired by larger platforms, is going to play out in such a way that the potential customers are going to wonder about the difference between Mountain (which is a purely independent platform that only cares about the customers' growth) and some of these others and wonder where their data is going and whose interest they're serving. So I believe that's an opportunity for us in the future to even grow greater share.

Operator

And your next question comes from Andrew Boone with Citizens.

Andrew Boone

Tony, what I'm trying to understand here is kind of the direction of the business on the go forward. And so I want to go backwards in terms of some of the things that we understood previously about Mountain and kind of what you're saying today. So one of the key themes was kind of self-sign-up in the past in terms of Mountain, and it sounds like this is really a sales execution. And so it just -- can you help us understand the evolution of what you guys need the sales team to be within a self-sign-up environment or whether just sales was more important there? Just tie kind of the historical messaging to now the sales execution.

Tony Weisman

There's still going to be an opportunity for that motion, obviously, for certain types and sizes of customers. And we want to be best-in-class in providing that level of service and doing it in a seamless, easy-to-use way. Customers still continue to sign up and request demos. And the sales team feels those as inbound. What we did had the best -- had the highest impact on the non-self-serve opportunities where sellers and demos that were brought in from the team themselves fell well below the volumes that we had seen historically in the past. So that's the area that we're focusing on the right hiring and the right training to get those folks on board so that they are quota carrying going forward, and we're going to continue to operate both motions going forward.

Andrew Boone

And then I'd love to ask around just the direction that's implied with the hires. So with Lynn Knaak coming over from Salesforce, who led brand, and then Frank Lee from Snap that led agency sales, it feels like there may be a change in direction where you guys are broadening out the platform from performance. Just -- one, is that right? And then two, can you step back and understood you've kind of been in the role for two days, but do you have any information around where you want to move the boat on a go-forward direction as we think about the broader opportunity for Mountain and where you want to take that ship?

Tony Weisman

You bet. Let me clarify, brand is inside sales. So we're using the term to describe direct sales from our team directly to the marketer for Lynn's team, whereas Frank's team is working with agents. So the brand term there may be misleading because we are not looking to generate what would traditionally be considered as top of funnel or high awareness any differently than we have in the past. It is the distinction between the channel. I hope that clarifies that.

I think the key -- the future for this business lies in being seen as the undisputed leader to deliver performance across every need that a customer might have, giving them a broad array of channels to choose from with the right message, the right time, and the right spend level to optimize the ROAS. This is a growing channel. We have the opportunity to be the premier partner, whether directly to a brand or to a performance agency. And I think my vision is for us to be seen as the most reliable, predictable partner that any of them could possibly have. And our focus, we are customer obsessed. And our focus, our success, our growth is a function of theirs. I think the opportunity lies right ahead of us.

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to management for closing remarks.

Tony Weisman

Thank you all for the welcome today, and thank you for joining us. I'm looking forward to getting to know each of you better and learning from you, from your perspective, and having an ongoing dialogue as we pursue the plans that we've outlined. I really appreciate your time and attention today, and thank you for joining us.

Operator

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.