How Marketing & Sales Can Leverage Data While Still Respecting Privacy
Overview: The keynote speaker of the Demand Gen Summit 2020, Henry Schuck the CEO and Founder of ZoomInfo talks about the future of demand gen and respecting privacy when collecting data.
About the speaker: Henry Schuck is the CEO of ZoomInfo (formerly DiscoverOrg). The Company has over $350M in recurring revenue, 1,000 employees, and is growing profitably.
Schuck founded ZoomInfo in 2007 in his law school apartment; since then, the company has undergone 5 mergers and acquisitions and is backed by The Carlyle Group and TA Associates. Schuck earned his J.D in law from Ohio State University, his business degree from the University of Nevada, and studied comparative law at Oxford.
Transcript
Dave: Hi, my name is Dave Elkington, I’m on the board of ChatFunnels, and I am the founder of a company called insidesales.com we’ve now rebranded to Xant. But today I am super, super excited to be hosting this interview with Henry shuck the founder and CEO of zoom info. Man, I cannot be more excited about this.
I’ve known him Henry for a long time. I’ve seen zoom info grow. I mean, it was it’s gone through several iterations. This is an amazing, amazing company. A little bit of background on on Henry. He founded this company in his dorm room, at least.
So the legend goes back in 2007. Then they’ve been on a meteoric growth rate, since they’re they’re funded by Carlyle and ta associates are two of the top investors in the world. They filed for their IPO this summer, and have had amazing, like an amazing success as a public company. They’ve had five acquisitions. Honestly, I can say this They are revolutionizing the way sales and marketing thinks about data thinks about CRM thinks about insights, in my opinion, most importantly, and this at inside sales.
This is a thing that we’re very interested in also, but Zoominfo has created a platform where it’s not just about information, and collecting information, but they’re creating an insights platform that is understanding third party data in context to like yours, your source original data, and then helping you make actionable engagements. both in sales and marketing. I’m telling you keep your eye on this.
But with that, I want to hand over to Henry, but and I think it’s the question that I love beginning any of these things with, What’s your journey? how did you end up here? We have thousands of people watching today. I think all of them have a little bit of a desire to be like Henry. So what led you into it? How did you end up here? And some of the ups and some of the downs?
Henry: Yeah. Great. Thanks, Dave. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to kick the summit off. So yeah, I founded the business in 2007. The legend is true. I did founded in my law school dorm. We did it in a bootstrapped way we put my co founder and I each put $25,000 on our credit cards. And we went out to build a database of at the time. IT professionals that we could sell to sales and marketing folks who sold to those IT professionals. It was 2007. We ran straight into the financial crisis.
Luckily, we’ll we were small enough where you didn’t feels sort of the bigger impact of what was happening in the market. But we grew organically and profitably for seven years. Then we before bringing any new capital into the company. We brought in a private equity firm in 2014. When the business was already at about a $25 million run rate.
It’s interesting, because a lot of people a lot of the conversation today is about whether or not you should bootstrap your business as though every founder has access to VC capital, but is making a decision as to whether or not they want to take VC or bootstrap. We didn’t even know how that universe worked. So we only have one choice to bootstrap your business.
Dave: And I love the way you did it. Because I’ve had countless conversations of young entrepreneurs saying, Well, I don’t have the money, like how do you bootstrap? Like, if you didn’t have the money either, like your this is on your credit cards, right?
Henry: Like it was, it was on our online credit card, for some reason, Chase gave me a $25,000 limit on my credit card, it made no sense at all. But I had this big limit on my credit card. So we, you know, ran it up to pay our first employees and set up an office and get a server and hire a developer to do that work.
It was the only way we knew how to do it. What a minimally viable product really was at the time was, what’s the minimum thing we could sell to somebody so we can get another month or another three months of paying the bills without you know, having to open a bunch of additional credit cards.
That’s really how we didn’t we invested every dollar that came back into the business, in marketing, and so generating appointments for our sellers, which were myself in our cofounder. Then back into the product. So making the data set larger, more robust with more insights. Then we have the opportunity because you know, one of the things that bootstrapping does for us, it makes you incredibly disciplined around every dollar that you spend. That discipline lived on through the business, even post, especially even post on institutional money from TA, and we continue to be disciplined about how we spent money, and that gave us an opportunity to go out and do m&a in the market. Go ahead.
Dave: So there’s a couple of strategies that you talked about that I actually think are unique, and I think people should hear, and it doesn’t matter if you’re founding your own company, or if you’re running marketing at an organization, you specialized in you. there was already a market in data. But what you just said is insights. You verticalized, right, you said and I remember, like this is probably like 2007, or eight when we met at an event. And you were focusing on it data, and you’re focusing on insights around it data.
So it wasn’t just the data. I think I would call it a traditional belief would be, hey, this is a red ocean space, don’t go into this space. But what you did is you said, Look, I know it’s a it’s a competitive space, but we’re going to approach it very different, like what was that your strategy and how’s it evolved over the last seven years?
Henry: A couple things. One, if you’re going to get into a space where there’s a big competitor, or there are multiple competitors. The best way I think to get into it is to build a niche that you can come in at. So even though there was, you know, when we started dnb, and info USA and a variety of sort of list providers in the market, what we did was we went really deep on it, and we surrounded it with insights on it. You weren’t just getting like a list of companies, you got the CIO, you got an org chart who you knew who reported to who, then we gave you all these insights around, like what the company was spending on and what their technology stack looked like. You couple that with the organizational chart and the contact information.
Dave, you know this but early on, somebody told me the most valuable thing you can give a seller is a direct dial phone number. So we came like laser focused on gathering a lot of direct dial phone numbers for the professionals in our data set. Then you gave them insights, you gave them the way to engage with the folks. It was a market where even if you were buying DMV or info USA or whatever else, it was easy for I head a sales or I head a marketing to say, Well, yeah, this is different than that. We can make the continued investment here.
Dave: The thing I love about that is that focus on direct dial, like anyone, any sales leader would buy that data. You were the only guys who did it. Like that was like one of your key differentiators. Frankly, I don’t think you were the cheapest but it didn’t matter. like yeah, we will such is such an amazing, like, breakthrough that I think everybody else tried to chase it. Even to this day, I don’t think anybody has a better data set than you guys have around kind of creating that premium value data. Yeah, absolutely.
Henry: Really, we work I wake up every day going like, okay, now today we cover off 100 million plus professionals, just basically every knowledge worker in the United States at 15 million companies. How do you keep that data set constantly up to date and accurate? You’re covering billions of data points across that data set? Technologies, a company uses their number of employees, their growth rate, their revenue. Who’s coming in and out of the organization? How fast are they growing? What are they spending on? So keep all of those billions of data points up to date and accurate at scale. That’s the work that we’re focused on today.
Dave: Well, and that’s a that’s a really difficult thing, and especially in context, and maybe we transition a little bit into some of the meat of the topic today, what people we know, traditionally change jobs every three to four years, which means every three to four years, whatever data that was junk, right? Yeah. Let’s transition a little bit into really like how do you leverage this person, all of this information, and all of the landmines around, kind of in society right now, and it’s around selling and data,
Henry: it’s really, really difficult. And I’m going to hit four of them. There’s compliance competition, the current COVID environment, and the complexity of like the technology market and the technology stacks that are out there. I mean, all four of these make it really hard but I’m going to just hit some high levels, and I want to just get kind of your take on a couple of them. But yeah, number one is like GDPR has become such a huge thing. You have ccpa, you have HIPAA, you’ve got PCI, and then just general like opt in strategies. So that’s just on the compliance side. We’re seeing competition blow up all over. So there’s lots of vendors and then again, COVID, and then just there’s kind of a technology glut in the space.
The first thing is like, as you guys think about providing value here in this space. What are the things that worries you? And what are some of the things that you do that are different than than everybody else? Because again, it’s not, it is a non trivial task right now, totally.
And so I think what data privacy is going to be a generational or multi generational issue for all of us. I think there are a couple ways that we think about data privacy, number one. I’ll walk through this and then I’ll give you a sense for sort of where we think it’s going. But number one, about two years before the GDPR rolled out, we rolled out what we call the notice and choice framework, which meant that we went out to everybody in Europe whose information we had collected. We said, Look, here’s the information we collected on you. It’s all your business professional information. It’s used by business to business sellers, and marketers who are using it to get an executive search firms and headhunters they’re using it to get in touch with you in a professional way.
Here’s a link, you can update your information, you can remove it, you can add preferences to it around how you want to be contacted, you could, include your phone number or remove your email address. We went out did that to all of Europe, we felt really good about the position that put us in from a compliance perspective. It allowed us for the next two years to go have conversations with fortune 100 compliance organizations and say, Look, your team still needs data to find and to sell your next customer. And this data set is incredibly compliant. Here’s all the work we do from a compliance perspective. It’s automated, it’s on our website. We got them all comfortable with continuing to do business with us as the GDPR rolled out.
Then the ccpa came out in California, rolled out the beginning of this year, and began being enforced in July. And before it rolled out, we did the same thing. We said, Look, we’re going to go out to everybody in California, and we’re going to give them notice we’ve collected their information, the opportunity to do all the same things we gave European individuals. Now the ccpa does not require that level of notice. The Attorney General regulations, they specifically say, if you collect information, not directly from the consumer, you don’t have to give notification to the consumer, you just need to have a do not sell my Information link to probably a lot of us have seen. But we said look, we just want to be way ahead on this thing. We gave it to California, and then we decided to give it to everybody.
So if your information exists in Zoominfo, you’ve been sent a notification, it says how we collected it says what you can do to have it removed or updated. It gives you the ability to set those preferences. It says who we sell it to. And so we proactively went out and gave all of that notice. We think that puts us way ahead of the regulations. interestingly, of all of the types of information that’s out there health information, your browser history, your social security number, your credit card information.
If you if you watch the social dilemma on Netflix, you’ll have a deep understanding of this. But of all that information, we actually believe that the least sensitive type of that information is b2b contact information, when it’s used for business to business, professional marketing and sales efforts. It’s not just us that believes that Canada’s privacy law specifically exempts this type of information from its privacy law, they said, Look, there are a lot of sensitive types of information, this type of information is so important to the economy, that we’re going to end and also much less sensitive than the other types of information.
Dave: So let me pause you for a second. Because there’s some things there’s a lot of stuff, I want to unpack a little bit what we just talked through. There’s a lot of technical things. But there’s this principle that you’re describing. As we got ready, and we were talking through this before this call, or before this event, there something became like really obvious. Privacy has become a huge thing as more of our data becomes available online. But at the same time, I actually buy stuff. I want to be informed when I’m buying stuff, right?
There’s this contrast of saying, Well, I don’t want anybody to know anything about me, except when I actually want to buy something. In that scenario, I want the people who actually have something that I want to buy to know about me. So what you just described is almost like a it’s a preference management system that it’s I can say look, these are the things you know, I’m interested in, I definitely want to buy in, especially in a b2b investing. there are people whose entire job is to collect information and to buy on behalf of a company.
So I think it’s not as simple as basically saying GDPR and GDPR. I think like you said, there’s nuances of, of b2b. For those who don’t, I think most people on this, at this event know this, but business of business purchasing, so when I’m buying on behalf of a business, or if I’m just consumer buying. That’s one of the nuances.
Henry: Yeah, interestingly, the GDPR talks about this. The way they talk about it, as they call it a legitimate interest. When they say, and if you have a legitimate interest. They do carve out direct marketing as one of those legitimate interests. But they also make clear here. That if you are going to use somebody’s personal information to do outbound outreach to them. That it be relevant to the person.
The more you’re able to call to say, look, I reached out to Dave, because he, his company was researching on the internet, sales, intelligence solutions. They’re the same size and in the same industry, as most of our clients. Dave is in charge of making these types of decisions, because he’s a senior vice president of sales at the business unit. Those are the reasons why I and the company had visited our website and viewed our pricing page. You couple all that together, and you do have a legitimate interest from a direct marketing perspective, to reach out to Dave.
I think that is, and I know, Dave, we’re going to talk about in a second. But that is marketers and sellers need to get to is a world where they can combine their first party data with third party data. To really specifically to specifically segment their buyers. And reach out to them when they’re in market for your products and services.
Dave: Okay, so we’ve got, again, thousands of people that are in sales in marketing, perfect, we have people and I think Billy just shared it in his introduction from all over the world, right? I mean, we have people in Europe and the Middle East and Africa, in Asia, and the United States all watching this live right now. I think it we’re trying to figure out, how do we engage? How do we sell to people who likely want to buy.
One of the things that I think are really interesting that you said is it has to be relevant, but that like, isn’t that what we want? Like, I don’t want to, I don’t want to be marketing to people who couldn’t or unlikely to buy from us. I think that is a that’s a style of the past. So that kind of brings this topic of like in the last 30 years, marketing has gone through an entire journey. Right? I mean, give me your view on where is marketing been? Where is it recently? And where is it going?
Henry: Yeah, so I think if you think about like the 70s, through the early 2000s, the way marketing worked was people were really focused on segmentation and targeting. They did that with kind of offline tools, you would put an ad in the Wall Street Journal, because you wanted to talk to business executives, you would put an ad in Sports Illustrated, because their demographic matched up to your products and services. So you use the places you paid placed ads, by understanding the demographic and placing them there. Then marketing automation and sales automation tools kind of happened in like, 2010, and then through, and what you saw happen there was all of a sudden, you didn’t have to go like placing an ad to some magazine, you could just cultivate your list of perfect buyers, and then go spread your message to them.
What marketers did during that time was they just sort of a mass these large data sets and then just started like spraying and praying, their, their outreach. The technology gave them the ability to do that. What you see now and I think like kind of what ABM is getting at, is during that period of time between kind of 2009.
And today, technology continued to advance in a way that allows you to be much more surgical with the way you talk to a company and a person at that company and the way you combine information that you have on that company internally with information that you can pull from third party data to be really targeted and your outreach, the whole idea of reaching out to the right person with the right message at the right time, really comes down to your ability to pull together your first party data with third party insights, and then be really specific about your outbound messaging to this folks. But it really is not that different than the segmentation approach that you saw, sort of in the 70s through 2000.
Dvae: But and I love what you say because like, look in the 2000s we’re all guilty of the spray and pray strategy. It’s because it was so inexpensive, like, so think about like this, this hyper targeting that we would do in the 80s in the 90s in the 70s, like, you pay for like a Superbowl ad and you’d pay three or $4 million. And you’re like, Okay, these are, you know, theoretically our exact Target or Sports Illustrated or whatever. But then like this technology made marketing, really cheap.
So I think we get, we got very lazy and we’re, like, send it to everybody. It doesn’t cost us anything. But what we didn’t realize is it cost us our brand. Like I remember once we sent candidly. An unsolicited email to the CMO of HubSpot. He sent me a nasty email back saying, I never signed up. I’m like, No, but I think it’s relevant. He said, Oh, it’s very relevant. But I never signed up. I didn’t want this. And so it was a little bit of a look, he was right. Like, at the end of the day, he was right. I wasn’t respecting. Again, I he was on a massive list of whatever hundred thousand names we had.
What you just said, though, is super interesting. We’re back to targeting so this ABM isn’t a new thing. It’s ABM is just targeting. Right. it’s using this the technology that allows you to do it at scale, inexpensively. But something that kind of I love it blows my mind a little bit. It’s about using insights, and being very hyper relevant versus just using technology. unintelligently. And I think that’s, I, well, you’re gonna say something what actually I’m gonna stop what Yeah, where are you going?
Henry: The time when you emailed the HubSpot executive, one of the one of the things about that time is you’re probably kind of trapped with first party insights in those days, which means like, whatever information you have in your CRM or information you have about what someone’s done on your website, or who you’ve sent an email to, and they’ve clicked, or whatever notes a sales rep has put into your CRM, that’s kind of the universe with which you do targeting. Meanwhile, like we were saying, professionals turnover 100%, every three to four years. And so the people you know, who work at a company today, the vast majority of them will not be there in four years.
Now. Companies change even faster, right? No company looks the same on December 31, as it did on January 1, they’re growing, they’re shrinking. They’re bringing in new executives, they’re adding and dropping technologies, they’re acquiring other businesses are getting acquired. All of that change is happening. There hasn’t been a great way to leverage that. Combine it with that first party data to be super relevant when you reach out to when you reach out to prospects and customers. And the fusing of that I think is, is where you get out of the like, spray and pray world and you get into something really specific and targeted.
As we think about data and first party versus third party data, I think that amalgamation. That common combination is what creates like real value. But it’s difficult to do. If you as you’re referencing this evolution of marketing tactics. There’s been this parallel evolution of, we’ll call it CRM, right? There’s been this like, CRM in the 80s was like remember act and goldmine, right? It was just an online or digital Rolodex. It wasn’t online, like it was on.
Then Benioff comes out and he’s like, Look, let’s take this, and let’s put it online. You also had an Oracle had their version, like there was a bunch of versions. But, you know, Mark made this big thing. It was virtually just creating ubiquitous access. But it was just still my data. It was all first party data.
So basically, I took my business cards, put it in Act. Yep. I’m putting my business cards in an online version of Act. And then we’re seeing a lot of CRM and I think traditional CRM, I think it’s got trouble, like because it’s, it’s more about bringing my first party data in, right. You’ve got technologies like mule soft, or tableau, where it’s like, Okay, give me insights into my data. But that’s not new, those insights into my data, I’ve had those for, for 30 40 years. Now. They’re good too. Don’t get me wrong, like these tools are as good as they get in terms of like, finding insights in my data. But it’s, you talked about third party data, so go into that a little bit more.
Yeah. I think that’s right. What you see CRM doing today is shifting from being just purely a ubiquitous access repository of that business card and company data, and then building tools around that, to working on being much more of an insights Driven platform. They’re doing one by one, you know, using mule soft to let you bring all your data inside of Salesforce. But then also adding Tableau. So that you can analyze and build visualizations of that data. That may give you insights Einstein. Which is designed as sort of crunch your data in your CRM and give you insights about what’s going on with your customers or your prospects or your sales campaigns.
And I think that what, what it misses, and really what zoominfo has been focused on providing is all of that third party data about your customers and your prospects, all those changes that are happening that aren’t instantly reflected inside of your CRM system. As you’re running Einstein and building a visualization. That not knowing like this company was acquired, this company shrunk. This company just installed a competitive technology. The our champion lap, having all of that data together. Really drives we think the most meaningful insights. But you see CRM making a shift to being an insights delivery enigine much more so than just repository with ubiquitous access?
Well, so we and frankly, we see there’s disruption happening in the space. Right it’s the Clayton Christensen like disruption patterns. Just as you know, I think Salesforce disrupted traditional role of digital Rolodex. Is we’re seeing like LinkedIn trying to move into the market and be a bit of a CRM. I think they’ve even come out and said, like, they are the next generation of CRM. But there’s another little thing that’s kind of emerging here is, is creating automation, around engagement.
You’ve got systems of engagement. I’ve heard, I’ve heard Marc Benioff talk about this. We’ve heard Satya talk about this. But I think it’s even gone a step beyond where it’s a system of insight, and I’ve heard you talk about that. I think as we think through what ABM is, it’s a ABM is actually leveraging third party insights in context of first party insights. But I don’t think people quite know what I mean. I think there’s all everyone’s now putting ABM on their marketing platform. To say we’re an ABM platform. Right, I think it’s bigger than that.
Dave: Tell, what if you were to look in the future, and let’s have everybody, stop, take some notes, because I think I’m curious to see where you’re gonna go with this. Like, where do you see the future of CRM going? Like, where is if you’re looking around the corner just a little bit. And again, you are one of the hottest, most intriguing companies in the in really in the market? I’ve talked over the weekend, I talked to a couple of folks who, who, who said, Oh, yeah, that company is a company to watch. You’re in the middle of a lot of like, really interesting innovation. Look around the corner a little bit. Where do you see CRM going?
Henry: Yeah. First, I think one of the things you also you see what CRM Well, let me back up. Number one, we have to engage with companies and buyers who aren’t knocking on our door. Like there are people out there doing research on your products and services, or who need the products and services that you’re building every day who need to hear from you to know that it’s out there.
If you look at Zoominfo business, one of the key things that jumps out in RS one, or if you talk to any investors is we have an incredibly efficient, go to market engine. Our sales efficiency creates a 10 x LTV to CAC, we have 30 day average sales cycles, we built automation all around the way we go to market. The reason why we did that is I got cold called in 2009 by guide Infusionsoft. Who said, Hey, come to this meeting, we’re going to teach you about the next generation of email marketing.
I said, First, you know, I already do email marketing. I build the whole business to this point on email marketing, I’m good. He was like, just come to the presentation. And maybe you’ll learn a thing or two. It’s the first first time I ever just went to a webinar. I got cold call to go to that webinar, I went. That webinar changed the entire future of Zoominfo, because what we learned from that was the ability to automate many portions of the sales cycle. So people need that they need to learn about new solutions. They’re trying to make their business better if you have a product or solution that will add value to them. You can do it at the right time. That is invaluable. People need to do that to drive the economy forward.
I think one of the things that I’ve noticed is the focus on the actual market makers. The tactical folks who are going to market every day inside of organizations has kind of been hazy. When it comes to CRM. You look at CRM, and you look at these lists of acquisitions, and they’re buying CPQ and Tableau and mule soft and all of these, Einstein all of these really interesting technologies, but they’re really not what the frontline seller marketing Programs person is using to help them hit their number every month and every quarter and every year.
So I do feel like CRM has become today much more of an IT led purchase, focused on the CIO. It’s also focused on the COO. And it gives the high level part of the business, the metrics in the forecasting and the tools that they need to really get the operation of the business down. It’s a great hub of information for the whole organization. I think what you what you’ve seen over the last few years is not a focus on that frontline seller on that frontline marketer.
And so I don’t expect CRM to become that. And that has been an area that we’ve been focused on is how do you build a tactical go to market operating system that really drives those market makers every single day, the people who come in and go, I need to run these programs, I need to have this activity in order for our company to hit their numbers. That’s really the layer that we’re focused on.
And it doesn’t seem like a layer that CRM has been intensely focused on. Well, so you know, the co founder of inside sales guy named Ken crook, I think Ken, he always says, in to the point where I’m kinda like, Yeah, I got it Ken. But we as it as an industry, we don’t, we don’t got it. And it’s every sales and marketing campaign starts with a list. You said something that I’d like to just highlight, I have no more additional insights to it. I just want to make sure everybody hears this.
There are people who want to buy your products today that don’t know you. And so you’ve got to somehow bridge this gap of introducing your products and services in a way that is not offensive, that’s not harassing, like I was doing to the CMO at HubSpot, like, and so they’re out there, and there are hundreds, and there are thousands of these people.
And by the way, you’re gonna get knocked around a bit, you know, like that. I’ve had plenty of HubSpot CMOS, you know, punch me in the nose when I’ve reached out to them. Not everyone is going to be like, oh, wow, this product that you’ve poured your blood, sweat and tears in for the last three years to build. I can’t wait to get it in my organization. There were a lot of people who just unsubscribe from your messages. Who don’t want to talk to you say they’re not interested. But it is very important for everybody to realize that that is how the biggest and best companies still go to market.
The largest companies in the world have teams of people picking up the phone calling into their buyers. They have teams of people of marketers trying to identify the perfect universe to send ads to send emails to. If you can stay focused on figuring out how to how to craft the relevant universe. That’s the work you can do to make sure everything downstream is much more effective. But you got to get out there again.
So I’m going to go back though, it starts with the list. Like you can have the best technology stack in the world. You can have an amazingly architected CRM. But if you don’t have the right list, you’re wasting your time. In fact, early on, I bet you I went through three sales leaders. At the beginning of inside sales, where I hired this amazing like this guy resume.
Awesome. And I had no leads for him, I had no names. Yeah, so he’s like, you know, they come in, they sell their warm list. And they’re like, okay, Dave, like, what are we gonna do? Like, are we gonna sell to? And I’m like, that’s why I hired you. And they’re like, No, we need, we need a basis to start from. So what zoom is doing, and I love it, I love this is it’s not i’m not buying a list, there was a list back in like, 2004, you’re gonna laugh called a list provider called Sales Genie. I paid 100 bucks a month for this thing. It was just literally the same as a phone book. Like, there was no insights, no context, I hired a kid to start dialing. And guess what, it kind of worked.
Dave: Imagine fast forward to today, with your platform. I know, at inside sales at Xant, we’re Xant. I know, when a new sales leader is hired, that is a perfect time to engage. Those kind of insights, or if I just raised money, or if I just or if someone just raise money or those corporate moments. It’s, it is those insights. Not only do I have to have the right names. I have to like engage in a time like you said. That people are going to buy so and to my understanding, like Zoom is leading the way here.
I don’t know of any other technology, any other platform or any other CRM that’s bringing these third party insights and then combining it I mean, your tools like the data pen tool, and like the insights capability again, it’s just and look, I make no commission here. I just love the technology. Like I’m telling you, I’m sharing this, I’ve built companies like I’ve built sales organizations. This is the most important part of your technology stack
It really is core and foundational to everything you do downstream. The first thing you need is to understand your customers. Your prospects, and the buyers that those companies and if you don’t have that. Everything else downstream has sand in its gears.
Then the other thing to remember is whatever the first messaging you write is not going to be good enough. It’s going to be bad. And you’re going to have to update it. And what you really should be doing. I think ChatFunnels does an incredible job of this is just a be testing everything. And so every message, every response, if you can a B test and build a framework of AB testing, across your organization. To know which messages resonate the best. Whether you’re doing it through ChatFunnels, from a from a chat perspective on your website. Or you’re doing it through email, or you’re doing it through your SDRs, making phone calls. AB testing everything is a key part of just getting better.
And again, so once you have your list, and then you’ve got kind of your engagement platform, again, you have to test everything. Shere do you see like the tech stack, going in the next five years. You think, again, another Hey look around the corner a little bit. See traditional CRM is dead. Traditional marketing may be evolving. What’s the next generation, what’s that tech stack look like?
Henry: I think the ability to feed all the interaction data back through to get smarter and smarter and smarter about what your next action is going to be a key part of where technology is five years from now. And if you think about what consumer brands are doing around this space. Or around this topic, or what social media is doing around this topic. Every action you take is just an indication of what the next action you might take will be. They’re gathering all that information to predict your next their next, next best motion. I think in b2b, we’re just way behind on that. We’re just not collecting the data. Then analyzing it in a way to make our resources that we have out there and deployed most effective.
So I think, look, as we’re gathering the list and sending emails and making phone calls, and getting replies back and getting no’s and yeses, that information being constantly collected, and driving the next best action. That’s where we’ll be in five years.
Dave: I love it. Now, I think we’re about out of time. But I want to circle back to something you said at the very beginning, when you started your company on a credit, you and your co founder, took a huge risk, right? At some point, you’re like, what happens if this doesn’t work? I’ve got 25, between the two of you have $50,000 of credit card debt? to do anything, you have to take risk, right? I mean, so if you were to give, well, I’m going to actually throw out an idea.
I think everyone listening to this, if they’re not using a ZoomInfo, or ZoomInfo type technology. They need to go try it, like take some risk. Try like you talked about this. You should be testing everything you should be doing some kind of split testing. So I’m going to like, probably not appropriate for you. But I’m going to pitch like everyone should go give ZoomInfo a shot. In fact, I think we pitched you I think, you know, Billy Bateman the co-founder of ChatFunnels asked if you guys had some kind of offer for every one of the you know, the attendees of this event to come and try this thing out. Like, what did I think you guys put something together?
Anybody who’s watching this will include the link to a landing page that will auto provision you into a free trial of ZoomInfo. You come in, put in your email address. Set up an account and you’ll drive right into complimentary version of zoom info. You’ll be able to look at your ideal customer profiles. Look at companies that you’re selling to get a real good feel for your buyers. And we’re making that completely free to anybody who visits the landing page.
This is a fantastic, huge value. Any last thoughts in terms of like how you recommend people move forward? Like how should if you’re a marketer today, one last piece of advice.
Henry: Take the time to get real specific about who you want to sell to combine that information with available third party data like intent and insights that you can pull from a from a service like zoom info, AB test your way to the right message against that audience, and then feed that loop over and over again. I think we have one of the best go to market engines in the world. And there are still places all over it that I look at and go that’s not very good. That’s not very good. Technology is constantly getting better and better and better. Take advantage of what’s out there. But you got to be out there with your message in market. Getting kicked in the teeth a little bit when you’ve go the wrong message. You’ve got to be out there with your message.
Dave: Amazing. It’s a huge privilege to have Henry come and share these insights. Let go execute these insights. If you have any questions, what’s the best way to reach out to someone on your team? Or you? If they want to learn more?
Henry: Our website is Zoominfo.com. There are many forms there you can fill out. If you want to reach me directly it’s just henryshuch@zoominfo.com if you want to shoot me an email and ill get you to the right place.
Dave: There is a man who believes in his industry, just gave you his email. Can’t thank you enough for this conversion.