DDOG Sales Calls

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Hi Folks,

First time posting here but a true Fool since 1998. I have read the rules of the board and respect them. Thanks to everyone here who shares their wisdom.

I just wanted to share with DDOG investors that I am a former IT Exec who retired from TJX Corporate about 7 years ago and have recently been getting calls to my mobile phone from DDOG. The other day, I decided to pick up the phone and see what they wanted. The woman wanted to know if I was in need of better monitoring of the infrastructure that I am currently responsible for. I explained that I was currently retired and that the only infrastructure that I was responsible for nowadays is the cable modem, router, NAS device and MacBook Pro that we own. No issues with monitoring those infrastructure components. :wink:

I stayed on the line with the sales rep to ask her how sales were going from her perspective and she explained to me that her job is to introduce the product/service to potential customers and line up a sales call with a sales executive (maybe depending on the size of the organization they are targeting?) so she only “sells” appointments!

I thought it was interesting that DDOG:

  • had my mobile number (not sure how they got that)
  • wanted to talk with ME about their products / services (I was NOT an infrastructure guy)
  • didn’t check my LinkedIn profile to see that I’ve been retired for 7 years

Other than that, the rep was pleasant to speak with and I wished her a good day.

'38Packard

  • watching DDOG but no position
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A one liner that is hard to resist: Did you recommend ZI to DDOG?

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Sales development reps (who set up calls for sales) are usually measured on call volume. They don’t have a lot of incentive to spend time qualifying the lead lists they have been handed. It’s usually an entry-level job for people who want to get into sales. It’s faster for them to call around an org to get the name of the right person than to try and research it, which is why they called you. In fact, did you give them the right contact? You may still know who they need to talk to :slight_smile:

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38 Packard - here is why and also instructive of how Zoominfo works or doesn’t, you make up your own minds.

I have a ZI subscription and cross referenced what little information you gave me in the original post with Zoominfo (ZI) and LinkedIn. Even if I don’t have you, this is still prescriptive.

LinkedIn has you as retired from TJX, but if you go back to ZI, I have this same person (the reason I know this is that the work history is the same and so is the location), you are listed as a current employee. It also has your business email, personal email, as well as Direct Phone to your old office at TJX and your mobile number.

This is consistent with my experience using ZI. I used to run a sales organization for a small technology start up and we used ZI a lot and had zero success with it. I do not attribute our success to ZI, but I do think they didn’t provide a lot of value. Doing it all over, I would have focused the money toward online marketing or user groups.

For these reasons, I have not invested in ZI and based on the reports on this board, I have missed out on a lot of capital gains.

Long DDOG

Mac

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Thanks for your perspective, Mac. In 2018 and 2019, ZI’s NRR for enterprise customers was over 120%. For all customers it was lower (100-110%), but wsm007 made the argument that it will look higher in 2021: https://discussion.fool.com/a-few-quick-notes-about-my-watch-lis…

Given your experience, how do you account for this? Are there any ways you think your organization’s needs may have been out of the norm for ZI customers? The significant difference between enterprise and general customers suggests that small customers like yourself may be even sub-100% NRR, suggesting it’s not designed to work well for you. Though since it seems the main concern would be data quality, I don’t know why that would be.

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I will answer this for my own experience, which is similar. We have ZoomInfo, but honestly, it’s by far the least productive tools that we use.

I think that for many organizations, it finds the names of contacts, their positions, their email addresses and their phone numbers. The phone numbers is key to many.

For our use, we tend to have a very very targeted type of customer. A good case study, is that one of our clients asks us about a company that just won a big Military contract to build a Microwave frequency Communication Platform for Lockheed Martin. They say, this should be a great customer for our widgets, please look into it (we are contracted sales-team for hire for very specific and very technical high-tech stuff including Semiconductor Chips, power supplies, and higher level electronic components that are building blocks for engineers building systems).

So I have a company name but I’m not sure who it is to speak to. Calling on the CTO is not the right level, I have to find engineers who are designing with Microwave components.

I’ve learned that I can google outside of Linked in and do a series of searches such as:

CompanyABC engineer microwave communications and I will get a fair number of matches from Linkedin.
With their names, I can get their email addresses because it’s easy to find the email format for a company (first letter, last name, or first.last etc). That’s all I need and it’s free.

When I run the same search on ZoomInfo, it almost never returns anywhere close to the same number of contacts for a given company. It will give me emails and phone numbers for the ones it has (normally), but that’s much less useful to us than having a bigger audience to start with.

I can use ZoomInfo to send one email to all of these supposed contacts and it will look as though it was just sent to them personally, and there’s some other nice things it has.

They tout providing org charts, but I’ve yet to find a single useful one from any customer of mine.

For my company, 3 seats cost $10k per year (discounted) and I regret signing up. My guess is that during the changing times that we are in, customers are willing to spend a great amount of money on “sales productivity tools” since salespeople are having to adapt to WFH and not face-to-face visits.

Thus the runway could still be quite long from here, but for our team, we definitely won’t be re-upping with Zoominfo going forward.

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