Hi All,
Infrequent poster here. This board has helped me tremendously over the past couple of years. I’m grateful for having found it and appreciate all the contributors. Thank you!
Aa customer facing professional in the enterprise software space, I have direct experience and access with digital transformation projects, tech stacks and use cases. There are several other important and interesting data points I factor in when deciding to invest in a company, which I’m happy to share offline. Let’s talk ZoomInfo (ZI);
Understanding organizational charts is critical for software sales professionals. A few years back, my counterpart used DiscoverOrg to understand a prospective customer’s organizational chart. He noticed a new Project Manager (PM) that reported to the CIO. This PM wasn’t mentioned on any other platform, including LinkedIn. He contacted the PM and 4 months later, closed a decent sized six figure deal with that account. There are several other examples of the value of this tool. DiscoverOrg was acquired by ZI in early 2019.
ZI’s primary use case is providing a database of accounts and contacts for sales and marketing. They have teams and technologies that crawl the web ensuring their data is as accurate. Let’s say I’m a new salesperson in any industry. ZI helps me find the right names, email addresses and phone numbers for people at my accounts. It also helps me identify new accounts that are not in my CRM (Salesforce.com, etc.)
Time-to-value and time-to-market is critical for growth companies. A lot of companies purchase lists to identify prospective customers and associated contacts for their sales and marketing teams to target. Most of these bulk list providers have low quality information or questionable data at best. As companies grow, they need relevant account and contacts for specific market segments, geos, and verticals. They need more accurate data and want to ensure they are targeting the right audience. Sales professionals are expensive resources and businesses want to maximize sales productivity, rather than have their sales teams research new companies and contacts.
ZI also offers Marketing Data Management solutions but this is not the primary use case for sales. It would be a natural extension for them to move into Account Based Marketing. Similar to what 6sense and Engagio do. They currently have a similar offering that but it’s not quite robust, so I hope they acquire 6sense for example. ZI has also started to offer Recruiting solutions, which I find very very intriguing.
I have worked with startups, mid-sized and large companies in the software space. Over the past 5 years, I have noticed that most of the sales people at my or other companies I’m familiar with have or want access to ZI. They have no real competition for their use case. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a staple tool for most sales and marketing professionals, but is used in combination with ZI. Their licenses are expensive and they offer a set limit of contacts per month per user. So their customers would need to purchase additional credits. Customers can’t just download all contact information and cancel their ZI subscription, making it sticky. ZI also does a great job of updating contact information. It also has a use case for mature companies as those are constantly looking for new companies to sell to.
Here’s a recent blog post about an eight figure deal that ZI recently closed. https://blog.zoominfo.com/closing-big-business-deals/. Eight figure software deals are rare, especially for a company of ZI’s size and product offering. It’s infrequent even amongst the software giants.
Hope this was helpful 
Cheers!