This is a sales lead generation tool

A friend of mine works at a company that uses Zoominfo in their sales process to find the right people to sell their product to. It is a database of people who in vast majority do not know their info is being shared and they may never know. Ever wondered how to reach head of product development at company X? Zoominfo will most likely have their name, email, phone and in some cases personal cell phone number and other info. They get this data often from data brokers but then actual users validate it once they make successful contact. I would personally hate to have my info in their database.

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I would personally hate to have my info in their database.

This industry is so old I can’t remember the company’s name we used to buy leads from 50 years ago, around the time of the birth of the ARPANET, the precursor of today’s Internet. The only change is that data gathering is thousands of times more efficient.

https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/arpanet

Except it was not packaged as leads. One would buy dossiers on the companies one was interested in which was acquired through diverse means from physical canvasing to reading ads. We based our market study of the Venezuelan economy on a book by the title The Oligarchy of Money by a Communist economist. The companies he was demonizing were our prime market! Data is treasure!

We all have two kinds of data, public and private. As long as they are collecting public data I see no harm, on the contrary, we all seek to “sell” ourselves to get jobs or contracts and even life partners. What needs to be kept secure is our private data and there Amazon and Facebook are probably more dangerous.

Denny Schlesinger
went to IBM’s Sales School in Cuernavaca, Mexico in November 1963

Memory returns…

Dun and Bradstreet

History [edit]
1800s[edit]
Dun & Bradstreet traces its history back to July 20, 1841, with the formation of The Mercantile Agency in New York City by Lewis Tappan, later called R.G. Dun & Company.[7] Recognizing the need for a centralized credit reporting system, Tappan formed the company to create a network of correspondents who would provide reliable, objective credit information to subscribers.[8] As an advocate for civil rights, Tappan used his abolitionist connections to expand and update the company’s credit information.[9]

In spite of accusations of invading personal privacy, by 1844 the Mercantile Agency had over 280 clients. The agency continued to expand, allowing offices to open in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. By 1849, Tappan retired, allowing Benjamin Douglass to take over the booming business.[10]

In 1859, Douglass transferred the company to Robert Graham Dun, who immediately changed the firm’s name to R.G. Dun & Company.[11] Over the next 40 years, Graham Dun continued to expand the business across international boundaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dun_%26_Bradstreet#History

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Thank you Captain for some historical context to this area of investment.

After reading the Q4 CC on Saturday I was almost as impressed with ZoomInfo as when I read the numbers Saul presented. Having been in Sales myself, before becoming a Physical Therapist, I really like what their doing in this space. I see there being added to the Snowflake Marketplace as acknowledgement that Data is the new gold. I see advertising going from dumb to smart as a good thing.

I started a 3% trial position today.

Excerpts from the Conference call:

Q4CC

We now work with over 50% of the Fortune 500 and over 30% of the Fortune 1000. And there is so much opportunity in the enterprise.
And…
And we are still in the early adopter stage of the evolution with a market that is low single digits penetrated.

————
Changes at the top
With this large addressable market in front of us, we see a great opportunity to increase our investment in our data platform and applications. Our first step in doing that is announcing that Hill Amir will now serve exclusively as our Chief Product Officer, so she can focus on driving innovation and product enhancements to capture the market opportunity ahead of us. Second, we’ve elevated Chris Hayes to the role of Chief Operating Officer, unifying our sales and marketing efforts. Chris is a longtime revenue leader who now takes on responsibility for the entire go-to-market organization, including marketing. We also announced today that Shane Murphy Reuter has joined us as our new Chief Marketing Officer, reporting into Chris. Shane joins us from Intercom, a San Francisco-based conversational relationship platform, where he was senior VP of Marketing. I’m confident that this team sets us up for continued growth and success.

QnA: We did sort of organize the management team underneath Chris. In a couple of different ways to make sure that we were optimizing the organizational structure there but nothing material. Really, we’re excited about the opportunity to marry both sales and marketing underneath one leader. We think you get all sorts of alignment and synergies by having everything under Chris, and we’re excited about the momentum we’ll see from that alignment
————

In the fourth quarter, we saw unprecedented usage of those integrations with nearly 2 billion automated calls of our API. That is roughly 2 times the volume we saw just 1 year ago. Across our user facing applications, we also experienced increasing rates of adoption throughout the quarter, culminating with January delivering record high engagement rates on our core platform as measured by daily active users over monthly active users as well as significant increases in usage of additional functionality and a record high NPS score in January.

Regardless of where or how our platform is consumed, the guiding principle for a ZoomInfo customer is to turn insights into action. In 2020, we shared a vision with our customers around being able to take a signal of funding event, a new technology added to a company stack, a spending initiative in the works or a spike in a relevant intent topic. And cross referenced that signal against an ideal customer profile, say, companies with more than 100 employees who use NextSuite and who are not current customers. And mapping that to their ideal prospect profiles and then instantly activating the campaign targeting that audience. Our vision is a fully automated go-to-market motion from signal to action.
This capability is more than sales automation or marketing automation. It is true go-to-market automation and is now fully available with our workflow suite. Today, the workflow suite, which is available within our elite package includes a reimagined interface that turns natural language statements into go-to-market workflows that integrate with a broad range of CRM, sales automation, marketing automation and advertising platforms.

We’ve also added contextual access to create workflows throughout the ZoomInfo platform and the ability to enable every user with this automation capability. On the enterprise side, we continue to build ways to deliver our data and insights in real-time anywhere. Our newly launched data shares, push APIs and custom data flows, allow our customers to consume our insights to new and innovative ways, including through data warehouses, custom applications and cloud databases.
In this arena, we are especially excited about our new agreement to list ZoomInfo on the Snowflake data marketplace. Allowing us to deliver our data and insights directly into our customers’ Snowflake instances for consumption by their business intelligence, data analytics and revenue operations team.

Hired 900 since March 2020, doubling head count.

One, once we were fully integrated with Clickagy’s intent asset into our platform, we saw intense signals attached to companies increased 3x. So our customers are now seeing intense signals on significantly more of their targets across their total addressable market.

And then on the EverString side, one of the things we were especially excited about with the acquisition was the opportunity to take the EverString data asset into a much larger swath of our enterprise customers by leveraging our go-to-market motion and our sales and account management teams. So in just the first month post acquisition, we’ve more than quadrupled the number of opportunities ever string was a part of as compared to the stand-alone entity. And you can see that within our $100,000 customer, we’ve significantly grown that space too, and EverString been a driver for that. So both of those acquisitions are performing really well. I think if you think about where the opportunities are in the future, number one, we have the capacity in the bandwidth and feel really comfortable that if the right value-creating deal came along, that we’d be in a position to execute against it. But philosophically, we’re looking for software or data assets that play in the go-to-market or recruiting spaces, platforms that sales and marketing and talent acquisition professionals are leveraging every day to hit their numbers. And we look for that software to be something that can be meaningfully enhanced by our data assets that we can sell across our go-to-market team and that will be accretive in the short term. So you should expect us to be acquisitive, but we’re not going to do M&A for M&A stake. We have this framework and a philosophy around M&A, and you should expect us to adhere to that.

So what they’re doing is they’re identifying a set of key moments or signals, that mean something to their business. And that’s different for all of our customers. That might be a funding round. It might be the addition of a technology, it might be a new executive that’s come on board. It might be a new location opening or a new product launch or a new partnership that’s announced. So they’re articulating a set of signals and then they’re loading into ZoomInfo or using our Salesforce sync product to identify the target companies that they want to see those signals from. Once they marry those two together, then they’re building the ideal prospects at those companies. For our customers, it could be everything from a CIO to a Chief Financial Officer to integrations engineer or a cybersecurity architect. And then they’re architecting a system that says, when you see this signal at these companies, capture these specific professionals and then run this go-to-market motion. And in that go-to-market motion can be everything from a marketing automation campaign to a display ad campaign, to an SDR calling campaign behind it. But the key part of this is it’s fully automated.

Here they talk about why there might be a difference in levels of appreciation by different users.
Natural language UI
on the least sophisticated side, you can see them using the platform by identifying a target audience. So saying, “Hey, look, every company with over 100 employees that’s based in these 5 metro areas, I want to run a campaign against the VPs of information technology.” And so it’s giving that level of access and screening to their sales reps.

The number of new customer adds in Q4 here, I think it nearly exceeded all of the new customer adds in all of 2019.
Q: some sort of inflection happening here?
A: And so what you’re seeing is the organization really getting its feet under itself around how to sell that platform around the broadness of opportunity we have in the marketplace. And so you see customers from all sorts of industries now coming to us, and we have a solution that can serve all of their needs. It doesn’t matter if you sell into an IT decision-maker or a medical director, if you’re selling in France or you’re selling in California, the solution can serve up better go-to-market efficiencies for your sales teams, regardless of what kind of company you are. And I think what you’re seeing is companies, one, making the realization, the digitization of their go-to-market efforts is a must and two, you see really the investments that we made over the last two years in our go-to-market teams and our product really paying off. And so we saw a broad based momentum, again, from all industries across the world across sizes. And that’s the momentum that we don’t think is a blip or something that short lived or short term, we think that’s here to stay.

Me here:
Having accurate information prior to going headlong into an ad campaign saves everyone head ache. Yes, I see this as very similar to targeted Digital Advertising, just way more sophisticated.

Question on the call
targeted audiences, which hasn’t gotten much love on the call, but it seems like a strong step forward in terms of expanding the scope of the platform into marketing and advertising.
within advertising, we think that we have a big opportunity to leverage that contact and company data asset to provide an incredibly differentiated solution to the market.
We’ve known for a while that our business and contact data has the ability to make a difference for marketers in the advertising space. And so with that product, marketers can now use ZoomInfo to target business professionals using data points that were not available before we brought this product to market. I think much like all of the other areas that we think about expanding to either internally or from an M&A perspective

earlier in the year, our largest customer it’s $2 million. It’s up to like 3.5 on at this point. And it continues to grow. So we think that there are significant opportunities to ultimately get well above where we are today with some of the largest customers that are fully integrating our capabilities to really drive more sophisticated go-to-market fortunes.
.

All calls are monitored for discovery of Best Practices
They use call recording software that we use and we flat customer mentions I’m sorry, competitor mentions across all of the calls are sellers and our account managers take. And competitors are still, on average, mentioned less than 1% of the time. And competitor mentions were actually down Q4 versus Q3. So to the extent that there are market alternatives in the marketplace, we are pulling away from everybody.

Questioned on Guidance
Henry Schuck, CEO founder.
Sure. I guess there’s one takeaway from this call is that we are seeing a positive momentum across all areas of the business. And we’re coming off the strongest quarter and the strongest year we’ve ever had. Our initial guidance is while higher than consensus. It is our expectation that these guidance levels take account a wide range of potential outcomes

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