ZoomInfo continued its rapid growth, posting GAAP revenue of $222.3 million, up 59% year-over-year.  Growth was both organic (52%) and via acquisitions (7%), with a net retention rate of 116%, up from 108% in 2020.  Revenue grew 13% on a sequential basis.

Roughly half the increase in net retention was due to new functionality, and half was due to improvements in gross retention and lower down-sell rates associated with the initial shock of COVID in 2020.

CEO Henry Schuck is bullish about their new MarketingOS offering as part of RevOS.  Since acquiring Clickagy 16 months ago, the firm has been building out ABM expertise in its engineering, product, strategy, and customer success teams to bring the new marketing suite to market.

“In all of our prelaunch diligence, we heard over and over again that the applications that marketers were leveraging to do account-based marketing were falling short for one main reason,” detailed Schuck.  “The data being leveraged in those platforms was both inaccurate and incomplete.  And that’s no surprise.  Today’s ABM platforms were all designed to leverage a company’s own first-party data that exists in their CRM or marketing automation system.”

“And in 15 years of running ZoomInfo, I’ve never heard a rep manager or revenue leader describe that type of data as either complete or accurate.  Yet without accurate and complete data, marketers aim advertising dollars at the wrong company and target the wrong people at those companies.  They deliver fruitless leads to sales, which erodes confidence and fails to build alignment between sales and marketing.  So, we built MarketingOS the same way we build every application with our best-in-class data at the foundation of the application layer…

For today’s B2B revenue teams, data, insights, technology, and orchestration are core to the motion they use to market and sell their products.  But these capabilities are siloed.  Some can be found in marketing tech or revenue operations, while others are in the sales tech stack.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck

MarketingOS also benefits from ZoomInfo’s longstanding presence among sales teams, improving the credibility of marketing data and removing channel conflict induced by sales and marketing standardizing on different third-party reference databases.

According to Schuck, the RevOS positioning helps reps better explain ZoomInfo’s broad value proposition:

“What RevOS does for us, and what the different platform and product pillars do for us, is it gives us a cohesive story that we can tell all across our business from our enterprise business to our mid-market business to our SMB business. And we believe that the products that we’ve put together have applicability across customers of all sizes…What it does from an enablement perspective is it gives our sellers the ability to go into those conversations in a way that allows them to articulate the broad spectrum of the platform in a way that our customers are understanding much more clearly.”

ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck

It test-marketed the RevOS positioning in December and January and found that the updated messaging raised both the win rate and average sales price.  RevOS messaging helps reps position Chorus, RingLead, and Engage at the beginning of conversations.

ZoomInfo, which announced the RevOS ABM Platform last week, is positioning itself as a best-of-breed platform for revenue teams.  ZoomInfo offers a unified platform for sales and marketing, removing the need to stitch together many point solutions that address individual workflows or problems.  With over 10,000 MarTech solutions alone (according to Scott Brinker of ChiefMartec), selecting and integrating many services has become increasingly difficult.  Conversely, go-to-market platforms such as ZoomInfo ABM Platform manage data, workflow, analytics, forecasting, and communications.

ZoomInfo is not looking to displace systems of record such as CRMs or MAPs but to synchronize with them and enrich their data.  For the past few years, it has been growing beyond traditional sales intelligence (companies, contacts, technographics, event triggers) to workflow, data orchestration, and engagement tools (webforms, visitor intelligence, programmatic marketing, chat, triggered workflows, sales cadences, engagement analytics, conversational intelligence, pipeline forecasting, etc.).  In 2021 it shifted from content acquisitions (e.g., Zoom Information contacts, Clickagy intent, Everstring business graphs) to orchestration (e.g., RingLead) and Engagement (e.g., Insent chat and Chorus Conversational Intelligence and forecasting) acquisitions. 

Likewise, ZoomInfo’s expanded product offerings support Sales Engagement, Recruitment, and ABM.

“We significantly expanded our offering by developing an application layer on top of our best-in-class data assets and acquiring and quickly integrating chat conversation intelligence and orchestration technology into the platform,” explained Schuck.  “These innovations enabled us to add more new customers than ever before and drove increasing levels of sales to existing customers and record net revenue retention of 116%, up from 108% in 2020.”

From a GTM perspective, ZoomInfo is not looking to verticalize its platform but focus more on functional specialization.  As a result, the new RevOS platform positioning focuses on four functions: Marketing, Sales, Operations, and Recruitment.

“It’s more aligned around personas that we sell to,” explained Schuck.  “The new packaging and models that we’re rolling out are aligned around persona, so a sales persona, a marketing persona, an operations persona, and a recruiter and talent acquisition persona.  And that’s the way we really think about our offering and the way that we take them to market.”