“Zoom IQ for Sales analyzes customer interactions to surface key insights, actions, and content from sales meetings. Sales leaders can also use this data to help make better-informed management decisions regarding their sales teams,” blogged UCaaS Product Marketing Manager Theresa Larkin. “With actionable insights based on proven sales strategies and a wealth of data, organizations can streamline the new sales rep onboarding process, create a modern sales methodology, and further develop their sales teams.”
Zoom IQ for Sales conversational analytics
Zoom describes Zoom IQ for Sales as its “First Step in Conversational Intelligence.” The service is “tightly integrated” with Salesforce, Google Calendar, Office 365, and Exchange. Insights include
Engaging Questions – Analyzes questions posed to determine the frequency with which customers respond to queries.
Longest Spiel – Identifies the longest monologue to help reps hone their pitches and avoid monologues.
Next Steps – Assesses whether clear next steps are outlined during the meeting.
Patience – Determines whether reps wait for a response after asking a question.
Talk-Listen Ratios – Analyzes whether there is a balance between lead speaker talk time and time granted to others.
Competitor and Feature Mentions – Tags competitors and product features so reps, competitive analysts, and product teams can drill into prospect concerns, competitive statements, and potential gaps in the product.
Post-deal analytics include which topics arose most frequently, time spent in each stage, and which negotiators made the final purchasing decision. General Deal analytics include the number of conversations per deal and the duration of conversations per deal.
Zoom IQ supports a video snippets library of best practices exemplars. Snippets can be used for initial training or for reviewing how to handle specific objections, present the value of various products, or position across target verticals.
Zoom Sales IQ Playlists
“Zoom has made strategic investments in homegrown speech recognition technologies and recruited a world-class team to produce high-fidelity transcription services that are a backbone for products like Zoom IQ…We’re developing domain-specific NLU (natural language understanding) using few-shot models to build features that will be more reliable and valuable to our users,” said Josh Dulberger, Zoom’s head of product, data, and AI. “Sales teams…want to focus on the customer, and managing the engagement rather than taking notes, but also so they can review their calls to pick up nuances, easily identify next steps, or solicit some guidance from a colleague. Managers and sales leaders can’t sit in on every call but want to understand the selling climate, when to coach, and which reps are finding the right message.”
Zoom IQ for Sales places Zoom in competition with many of its partners, including Salesloft, Outreach, Chorus, and Gong.
TechCrunch Senior Report Kyle Wiggers cautioned buyers about Zoom’s AI capabilities: “The jury’s out on the accuracy of Zoom’s algorithms, particularly given the company’s history of deploying flawed AI. Sentiment analysis algorithms are especially prone to gender and race bias, and not every salesperson will necessarily agree with how Zoom measures engagement.”
“Zoom is almost certainly feeling the pressure from investors to establish new lines of revenue,” continued Wiggers. “While the company’s earnings soared during the pandemic, guidance is down as customers begin to shift to hybrid and in-office work arrangements less reliant on videoconferencing.”
Zoom IQ for Sales is priced at $79 per month per seat.
“Half a million businesses choose Zoom and rely on it for internal and external conversations,” said Dulberger. “The Zoom platform already has a strong foundation in this area with features such as transcription, recordings, and highlights. This also gives us an opportunity to expand this type of functionality across the Zoom platform such as Zoom Contact Center and within our meetings and events solutions to help presenters pace their speech, take notes, capture action items or employ specific tactics.”
Zoom Events, Zoom’s platform for virtual and hybrid shows, is adding a backstage feature that lets panelists, speakers, and production crews meet before, during, and after events. During the session, support staff can view the webinar feed, chat with each other, answer attendees’ questions, and practice their presentations. Zoom Events Backstage should be available by the end of April.
Other new Events features include branded wallpaper that displays behind tiles and webinar reactions.
Last month, Drift rolled out its Conversation Cloud, which combines the capabilities of its Conversational Marketing, Conversational Sales, and newly launched Conversational Service offerings. Drift’s Conversational AI guides visitors along any stage of the customer journey, helping them “voice their intent with open text questions, find answers to their own questions, get personalized recommendations, or book a sales meeting.”
“Everything starts with a conversation, and in-person communication and experiences are taking a back seat to the conversations we have online, especially in our business relationships. Businesses are relying more and more on digital experience platforms – or in our case, conversational experience platforms – to bridge these connections and manage key customer interactions, touchpoints, and engagement. Our guiding philosophy at Drift is to put the buyer at the center of everything we do, and we are excited to bring the Drift Conversation Cloud to market to help our customers deliver a better experience to buyers at each stage of their journey, all while improving their sales teams’ efficiencies and accelerating revenue.”
Drift CPO Leo Tenenblat
Drift Conversational Marketing supports real-time conversations with web visitors, helping to answer questions, deliver desired content, or “qualify and convert best-fit buyers.” Conversational Marketing functionality includes visitor intelligence, chatbots, meeting scheduling, and Fastlane lead form booking.
Drift Conversational Sales manages customer conversations across chat, video, email, and phone. Drift routes high value leads to sales reps, notifying them when qualified leads are engaging with the chatbot or the website. Sales reps can “craft personalized outreach based on what web pages buyers visited, which sales touchpoints they engaged with, and how often they interacted with your brand.” Prospect activity is automatically logged to Salesforce.
Drift Video asynchronous video sharing on LinkedIn messenger
Reps can also deliver personalized video messages based on site activity intelligence. Videos may be shared via LinkedIn, Drift, Outreach, or Salesloft. Drift claims a more than 3X improvement in response rates for asynchronous video.
Drift not only schedules meetings but also offers a new Deal Room module for capturing interactions between buyers and sellers, including meeting transcriptions and document sharing. Deal Room also provides real-time alerts when prospects engage with the Deal Room and manages Mutual Action Plans.
“Drift Deal Room enables seamless collaboration between your internal team and entire buyer committees in one central location,” blogged Drift Senior Product Marketing Manager Holly Xiao. “Everyone involved will be able to have conversations, share files, manage action items, schedule meetings, and more — directly in Deal Room.”
Continued Xiao, “Drift Deal Room lets you see who, what, and how buyers interact with your business throughout their entire journey. So, when it’s time for your next deal review, you’ll come to the table with a clear picture of deal activities and trajectory. And if you notice opportunities with lower engagement, you can rely on Drift Video, Drift Chat, Drift Email, and more to help you nurture deals in the right channel at the right time and keep them moving in the right direction.”
Conversational Service answers simple support questions, allowing the service team to focus on difficult support problems and high-priority customers. The Drift Chatbot supports Salesforce and Zendesk knowledge base articles. Conversational Service lets customers create their own support tickets or hand high-priority requests over to live service reps.
“Translating click-based engagement into buyer-led enablement across interactions requires conversation design that senses and responds to spoken and unspoken buyer needs across complex and connected buying journeys, wrote Forrester Principal Analyst Jessie Johnson last November. “Conversational interactions help B2B organizations meet buyers where they are in their journey, enable their buyers and customers in the moment, and inform the next interaction. The impact of poor execution, however, can have a lasting negative impact on the buying journey, customer experience, and even the brand itself.”
Technology Intelligence vendor HG Insights acquired fellow data vendor Intricately. The acquisition provides HG Insights with global cloud product adoption, usage, and spend data, “adding to HG’s market-leading optimization of the world’s top technology brands’ Go-To-Market.”
The entire Intricately team has joined HG Insights, including CEO Michael Pollack and CTO Fima Leshinsky. Pollack assumed the role of EVP of Market Innovation, and Leshinsky was named an SVP of Product.
HG Insights’ NLP gathers technology installation and spend intelligence for eleven million global companies, capturing 96% of the world’s total IT spend and intelligence on over 15,600 installed products.
“We started Intricately to provide decision-makers with actionable data and insights they could use to plot a course through the ever-expanding Cloud universe. At the time, we saw a world with individuals relying on gut instincts, teams making ‘best guesses,’ and organizations making big bets on circumspect data. We started this business with the goal of making the unknown known. Our vision was, and has always been, to be the authoritative source of truth for digital product adoption, usage, and spend.”
Intricately Founders Fima Leshinsky and Michael Pollack
Intricately’s proprietary sensor network gathers cloud product adoption, usage, and spend data for seven million global businesses across 21,000 cloud offerings. Data are collected from over 150 global Internet points of presence, helping Intricately map digital infrastructure. Its insights are delivered via an API, integrations, data snapshots, and web applications.
“Intricately provides unique and actionable insights that enable cloud sellers to increase velocity by focusing on the highest potential opportunities,” said Pollack. “As the workforces of global companies become increasingly distributed, cloud spend and product adoption have become key indicators when assessing potential buyers’ likelihood of purchasing and deploying new products. Intricately’s intelligence, now part of HG Insights, is uniquely positioned to lead the market on this trend.”
Intricately Cloud Intelligence
Intricately’s customers include the top three cloud companies. In addition, the acquisition provides “real-time visibility into a company’s cloud footprint and application tech stack.”
“Now, with the addition of Intricately, we can provide real-time visibility into a company’s cloud footprint and application tech stack to provide richer insights for better decisions and faster results,” said HG Insights CEO Elizabeth Cholawsky. “Our customers have come to rely on HG Insights as an indispensable input into their most strategic decisions such as market sizing, whitespace analysis, and territory planning as well as for fundamental activities including opportunity prioritization and account-based marketing intelligence.”
HG Insights and Intricately offer complementary spend data. HG Insights focuses on projected spend for forecasting and go-to-market planning while Intricately measures actual spend for benchmarking and plan measurement. Combined, the companies offer “unmatched spend insights in the Cloud Market that support the full lifecycle of Plan, Optimize, and Execute to empower sales and marketing organizations.”
HG Insights listed a series of technical benefits:
Richer combined datasets to operationalize the planning, targeting, and messaging to prospects based on technology adoption and usage
Improved precision of workload volumes, estimated spends, and the related technologies running on cloud-based infrastructure
Expansion of insights into customer-built cloud and self-hosted applications
Detailed location insights providing a view into both the location of consumption and/or physical infrastructure to power hyper-focused Go-to-Market strategies
Real-time detection of changes to a company’s cloud application and technology strategy
Business professionals can leverage HG Insights expanded intelligence to evaluate their TAM/SAM/SOM, prioritize ABM campaigns, establish “equitable and efficient” sales territories, and determine which prospects have the highest propensity to buy. In addition, sales reps can identify prospects evaluating other vendors or shifting their usage patterns, signals that an account is at risk.
“With this new intelligence in its offering, HG will provide game-changing insights that transform our customers’ Go-To-Market initiatives and accelerate growth,” HG Insights Product Marketing Director Darcy Moss told GZ Consulting. “Strategy, marketing, sales, and operations teams can leverage this insight to answer critical business decisions with greater confidence.”
The addition of Intricately Cloud insights helps answer the question, “What is Coming?”
“By adding Intricately’s market-leading workload and usage data, we’ll give our customers the most detailed, unique picture available of an account’s technology strategy; not just what they have, but why they have it, how they’re using it, and ultimately, what they’re likely to do next. It’s a competitive advantage unmatched in the market,” stated Moss.
Intricately was founded in 2014 and is based in San Francisco. LinkedIn states that it has 54 employees, having grown its headcount by 35% in the past year and 93% over the past two. However, its employment plateaued last November.
“At this time, we will be business as usual until the transition is completed,” stated Moss. “This includes retaining current office locations.”
HG Insights did not disclose any size or growth details. It also did not disclose the acquisition price. Intricately is HG Insights’ second acquisition. In 2018, the firm acquired Pivotal IQ, a curator of IT contract and spend intelligence.
Account Based Engagement platformTerminus announced Connected Account Experiences, which helps customers identify in-market prospects, reach out to them, and engage them across the buyer’s journey.
Terminus claims that its cookie-free, first-party data provides a 16% lift in traffic from its targeted audience activation.
“Marketers can continuously optimize ABM strategies with Terminus Identify, the visitor identification system recently added to the Terminus Platform which features the company’s own first-party data sets,” stated the firm. “Unlike other platforms, this owned data is never static and gets stronger with every interaction and with every channel.”
Terminus leverages both first-party visitor intelligence and partner intent data sets from Bombora and G2, helping marketers identify in-market accounts. Other Terminus intent datasets include psychographics (the wants and interests of a company based upon public messaging), technographics, and hiring insights derived from job postings.
Other account intelligence includes firmographics, event data, relationships, and engagement data captured through interactions between prospects and company employees and automated platforms.
New engagement channels span CTV and audio, including Spotify, Hulu, DirectTV, and other streaming services.
“CTV is considered one of the fastest-growing channels in video advertising,” advised Terminus. “Leveraging CTV from Terminus means customers can diversify their arsenals of creative assets and advertising channels, reach customers while they’re watching Hulu or other ad-supported streaming platforms, and boost brand awareness and revenue.”
Connected Account Experiences supports partner integrations through Salesloft, Outreach, and Slack.
Terminus supports many channels, including targeted display advertising, email signatures, account-based chat, personalized websites, LinkedIn Sponsored Content, direct mail (via Sendoso), asynchronous video (via Vidyard, Wistia, CloudApp, Hippo Video, or Loom), CTV, and audio.
“Today’s marketers need an ABM strategy that engages buyers with personalized touchpoints and connected account experiences across all channels and across the full funnel,” said Tim Kopp, CEO of Terminus. “With Connected Account Experiences, Terminus enables marketers to identify their buyers wherever they are, reach them on any screen they use, and engage them with the marketing and sales automation tools their teams use every day.”
Technology Marketing Intelligence vendor HG Insights released Functional Area Intelligence, a set of advanced insights that specify the department and location where specific technologies have been deployed. The new offering provides deeper intelligence for sales and marketing teams.
“Functional Area Intelligence is a first-in-the-market [capability], deriving insights about a company’s organization linked to its technology profile,” said CTO Rob Fox. “By providing actionable data at the departmental level, we’re enabling companies to better understand technology adoption across teams and locations. This increases the ability to better optimize territories, hypertarget marketing campaigns, and build better account plans across sales. We’re committed to improving insights for sellers and marketers so they can close more deals, and this is a step in that direction.”
HG Insights employs advanced NLP for analyzing structured and semi-structured documents to determine where technology has been deployed at global organizations. Functional Area Intelligence is available through the HG Universe data subscription as a monthly or quarterly feed. Functional Area Intelligence includes
The department tied to a particular technology and specific location
Summary and detailed location views
Department size predictions down to the location
Trend analysis to show department adoption changes over time
Decisionmakers associated with the documents from which the technology signals have been mined.
“Armed with this knowledge, Go-To-Market teams can develop targeted competitive campaigns connecting the organization, key location, and technology information, enhancing program effectiveness to drive revenue,” stated HG Insights.
HG Insights organizational and technology insights.
My last two posts have been about rebrands (IDG → Foundry and Artesian: DueDil → FullCircl), but things have suddenly gotten very real in Europe with Russia invading Ukraine under false pretenses. As Revenue Intelligence vendor Revenue Grid is based in Ukraine, I thought I’d give them my blog today.
Here is what they posted on LinkedIn:
“A big part of our Revenue Grid 🇺🇦 team is located in Kyiv, Ukraine. This is where our product was born, where our heart is. Now the whole world watches as the war burns our homes and kills our people. The Corrupt Russian government has brought death and destruction to our land.
Our homeland is under attack, and each one of us has the power to influence how soon the hell in our homeland ends.
We are receiving tremendous support from our clients, partners, and friends everywhere in the world. Many are asking what they can do to help.
Here is how you can help:
1) Stop doing business with Russia. Ask companies to stop cooperating with Russia, since every activity currently held there is supporting their criminal government and funding this unjust bloody war.
IDG Communications, which acquired four data and MarTech firms over the past 18 months, rebranded as Foundry (Foundryco.com).
‘’We set out to deliver on a strategy that reinvents our business for a new era in technology marketing where data and MarTech are engineered to work seamlessly together, powered by our global ecosystem of editorial brands,” said Kumaran Ramanathan, President of the newly named Foundry. “However, to pivot, to reinvent you sometimes have to turn away from the very things that previously defined you and the long-standing equity in our name, synonymous as one of the world’s biggest media companies ultimately limits our ambition and ability to be identified as a marketing technology powerhouse.’’
Earlier this month, IDG acquired Marketing-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform Selling Simplified. The Denver-based vendor provides lead generation products, data services, and analytics. It also maintains a database of 160 million B2B records “specific to tech industry purchase intent.” The acquisition added contact and account-level AI-powered lead generation capabilities to IDG’s expanding suite of intent-based marketing technologies. IDG is moving quickly into the B2B MarTech space, having recently acquired ABM Platform Triblio, visitor intelligence vendor KickFire, and intent platform LeadSift.
“We meet with tech companies, marketers, sellers, and agencies every day and in every market around the world,” said Jason Tenenbown, Chief Strategy Officer of Foundry. “What we’ve found is a growing disconnect between sales pipelines and marketing funnels. Our strategy has been to leverage our proprietary data with proprietary marketing technologies to bridge that gap, creating an outcomes-based set of products and services that satisfy the needs of our clients.”
IDG Communications was founded in 1964. It remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of IDG which is best known for its 200+ technology publications, including CIO, ChannelWorld, Computerworld, CSO, Network World, PCWorld, and TechHive. Its digital publications provide a stream of second-party intent data “with access to more than 200 million individuals and global behavioral insights that are authenticated, timely and, contextually relevant.”
“No one else has first-party media relationships integrated with marketing technologies to help create an ecosystem that resolves customer pain points,” added Ramanathan. “With the rebrand of IDG as Foundry, we are establishing ourselves as a company that generates and innovates with data. While the new brand marks the completion of a major milestone in our corporate transformation, we will not stop innovating and building upon our recent success.” In a corporate branding video, Foundry emphasized that “those operating at the intersection of media and technology will have the edge.” Furthermore, “MarTech without data simply does not work” and “campaigns without technology are limited in their ability to provide measurable return on investment” and are “hard to scale with real-world impact.”
Clearbit announced the general availability of its Data Activation Platform. The new service helps B2B marketing teams “focus on creating demand, capturing intent, and optimizing their pipeline.”
The Data Activation Platform addresses the “business imperative for companies to have real-time intelligence about their target market, ideal customers, and engaged prospects.” It then applies this intelligence across all stages of the customer’s journey.
The Data Activation Platform offers Clearbit customers a user interface for many of the features that were previously only supported as APIs.
“Data activation is specifically around the next step of how we’re helping companies put data to work,” explained CRO Kevin Tate to GZ Consulting. “We started with the data. How do you collect data and make it available so that companies can be smart as they engage your customers in the market? And then, over the last three years, four years, what we’ve gotten to see is how these very fast-growing companies and their growth engineering teams and go-to-market teams have put our data to work in all these different customer touchpoints. Until this Data Activation Platform, the way they put that data to work was through APIs and integrations that they stitch together.”
“We’ve been fortunate to work with many of the most innovative B2B growth teams in the world, and they’ve taught us that it’s not just about having good data. It’s about activating that data to improve your funnel from top to bottom,” said Ross Moser, CEO of Clearbit. “The ability to apply real-time intelligence to each step of the customer journey – and optimize experiences in real-time – is what’s driving success for Clearbit’s customers.”
Clearbit company and visitor intelligence
The Data Activation Platform leverages Clearbit’s heritage as a data company. Its database spans 44 million companies with over 100 firmographic and demographic attributes. Clearbit also maintains data on 350 million contacts. Marketers can target audiences, enrich their CRMs and MAPs, and personalize their website and customer experience apps. Capabilities include
Clearbit Reveal visitor intelligence for tying anonymous users to firms and detecting website visitor intent
Audience management and segmentation based on data ingested from a company’s CRM, MAP, or CDP. Alerts may be triggered to activate audiences across systems.
Real-time enrichment for short webforms.
Real-time integrations and APIs
Audiences can be targeted in multiple ways. For example, marketers can deploy audiences on Facebook and Google:
Prospect Audiences target employees across the complete ICP, including account expansion to new prospects outside the CRM. Targeting may be filtered by role and seniority, providing persona-level targeting across the ICP.
Contact Audiences that sync all matches to a contacts audience for retargeting on Facebook and Google
Site Visitor Audiences that retarget web visitors when they match on Facebook and Google.
Data syncing includes “Audience inclusion attributes” or “smart attributes” that are calculated, such as a Boolean ICP or current customer flags that can be pushed downstream to Salesforce and other platforms. The refreshed value is automatically pushed to downstream systems if the calculation is modified. Smart attributes are updated every fifteen minutes.
Clearbit partners include Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Segment, Drift, Intercom, Chili Piper, Slack, Zapier, Qualified, and Clari. Personalization partners that leverage Clearbit Reveal include Uberflip, Optimizely, and Mutiny.
Clearbit is coming off a “big, big growth year” but does not disclose any sizing or growth details. LinkedIn lists it with 177 employees, up 90% over the past year. Business Development and Sales grew at a 150% pace. While Clearbit originally targeted B2B Internet service companies, it is gaining traction in financial services, retail services, and investments, businesses that are “looking for data, to power their intelligence, their go-to-market motions,” said Tate.
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 now presents itself as a best-of-breed platform that replaces disparate elements of the sales and marketing tech stacks.
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.”
ZoomInfo provides a set of data-enabled services for sales, marketing, recruitment, and revenue operations under the RevenueOS brand.
ZoomInfo announced the immediate availability of its new MarketingOS ABM Platform. The service is part of a broader RevOS offering that supports marketing, sales, operations, and recruitment. MarketingOS consolidates ZoomInfo’s legacy marketing capabilities, bringing together two recent acquisitions, Insent and RingLead, with new programmatic and audience management functionality.
ZoomInfo also refined its positioning statement from Revenue Acceleration to Revenue Operating System. It stated that RevOS is “the World’s only revenue operating system of its kind.”
“Our comprehensive B2B database is the key differentiator that sets MarketingOS apart from other ABM solutions,” said ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck. “ZoomInfo’s unique data science algorithms allow marketers to connect with the right prospects at precisely the right time. No other solution on the market combines the power of data-driven insights and marketing-optimized workflows like ZoomInfo’s MarketingOS.”
“Marketers typically fail because the data in most ABM platforms is both inaccurate and incomplete. Current ABM solutions are designed to leverage companies’ own first-party data, which exists in their customer relationship management or marketing automation systems. Without quality data, marketers pour advertising dollars at the wrong prospects and companies, and, as a result, deliver fruitless leads to sales and waste time and resources. With ZoomInfo’s best-in-class data and intelligence at its foundation, MarketingOS enables marketers to effectively reach target accounts and drive qualified leads for sales.”
New functionality includes social and display advertising, abandoned from tracking, and audience targeting. Marketing can build audiences and track campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Marketing can also build campaigns and manage them programmatically through Clickagy DSP (ZoomInfo) or TradeDesk.
Marketing OS looks to address the “Funnel Famine” suffered by traditional marketing teams. Several issues cause Funnel Famine: crowded B2B advertising channels, dirty data, leaky black-box marketing campaigns, siloed data, and sales’ longtime distrust of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).
MarketingOS addresses the issue of leads created by “The Funnel Famine.”
“Most marketing programs begin with data, whether it’s for tailoring your communications, whether it’s for sending an email, whether it’s for sending a direct mail. It’s all about those accounts that you’re targeting and the professionals at those accounts,” explained ZoomInfo SVP of Product Strategy and Product Marketing Justin Withers to GZ Consulting. “And the reality is that a lot of data, especially if it’s pulled from the CRM or other systems, is outdated. It’s inaccurate. It’s incomplete, and that can actually pollute or even inhibit the lead flow at the top of the funnel, and [it] ultimately leads to poor conversion. It leads to leaks in the funnel, and all this hard work that marketers put in at every stage of the funnel ultimately spills out before it can even reach sales.”
The reality is that the sales and marketing funnels operate in parallel, not sequentially, as represented in traditional funnel diagrams. MarketingOS lets marketers run account-based programs in parallel with sales running account-based sales programs “so that everyone’s aligned at every step of the funnel.”
Under current processes, sales and marketing operate in parallel to each other with little coordination and a single point of handoff for MQLs, a situation that “really doesn’t set marketing up for success…and it leaves sales in a bind,” continued Withers. Thus, marketing complains that sales teams ignore its leads, and sales reps complain about the quality and quantity of marketing-sourced leads. As a result, there is an “acute misalignment between sales and marketing.”
With MarketingOS, handoffs can occur at different points along the marketing funnel, based on the channel and prospect response.
Sales and Marketing are aligned around a set of target accounts both within and beyond the ICP. Thus, an ICP account with spiking intent will be passed to sales, even if marketing has had limited conversations. Furthermore, the rep will know that multiple individuals from the firm have visited the website or that individuals have clicked through on ads or email campaigns.
Likewise, chatbot conversations with target companies can immediately route a chat to the sales rep or schedule a call.
New functionality for managing abandoned forms can revive a prospect. ZoomInfo claims a 60% increase in lead flow with its abandoned form tracking.
MarketingOS Audience Builder with Audience Segmentation
MarketingOS functionality includes
Expanded targeting that leverages the full set of ZoomInfo’s first and third-party intelligence for building and activating audiences. ZoomInfo selects include firmographics, technographics, biographics (e.g., Title, 192 Job Functions, Job Levels), web forms, and uploaded lists (e.g., tradeshow lists). Other selects include business events (e.g., funding data, executive changes, projects) and over 300 company attributes (advanced data-mined firmographics such as fleet size and company benefits). Targeting also ingests account, contact, and lead attributes from Salesforce, HubSpot, and Marketo.
First and third-party intent data time outreach while buyers are in-market, helping to improve marketing and sales efficacy. Marketers can track up to 500 intent topics, with up to 50 available at a time. In addition, chat-based targeting is coming soon.
An “in-market predictive score” that identifies each prospect’s buying stage, “informing how and when marketers should engage with prospects based on their ranking and helping them to prioritize their outbound efforts on prospects who are most likely to convert.”
Campaign Management and Analytics. Marketers upload their creative, build an audience, set the budget, and select their channels.
Webforms, infused with automated enrichment, support shorter forms with reduced abandonment rates
Abandoned form tracking, with Workflows passing the lead to sales or additional nurture steps
ZoomInfo Chat (FKA Insent), a conversational marketing chatbot that leverages ZoomInfo data to score and route leads. Chat immediately passes high-scoring, live leads to sales reps. The chatbot also automates meeting scheduling.
Visitor Intelligence, with pages scored differently (e.g., Product Pages are scored higher than Career or Investor Pages)
Automated workflows triggered by intent, custom intent, WebSights visitor intelligence, Scoops (e.g., business events, projects), Funding, Technologies, and FormComplete. Workflows can also be built to expand reach across the potential buying committee by persona.
RingLead data orchestration to dedupe, cleanse, enrich, and route leads
ZoomInfo Enrich, a set of DaaS enterprise platform integrations for data enrichment and hygiene.
MarketingOS is powered by ZoomInfo’s database spanning 100 million companies, 150 million executives, technographics, intent and engagement data, and event data.
“Marketing and sales funnels work in parallel, so everyone is aligned at every step of the funnel,” explained Justin Withers, SVP of Product Strategy and Product Marketing. With MarketingOS, “sales and marketing are working in lockstep at every stage of the journey.”
MarketingOS is one of four products branded under the RevOS banner.
Tying together intent and engagement data and processing them through ZoomInfo Workflows is the future of ABM. Intent data is employed at the top of the funnel when buyers are in the initial research phase. Once prospects have begun interacting with a vendor, most buyer behavior research falls under the engagement category (e.g., web forms, email responses, chatbots, conversational intelligence, etc.). Finally, intent data helps identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities at the tail end of the customer lifecycle.
Engagement and intent data are also valuable churn risk indicators, helping customer success and account managers detect potential cancelations or defections well before decisions have been made. In addition, intent data can show a spike in research related to product-associated topics and competitors. Engagement monitoring widens to include customer success interactions, training participation, platform usage, and general account health indicators.
“We can support your new customer acquisition with these signals,” stated Withers. “We can support your opportunity acceleration with these signals. We can also support your renewal, upsell, cross-sell motions based on different types of signals that are happening at those accounts. So, it really is a full customer lifecycle marketing solution.”
MarketingOS will be available as a pair of SKUs:
ABM Elite+: The full ABM Platform package, including RingLead Cleanse, Enrich, and Route
ABM Advanced+: Package includes everything except RingLead
“The purpose behind the two distinct offerings is to simplify our primary offering for those focused on ABM engagement and marketing programs, as opposed to the more operationally focused data orchestration capabilities,” explained ZoomInfo Analyst Relations Director Michael Basilio to GZ Consulting.
MarketingOS includes ten marketing seats and three administrative seats for RingLead routing and ZoomInfo Chat.
The broader RevOS branding consists of MarketingOS, SalesOS, OperationsOS, and RecruitingOS. ZoomInfo calls RevOS the “world’s first integrated go-to-market platform.” All four RevOS services are generally available.
ZoomInfo’s data cloud, orchestration tools (e.g., RingLead, B2B DaaS, Workflows), and engagement tools (advertising, sales engagement, web forms, chat, and conversational intelligence) are at the heart of RevOS.
“There’s nothing more important in business than successfully executing your go-to-market strategy,” states ZoomInfo in its product collateral. “Get it right, and your business flourishes. Get it wrong, and you’re toast. That’s why having one integrated go-to-market platform is so crucial. You can think of it as your revenue operating system.”
SalesOS bundles together a set of new and legacy sales tools:
Sales prospecting
Chorus, the conversational sales platform the firm acquired in July
Sales and Marketing Alignment has been a stated goal of the two functions for at least a decade, but they have operated with different datasets, metrics, objectives, and platforms. Thus, alignment was more vision than reality. By aligning ABM on a common platform and reference database, alignment is no longer impaired by an organization’s tech stack and data foundation.
“Crucially, MarketingOS lets marketing teams work from a common data foundation. Only 39% of sales and marketing teams share buyer signals, and half say it’s because their sales and marketing systems don’t integrate. The shared data foundation of SalesOS and MarketingOS tightens key handoffs and unlocks true marketing and sales alignment, eliminating conflicting records, wasted effort, and missed opportunities.”
ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck, “Introducing RevOS: The future of modern go-to-market software,” (Feb 8, 2022)
OperationsOS contains RingLead data orchestration (i.e., match, unify, dedupe, normalize, cleanse, enrich, score, and route data) and B2B DaaS services (e.g., APIs, webhooks, cloud data warehouse integrations).
Finally, RecruitingOS contains ZoomInfo Recruit, its recently launched prospecting and engagement service for HR departments and recruiters. RecruitingOS also includes a set of Applicant Tracking Service connectors.
“Recruiters can filter and reach more good-fit candidates, use pipeline management tools to collaborate and organize the hiring process, and automate the candidate outreach process,” explains Zoominfo. “This helps you source and connect with candidates faster, reducing the time to find and hire talent.”
Along with new product positioning, RevOS sports new logos, color palettes, styles, and a “unified in-app experience to create a singular, cohesive go-to-market solution that spans the entire suite of ZoomInfo products.” There are also redesigned data dashboards and reports that “offer a faster, more responsive experience that allows your sales, marketing, and recruitment teams to visually demonstrate ROI and how their work aligns with broader organizational objectives.”
In short, RevOS unifies sales, marketing, revenue operations, and recruitment on the same set of data, providing “the same source of truth” and “one integrated platform for every stage of the marketing and sales funnel.” “If data is the lifeblood of the modern sales organization, then go-to-market teams must have the technology to act upon that data. RevOS’ unified data tech stack gives sales, marketing, operations, and recruiting teams a single source of truth from which to launch their campaigns and go-to-market motions, simplifying internal workflows, reducing costs, and maximizing interoperability between teams,” blogged Schuck. “RevOS is the next chapter in ZoomInfo’s journey as the world’s leading go-to-market platform.”
MarketingOS supports a Campaign Manager for building, sizing, and tracking campaigns.
