YouSaid · the spoken record

Henry Schuck

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94
first
2023-05-23
most recent
2023-05-23
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1
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  1. “My mom gave up most of her youth to raise us, my sister and I. And that meant for her working three jobs as a nurse to be able to pay rent, buy us clothes, buy us food and gave up probably the most impactful years of her life for us and those years I know were very hard on her. So I think that selfless kindness where she put us in front of herself. That has to be the kindest thing anyone's done for me.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “That doesn't line up to our strategy and our goals, and you have to fix that. Or I'll go look at the metrics and the goals that they're rolling up and I'll go, well, that metric and goal doesn't make any sense. It doesn't align to these four things. Go fix that. And so once I've set that strategy, I put the people in place to execute it. My job is to go make sure that resource allocation and the work that we're doing align to those things that I care most about.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I would say I probably feel something like a seven and a half to eight Big part of my job today is Articulating very clearly what we're going to do, what is important, and what's not important. What are we doing? What are we not doing? And then saying, based on this, I want to see resource allocation lined up to this. I want to see product and engineering resource allocation. I want to see go-to-market resource allocation. I want to see marketing resource allocation. I want to see support and productivity resource allocation lined up to these four things. I want every initiative that we're running at the company to line up in metric to these four things. And then I, throughout the quarter, throughout the year, have to show up and make sure that people are aligned and that that is actually happening. So a 10 would be, I just set that, boom, everyone's just like going and it's all aligning. The reason why it's like a seven and a half or eight is that it often isn't aligned and I have to show up and go like, no, no, no, no, no.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “With narratives, good and bad, and you're going to have to show up and put your narrative out into the world so that when they are circling on these different narratives, that your narrative is also sitting right beside those. Because if you don't, then you leave your entire company narrative up to a bunch of investors who don't really know your business. You are responsible for articulating the narrative to the public market so that when they articulate their own that there's somebody out there who's read your narrative and understands it and can refute whatever the other narrative is.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Employees. If something happens in the business, employees are going to create their own narratives around it. They're going to go out and they're going to say like, oh, this person left because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The worst possible narrative you can think of. If you switch directions from one product to another product and you shift resources, employees will come up with the worst possible narrative for why you did that. And it is your obligation to get your narrative out to your employee base so that when they start spinning on something, that there is another narrative that's found its way into their mind that they look at and go like, okay, yeah, that's probably what it is. It's not this like crazy thing that I'm making up, or at least when they're articulating it to their other counterparts, there's somebody who's like, no, but that's not what it is. Like Henry said it was this or that. That is also your job with public company investors, I think. They are going to come up.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Working on any of those 50 risks at one time. Inevitably, one of them is going to drop. And then you're going to go, you know what? They told me that that was a risk in the business. And now it's showing up and it's an incredibly frustrating event for you. And you just have to keep in mind that there were 49 other risks that they brought up that you managed really well or that never actually came into fruition. Number one is figure out the investor base that's adding you value and get value out of them. Like tell them to share their customer interviews, their analysis and insights with you so that you can do something in the business with them. The risks that the investors are going to bring up to you, those are real risks. You should understand them and then figure out which ones are the most meaningful risks and what you're doing about them in the business. And then I think the third thing I would tell you is, and this is very similar to how you communicate with”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, so first I would tell you that investors come on a spectrum of value additive or not value additive. Many of them show up. They have really unique perspectives. They've done research on your customer base, on your competitor set, and they show up with really interesting insights that you can then leverage inside of your own business. Then there are investors who just show up and then they articulate every risk in the business and they want to know your answer to every risk in the business. These are painful meetings for a number of reasons. And ultimately, they're also the ones that eat away at you because inevitably one of those risks is going to come true. Like you know that they know that there's 50 risks. They tell you every single one of them. And then you go like, well, here's the optimistic answer to any one of those risks or the honest answer to any of those risks. And you're kind of.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Look, I think you have multiple jobs as the CEO during an IPO process. And one of them has to be thinking about how you leverage that moment to drive as much awareness and branding and validation for your business as possible. And so the NAS.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “What that's your target rich audience, by the way, you show up at that place. Those are all the people you want on the podcast. You can sit in the main room and just like when they open for Q&A, just ask them if they'll be on your podcast.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I would show up at those things with a list of people you're trying to get on your podcast and then figure out a unique way into having that discussion with all of them.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, so these investor conferences bring big name CEOs like the last conference I spoke at, Bob Eiger spoke before I spoke on the same stage. And so we would have crossed paths in the back before we went on. And so the biggest CEO names are at these conferences. So one of the plays that we're running is I'm sending an email out to all the other CEOs who are there who are customers of ours. And I'm just saying, hey, I'm here. I'd love to just introduce myself five minutes. You guys have been a customer for 10 years. It would just be great to just put a face to the name and say hello. I have no agenda. And I'm getting great responses from that, from Fortune 500 CEOs who like are like, yeah, I am here. Here's my cell phone number. Text me. I may have five minutes to connect. And that's really all I need is a connection like that so that in the future, if there are opportunities for us to expand a relationship, I have a contact there that I can connect with who's met me, who's met me in person. So if you want.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Totally, 100%. And I'm also thinking there are probably, if he wants to go out and direct market himself, I would be thinking about what are the events or businesses where a young kid DJ would be really interesting or fun to have. And could they offer it as a service for a birthday party wherever their birthday party, there's a kid's zone, like a trampoline park, could you go to them and say, offer DJ services for the party for an extra hundred dollars and we'll split it and DJ Navigator will show up and play music at the thing. So are there places where you can plug into really easily?”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think about how do you partner up with somebody who's out there that he can open for or be a quick act at the front end of a show. And I think that that is probably how you get him much broader engagement.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So I think of that in sort of two buckets. The first one I think about there's just easy stuff, right? Like your son goes to a school. He's probably involved in some teams or extracurricular activities. Those places are going to do father or daughter dances and saw cops and school play or whatever I would go to the school and say like my son, he's a DJ now and you should use him for all of these events and he'll be really inexpensive and it'll be a great experience for him and he can work through all of your constructs. Plus he's going to bring super high-end equipment because we bought him all of this super high end equipment. That's one. That's just like easy. The second is if you relate this back to business and channels that you go to market against, partnerships matter. And so if I'm thinking like how do you take DJ Navigator and make him like a household name?”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Their own. They have to operate with a performance mindset. They have to be the best individual professionals in their given area. And then they have to be great collaborators and team players. And if we get those people in the room, then anything is possible. I want to do something unique in the way we run the business that no one else has. And I think that that breaks down into great growth and great profitability. I think we can innovate around how we can support both enterprises and SMB businesses. I think that's a really unique opportunity for us. And then finally, I want to consistently grow the value of the company.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Other day I wrote this when I'm 80 years old and I'm reflecting on what my career at Zoom Info has been, what gave me the biggest sense of fulfillment and winning. And I actually think the answers of that answer this question, which is number one, winning create a bigger category here than anyone has ever believed was possible. And as a piece of that, that means we have to build and deliver a great unified platform around that data. So that's number one. Number two, I want to do it with great and good people. So if I'm looking back, the people at Zoom info have to be intellectually bright, intellectually honest. They have to push their own and their team's boundaries. They have to be a pleasure to disagree with. They have to put the company's best interests ahead of.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yes, it is a top-down command and control function. You have to create the objectives and drive it through the organization.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Okay, so for MA, I would say planning is critically important. So knowing what you're going to do before you sign on the dotted line in every part of the integration is really critical for corporate communication, I would say get really used to repeating yourself because repetition across the company creates understanding and people will gravitate towards that messaging and it'll feel exhausting to say the same thing over and over and over again. But that's the only way that you can get alignment across key points across the company. And then on this nascent one, I would say do not overestimate the ability of the leaders underneath you to create alignment without a framework for that alignment. It just doesn't happen organically.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Be there. And so I am catching up as fast as I can doing the methodology that I used to learn. So I'm reading books about this and then applying it to Zoom info and also telling myself, you know what? If corporate objectives are going to work at this business, if company values are going to get through the entire business, you have to lead that. That has to be your thing, Henry. When HR shows up and wants to talk about company values, everybody just turns their ears off. If I show up and want to talk about company values, people are leaned in and listening and thinking about how that applies to their team and the upside they're going to get from it. So that is my responsibility and I have to own it. And I recognize today more than ever how important that is.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Articulated for you. What I realized today at this scale is that if you don't have an overarching objective, if you don't have a strategy under that objective and initiatives and metrics that people are running to that ladder up into that objective, you end up with a bunch of people doing things in silos and you never get the benefit of the orchestra playing in unison. You have the violinists playing something and the celloist playing something and the piano players playing something. And if you're lucky ever once in a while, they're playing the same song when you put those corporate objectives in place, you articulated across the business, you can get that orchestral effect of the entire business. And the bigger you are, the more important that becomes. And I realize today that I'm actually behind where I should.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “everyone yeah and all of a sudden we're a thousand employees 200 are in israel 400 are in vancouver 400 are in boston and communication became really important and people weren't going to have a direct personal relationship with me so they needed to understand the direction i was taking the company and why i was taking the company in that direction so i had to get really good or better at communicating with the broader set of the company that had to be a priority of mine today we're close to 4 000 employees pretty dispersed some are remote some are in office and what i realized today if you asked me three years ago hey henry what are the corporate objectives for the business what are the value principles of the company i would be like i don't know if you ask somebody else here who like came in”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Actually, gonna do this thing right. And so learning what M&A meant and then there was this period of time where M&A was incredibly important to the platform we were building. So being really precise about what the M&A playbook was and how we run it and how we best shares after or create retention bonuses for people and having that codified in a way that we could run that repeatedly was really important. When we made the Zoom info acquisition, I wasn't much of a corporate communicator. And at 500 people, I didn't really have to be. I kind of like ran into half the company every week. I didn't have to think about how I communicated with the company, how I was transparent with the company. I was in meetings with”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “And our investors got panicked or something, and they were like, have you brought Deloitte in? Like, as Ernst Young reviewed the whole plan, and I was like, no, we're going to set up a call in one hour with Deloitte to review everything you've done and ask you questions on it. Like, all right, great. So we get on with Deloitte and they ask us a bunch of questions. We have all of the answers. We've already thought through everything that they had been asking. And I remember when we hung up that call, I was like, okay, we know what we're doing.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Profile. Yeah. That was an acquisition where we paid $300,000 for 1.2 million of ARR. It was like the last company in the fund they had to get out of it. It like languished long enough. And I remember the lead partner at TA saying, just go learn on this one. And I was like $300,000 just like buy me a $20 book and I'll learn from it. And they're like, do the acquisition. You're going to learn a lot about how it works and how you bring the team together and all of that. And it'll put you in a better place to do something bigger later. That was a great learning experience for how to do M&A. The ranking acquisition, there was this moment in the ranking acquisition. We had just finished a whole day of meetings with their leadership to kind of understand the business and the best salespeople. And when that finished, we were, I think, 30 days to closing the deal.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Think the hardest one is at the early stage. And you're responsible for generating an email campaign that turns results or closing 10 deals in the month that generate revenue, shifting from that to being more of like an actual director of the motion is really a tough transition because you have calculated your value to the firm by the execution of tasks. And when that changes, it's hard to shed. Obviously, you have to do it, but being conscious about how you make that move and not keeping your hands in everything is the first evolution. I have to learn how to do M&A. I didn't really know how to do M&A. In fact, the very first M&A we did was actually of the company that I worked at in college, which was the precursor to.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Companies in my territory. It's big enough. It uses this technology. It has this many employees. It's based in this location. How do I use generative AI to wipe out any of that pre-thinking to try to find the right companies and just have it be prompt based where I can say, you know, this about me, who are the best companies I should talk to today? And generator of AI does all of the triangulation for me.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Data becomes really valuable for what companies want to do with generative AI. Our customers, every go-to market teams want to identify the best companies. They want to automatically generate the emails to them. They want automatically generate the responses to them. They want to pick the right people to engage with. And you need a really proprietary data asset on company and contacts in order to deliver that. And then I think about the triangulation problem, which I think you see in medicine today in the way that people are talking about what generative AI can do in medicine, which is take a whole bunch of different disparate data points and bring them together in a way that would take a human much more time, much more expertise to be able to do. And I think about how do I bring that triangulation capability to my customer. So instead of them doing the triangulation, you know, this.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “There isn't one. And so what we've been advocating for for a long time has been, hey, look, for you to get the most out of your CRM system, you have to have accurate data on companies and contacts in that CRM system. The problem with that argument for us for so many years has been only the most sophisticated companies understand where SAN gets in the gears when you don't have great data in your CRM system. But what generative AI does is it just shines a bright light on all of the things that you can't do with CRM data because you're CRM data is really inaccurate and it puts us in a really great spot there. So number one, if you have a proprietary data asset, think about where that plugs into downstream use cases where you're”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “They actually show the generative AI going into CRM and capturing the best buyers and then sending a personalized email out to them. There isn't a company in the universe that would trust generative AI against their CRM data set”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “So, the first thing I think about is we've been using AI at Zoom Info for the last five years to help us make decisions about data, I think the question actually is more, are you ready for generative AI? Are you ready for large language models to be put into place? And for me, the way I think about that is two ways. Number one, the most valuable companies in a universe where generative AI is ubiquitous are companies with proprietary data sets. And what I see for us in the future is that we become the source of truth for company and contact information to get plugged in to any LLM. I watched Salesforce announce their Einstein GPT product. And in the example,”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Talk to every contact data provider out there, and there is not a compelling place for us to make another acquisition from a company or contact data perspective. And if I look out into the future, what we really need to do is to build a workflow and application layer above that contact data asset so our customers can get the maximum amount of value on top of the data that we have. And so what are the companies where if our data is integrated into those software packages, that those software packages become so competitively differentiated that it doesn't matter what the next feature or functionality is on that software, the data is driving that differentiation. And then that changed the way we thought about M&A for the future.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “To use, we went and acquired that. We needed intent data. We went out and acquired that. And then we needed a broader set of company data. And we went out and acquired that. And when we were done with that, we were like, okay, yeah, let's just keep going on this acquisition strategy. Who's the next contact data provider? I spent the back half of 2020 taking pictures from every other contact data provider in the marketplace, going like, hey, this great successful motion, let's just keep it going. And what we realized was there wasn't a worthy next contact or company data acquisition to make. The companies that existed out there, they had low quality contact data. They didn't have the same data collection methods that we had. They had no unique strategic differentiation in the way they collected data. So I wrote this memo at the end of 2020 that said, like, hey, everything just changed. And I've gone out and...”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “It's a great question because up until 2020, the plan was how do we build or buy the best possible company and contact data asset? And when we made the Zoom info acquisition, one of our problems was we were really niche. We had five million contacts at 250,000 companies. Zoom info had 100 million contacts at 15 million companies. And so our total addressable market was just like much more niche than if we had this much broader data asset. So number one with the Zoom info acquisition is we want to open up the aperture into a much larger total addressable market. So that happened right away with the acquisition, which was great. And then we said, okay, what are the other pieces that make up a world-class data asset? We needed technographics. So technology is a company.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Going to slow down. So the Zoom info purchase, we're like, okay, this is a business that's growing faster than us, has a ton of momentum. If I come in and run the same playbook that I ran at ranking, I'm going to crush the thing that we want to buy, which is like this momentum. I still have to drive efficiencies in the business. But here's how I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it and go to market. I'm going to do it by getting rid of duplicative costs from a branding perspective and an SEO perspective. I'm going to consolidate some functions. But it's not going to be the same playbook that we use at Ranking.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Same thing debt, which that was really interesting because then we ended up with a lot of debt at that point in the business because the business was efficient. You know, Zoom info was a similar story. We were at that point about $170 million top line business running at call like 50% margins. Zoom info was $100 million business running again at like 10% margins. Now you had some history. So you could say like, hey, look, this is what we did at Ranking and that's what we're going to do at Zoom Info too. The trick about Zoom Info was it was growing faster than us. And so the playbook that we use at Ranking wasn't going to work because we went in ranking and we cut 55% of the stack on the first day we showed up and we were transparent about it. We gave people severance and we told them we can't have these duplicative resources anymore. Now in any business cut 55% of the staff”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Your job is to buy and then to sell businesses. And so if we show up and say, hey, we're going to pay you a 6x return on that asset seven months into your hold. It's very hard to say no to that decision. And actually, the six X return for them was probably more like a 15 extra return because there was debt on the deal and they didn't buy the whole business. So we came in, bought Zoom info. That was just about an 800 million dollar acquisition that we did. It ended up being like 13 months after the Ranking acquisition.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Ranking process and the Zoom info process was hey, it's in private equity's hands. And so there's a number that works. There's always a deal to get done when these businesses are owned by private equity. When it's just a founder-led business, that's like a more complicated onion to peel. But when you're owned by private equity,”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Make this acquisition, I would sell it this way. I'd position it this way. And then I said, okay, well, that aside, here's what we have to do to win, how we have to position the business to win and what we have to do from a product perspective. We met with the board eight months after the Ranking acquisition and we went, we have to go out and buy Zoom info. And Zoom info had just gotten acquired by a private equity firm five months earlier. And we're like, well, what if we just pay them a forward multiple on the price that they paid as if they held it for three years and everything went really well over those three or four years? We'll pay them that outcome. We'll do it seven months into their hold period on the business. Also, there's a guy on our board from TA associates who is like great at deal making. And so he led a lot of the conversations with the private equity firms. But what he told me during”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Pretend executive. I think I was 34 years old. And I remember flying to DC to make the acquisition. And I felt like I was playing like pretend business. And we made the acquisition. The next morning, I came into the office and the office was like on fire. Everybody was on their feet. They were like calling their customers, discover work bought us yesterday. We got to get this deal closed. It's the end of the month. Everybody bought in. And it was like, okay, this is going to be amazing. It's going to be really successful. Now, anytime you do an acquisition when you have a small grouping of companies that are focused on a space, you create a vacuum that creates a very obvious number two to come into. So immediately after the Ranking acquisition, I went, okay, zoom info is going to be the number two. No question about it. They're going to zoom into that position in the number two spot. And I wrote the board of memo and I said, if I was CEO of Zoom info, I would crush us. And this is exactly how I would do it. I would.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Our go to market motion was way more efficient. We just acquired customers in a much more efficient manner than they did and then kept them at a higher rate. So I often tell people, usually when you think of strategic differentiators, people think about their product. Like my product is a competitive or strategic differentiator or this thing that we do in the product is the strategic differentiator. But if you just zoom out a little bit, there are lots of places in your business that can be strategic differentiators for us at that point, it really was the go-to-market motion that created the strategic differentiation that allowed us to make these acquisitions. So we bought ranking. We put the businesses together. I remember having a panic attack the day before because we would put all of this money above us from a cap table perspective, right? The deck goes in front of the equity holders. I was like, is it going to work? And you kind of felt like.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Of profitability and growing similarly-ish to us, a little slower. Can we take that business? And instead of $40 million top line and $5 million bottom line in one year, can we make it a $50 million top line and a $25 million bottom line and effectively like significantly increase the value of that business in one year? And we were in a position where we could do that because at the time the Discover ORG business turned into Zoom info was run so much more effectively and efficiently than the Ranking business.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “10 years and we had the opportunity to acquire them. And why did we have the opportunity to acquire them? It wasn't just because at that point we had built a bigger business. At this point, we were a $80 million business and there were a $40 million business. But it was because we were operating that business so much more efficiently than they were. So we had all this room actually to raise debt to do the acquisition. So we didn't have to dilute any of our shareholders. And we also didn't have to go raise more money from our private equity sponsors to be able to make this acquisition. Because the business was run so efficiently, we were able to go out, raise debt, make a really meaningful offer to buy the business. And the whole idea was, okay, here's this $40 million business generating, call it $5 million.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Let me take you through our first two big acquisitions because I think those highlight how we thought about M&A and then I'll highlight a few others after that. So the first big acquisition we did was of a close competitor, a company called Ranking. And we're both selling to the same end market had very similar customers, very similar data sets, and we're going to market really similarly. We'd see them in a lot of our deals. They had a really similar product little tweaks, but pretty much the same thing. Now, what put us in a position to buy Rain King, because we both started the same day of the same year, and they should have won, actually, because that was a company that started with $4 million of venture financing. They brought in a team of executives who had built a data company before. We started with like my friend and I and my law school dorm and $25,000 on our credit cards.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “On their potential by not having access to this scarce asset. That's what we're trying to show you in the sales cycle. That's what we're using social proof to show you. That's what we're bringing case studies in to highlight. That's why it's so important to understand the customer's pain point. Because when people say identify the customer's pain point, you're really going, identify where they're not going to meet their potential. And people don't want to not reach their potential just because they didn't make the right decision on what to buy or who to partner with. So giving them a view of what their potential could be and then a price to reach that potential for themselves, for their company, I think that's the way that we articulate that.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “So, first, I think that is right. I control a scarce asset that is valuable. That is the first part of power. Maybe the more important part is how do I get you on the other side to appreciate the value of that scarce asset and then get to a place where you realize that not having access to that scarce asset actually hurts you personally, professionally, and your business. And that's really where we drive. By the way, that's true too. Give me two companies, one that uses Zoom info, one that doesn't, the one that uses Zoom info is always going to outperform the one that doesn't because they just have a meaningful head start into their go-to-market motions. So I want someone to appreciate that they're missing out.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “If I can push payments out, I'm going to do that. So payments matter. So look, you can buy it today and I won't charge you for the first 60 days. And we were always a super cash flow positive business. So we had that flexibility.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Could get more out of that end, and then you had really small companies that wanted some access to Zoom info but really couldn't pay for the full feature and functionality that an enterprise would get. And so then we build models around that. What's good, what's better, what's best, what's in each of those packages, how do you price it? What are the discount floors? We always had some level of discounting built into our go-to-market motion. That's one of those, hey, what did you figure out drove you to a decision in every sales process introducing a discount always helped move a deal through the cycle? Now, having boundaries on that is really important. So you have discount floors and approvals that have to get set today, but in the early days, it was like, hey, if I could pull a deal forward by discounting 5%, 10%, I'm going to do that.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “And your products and services, they visited your website, they looked at your pricing page. That's just opportunity that you worked for. You spent money on, you brought your marketing team together against, and you finally drove them to your website and you have no visibility into that. And so the fear of loss tends to be a bigger driver than an upside opportunity. And so showing you how much you're missing helps anchor when you show up to give you what the price of the product is. So originally, we had like a flat pricing, gave you unlimited access to Zoom info. Over the years, we added different tiers and sort of a good, better, best model for pricing. And really because our total addressable market opened up. And so now you had super enterprises that you could create ratcheted usage pricing.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Be and then getting to pricing from there. In the early days, today, you're talking about how do I increase the productivity of every account executive and account manager. I'm leaning into fear uncertainty and doubt. And so I'm going, did you know that these 20 Fortune 1000 customers were researching your competitor this week? These are opportunities that disappear. They're going to sign a three, five-year contract with your competitor. You're never going to get back into that account. But you can be in front of that. Did you know that these companies are currently in market for your products and services? And the website feature that we have in our product, which is like of 100 people who visit your website today, two of them are going to identify themselves. And the other 98 just disappear into the ether. What if they're your best, most likely next customers? And you actually have no idea that they were so interested.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Value is everything, and so you have to align to value. If someone shows up at Zoom info as a lead and I go, oh, you're looking for company and contact information. Great. We have 260 million contacts at 100 million companies with 100 million mobiles and 200 million email addresses. It's $25,000. They'll be like, no, that's not what I want. That's way too expensive. It should be $5,000 or $2,000. So really the way that we got at pricing in the early days and today is to really try to understand what we're going to deliver from a value perspective to the customer. And that should be an order of magnitude more than what you're going to price the product for. So really getting your customer to look at what the outcome of the product is going.”

    2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source