YouSaid · the spoken record

Henry Schuck

lines on the record: 94
first: 2023-05-23
most recent: 2023-05-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so we would generate as many leads as we could. We'd fill the calendars of the people that we had capacity for on the sales side. And then once they were at full capacity, we'd bring on another salesperson, another salesperson, another salesperson. And that's basically the way the business ran for the first seven years. And so we went from 300,000 in our first year, 800,000, 1.7 million, 2.7 million, 5 million, 15 million, 25 million, 35 million was kind of the first however many years that was. And when the business was about 30 million of run rate, this took seven years, was that a $30 million run rate, it was profitable because there was no venture capital for us to go get in Columbus, Ohio in 2007. We brought on our first institutional investors in 2014.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But how did you get them to a point of decision? How did you negotiate price? How did you get to power? How did the decisions actually get made at these companies? So it was really sort of figuring all of that out because you knew you had a great product. And it was really like, how do you run a sales process that regularly gets you to a decision and figuring that out? my friends, because those are the people I knew. My first high school friend finished college, packed up all his stuff in two duffel bags and showed up at the airport in Columbus, Ohio to be our first salesperson. My second college roommate showed up a year later, quit his job, came to Columbus, Ohio to be our second salesperson. We signed some big clients right away. Adobe was one of our first clients in the first year. We had a real pipeline of leads that were coming through asking for appointments.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're like, yeah, it's in the system. The check should cut in like a week or something. I was like, okay, great. This is going to be an actual thing. So we spend 50% of our day gathering data for the product and then 50% of our day basically gathering data to market to our potential customers. One of the benefits of where we started was it was a pretty niche. And so you knew exactly who your potential customers were, like the type of business was really specific. And then the type of person at the company was really specific. So the value proposition landed every single time. There was never a call where you got on and somebody said, we would never use this. I have no painful memory of not having product market fit. It was more about learning to sell. You knew you had a product that every customer could use that you were talking to or got a call with.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Calls into companies. We'd put all the data in a spreadsheet. I'd hired a third party contractor to go build the actual front end interface. We were sort of just handing data over to him and saying, okay, this is the data that needs to show up inside of the platform. Six months in, we sold our first deal. It was a $14,500 deal to a publicly traded staffing company. It was called ComSys. And I remember being on Christmas break at my mom's house in Los Angeles and calling into procurement at the company and saying like, hey, are you guys going to send us money?”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Day zero, I just finished my first year in law school. And a friend of mine and I decide we're going to start a business that was similar to a business we worked at in college. So the first six months was really building a product. And that meant gathering that unique data. So figuring out at the time who are the decision makers in the IT department of we were going to launch with 800 companies or something like that, that was just brute force. It's like you did a little bit of online research. You'd find out who the chief information officer was at an account. And then you'd call the company and you'd say, like, hey, can you tell me who the people underneath the chief information officer are? And they'd tell us and then we go like, okay, can you tell me their phone numbers or their emails? And we did that over and over and over and over again on Skype. I was studying abroad that summer. And so we would get up early in the morning. We'd make a whole bunch of”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally 100%. And we were selling quality. And so when we showed up to a call, our whole shtick is this is really high quality because we have people calling because of the way that we gather information. There are a bunch of lower quality providers out there, but you don't need low quality. You need really high quality. And if they go, hey, zoom info, we go, well, look at you want to call Abraham Lincoln. And it's like, oh my goodness, these guys are right. Quality does matter.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This one's a good one. Before we acquired Ranking, we found out that on their Twitter, they had just started following 700 new people. And if you went through the list of the people they were following, they literally went alphabetically through their customer list and added every single customer A through Z. And we're like, okay, well, now we know who all of their customers are and we can run really targeted motions directly at their customers.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Published. And the guy who is the commissioner of Major League Baseball who died like 20 years ago was published. Older than Bud C, like the guy before that. And so we put all of these things together and then we showed up in the sales process and we would be like, do you really want to go through like Abraham Lincoln and this dead commissioner for every deal that you go out to, you want to send emails that are going to bounce and call people who are not going to work? This is just like throwing more sand in the gears of your sales motion and it worked. And you think about in that business what you actually have to do to change course because those things are being published by a team on the technology side. And so you have to get enough noise coming from the sales team to go over to the CTO and go, hey, you've got to figure out how to take these pages down. And then you're talking about like months for them to like identify which ones are Abraham Lincoln and the dead MLB commissioner.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five million contacts. And in our universe, trying to sell to buyers to explain quality at the time was really hard to do. And people would gravitate towards quantity because it was this objective metric. And so I could say, hey, we have five million contacts. The next person has 2 million. You know, of course you would go with us. And now we were in the universe where we were saying, hey, we have 5 million contacts and Zoom info has 100 million. And how do you compete now when that's such this objective metric? We thought about it. We thought about it. We thought about it. And then we found out that Zoom info had directory pages where they had a whole bunch of people's names published on the web. And there were people who were in their database that was then published on the web. And so we went through it and we found like Abraham Lincoln was one of the people that was”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You to all of the right people at the company to help the deal go forward. The other thing that I think about is we bought Ranking in 2017. It was sort of our next closest competitor. And when you put two companies together and they then kind of become the leader in the space, a vacuum opens for second place. And so inevitably, someone's going to come into second place and challenge your business. They might not do it one month in or two months in, but you don't get an unlimited runway of being leader without any real competition below you. But right after we acquired Rain King, it became also really clear that Zoom info was going to fill that void. And so we were Discover Org. There was Zoom info pre-acquisition. And Zoom info had 100 million contacts.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, two things. And I'll give you one example of just like a really great sales process. There was a guy who was at the time, it was a business called ClearSlide. And he had sent me emails. He had called me. And then he saw that we were doing an event in San Francisco, which was right down the street from him. He had me multiple emails, called me multiple times. And I show up at this event and he shows up. He's like just an AE out of small tech startup. He wasn't trying to sell me there. He just showed up and went like, hey, I saw that you guys were doing this event. I just wanted to come and say hi. Looks like a really interesting event that I can learn a lot from. But like, I'm the guy in your email. Dang, nobody else was there trying to pitch me at the time. He was the only person there who was interested enough to not only track me, but also track the business to know we were doing this event and then showed up. And I was like, all right, all right, all right.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 15th time. Now I do understand, and I can show up, and it's really comfortable. And we both have like a pretty good time on the conversation. And we get what we need to move a deal forward. But the first 15 times were just learning. They were learning that was kind of like munched up with really uncomfortable conversations.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. This happened to me again with our enterprise business. All of a sudden, we got to a place where we were serious about our enterprise business and part of the way that we can drive enterprise businesses having me connect with chief revenue officers, chief executive officers. And the first few times that I did that, it was really uncomfortable because I didn't really know what they cared about. I had like an idea and I brought a deck that we could talk through, but I would show up and I'd throw a bunch of stuff out. Oftentimes none of it hit. And it would be really uncomfortable. And I just kept telling myself, like, once you've done this 15 times, you're going to really understand what people care about. And your pitch will be much more suited for every one of those calls. And so.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I was like, what do I do? And it was in Vegas. And there was a bar like on the way into this place. And so I walked out. I took two shots of tequila and I walked right back in and I just went like booth to booth to boot to booth to booth the whole day and just got over it. And then the trick there is at some point I needed to get somebody else to be doing that. But I think ultimately like getting over those really anxiety driven moments. By doing them over and over again is really like how you build muscle in business.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And let me show you one. You didn't need to implement any sort of like change management to get the value out of Zoom info. You just were doing something really poorly and we plugged right into that process to make it more efficient, more effective, give you a view of the world that you didn't have that you needed. First time I did this, Patrick, I sweat when I get nervous. I just start sweating. And so I went to the first booth. It was dibled the company and I show up and I tell the guy, I do this feel. And he's just like not connecting with me at all. And I just start sweating. I was like nervous and sweaty. And so I finished the thing and I walk away for a second and I'm just like, okay, get yourself together. This is the first booth you went to and you spent $700 coming to this thing. You took a day off of work. You need to get through the rest of this conference.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is so far out of my comfort zone, by the way, to show up at a conference and walk booth to booth to booth where people are willing to engage with you because they think you might be like a potential buyer of their products and services only to find out 20 seconds in that you're actually trying to sell them something. But it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. So I would get on a flight in the morning. I'd go to Las Vegas mainly or San Francisco. I'd bring an iPad where I could show an organizational chart of a company's IT department and I'd go booth to booth to booth. And I'd show up. No one knew who we were. And I'd say, hey, have you heard of Discover Org? They would say no, which was the precursor to Zoom info. I'd say, hey, would it help you if you had IT org charts for all the companies that have come to this conference?”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. So when we were a startup, we still do this today. But when we were a startup, we had really great product market fit with salespeople at technology companies. We knew they were our best segment of customers. They closed the fastest. They paid the most. Our data lined up perfectly with what they were doing. And so what I figured out at some point was I didn't need to buy a booth at a conference, like a big tech conference. And in fact, it didn't make sense for me to buy a booth because the people walking the floors were technology decision makers, CIOs, VPs of IT. I didn't want to talk to them who I wanted to talk to where the people who are manning the booths at all of these conferences. And so all I needed to do was get like a free pass to the exhibitor floor, show up and go talk to the most target-rich audience that existed for our business.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you're not just going through the motion, but you're legitimately trying to understand what the customer sells, why it's important, who they sell it to, how their systems are set up. You follow up really well. So you follow up with value, you send key case studies, you look at intent for their products and services, you send interesting use cases that they may use Zoom info for, and you leverage reference customers in the sales cycle. And then there's an attitude component to this. And so you're competitive. You fight for every deal. You hate to lose. You think strategically about each opportunity. You understand how to solve problems for customers. You really know the product inside it out and you hustle. You hustle in every deal. You never lose because you get out worked. That's kind of how I think about what makes a really great rep.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're just kind of figuring things out as you go, and a lot of it is left on you to figure out. As you get bigger, there's all sorts of scaffolding around an account executive or an account manager. So all of a sudden, things are being driven for you and you don't have to figure everything out yourself. When I was thinking about what makes a great salesperson, I wrote down these things. Do you understand who our customers are and how they leverage our solutions? Do you understand our products? Do you connect the dots between the value our products offer and the pain points that customer is trying to solve for? And do you follow a structured process that the customer agrees to that drives to a decision? That also means you're going to show up to the calls prepared. It's going to mean you understand business context during the call.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We found that at the startup stage, the best performing account executives were the ones with the highest cognitive score on these tests. That was really valuable for us because then we were able to go out and hire people. We were able to use that as a screen up front, like the Wonderlick test. This one was called the Omnia. Same sort of concept. And then that lasted until we were about 1,000 employees and at 1,000 employees broke down. It didn't actually track to the best account executives and account managers anymore. There were different criteria that made sense or people with really high cognitive ability were being outdone by those who had lower cognitive scores. It just didn't matter once you got to size. And in a startup, obviously, you have to figure out a whole bunch of stuff on your own. You don't get enabled. There aren't tools and systems and battle cards for every situation.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they definitely differ at the stage of a company. It's funny you ask that. I'm literally right now building what I'm calling an anatomy of a great account executive, account manager and customer success person at Zoom info. But if we go to the startup stage and talk about that, in the startup stage, what we found, and I've struggled a lot with this, but what we found during the startup stage was people with basically high cognitive ability perform the best in a startup stage. And I was trying to hire account executives for two years. I'd hire six and one would stay. I'd hire four and one would stay. And it was this painful, painful existence. And at some point, we started giving a mix of personality and aptitude tests to our account executives to try to get a feel for where they fall on those spectrums. And is that like a test that we could use for future hiring? Ultimately.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then they send it out specifically to each of their account managers, account executives, and sales development reps as a ranked list of who you should be engaging with every day. So it is like driving towards that utopian, how do I know who to exactly run after? And they're doing it by bringing all of their data into one place. data scientists are behind that driving the scoring of how important is it if they visit our website how important is it if they hired a new cio and then that list is constantly being ranked and then shipped out on a daily or weekly basis”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way those places work is kind of like that last example, but essentially they go, listen, we have a huge total addressable market and we need to make sure that our field is going after the companies most likely to buy our products and services today. And so they go out, they pull product data into Snowflake or Google BigQuery or wherever. They pull in product data. They pull in their data from Zoom info. Maybe they also subscribe to some unique data point about healthcare companies or oil and gas businesses or whatever. They pull that into. They pull in any engagement data that they have. Have we talked to the customer? Have there ever been an opportunity? They pull in conversation intelligence data. Have we talked to them? What did they say on the calls? They bring that all together in one place and then they score it.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Succeed, but it does show that there is a meaningful appetite for leveraging this type of data in a different, more sophisticated way, but companies have not figured out how to deliver that.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally don't even know who they could sell to. So you see a lot of that in the super enterprise. In the tech companies, the more modern cloud-based tech companies, their frame of mind is how do I take all of this data, get it into a data lake, and then start making the right propensity to buy decisions. But what ends up happening, what I see really often, not really often, but in the super enterprise, I see fairly often they go, oh, we're going to build our own unique pane of glass for this. We're going to go run a project with probably our worst internal developers, and we're going to have them build basically zoom info internally for super enterprise company. We're going to take Zoom info data. We're going to take other data, our own data, Marriott, and our reps are going to have the perfect sales intelligence platform. And I've never seen that product.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their territories. The head of sales was like, this totally changes the game for us. All of a sudden, my sellers have 40% more accounts to go after in Salesforce. That is on the spectrum of maturity way, way early in the process. But it creates this immense amount of value for that company because there are businesses that should be buying their products and services that they don't even know exist during our IPO. I met with one of the biggest banks in the world and I met with the head of commercial banking at that bank. And he goes, I want to grow in these 15 regions, Salt Lake City, Denver. And I couldn't tell you within a 50 mile radius of any of our main branches how many businesses there are that should be customers of ours. And I've got like 200 people in India trying to like pull that information together for me. And again, it's like the”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is interesting what you see in the super enterprise is actually often exactly what you see in the super SMB. So you have account executives. They get a territory and they have the data in their CRM and they're told to go generate more business. And that's kind of it. Here's your CRM data. Here's your territory. Good luck, sell more. I talked to a large multinational enterprise company just the other week. They told me one of the biggest pieces of value that they got from Zoom info was they were able to take the accounts in Zoom info, compare them to the accounts that they had in Salesforce, and then realize that in any given territory, there was a 40% delta in between the accounts that were in Salesforce, which effectively make up their territories and the accounts that were in Zoom info, which are the actual universe of accounts.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fun of those clients and automated motion runs behind it. That's what makes data really sticky. Whereas today, if I tell you like, oh, here's all the data on your total addressable market, log in and read it or find your own list or whatever, that's a really painful way to extract value out of Zoom info. If instead I start with a set of triggers that indicate a company may be interested in your products and services and I let you build a downstream workflow and you build 50 of them. Now all of a sudden you come in and you instead of looking for information you have a command center that tells you we're talking to these five companies because of this trigger and these 10 companies because of that trigger. And we already sent out the emails and the display ads are going on these companies and the SDRs are calling them. Orchestrating that motion that starts with a trigger and Mary's company.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Postings mention account executives or SDRs, which companies are getting funding, which companies are spiking on intent. And then you need to marry that to the rest of the unique data. So, okay, I know which companies, and then I need to go which contacts. Who are the people that I talk to? And then how do I build workflow around that so that instead of these things happening in an ad hoc way, it's automated and scaled all across my organization so that every time one of these triggers happen, we automatically launch a go-to-market play behind them. We're sending an email to the right people, a sales development rep is calling them. We've got display ads going against the individuals on social media and on the display ad network. In the future, they're getting an ad on connected TV or on Twitter. And so every time you find one of these key moments that indicate that you should be in.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what you really want is if I go walk across the sales hall today here at Zoom Info and I grab the three best account managers and the three best account executives on our staff and I ask them, hey, tell me what you do to source a new opportunity that works the best. They'll tell you exactly what they're doing. They'll say, you know, I look at companies that just got funding and I see if the chief revenue officer used to work at a company that was one of our clients. I go search job postings and I look for companies that are hiring account executives or sales development reps. And I go reach out to them and tell the chief revenue officer, whatever that might be. What we think is that it's really just been a failure of imagination to be able to capture all of those key things that your bestsellers are doing and then automate emotion behind those. So it requires unique data. You have to have that sort of, oh, which job?”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we think about unique data and workflow, I think about it a lot in the concept of go-to-market plays. How do you help a customer go to market in an automated way? And by the way, most companies are nowhere near this.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generative AI helps a lot with this. The future is being able to take all of those insights and all of those things that are important and predictive around who you should be talking to today and probably what you should be saying to them and then deliver that to you every single day. These are the 15 companies and then the 15 people at those companies you should be engaging with today. Click a button to see all of those reasons. Intent visited your website, new CIO, Good Quarter, whatever that might be. But I think what you're working backwards from, Patrick is exactly that. Let me deliver to you the exact companies and the exact people you should be engaging with today based on all of the proprietary data and insights that we've collected.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's the hard part about being a seller today is that there's all sorts of information and insights about accounts that you should be selling to. Maybe a company in your territory visited your website and viewed the pricing page five times. Maybe a company in your territory has been researching on the web your products and solutions. Maybe a company just hired a new chief information officer and they came from an existing account. Maybe they had a good quarter or a bad quarter. The CEO mentioned your types of solutions in an earnings call. They're all of these really unique insights and signals that are happening in your territory. But today a seller has to personally triangulate all of those different things to decide who is the right company for me to go talk to today and use my resources in the best way. The future, and I think actually.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coordinated motions happening at the company, and I care now about the Golden Customer Journey because I see the operational improvement that it can drive. And until that ties off, it's really hard to get momentum in the business around any initiative until the business really understands the performance metrics that some initiative is going to improve. So in that way, everybody becomes a little bit of a facsimile of me. But in the ideas, they're not. There was no universe where I was going to show up and say, like, hey, we need a golden customer journey. That was never my jam, but highlighting that we can't be operationally excellent unless we have that, that's the piece that everybody gets their head around.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And every time I hear it, I just feel like it's just like something that customer success people think is important to do. And it doesn't actually create any value in the organization. And first of all, I'm listening to him. I'm paying attention to why he thinks this is a good idea. And ultimately, it comes down to you can't expect to operate and execute perfectly if you don't know what that journey looks like and you don't actually coordinate the motion. Otherwise, you have situations where you go, okay, when a customer doesn't come out of onboarding the right way, what do you do? And then that's like, oh, someone in customer success is going to call. Product marketing is going to send a message. Customer marketing is going to send a message. We're going to put a pop-up in the platform that says like, hey, log in more, get your user's provision. The AM responsible for the account is also going to call in and call the impoc. And now there's a bunch of.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think mainly, yes, certainly around performance management, yes. I think people on my executive team have different perspectives about things that don't come naturally to me, that are valid perspectives and help the organization run better operationally. But I tie that all back to performance. I'll give you an example. Our chief revenue officer came in and went, listen, we have no golden customer journey at Zoom info. We don't know what a perfect customer looks like. What is their experience in sales, onboarding, implementation, the first three months of usage, provisioning, integrations? What does the perfect customer look like? And then operationally, what do we do when a company doesn't look like one of these perfect customers? What is the operational motion around that? People have been telling me about Golden Customer Journey for, I don't know, a decade.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I only care about a website that performs really well. So I'm coming here to make sure that all of our motives are aligned. Your pathway to getting me out of these calls, because I don't want to be here either, is to close the gap on one of those three things, C-R or M. And I think if the leaders at the organization also drive that level of transparency and communication, then you can drive performance in those organizations because you're just constantly aligning to the most important metrics that you're going to track.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I've started doing today is when I'm involved in a project or I'm involved in the execution of something, what I do is I'll explain why I'm there. And I think it breaks down to three things. Competence, reliability, and motive. So when I show up and I'm involved in something, I might be involved in a website redesign. And I come in and I'm in those meetings. And then at some point, I go, listen, I want to tell you guys why I'm here so that you can get me out of this meeting. And it's one of these three things. CRM, I either think you guys are not competent to actually deliver this. And that's because the last three things you delivered were off here, off there, off here. I might not think you're reliable because we have to hit a deadline on this and the last three things you didn't deliver on time. Or I actually think your motives are wrong. Like you actually want a pretty website.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To improve whatever you're doing. Nothing is in stasis. So if you feel really great about something that you built here at Zoom info, for sure we're coming after it in the next quarter or in the next couple of months to go, how do you tweak it? How do you make it better? How do you turn the screw on that so it's a little bit better and a little bit better all over the organization? So there's this constant pressure to improve.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what it feels like on the receiving end is there is an expectation for perfection or at least near perfection, which really means we expect projects to move quickly and be thoughtful along the way. So when you show up ready to execute on a motion in the business and you're at the gates and we're looking over the project, there is a performance plan that's expected and a goal that we're expected to reach, there are metrics that we're going to follow and that we're expecting you to hit. And then we're going to come back every week and go, hey, you launched this project. What is it looking like? Is it hitting the metrics that we said? Why or why not? Let's make changes. Let's make improvements. Come back the next week. Did it hit those metrics? Why or why not? What did we learn? How are we fixing it? I think pressure means there's this constant iterative process.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Performance management that comes along with winning a championship because that's what you're going to get here. And it may not be what you get somewhere else.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wrote it like four days after the IPO or something like that, seven days after the IPO in 2020. And what I really wanted to reset was a couple of things. One, people felt really great about the IPO and the outcome of the IPO, but it had to be really clear that the IPO was just one step in a much bigger journey. And that if we got so caught up in how great we were when we IPO'd this one little moment in time that we'd forget that there's a much longer road in front of us where we have to continue to perform and continue to win championships. And look, I think there are places for lots of different types of professionals in business, but you should align yourself to the kind of team that you want to be on. Do you want to win a championship? And do you want the pressure?”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just operate differently. And someone can be really successful on the pirates, and they're never going to make it on the Boston Red Sox. And what I told our team is, look, we are building a championship team here. And if you look around and you feel like it's hard or it's not for you and you don't want to give the discretionary effort to Zoom info, there are lots of companies that aren't building a championship team. There are lots of Pittsburgh pirates out there that you could go and have a really comfortable existence at and not feel sort of this everyday drive to be the best to win a championship. And Pittsburgh Pirates are good people and you could go work at that company and you won't feel the pressure of what we're trying to build at Zoom info. But if you come in every day and you think that you're going to have the Pittsburgh Pirates and win a championship, it never happens.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gist of the message was we're building a championship team here at Zoom info. And not everybody is cut out for a championship team. And I use the analogy of the Pittsburgh Pirates and compared them to the Boston Red Sox. And I said, look, the Pittsburgh Pirates, they're a bunch of major league baseball players on the Pittsburgh Pirates. And every year they show up and they play the game and they're never in the hunt for a championship title. And they never show up expecting to be in the hunt for the championship title. So they show up. It's a nice place to work. They make pretty good money. They finish the year and they're very mediocre or sub mediocre. And then there are other teams like the Boston Red Sox or the Yankees who every year, year in and year out, are focused on building a championship team. And they're always in the hunt for a title. And those teams.”
2023-05-23 · Invest Like the Best · Henry Schuck - Building ZoomInfo - [Invest Like the Best, EP.330] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source