A short interview between Jason M. Lemkin and ZoomInfo's CEO (or senior exec) focused on renewal health metrics (seat usage, engagement, net renewal/retention) and how AI is being applied in ZoomInfo to enable personalization (pre-configured user views and contextual communications) and prioritization (triangulating signals to surface the best accounts). The speakers note uncertainty in the market but expect more stable operating norms in 2024.
Chapters
Am I using all of my seats? How deeply am I engaging across those seats? Those are the metrics that matter the most for whether you're going to be healthy at renewal time or not.
Yeah, it's a good insight. The high energy are just. It was a generation of disguising issues from product to sales. All. All up and down the stack. Right.
100%. You would pat yourself on the back.
You'd go, yeah, we're geniuses.
We're the best.
Customer success deployment.
I'm glad I made all those investments in customer success because look at this. Net renewal rate, net retention rate, ticking.
Up this small question, but curious this to go in and say, listen, I'm going to have Zoom Info for Bob, but not Elena and Jim, but not Jane to save money. That does take energy. Yeah, it takes a lot of energy. And you could do it once because there's a crisis or my boss yells at me, but you can't do this every month. Has this got to end in a way? There's only so much time with software management.
Yeah. Look, I think this is the worst emotion for software sales is uncertainty. And we're, we, we have been in this very uncertain time. And I think that what we're coming, you know, what we should be coming out of.
Yeah.
In 24 is that uncertainty. Now I know where my operating levels are. I know how to operate in this environment. A lot of companies have shifted around their executive teams, brought in new people. These people know how to operate in the environment that they are in. And so there shouldn't be another handbrake moment. Yeah. We should be understanding where we're operating and how to operate under this construct. Good.
All right. Before we run out of time, I want to make enough time for what's new. What's new at Zoom Info. And. But the first part, just tell me because we're all curious. Everyone that's in B2B is curious what's real and what isn't. An AI, what's demo where. What's moving the needle? What are you hearing from your. And what do your customers want that may be real or fake or not right there in general and across your portfolio, what's real?
Yeah. So I think what's real first, I think there's a lot of stuff that's real, but maybe not that valuable. And then there's stuff that's just real. So I'll talk about the real things in our business. We see prioritization and personalization are real. So when you come into Zoom Info today, if I want to personalize that experience for you. I want to show you the right accounts. I want to show you what technologies that a company is using matter to you, what intent topics are important, what scoop topics are important. I got to ask you a whole litany of questions, right? And I have to ask you them by product because maybe Your company has three product SKUs and the buyer for one is different than the buyer for the other. The scoop that you're looking for is different for one product versus the other product. It's like this nightmare from an administrative perspective. What size companies? Where are they? You know, how big are they? What technologies do they use? Who's in your buying committee? It's impossible to really get someone to sit down for an hour and onboard with you to ask all of these questions. Questions and then get to like a really solid result that allows me to personalize the interface for you.
Yes.
AI does this incredibly well and can be tuned so that when every user comes into the platform, I have pre configured the platform exactly. To which companies, which people, what scoops, what intent, what signal is important to you. I can just deliver that to you. And then I can also deliver for you contextually what your communications to those companies should be based on your website. All that understanding that I have about you, your case studies, all that information should allow me to craft in any circumstance a really contextual communication for you. The second is prioritization. And today triangulation is how people prioritize who they're going to reach out to. They go, okay, here's my list of accounts. In those accounts, what's happening in them? Are any of them on my website? Have any of them hired a new cto? Have any of them had a good quarter? Have any of them posted a job for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
