E39: CRO James Roth on Resilience, Reinvention, and AI at ZoomInfo

Hello and welcome to the Revenue Leadership Podcast by Topline. I'm your host, Kyle Norton, CRO at Owner.com, and every Wednesday we dive deep into the strategies and tactics being used to drive success by the best revenue leaders in the world. So join me as I sit down with revenue operators to discuss actionable frameworks that you can implement in your business today with no fluff, no sales pitches, and no platitudes.

This episode is brought to you by Pavlov. I'm excited about this one because as a customer myself, I can tell you it's a game changer for revenue. We all know acquisition is critical, but how much revenue opportunity are you missing post-sale? Pavlov's AI agents plug directly into your entire GTM stack to find opportunities and take actions that grow revenue from your existing customers, whether it's accelerating time to value, driving expansion, or proactively addressing churn risks. For us, Pavlov cut our customer time to value in half and increased our revenue activation from 70% to 90% plus. This product is insane. Learn how Pavlov can accelerate your NRR growth at trypavlov.com/kyle. That's trypavlov.com/kyle. Kyle Norton.

Today's guest is James Roth, who is the CEO at ZoomInfo, which is now trading under the symbol GTM, which I really enjoy and I thought was a cool update. James was originally the VP of Sales at iCore Networks, where he was acquired by Vonage in 2015, and then James stayed with Vonage for over 6 years, eventually becoming the SVP of enterprise and field sales, and he grew the Vonage business revenue from zero in 2015 to over $1.2 billion in 2021. So, an awesome ride there. Vonage eventually acquired by Ericsson, I believe, and James has now been with ZoomInfo for almost 4 years where he's navigated the company through very interesting times, through a tech recession, through a major platform shift, ZoomInfo is going through a major rebirth as we speak, which we're going to talk a bunch about. So I'm excited for this one, James. Appreciate you joining me.

Yeah, Kyle, thanks for having me. Excited as well.

Yeah. So what did I miss in your background? What else helps round out the picture for folks?

Yeah, I think the only thing I typically like to share, I started as a door-to-door salesman. That's, it's not that long ago that people were still going to market that way. I love, Talking about those days, especially when you talk to SDRs today who are in these beautiful Class A office buildings with air conditioning and snacks and bathrooms. I was driving out to a territory hitting 50 doors a day every day. And so that's where I started my career selling sort of technology, kind of managed services door-to-door to small and mid-sized businesses and worked my way up through that company. And that's what led me to I-Core Networks after we sold that company. So So, you know, I think that's a piece I always like to share, just given the fact it's probably the most antiquated selling that can be done. And that transformation through where we are today is, you know, it's quite a journey, but it's been a lot of fun along the way.

Yeah. So I think about this a lot because I grew up in a boiler room. I spent 4 and a half years selling pretty crappy conferences and events. And my first 9 months there was like a stack of paper leads on a desk with a phone and like this This wasn't the 1980s, this was 2008, but we were just an old-school company. And we're going to talk a bunch about resilience and grit today. And so, I'm curious, how do you think about trying to develop grit in reps when things are sometimes so comfortable, when folks haven't gone through the door knocking or the like OG cold calling and have that level of suffering and toughness building?

Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's funny you bring it up because I talk about this a lot and I, I too have to watch out so that even the 2008, 2009, 2010, now realizing it's 2025, we can be looked at as dinosaurs even though we're not. But no, I think it's interesting, especially that company that I started with. A bunch of folks have had tremendous careers and I think a lot of it is if they could figure out the product and the sales methodology and then go deal with getting doors slammed in the face, getting physically thrown out of buildings, being told you're like a scourge to the earth type thing, it does develop this resiliency that I think a lot of folks don't have. If you started, you know, 2020, '21 and you had COVID and this unbelievable tech boom, yeah, I think that mid-'22 and '23 certainly was a wake-up call to a lot of folks. That either didn't have that initial resilience or grit from the hard times of doing it the old-fashioned way years before, or frankly, just graduated into the greatest time ever to be a tech salesperson. And I think the context setting is probably one of the most important things, because if you have somebody that started at ZoomInfo in 2019 or 2020, and all they knew was just up and to the right, and this thing flew off the shelves, you talk to some of the former folks, they would open up their Okta and they'd have 5 DocuSigns of people that just bought more stuff. They didn't even have to talk. And I think you have, without the context, you think that's what life is. And when things started to get more challenging and when things got harder, you know, there was that initial cohort of people that was like, I'm just going to go find what ZoomInfo was 2 years ago now. And, you know, we've had a huge amount of boomerangs and it's really difficult if you're a leader and you're Hey, Kyle, it's not that easy. And a lot of companies are going through this. They're like, screw you, you're just trying to retain me. And then they go out to a startup or they go out to another company and they realize that basically everybody, with the exception of maybe 5 or 6 companies in that, you know, 2023 route in the tech space, they're experiencing a lot of the exact same things. And so I think it's, it's context setting is a huge important part of it. But in terms of building the resilience or building that grit, it's really hard to do. And I think a lot of it is hiring for it, you know, hiring for people that have that, whether it was in a background that you and I started in or there's, you know, certain things within their education or, you know, college athletics, certain things like that that I feel like can give you some proxy for a level of grit or resilience that they're going to need. But I think that first year, I'm not sure if you all saw something similar, but that first year there was that cohort of folks that just said, I need to go find something easier. You know, I'm going to go find that company that's just like ZoomInfo was 2 years ago. And I had the exact conversation. It was a great rep of ours. And he's like, hey man, I appreciate everything. He started in 2017. He's like, I appreciate everything. I love this place, but I'm just going to go find ZoomInfo of 5 years ago. And I was like, I don't think you realize— I wanted to shake the guy. Like, I don't think you realize that you caught lightning in a bottle at the right place, at the right time, in the right market. And just finding that again, you know, good luck. But yeah, and ultimately the guy came back a year later. But yeah, again, would be happy to go deeper on the resilience and the grit piece because I think it is so important in this. But we've definitely needed it over the last 2 to 3 years.

Yeah. So we're going to talk about two major topics. I would love to talk about leading through change, both how you led yourself through a bunch of this and how do you lead a team through a bunch of what ZoomInfo has experienced. And then I want to talk about now the sort of rebirth of ZoomInfo. Changing the ticker symbol, I think, is like a very symbolic representation of it. And I want to hear a little bit about the product strategy, but mostly how you're now adapting go-to-market strategy to it. But the first topic is leading through change. And so, for those who may not be familiar, so ZoomInfo, obviously, like one of the great companies of our time in go-to-market, largely built the GTM data category. But like many companies in the post-COVID era saw slowdowns, the seat contraction, I think ZoomInfo lost 75% of its market cap at some point. I was at Shopify when we lost 80% of our market cap, so I'm certainly familiar with this tale. And as the market's now recovering, ZoomInfo is in a place where there's a lot of disruption happening. There's a lot of competitors. AI is a big platform change. And so you have done this all as a first-time public CRO now for 4 years, which, you know, from the outside must take tremendous amount of grit and resilience and determination. And so my first question is like, how did it affect you personally? Because you got there just as that slide was starting and your first 2 years were like big slide because everybody was experiencing the same sort of drawdown. And how did you, how did it affect you personally and how did you think about keeping yourself motivated and engaged and driving forward without letting any of that affect you?

Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I think back to context setting, you know, when you talk about Shopify or you talk about ZoomInfo, I think ZoomInfo at its high, we were $600 million in revenue trading at a $32 billion market cap. There was a level of kind of irrational exuberance that I think people forget in 2021. And I think one of the keys to that is, and you talk about timing, you talk about luck, and I would share this with the team quite often. When COVID first hit, Vonage's share price dropped to like $3 a share. And call it one year later, we were selling for $22 a share. And so it's hard if somebody has only ever seen up and to the right, announce earnings, goes up, announce earnings, goes up, announce earnings. And so I think, you know, level setting on the fact that there are going to be peaks and valleys and folks that depending on when they graduated, depending on when they start, they don't know that. And so I think articulating it is one thing, but as you and I both well know, you're going to have 25%, 30% of the org that says, okay, Kyle, I believe you, you're right. And you got that other 25% at the bottom who's like, you're just lying to me, you're going to tell me whatever. And so I think, you know, to answer your question on the personal front, because I think that does have a huge impact on how you lead the rest of the team, you know, a big part of it for me is I never really had the time to sit back and think about like, oh no, like look at what happened. You know, you're, you're in it. And I think to, to the personal, to the mindset, if you will, that I've taken, you know, to every company, to every role that I'm in, is that there is such an opportunity to actually learn and get good at what you're doing. And I think what I've seen through leaders over the years, and, you know, especially when you get like the emperor with no clothes on, some of these companies that were extraordinary, they were rocket ships, they grew very quickly and you had somebody kind of sitting in a big chair that maybe made a tweak here, made a tweak there, and put in a sales methodology and I'm amazing. And then when times got really difficult, they had gotten so far away from the teams, from the field, from whatever it may be. And I don't think they took advantage of the opportunity that they had in the years prior to say, I'm going to take this opportunity to learn and get really, really good at what I do. And so like a maniacal focus on, okay, yes, here's this opportunity. First-time CRO, you know, this is 2023. I'd never done the role before. I'd never had to deal with analysts. I'd never had to deal with, you know, board at that level. I'd never had callbacks. I'd never had to do any of these things that are a public market, you know, CRO would have to do. And I'll be honest, those things are grueling and they're hard and they're not fun. I remember way back when I always remember, you know, I was like a VP of sales. I'd be like, oh, I wish I could get into the board meeting. I wish I could have a seat at the table. Now I'm like, I wish I could put anybody else at that table. Even with, even with great results, you still dread the thing, the level of preparation. But I think rather than dreading it, you know, it's that old adage of like, I have to versus I get to. And looking at those situations where it was like, okay, each one of these quarters that goes by that I'm dealing with analyst callbacks, I'm dealing with, you know, public company board, I'm dealing with all of these things. I get to get better at it. I have a story to tell. I, you know, I've been there, I've done it, I've seen it, and I start to get better at it. And so I think through what was, you know, inevitably not the most fun times, it was, we're going to get through this. You know, ultimately, we're going to build a better company than we were before. That's not necessarily driven by market landscape or ZERP or, you know, stay at home or any of those things. And we're going to build a great company. And along the way, especially for the folks that are in it, we're going to learn a lot to actually be really good at this job. And I think there were a lot of folks, and again, not just ZoomInfo, across the board, you look at a lot of these companies that were these rocket ships, you know, you did have the opportunity to sit back and you could do nothing and they were still probably going to be rule of 50, rule of 60, rule of 70 companies that you know, did extraordinarily well in that period of time. And I think for those who sold before, you know, 2019, 2020, that sold in 2010, sold in 2009, you know, they understood that. And so I think it was building that group of people like, this is the team that we're going to have that's going to get through this. There's inevitably going to be folks that you're going to bring in from the outside because they bring an outside perspective that says, you guys think it's hard here. Holy crap. You should have been at my last company that was a $70 million, well-funded, but losing a ton of money. Like, we had to close the doors. And so, you know, that level of perspective. But I think that the key takeaways are setting the context and building that team of a combination of internal and external folks that are really going to be like the next chapter of what the company is going to be. And then I think the last one, as far as just getting through it, you know, I don't know if he's— I don't know if people are allowed to talk about him anymore, but I always love history. And, you know, you look at like Washington at Valley Forge where it was like snowing, people were dying and, you know, they had disease and they ran out of food. And, you know, Washington rolls down there and he brings like his presence there. I always use that example. There's the great artwork that's in the Capitol of him. And again, I don't know if he's been canceled. So if he has been, you can cut this part out. No, we're good.

I'm a history guy. I like it.

And so I think that that's probably, you know, both personally and to the team, I think the most important part of it is that if you are in there and you have one of your biggest customers telling you that they just cut 5,000 of their salespeople, so your contract's going to get cut in half. If you're in it with them and they know that you're leading from the front, not only so that you have the context of what they are going through on a regular basis, I think that was probably one of the most challenging things. If you had a leader's leader that was kind of up in the pooh-bah clouds and, you know, renewal rate, churn, downsell, upsell, you know, was drying up. If they didn't have that, like, we're on the front lines with you hearing it from the customers, it would be very easy to be like, Kyle, what'd you do? Like, why? Like, why? How did you let that happen? Versus you're in it with them or, you know, in the proverbial valley forge and you're hearing it from the customers. I think that's probably, if there's any takeaway from this, I don't think there is a better opportunity to lead from the front than in bad times. Because not only does the team see you do it, and so they're inevitably going to be more bought into somebody that's there with them. But I also think you get to hear what the actual problem statement is so that you can then go guide the strategy. And so if you're in it hearing from, all right, Kyle, you guys need to cut 50% of your spend with us. Why? What are you looking at? Is it Is it market-driven? Is it attrition-driven? You know, for folks that are not there hearing that from the customer, how would you ever build a strategy to go fix it? You know what I mean? And so like, and it's not just your biggest customers. I mean, what ultimately hurt us the most was the SMB, you know, in a ZIRP, free money, you know, we had basically gone way too heavy SMB to the point where it was 50, 60% of our overall revenue. And it was a great business in 2021 and 2022 when everybody was growing, everybody was adding headcount. The minute that that went away, SMB became this ticking time bomb of folks closing their doors, folks that couldn't pay their bills. And so hearing it from those customers, hearing what the enterprise customers were saying, hearing what mid-market customers were saying, hearing what certain verticals were saying, you know, it not only allows you to lead from the front, and have the buy-in from the team. But I also think when you go back to the chief product officer and you go back to the board and you go back to the CTO and CEO, you've got a really grounded point of view to say, this is what we need to do and this is why we need to do it. And then you go drive the strategy accordingly. So I know that's a much longer answer than, you know, just the, how did I deal with it personally? But I think they do all come together as far as like, getting through that, that 2 years.

Yeah, there's so much in here that I agree with. This is very much a similar message than I, that I try to deliver. And the, the focus on learning and growth, I think, is the ultimate equalizer. Like, if you have a, if you have a growth mindset and you're focused more on developing yourself and becoming the person that you need to be to be in that future role, and as opposed to being focused on chasing the title or chasing the dollars, counterintuitively, that gets you to the dollar and the titles way, way faster. You do have to be smart about picking. You want to make smart bets about the companies that you're joining, and that's a thing that I think people get wrong a lot of the time, but if you can have this internal locus of control, this internal focus where you're focused on your controllables and developing yourself as the best version, then the outcomes will eventually come. A thing Hunter Madley said this to me at this golf event, he was a former CRO at HubSpot and now runs, is the CEO of Vena. He goes, sales is the most unfair profession in the short run and the most fair profession in the long run. You know, because, you know, your territory is going to get carved up. You're going to have the like bad BDR, you're going to have the bad AE, and things will— and you'll see others succeeding who are, you know, putting in less effort. That will always happen in the short term. But in the long term, you will always be the successful one if you have a higher work rate, if you're learning faster. So I love these lessons. It's It's really great feedback for folks. And so, and I just want to go back to you personally. So, was it as simple as like you just didn't have time to think about it or were there things that you needed to do? Because that's a very unique experience as a CRO to go through that level of chaos. And especially as a pub in a public market, were there any things that you had to do to make sure that you were in the right headspace to be successful or like not drawn into the negativity?

Yeah, I mean, just for full transparency, I think what was helpful, you know, when I started back to the learning and development thing. So I had run all of new business for Vonage. I'd never run the account management business. When I started at ZoomInfo, I did not start as the CRO. I started as the head of the customer business. So I had CSM, account management, you know, basically that entire org, we call it RNG, retention and growth. And so, you know, I got that front row seat in the customer business.

Wow. That must be crazy.

Yeah. So, so in that, you know, and you're looking at former 115, 120% retention and then you start to see that just decline. And, you know, in that seat, I got a lot, again, a front row, hadn't done it before. And so, you know, I think to your point, there is this— that first 6 months, if you will, I would say the back half of '22.

Yeah.

You know, for us, Q1 and Q2 were great quarters. So at least I had like my first 2 quarters. I could be like, hey, did better than last year. I'm doing great. So I think timing in a fully vulnerable sense, I think timing makes a big difference. I think had I started you know, January 1st of '22, and the bottom just fell out. You know, the imposter syndrome of like, okay, I'd never run the RNG business. I'd never run account management. They made a wrong bet, and I just cratered this thing. So I think those first 2 quarters, you know, and we delivered more 7-figure deals than we'd ever had. We, you know, there was a lot of good in that first half that I think probably saved me personally and professionally because it was like, hey, this guy's actually really good at what he does. You know, doing large customer meetings with CEO and our COO at the time. And so I don't think there was ever that additional, like, this guy's an idiot and he just ruined our business. So I luckily missed that, which helped because then it really, it was Q3 of '22 and Q4 of '22 where it really started like, oh my God, something is happening here. And even if you look back, like, it hit companies at different times.

Yeah.

And so we came out in our Q2 earnings call, we're like, we did pretty good. And there's like a great interview on CNBC. And it was like, like, there was like some hubris of it's not affecting us because everybody's blah, blah, blah, because we're great.

Yeah.

Because we're so great. And, you know, Q3, we certainly took our medicine. And then it just started this, you know, and I think certain companies that you know, whether you had a platform and you had other things that you could bolster renewal with different products, or if you were a single product company, like everybody took pain at different times. I think everybody then comes out of that pain at different times. But, you know, we ended up growing in '22 47%. And so even with that back half of the year of things getting really, really tough, you know, it was still my first year. We still grew the business 47%. We crossed $1 billion. There was like enough to be like, all right, you know, this isn't completely catastrophic. And then, you know, for us, '23 probably hit the hardest. And, you know, at that period of time, that's where we were transitioning CROs out. So I took the role in October of '23. And by October of '23, it was very obvious that this was like incredibly market-driven, the front office sales and marketing landscape, the attrition numbers, if you recall, Q1 of '23, it was like 130,000 tech sales people got terminated. And so, you know, from a timing perspective, I think had it been like day one is Q3 of '22 as the CRO, I probably wouldn't be telling the story that I'm telling now. And so I think so much of that, again, timing, context setting, but even in getting into the role in '23, you know, it was nothing had changed materially. You know, we were still in this, this route, if you will. And so when I got into the role and again, and we all live on these social media platforms, you have LinkedIn and LinkedIn has all this noise, good, bad, and ugly, you know, and of course you have that moment where you're looking at the share price from the moment I started. And if you recall Q4 of '23, there was a lot of optimism in the market. You know, they were going to start cutting rates.

We're coming back.

You know, I had people sending me screenshots of like, oh, the James Roth effect, because we had gone from like whatever, $8 to $12 and we were up. And sure enough, then February of '24, just a little market history. February '24 is when the CPI print came in. It was really, really high. We had just announced great earnings. From Q4 of '23. And we announced and we were up in the after hours like 30%. And so like really start feeling probably better than I should and wake up in the morning, the CPI print hits and the entire market just craters. We still ended up 12 or 13%. But like those moments, I think what I do personally is like you can't feel too good in those moments where you're getting the like congratulatory texts and people on LinkedIn nice things. And then you go have a, you know, it was Q2 of that following year where we had this huge, you know, a bunch of that SMB business basically wrote off. The SMB business from like '22 and '23, that ticking time bomb, if you will, kind of exploded.

And so renewals all start coming up. They all start rolling out.

Yeah. And I think it was that. And then it was just, you know, and we've shared this publicly, so it's not anything MNPI, but, you know, we, the volume of SMB that we had, we did not force you to pay up front. You didn't have to put a credit card in. We basically let you get into ZoomInfo and there was such a large portion of SMB. It's kind of like an accounts receivable nightmare. And we were not making them put a credit card up front. And so there was this cohort and I still to this day think there's like some Reddit article out there that's like, here's how you get ZoomInfo for free. But anyhow, so that, that hurt us badly because you had this, you know, from a revenue standpoint, like probably the most, if you really want to know, like the grit and the resilience, the most frustrating point of my entire career was Q2 of '24 because we blew the bookings number out. And I remember I was driving up the Northeast. I stopped at our CEO's house. It was Sunday. It was the last day of June. And we were going to blow out our net add number. And we were throwing high fives, felt great. And it was like, we're back. Like, we are, we're officially back. It was a great upmarket quarter. Like, all things were great. And then the revenue numbers came in and there was this charge from these SMB write-offs. Like, literally stuff that was sold, like, before I even got to ZoomInfo. Wow. So we went from this, like, gonna be our coming out party and the bookings number, like, all of the numbers were amazing to, like, you know, and as a public company, you go from being above the high end of guidance to this charge takes you, you know, to basically below the low point of guidance. Then you have all the smart, you know, Wall Street types saying, okay, if you're going to miss the low end of guidance, like, you know, throw out the kitchen sink. And so, you know, you go from this like amazing high on the Sunday, last day of June to this like just gut punch of despite all of those things, nobody cares because this is what we're going to have to basically go report on. And so, you know, I think internally, company, that was hard because you were pushing and they were driving and they delivered this great result. And then they're not going to get that credit for it in the public market that I think everybody really, really wanted after what was a couple quarters of like really intense work. And so I would say that was probably the most challenging test of resilience, both for me personally, for the company, and for the internal employees, because it was this like, you know, 3 good quarters, you did exactly what we asked you to do. And this stuff that happened years ago has come back to bite us. And so then you start to lose a little bit of the trust of like, we did what you said we had to do, we did it, and we're getting hammered for it. So.

So what was the messaging to the team? This is sort of the next part of the conversation I wanted to have. So talked a little bit about internal. Well, let me just, one follow-up there. So like internally, that sucks. You do, you personally did what you thought you needed to do. You were excited and then you get struck with, you know, a bad earnings call, which is never that, which is never fun. So how did you manage that? Personally? Like, what did you do to keep your own mindset in the right place?

Yeah, so I mean, at that point, I was 3 quarters into being CRO, public company. And I, you know, you always go back to the John Wooden, you know, did I do everything that I could do? Like, is this my fault? Did I do everything I could do? And I felt pretty confident that we had done everything we needed to do. And then I think to the broader team, you know, as you separate that out, and I'm going to keep going back to this theme because it is truly what got me through it, where it's like, all right, I'm going to have to go face for basically the entirety of Q3, board, analysts, shareholders, noise, etc. And I've never had to do that in this type of landscape before. And I feel like I always talk, whether it's my teams, you know, depending on what video games you grew up playing, you know, you're collecting gold coins, you're collecting arrows in the quiver. Whatever it may be, I figured that was going to be one of those moments where, you know, I knew, I guess what helped me through it is I knew that we did everything we could do and the numbers were pretty clear on that. So that gives you some level of confidence that it's like, hey, board, remember, like, look at the bookings numbers, look at what we did, separating those things out. So like the context setting, very important. And then looking at this is going to be a brutal 90 days. And how can we ultimately, how can I personally make this into the learning opportunity of all time? Like how many CROs in their third quarter in the gig get to deal with like irate analysts? You know, it doesn't sound like a ton of fun, but it is like you start to just learn, okay, if I can do that, I can do just about anything. And it was the same thing, you know, going back to knocking on doors. If I can go do that, I can do just about anything. Because there's not going to be anything that's harder than physically being thrown out of a building because I'm soliciting it. And so having highly educated people be angry about a result that you can get through those things. And so I think it tested that muscle. And I also think that, again, getting back to another theme, yes, okay, it's hard to go to the broader team. And say, well, guys, I'm learning a lot. You know, I get to go learn how to deal with pissed-off analysts. Like, that message doesn't really resonate with sales managers and sales reps and sales directors, et cetera. And so, you know, coming out doing that of like, well, guys, I'm 3 quarters in, I'm learning a lot. That means nothing to them. And so how do you then transition like, okay, that's what's getting me through it. How do I now get the rest of the team through it? And I think a big part of it is, you know, again, transparency where you could come out and you could give them sort of the smokescreen of, oh, it's just financial stuff, it's just analysts, don't worry about it, we're doing great. But I think getting into a level of detail that they probably weren't accustomed to of saying, this is exactly what we did. And by the way, if you're a sales rep, if you're a sales manager, you guys are all getting paid, okay? Because you blew out your number. And so everybody in the sales org all the way up through the sales leadership, like you guys did what you needed to do and you are being compensated for it. Many of you are in Gate 3 accelerators. Many of you made more money than you ever made. And those are very real, very good deals that you deserve to be paid on. And we're not cutting any of that stuff out. And then ultimately, the thing that takes a momentary hit is our share price. But if look at that, and I think this was the best thing that came out of it. I always try to find these golden nuggets of like, what's the opportunity that can come out of this thing? And so there had always been this reluctance, if you will, to really go focus on the SMB the way we needed to, you know, build out an e-commerce, build out PLG, build out a publish-to-checkout where you can pay upfront and you force them to pay upfront, build out a risk model that says these people have to pay upfront. And it allowed us, and it was really the big pivot into shifting our business, where we're going to go deal with the SMB the right way, and then we're going to go make this an upmarket company. And so I think, again, similar to that first hard time, the second hard time, you build that team out that's on board with that. It's like, we're going to be a company that's 70% plus enterprise, 70% upmarket, and we're going to have a smaller SMB, and it's going to ultimately give the opportunity for a lot of people to build their careers from what is hyper-transactional SMB, 2-day close, inbound comes in, demo, close, into like the folks that can make $1 million a year selling multimillion-dollar deals. If you stick with us, we have that opportunity here, and that's exactly what we're going to go do. And so, you know, you probably lose another 5 to 10% of the people that are like, not this movie again, I'm going to go find something easier. But then the people that really lean in and see the opportunity ahead of us, you know, we did a couple of things where we were able to go, you know, for the really key employees, you can change some of the compensation stuff, you can issue equity. There's, there's all kinds of tools in the tool bag that help you ingratiate the key people that you can't live without. But I think beyond that, it really is just setting that like, this is what happened. This is exactly what happened with a level of transparency you're not accustomed to. And this is exactly what we're going to go do about it. And I'm going to be there with you on the front lines going and driving this thing from a segment ship perspective, going to verticalize the business. We're actually going to go focus aggressively on upmarket and we're going to fix the SMB. And I think there was a lot of folks that saw that as an opportunity to like build out, you know, the next chapter of the company and innovate on product and all that stuff, but was not fun or easy.

Yeah. You're a history guy, so you'll love the Churchill quote, like, never let a good crisis go to waste.

Yeah.

And oftentimes companies have to experience this type of pain to make the changes that are required to move it into the next phase. And, you know, building SMB and a PLG self-serve motion is part of it. And then we'll talk about this whole rebirth. I think like one of the other pieces of messaging that I've, that I've stressed in these scenarios is like, look, like things being hard is a feature, not a bug of what we do. Like, you don't do startups or you don't do sales because you want something easy. You want to do something hard because that's how you learn and get better. Like, you can't, you can't get big muscles lifting light weights. Like, you know, 5-pound weights won't really get you that far. Order taking and just like, you know, sending out DocuSigns isn't really going to build the skill sets you need to be successful. And so, trying to reframe people's mindset to like, look, this being hard is a good thing. Yeah, you don't want to be silly with your effort and put effort into something losing. But in a business like ZoomInfo with great fundamentals and a product that has tremendous fit, that it's going to go through cycles. Every great business goes through cycles. The fundamentals are there to want to stay through it. But making that decision to like, hey, talk about a learning experience, going through the ups and downs of that is really cool. All right. So, let's actually shift and talk about this sort of rebirth of ZoomInfo. So, this is all happening, the market has a massive correction, you guys get growth back on trajectory. The ChatGPT moment happens sort of November '22, and by the time we get into early '24, you're starting to see the emergence of a bunch of AI-native competitors. Clay, I don't know if Clay's a competitor, if you guys are plugged in, and so maybe that's actually a partner, but there's a bunch of competitive solutions now in this data space. So, just maybe when you're thinking you're out of the woods, you're back into the fire. But it seems like ZoomInfo has actually seen a lot of that coming and been proactive. I think you guys have done like over 10 acquisitions in the last 5 or 6 years. A bunch of that is fairly recently. A bunch of that is actually in the AI space. So just talk to me about the company and product strategy part of the GTM sort of rebirth. And then I want to dig into like how you make that happen on the go-to-market side. So maybe just give people the strategy, like the company strategy stuff.

Yep. So, you know, I think back to '22, we had made several acquisitions. We bought Chorus. We built a sales sequence, you know, sort of outreach sales loft competitor. We had a talent platform. And I think we were probably the first to go a little bit too wide. And then a lot of companies followed that. You had Clary with Wingman and Groove, and you had Salesloft and Outreach and Kaya. And so everybody was trying to get to this kind of big platform, if you will. And I think we would compete over, hey, you don't need them, you just need us. And, you know, each one of them had a core competency and some of whatever they acquired or built maybe wasn't as good as some of the others. So one of the big shifts that we made from a product standpoint And I think this helped with the emergence of AI. So like early days, ZoomInfo, one of the value propositions is, Kyle, your CRM data is terrible. Reps don't input it, you know, and I think 3 years ago you would have said, yeah, I know, it's fine. It's the way it's always been. Reps never put stuff in. Nothing we do changes it. It's kind of fine. And I think the emergence of AI has been great for our data business because now that you have these AI products who've these AI tools that are doing amazing things if it's sitting on—

Only if you have good data. Yeah.

Exactly. And I think that, so that part of the strategy, you know, as we moved in '22 to all of these different kind of application, again, what's crazy about market landscape is we were trying to move away from the data side of it because if you looked at data companies, their valuations were near what software application companies were. So we wanted more software application. It was a metric that we read out on earnings. Like this, this is how much application business. And then like overnight with AI, it was almost like people cared about their data. And that was a big turning point from a product and a strategy standpoint of let's reinvest R&D dollars into making sure that no one gets close to us on data quality. And in that application phase, you had a bunch of ones, SixSense bought Slintell, you had a bunch of folks that were kind of getting into the, hey, we have some data too. It's not as good, but it's cheaper. You know, Apollo did that, you know, with, with, you know, a lot of momentum in those days because we were probably slow to kind of bring some of the pricing down in certain segments. And so you could have somebody that just said, yeah, I could pay $0.25 on the dollar and data is data. And so I think that refocusing on data was a huge, you know, pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the data itself. The second piece, kind of getting back to my earlier point, in talking to all of these customers that I've talked to, what we would see, and I felt it as a customer of ZoomInfo, I probably had 30 to 40% of my org that were sitting in front of multiple screens and they had all of the different ZoomInfo data tabs open. They were using intent. They were using scoops. They were using key contact tracking. They were using website tracking. And then you had like 30% of the org that was just logging in to look up Kyle Norton's cell phone. Yeah.

And they loved it.

Don't get me wrong. They loved it. It's an incredibly strong value proposition, but you would hear these folks in RevOps being like, oh, we went and bought this product because they've got this. I'm like, do you know that in your entitlement, you guys have that? And they're like, no, we didn't know that. Would have been nice to know. And so there was this almost a downside of having such a strong brand in contact data that, you know, you got 37,000 customers. It's really hard to go tell each of them that we've got all this other stuff. And so we, when we built out Copilot, The whole purpose was to say, okay, ZoomInfo has traditionally been a pull, like I'm going to pull Kyle's information out of ZoomInfo, and that requires me to log into ZoomInfo, pull it out myself. With Copilot, it was much more of a push to Kyle where you can tune the ICP, you can tune your segments, your target accounts, your vertical, whatever it may be. And we proactively serve up those signals. We proactively serve up Kyle as like the key persona, but then all the people in the org chart. And the goal was to get that 30%, maybe 40% of people that don't open a laptop in a given day— they're on mobile, they're out in the field, whatever it may be— and send them all of those insights proactively. And so that was the whole purpose of Copilot, where with the introduction of AI, you know, you could have never done that before. You just have all this data, and then you need somebody to pull it out. Now, from, you know, what those LLMs can learn, essentially, is I know who you're targeting, I know that you sell to SMB. I know that you typically sell to the CFO at SMB companies, and it's key that they're 50 employees plus because they have, like, all of that information you can train and then basically say, okay, I want to know every time this, this, this, and this happens, and I want it proactively to Slack. I want it to email. I want it to mobile, so on and so forth. So that was really the, how do we activate all of this data? And that was Copilot. And so a lot of success there. You know, we crossed $100 million very quickly. You know, we'll have more announcements in a month. But, you know, so that was Copilot. And then I think recently, and you mentioned Clay, yeah, there's this, this concept of now that you've got all these AI tools and you've got all of this data sitting structured, unstructured conversations, emails, how do you bring all this data together and make sense of it? And so that's what we're building with Go-To-Market Studio. Where you have a ZoomInfo data foundation, the ability to plug in other data providers as well. If you like hierarchy data from D&B, but you like the sort of headquarter data from ZoomInfo, you know, basically marry that data together, bring in structured, unstructured, bring in conversations, bring in calendar invites. There's so much data that lives around on a day-to-day basis.

And that's first party and third party then?

First party, second party, and third party. Is bringing all of those in and basically, again, making sense of it. I think before AI, you couldn't do that. It was too much data. You couldn't see that we were on this podcast and here's this snippet of where I said something about moving upmarket.

Yeah.

You know, those things just, it wasn't feasible. Now it is. And so I think as we build that product out, we've shifted significantly. You look back 2 years where we're just fighting tooth and nail that you don't need any other provider. Into now, you know, we've got a partnership with Gong, we've got a partnership with Salesloft, we've got a partnership with Outreach, like we've got a partnership with Clari. All of these areas where it's like, okay, what's your core competency? And what is that golden tech stack, if you will, of what you like to have? And then how do you get a really strong intelligence kind of data foundation under that that fuels your forecast within Clari or fuels your sales sequencing within Salesloft? You know, having the right data across first, second, third party to do it. Whether you're using Kaya, whether you're using Wingman, really doesn't matter to us as long as you're getting that first-party data into this big sort of studio, if you will. And so that's, you know, from a product and innovation standpoint, that's where we've been moving towards. We just released Go-to-Market Studio a couple of weeks ago. I know I'm not supposed to sell on this, so I will stop there. But I think it's a combination to the go-to-market side of what is go-to-market really looking for, what do they really need, and what are the areas that we can truly help people there, and then who are the partners that we can work with to ultimately get them to the best outcome.

Are you ready to level up your go-to-market strategy for 2026? Then don't miss GTM 2025, the only B2B tech conference exclusively for Go-to-Market Executives. Join 1,000 other revenue leaders this September 23rd to 25th in Washington, DC for an exclusive executive-only experience. This 3-day event is hyper-focused on connection, strategy, and execution. Expect hands-on workshops, in-depth strategy sessions, and curated opportunities to build relationships with VPs, CXOs, and founders facing the same challenges you are. You'll stress test your GTM approach, align your team, and leave with real actionable insights from top-performing leaders. Don't miss the must-attend conference designed to help you boost go-to-market results in 2026. Visit attendgtm.com. That is attendgtm.com to secure your spot today. And don't forget to use the code Topline for 10% off your GA ticket.

Does this mean you're refocused on being a data product as opposed to trying to be sequencing, call recorder? Are those like still parts of the portfolio?

Yeah, so we've got, we, again, we acquired Chorus. It's a good business. And I think for the better part of 2 years, it was, hey, you don't need Gong, use Chorus. And you think about the lift and shift of, hey, save a couple bucks because we're bundling this together versus something that you've got hundreds of hours of recordings on. And so I think it's less of a, we want to go win the conversational intelligence space. It's that we need our customers to have that first-party data. And so we still have it. And I would say, you know, in certain verticals, conversational intelligence is still relatively nascent, whether that's security compliance, whether they just don't know, whether they don't know if they need it. Certain verticals, it's very saturated, but we want the opportunity. Yes, they can use Chorus if they already have an existing footprint with one of the others. Great. We just want to be working together with them. On the sales sequencing side, same thing. We've still got customers that are using our basic sequencing, but we wanted, especially in that move upmarket where you have products, if you will, that are good enough for certain segments, certain verticals that might be going from nothing to something. But if you really want to succeed upmarket, which is obviously what we're doing, you've got to be able to partner in this ecosystem of you don't need to disrupt your entire tech stack. And we want to work well, integrate fully with all of the best players in the space so that it can be a seamless experience for the customer.

Yeah. This has a lot of rhyming to my conversation with Mark Niemiec from— who's the CRO at Salesloft.

Yeah. Hello, Mark. You're hidden well.

Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Good. And so, you know, they've been marching up market steadily and in a similar plan, like rather than forcing everybody into your ecosystem for every single product, being more open to plugging in with, you know, the best in breed tools around and becoming more of a platform. And obviously they want to get as much penetration and adoption of their own product, but at the same time, making it easier for the customer to say yes and start that journey and eventually like win, win the business from there, which is really interesting. Okay. So then what does this mean for go-to-market strategy? So now, you know, that's a, that I'm imagining was a pretty foundational shift from, hey, you know, we're trying to be a platform. We want to be head-to-head competitive with Gong and Salesloft in every one of these categories. And now refocusing on data, refocusing on what you're world-class at. How did, how did you think about, okay, here's this new mandate and like, what did you do to build the go-to-market strategy? What were the core components that you had to build first? Just like walk me through developing that plan.

Yeah. So we went from, again, probably 8 different core products and we had 8 teams of overlays SEs that were supporting those particular products. And I think from a customer experience standpoint, the feedback that I would constantly get— there were SDR teams, and let's use Chorus as an example. There was an SDR—

I know where you're going with this.

Yeah, there was an SDR team that was solely focused on calling existing customers and selling them Chorus. Then you had an overlay team that had an overlay quota for selling Chorus. Then you had an SE team that solely focused on sort of being the technical expertise. And then we had these, we called them emerging adder rates. So like if you sold more of the emerging products, it would double up on your quota attainment, whatever it may be. And then you multiply that across talentOS, marketing, Chorus, what we called Engage. Oftentimes you're going after the same main point of contact, RevOps. CRO. And so they're getting calls from, you know, we have a data as a service business, Operations OS, we have Ring Lead. And so from a customer experience standpoint, it wasn't great. And I think it was built in the times of everybody's got budget, everybody's buying the next thing. And so yes, go attack that market. And so as we started to move into more of like, okay, we called it good co, bad co, like what are our great products, right to win, product market fit, and then how do those consolidate or how can we bring those together so that you don't have this disparate go-to-market of different SDR teams and different overlays, XYZ. And so we talked—

What's good co, bad co? I didn't quite follow that.

All right, good company, bad company.

So what do you mean? Yeah, what do you mean by that?

Like if you were to look at the fundamentals of those respective businesses, revenue growth, down—

Oh, fit, okay.

And so, you know, it was pretty obvious where we should focus on and where we might want to go partner elsewhere. And so, you know, we picked the product sets that clearly, you know, in the good times, if you wanted to say, hey, here's this product, product A, and here's product A2, they're pretty damn similar, but you can monetize them if you sell them as two different things. So there was some consolidation that we could do within our own product portfolio, which just made for a much simpler go-to-market. And I think the best way, and this was not from a historian, it was from an internal sales leader, that articulated the overlay setup that we had. He's like, you're basically going from one dumb salesperson to two dumb salespeople in the same call. And they weren't at odds, or they were at odds in terms of like one just wanted to get a renewal, maybe grow the renewal, and one just cared about closing their respective SKU of their respective product. And so you'd have these just cringeworthy calls of like, here's an account manager that kind of owns the overall account, and then here's got this overlay. It's clear that they want to do something over here and the overlay is just like, no, Kyle, that's dumb. You need to do this. And so it's almost like you have these guys at odds. So we blew that up pretty quickly. We consolidated the products into what is obviously going to the same main point of contact. We separated out groups that if it's a different persona altogether, yes, okay, that can be its own standalone business. So if you look at our business, like the talent business, it's a different persona. It's a very different main point of contact and frankly, different ICP overall in terms of like, who are they targeting and how? And then we basically took all of those overlays and we brought in, you know, the ones that could translate, but we brought in more SEs. My point of view was, okay, most of these products center around data. So it's not that wild of a conversation where you need like significant technical expertise. Expertise. So if they're, you know, people trust SCs more. So if you have a great account manager and you've got a great SC that's well-versed in the data landscape, we have specialist SCs that if they do need technical proficiency on Chorus or they really need to go deep on how we go, you know, acquire our data, et cetera, we've got technical expertise there. But for the most part, we did away with the overlay, product overlays. We doubled down on SCs. And I think the biggest thing is in that old world, the account loads for an account manager. I mean, enterprise account managers that had 100 accounts. Wow. Yes. So, and again, the thought process in good times wasn't wrong. If you've got an army of SDRs that are all selling different products and you've got an army of overlays, then sure, maybe your account manager doesn't need to have as much. But if you just think about the customer experience, of like, Kyle's my guy. Kyle's been my account manager for 3 years and I trust Kyle and he's managed my account versus here's this army of 15 different people that blow me up every end of month.

Mm-hmm.

Lose that connectivity, if you will. And so we lowered account loads significantly. So we said, okay, in the enterprise, you know, let's strategic enterprise, it's 2 to 6, you know, enterprise grow, enterprise core, call it 15 to 20. And we're constantly trying to bring that down because I think a real global account manager that has a real relationship that then has the technical support that they need is far more effective than a bunch of faceless overlays that are just trying to hit their nut on selling you an extra thing that's in their bag. So I'll pause there.

Yeah, I got a bunch of follow-ups. So now, you have one rep selling into the RevOps portfolio, one person selling into the talent portfolio. Like how many, how many reps, if you have 8 before, how many core reps do you have now?

Yeah. So basically the only real different group that sits aside is talent because they're going after.

So it's one rep per account now. Like plus talent.

One rep per account, yes. And even in talent, so like Walmart as an example, large customer, you have an account manager for Walmart and then you have a rep that basically just sells talent into Walmart, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah.

So every account has, every customer has an account manager. And so, The only one where we still have that model where you've got another rep kind of calling in is talent. Just because they're not calling in. If you look at who buys ZoomInfo, typically it's marketing, it's rev ops, operations, sales leadership. Like those are the key personas within the org. Sometimes, you know, large customers, you'll have a big footprint with marketing ops, large footprint rev ops, large footprint sales, you know, sales seats. CDO is another one, but usually CDO is kind of being told what to do by the business.

Yeah.

Business has, whether it's a TAM exercise or whatever, and then the CDO is the one that goes and puts it into Snowflake and makes heads or tails of it. So those personas, we have the, again, one account manager to one account. Talent is still that group that is separate because they're not selling into any of those personas that we would typically sell into.

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah. And so did you have to, did you reduce the overall rep number or? Did it get sorted so it's sort of the same number of reps, but just now like way fewer accounts per rep?

Similar number of reps. But if you think about like how we have— so overall reps, when you talk about PLG, when you talk about, you know, some of the work we've done to automate SMB, the volume of SMB reps we had across AE, new business, and account management, given how big SMB got, huge amounts of headcount. And so we've been able to move those folks in some cases upmarket into like low mid-market or wherever. So we've been basically keeping the total number of account managers the same, just shifting where we have capacity, where we have headcount. You also had, I think at the heyday, 150 overlays. And so you have that 150 overlays, which is now basically 8. So there was a lot of headcount, a lot of capacity. And those overlays, despite the funny comment from the sales leader, those overlays were good and they were very easily slotted into kind of full account managers. And so there was a couple of pockets that we were able to, without dramatically increasing the size of the org, take account loads down significantly.

That makes a lot of sense. And so how did you justify that level of investment? Going, going down to, you know, strategy AMs with 2 to 6 accounts. What type of modeling and financial analysis do you have to do to, to get that decision done? Because that's a, that's a big commitment.

You know, it is. I think the thing that helped the most is the ability to have it cost neutral. That's always easier, you know, to say, I'm going to pull headcount from here, I'm going to pull headcount from here, I'm going to pull capacity from here, that CFO is typically like, all right, if it's cost neutral, fine. So that was number one. Number two, we started very small. So we started at the very top of strategic enterprise. And so if there is a bet to be made, like when I first started, this is even pre-CRO. This is when I was running the RNG business. I looked at our strat enterprise business. We had unbelievable logos that were spending money with ZoomInfo. I looked at our pipeline in Q1. And I saw we had a rep and she had 25 accounts. One of her accounts was Cisco. They had 43 active agreements with us across 43, and each one of those has to go through Cisco procurement. And so that's one. She's got 24 other accounts. And I remember when I first started, they were like, oh, you know, we're just not getting these big 7-figure deals. We're just not getting like true enterprise selling. And I look at her pipeline and it's a bunch of like $8,000 to $10,000 adds to these like different agreements. And then she's firefighting multiple renewals every single month, a $50K here, $80K here, $90K here. And so I'm like, it's basically like diametrically opposed to say, I want somebody who's building account plans and building ELAs and getting like high and wide in the organization to go bring this to a multimillion dollar deal. But we've been driving this kind of transactional. And it's not even that she's transactional. She's one of our best reps. It's that that model of 25 accounts, probably 150 renewals in a given year, it's impossible to do true enterprise selling. So I started with that team. It was a team of 2 people. I'm sorry, 2 teams that ran strategic enterprise. And I said, here's the bet. We're going to move a bunch of these accounts into what we call enterprise grow. They can take it, you know, taking their account loads from 50 to 60 in the interim. But I want this team to have this lower account load. Started with 10 accounts, moved it down to 5 accounts. The return on that in that pilot, if you will, you know, like it was a small enough pilot. We had great people in that or we had great customers in that org and seeing what 25 different, 25 different customers with hundreds of different accounts versus 5 do in that initial pilot we had in that Q2 of 2022, we had our best 7-figure transaction. And that's in like 4 or 5 months. And so that was deals that originated, deals that started. And so it was painfully obvious. I think you had a bunch of folks that like anecdotally would say, yes, that makes a lot of sense. Having 25 Fortune 500 companies, like you're never going to do anything of any real substance there. So you had like the 70% of the team that anecdotally said, yeah, this is great. Then you had the 30% that needed it to be proven. And so Started very small with those particular teams, proved it out, built out the actual structure around them that they needed. ECS reps, renewals manager, like basically built a pod around that individual that said, okay, you're 43 agreements with Cisco. You got a renewals manager. You know, when you think about that SMB group, where can you move some of that headcount? Say an SMB account manager could be a great renewal specialist where they go and they renew $40K at Cisco for a biz dev team that they bought 2 years ago.

Yeah.

Put an ECS person in that can handle all of those transactional upsells. Like if I think about some of our large commercial real estate customers, large insurance customers, they buy a lot of seats by the drink, like individual brokers, individual franchises. Having a high-paid enterprise account manager doing that makes no sense.

And what's ECS?

Enterprise Corporate Selling.

Enterprise Corporate Selling.

We ripped that from Salesforce. So like in Salesforce, they're pods. You've got an AE, you've got an ECS reps, you've got a new renewals manager. Basically the whole purpose is to let the actual salesperson do real selling. And then any transactional upsell, any sort of onesies, twosies, hey, Kyle needs 5 more, you want to clear as much out of what that real enterprise, whether it's an account manager or AE, is doing. And you offload that to the sort of newer, lower-cost resources that are just processing transactions. And then with lower accounts, you start to see them actually building real enterprise ELAs, et cetera.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And so how long did it take you to see the, the revenue impact or in the LTV CAC impact? Because now you're adding a bunch of heads to the same account. Obviously a bunch more revenue needs to come out of it. Did that take a while to shake out? Was that pretty immediate?

The strat pilot, and this is where I think one of the keys to whoever is building that business case, we here had a culture of immediacy. And so people had tried this in the past. It lasted 60 days. And then again, 2021, who cares? Shut it down 60 days. Things are great. So I basically modeled out, I said in Q1 when I started, this is what we're going to do. You're going to start seeing pipeline impact from it in Q2, maybe a deal or two. You're really going to start seeing a revenue impact in Q3. And then in Q4, that's when you can expect— and I went through each quarter in terms of metrics that you're going to expect from pipeline, metrics you're going to expect from closing. Now, good news is we shortened the gap on that. We had 3 different 7-figure upsell transactions at the end of June. So 6 months in. Wow. So that gave me some wind at my sails to say, all right, like, dodged a bullet, it's working. And then Q3, we landed the biggest deal we'd ever landed. And so that was again, another kind of victory lap. And then in Q4, we had 7 different 7-figure upsells. And I think that was, you know, worked out well, knock on wood, say a prayer, whatever you want to say. But I think setting those expectations, setting like, and I even said this, I said, guys, this might be unpopular. This is what you can hold me accountable to by quarter. Don't expect anything in Q2. We're starting this in Q1. So Q2, just look at pipeline. If pipeline has not changed, then sure, I'm wrong. I'm an idiot, whatever. Look at these metrics for pipeline. Q3, you should start to see, you know, again, on a 6 to 9 month sales cycle, you should start to see these half million dollar, 7-figure deals. And then Q4 is when we blow it out. So that year, 2022, we absolutely hit each of those milestones and then some, which then allowed me the credibility to say, okay, what we did in strat, we're going to do in encore, we're going to do it in grow, and then we're even moving into mid-market VIP. So we sub-segment all of our different segments to say, okay, mid-market V is probably the next one on my list, even 3 years later. For mid-market V, we took down from, call it, 150 accounts We've got it down to 50. Mid-market V is a great area. I mean, these are 500 to 1,000-person mid-market companies, well-funded.

Growing fast.

100%. And so basically creating that same model of, you know, and then there's a, again, not to get back into ZoomInfo, but there's a lot of propensity scoring that says, okay, here's a customer, their sales FTEs, their firmographic attributes. This is probably never going to be a million-dollar customer. So getting really specific around, okay, they might spend $100K with us and that's good. They've renewed flat for 4 straight years and there's legitimately no white space or no growth. So let's move that over to a team that is just handling renewals versus here's an account that only spends, you know, we had Fortune 100 companies spend $16 grand with us and it was one of 120 accounts that this rep had. And she said, I'm going to make this a big bet. They spend $9 million with us now. Wow. $16K to $9 million. And so, you know, it's, there's, there's so many of those. Like we had one in Q4, you know, big company, everybody knows them, Fortune 100. They, same thing. We had 5 Canadian reps that basically inbounded. They bought ZoomInfo and it was sitting in what we call the enterprise sub-$100K cohort where they're enterprise companies that spend less than $100K. We've gotten really pragmatic in terms of like, okay, there's probably 30% of these that'll never spend another dollar. That's fine. There's no real use case. So then taking the ones like this, giving it to some of our best people with lower accounts, we turn that thing again from 5 reps in Canada to 7,000 reps globally. So there's a lot of opportunity like that where I still believe the account loads are too high in certain areas. And you think about from an LTV to CAC standpoint, we've got customers on our paper. We have customers that are actively ZoomInfo customers that have tremendous amounts of whitespace that might not be worked in 3 to 6 months because it's just like, oh, I'll get that $15K renewal.

Yeah.

Like my job is to go get that $15K renewal. So we've fundamentally shifted the go-to-market to say, you know, you've got like renewals folks, you've got growth folks, et cetera. But yeah, it's, it's been a journey.

I bet. How helpful is it being founder-led? Like these are big bets, big swings, like a lot, like, you know, these are bold. How much has it helped to be, you know, helmed by the founder still?

Yeah, I mean, I think anybody you ask, there's pros and cons, you know, I think one of the best parts about working with Henry is he's tremendously in the weeds. I mean, he's built this business, it's 19 years old, he knows everything about it. That can be a con for some because I learned this very, very early on. You can't get away with just like a BS nothing burger answer. I had a guy, VP of Enterprise, and we were going through and there was like a 20% churn on a pretty big company. And he's like, oh yeah, this is in bad times. He's like, yeah, they missed earnings. And so like, they're going through, he didn't say they missed earnings. Earnings. They're going through tough times. And, you know, our CEO pulls up their earnings call and he's like, nope, they crushed their earnings and you suck. And so like, again, I learned it early on, you know, and I think 80% of companies, you probably have a group of people sitting around being like, that makes sense. Like, move on.

Yeah.

And so I think that level of depth, the level of detail, like no one cares about a company as much as somebody who's like like it's their baby. And so I love that. And I think to some of the adages that we talked about, I think complacency is like the worst thing that can happen to anyone in their career where it's like, I've gotten to this point. I know what I do. I got my playbook. I got my sales methodology. I bring in fourth management. I make them do account planning and boom, set it and forget it. And I go play golf. And I think, you know, one of the biggest unlocks, if you combine the lifelong learning and, hey, I suck at this, so I'm going to go get really good at this, or I don't know anything that Kyle just said. I need to go ask him what the hell he just talked about. If you couple that with a founder who's in the weeds every single day, I mean, I joke with my wife. I'm like, you know, we'll go out to certain cities and we'll have full days of meetings. And I'm like, you know, maybe this is going to be the last day where he like, I, you know, have a bad meeting or I say something dumb. And I think it causes you to prepare like crazy because he does. And so, you know, I love that about it because, you know, I'm 4 years in, you know, we're in the midst of this turnaround and I like, I could easily go wing it, you know, have a meeting with Hilton yesterday with, with Henry. And I could easily go in there and just be like, yeah, we've done this a million times. Like, hey, how you doing? What are you, you know, what are you thinking about? But like the level of preparation that almost just like, I know that if I don't do my absolute best, he's going to be the first one that tells me about it. He'll call me out on it and he'll give me shit for it for the next 6 weeks.

Yeah.

So that's, I think that's the pro. I think on the con front, yeah, I mean like in some of these moves, you know, we haven't done it. And so some of them are uncharted territories. Like when we talked about the e-commerce on the SMB side, You know, sometimes it's harder, especially when you have this like explosive growth to be like, we're going to do something fundamentally different and we're going to slow down this amazing velocity business that we have in SMB and we're going to basically make people pay upfront and we're going to make them pay in full upfront. It's the right thing to do for the business, but it is going to slow down like assured. And that SMB business was a significant part of the transactions that we were doing. And so those, you know, if we hadn't done it before, then there's the like, well, this is the way we've done it. And I give Henry a lot of credit because he's not like that. He'll go talk to other CEOs, he'll go talk to other founders. Have you seen this? He'll connect me with them. And then again, to that rigor, he will make me go through month by month, week by week, what's it gonna do to pacing? What's it gonna do to pipeline? What's it gonna do to this? What's it gonna do to that? Again, I think it's pros, you know, obviously it's become a big thing with Chesky's founder mode and all that kind of stuff, but I do think there's a lot of value to it.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. All right, last question, then we'll get to quickfire. So that rep job is changing a lot. So what did the enablement journey look like to get a rep who was selling a single product just like focused on their, their core solution to somebody who's going to sell all products, own an account, have to go deeper? How did you enable the organization?

Yeah, I mean, listen, especially in enterprise, it's a lot of external hiring. I think very challenging to have somebody that does 40 SMB deals a month in the, hey, Kyle, here's a demo, sign here. End-of-month discount to somebody that can go do a $9 million deal with a Fortune 100 company. So the way we did it, I brought a lot of folks from my network, a lot of folks, you know, we, we basically hired 80% externally for the Strat Enterprise. Wow. That were in that role, great reps, don't get me wrong, you know, we put them into roles whether it was in Mid-Market V, Mid-Market G, whether it was in core, we tried to fit people to where their skill sets lined up the best. And I think the good news is if you have one of those reps and they've got 43 agreements with Cisco and they're just banging their heads against the wall on how to make this thing a real enterprise deal, most of them, I would say, really wanted to get into these other segments where, hey, you might have more at-bats, you might have more transactional success. And then on the bottom end, you've got reps that had been here for years that knew SMB was where you could make make the most money. Our new business, by the way, was never segmented. So it was like, it was all routing logic. And so the best reps got the highest propensity to close fast. And so if you looked at our best new business rep, 82% of their 2022 was SMB. And so you had this opportunity to segment new business because if you think about kind of, we called it Project Ladder, where I think one of the most important part of sales, whether you're selling events, whether you're selling door-to-door, is like, okay, this, what I'm doing now is really hard and I need that sort of next thing that I'm going to get to, not necessarily promotion hunting, but you got to get through hard times. You have to know that there's either more compensation or better accounts or better territories. There has to be something that you're grinding it out to go get to. And so we lost that in new business because there was no like start as an SDR, get to SMB, then get to high SMB, then get to low mid-market. Market, make more money along the way. It was basically like, you got to compete with these guys who are like 10-year vets. They're the best people. So they're on the router and they get the best stuff. And so they're going to cherry-pick. If they want to work an enterprise deal, they will. If they want to go close 50 SMB deals, they will. So we completely segmented new business. But in that, it gave us the ability to build that, okay, do great in SMB, learn transactional, learn the product. Move into MMP, which we call mid-market preserve, which is the lowest end of mid-market. So 100 to 150 employees. Then you got mid-market growth, which is kind of the middle of mid-market. And so getting them from a skill set perspective into the right places based on how many accounts do you have, is it transactional, is it more strategic? What's the product mix? You know, the product mix that we sell in the enterprise, heavily data as a service, heavily operations OS. The products that we sell downmarket are much more of the, again, triple play, if you will. So ZoomInfo, Chorus, Engage back in the day. And so like getting people into those right roles and showing them the path of like, okay, it looks like you're going down, but you're going to be way more successful in mid-market G than you would have been in strat.

Mm-hmm.

Flip side, if you're great in SMB, you can move up to mid-market G. And so I think segmentation helped that a ton. And I think aligning leaders, aligning reps, knowing where you have to hire externally, and then knowing where you can move great people internally to put them in the best roles to succeed.

Yeah, it's, it's interesting. One of the things we've been debating internally is whether or not we're, we're open to moving people down segments. So if you promote an AE into a, if you promote a BDR into an AE role and they're, they're not performing that well, the traditional approach would be like, well, then you have to put them on a plan and move them out. And my feedback is like, well, like, why? Like, if they're good as a BDR and they want to be a BDR here, like, why wouldn't we let them be like an awesome BDR? I look a little bit differently at BDR. I think more people should think about that as a longer-term career. But, but it's like, why, why don't we have mechanisms to move to right-size people into the right segments? It's a difficult conversation, sure, and maybe people want to opt out at that point, but I think more organizations should be open to like, look, if you overpromoted a rep, maybe just let them take a segment step back. They might actually be relieved because this segment sucks for them. They're dealing with procurement and legal stuff and they don't get enough of the quick wins and the dopamine hits. But I think there's this resistance oftentimes like from HR principles that like we don't want to demote somebody, but like it's not a demotion if that's the right role for them.

So I love this topic because I come up with this when we segmented. There's always the enterprise as the top. And I always use this example. I'm like, go talk to our head of enterprise. See if he's a happy guy. I, you know, when we had the segment, segmenting leaders was hard too, because, you know, people that were going to be the leader of SMB were like, oh, I'm at the bottom of the stack. If I had a choice, leading SMB, where it's like, they're hanging on every word, you know, they're like, you'd go give a rah-rah speech and they're like, yeah, I'm into it. You go do that, like strategic enterprise. They're like, fuck that guy. Like there are different skill sets and it's kind of like What do you want to do? You know, do you like to teach and learn and develop and train like moldable minds? Or do you want to be on a plane? 100%. And then I think on the rep side, you know, a great example, we had a guy, he'd been here, he probably started in 2011 and he sold over $40 million of ACV on new business. He was arguably like a top 3 guy every year. And when we segmented, he was an obvious choice for enterprise. He did enterprise for 2 months and he's like, I hate this. I hate this. Like, he moved back down to SMBs, happy as a clam. Because to that point, I always use this example, like, you get great enterprise people, they might do nothing for 6 months. Like, no commission checks, they're eating nails, and that big deal can either happen or it can't. And if it does, then yeah, we always talk about the million-dollar commission check. We always talk about how amazing it is to be there. Person, but you don't talk about the 6, 9, 12 months in some cases where they're just sweating bullets about is this deal going to close.

Yeah.

And so this guy was like, hey man, I like closing 10 deals a week and I'm really good at it and I can make a great living doing that. So yeah, we absolutely moved him back. He's happy, made President's Club as an SMB guy. You know, so I'm a big advocate of like the right people in the right place. I think where that gets hard is if you and I don't agree on the right place. You know, that's— Yeah. It's really easy if he says, yeah, I'm one of the best guys, but I want to be an SMB. It's when he's like, no, I'm really damn good at enterprise, but he's not. And we're trying to get him to SMB. That's more challenging. But I think showing them, you know, like this is the success that you can have. And then if you do a great job here, then you can start moving up more coherently. But, you know, you started at the right time. You got overpromoted in 3 years. You went from a BDR to an enterprise rep handling AT&T. It does make a lot of sense.

Yeah. Hopefully this gets people to think about it a little different because I've had some arguments about this with people externally and internally recently. Okay. The super rapid fire because we only got 2 minutes. What do you think separates a good CRO from a great one?

Oh man. That's a hard one in 2 minutes. I think a lot of the things we talked about, and by no means am I saying I'm a great one at all, and I think that is, okay, maybe that's my answer. I think that humility, and this isn't some platitude, but I think the humility to know like, these are the things I'm really good at, and these are the things that I'm not that good at. And then either taking the time to get good at those other things, whether that's financial operations, whether that's operational in general, Can you hire somebody that can be your person there? So I've got a guy on my team, Mark Harris, who's former consultant, former private equity guy. He's brilliant. And a lot of the things that either would take me 2 hours to do that he can do in 2 minutes, like I can build that team out to say, I'm not great at this stuff. So Mark, who is outstanding at those things, can help me. So I think it's the ability to know what are your key superpowers And you have to be right about it, by the way. You get a lot of people that think their core superpowers are different than what they actually are. And then I think more importantly, know, here are the 5 things that I stink at or I've never done before. And I think 3 of them I can get good at and 2 of them I'll never get good at. So what can I do to augment the team or the support system? I do think that kind of separates it because you have some people that either lean totally out of what they're bad at. So they spend all the time in the locker room doing the rah-rah speech or being on the plane and doing all deals, you know, or you get people that love the operational side and they don't do any of the other stuff. And so I think it's finding that balance and more importantly, being incredibly prudent on what you're good at, what you're not good at, what you're going to work on and you're being bad at, because that's another one of these big topics on LinkedIn. Do you focus on your strengths, focus on your weaknesses, blah, blah, blah? I think you have to know both. And I think you got to either build out a team that can augment your weaknesses or commit to getting better at something that you haven't done before.

Yeah. Another dumb false binary. Do you get better at your strengths or weaknesses? Just do both, man.

Yeah. So many dumb false binaries.

What's, what's the most common advice you give to new senior leaders? Like a new third line leader that's like got a big org for the first time. What do you find the most common things you say to these folks?

The most common. The most common is if you look at the pie chart of what's going to get you to the next level, I don't care where you are, who you are, 80 to 90% of that pie chart is going to be hitting your number. So a lot of times when you get that second, third, fourth line leader, they want that next gig and they're doing all the stuff around the core job. You know, they're VP of SMB, they want to go help out and do mid-market. They want to do X, Y, Z. 1, 2, 3, if they're not at their number and above their number, the conversation stops.

Yeah.

I think so many times people that are ambitious forget that, where the conversation doesn't start unless you are at your number and you're at your number consistently. And so before you go focus on all the other stuff, you know, if you're running 3 teams, if you're running 10 teams, those 10 teams better be doing an amazing job. Those 3 teams better be doing an amazing job before that conversation starts. And so that's, you know, that's one of the basic, just like how to get to that next level is focus on the level that you're at. Because at least what I found, at least what I've seen is that you typically don't need to ask for the promotion if you are doing exactly what you need to do consistently and you have some of those intangibles.

Yeah.

Versus I'm sure you see it all the time. Sales manager has a good quarter. Hey, look at my quarter. Hey, here, look at the leaderboard. Look at my quarter. Is it time yet? Is it time yet? And then they have a bad quarter and it's everybody else's fault. Then they might have a better quarter. They're back in your face hitting you with it. And I think it's, it's, it's, you know, it's such a long game. And that's the second piece of advice that I'll always give is that it's a super long game. I mean, people will look at my career and they'll be like, oh, you got there pretty fast. And I remind them, Because I think, again, LinkedIn, such a, such an area for bad advice. Like there's no wormhole. Like I was a sales rep. I was a sales manager for years. I was a sales director for years. I was a VP of sales for years. I was an SVP of sales for years. Like there was no moment where I was like, oh, flip the piece of paper and go through the wormhole. Like, like you have to do these jobs and you have to get to a point as a manager where it's like, I've been a manager for 3 to 4 years. I've seen a lot of things. I've done a lot of things. I dealt with the guy that can't show up on time. I've dealt with the person that's like, you know, you get to that level and then, okay, I feel pretty good about what I'm doing. Then you get moved into this next role as a director. Oh, shit. Now I have 3 managers that I'm dealing with. You do that for years because you have all of these. I've seen this from a manager. I've seen this from a manager's reps. Oh man, this manager did a very bad thing with this rep. Like, and then as you start to feel comfortable that you're pretty good at that, somebody knocks on the door and says, hey, you're VP of sales. Now you've got directors and managers underneath them. Each one of those things just takes a huge amount of time.

Yeah.

And so I think, you know, irrespective of how fast or slow certain careers look, it is just like, be the best manager of your team and then somebody will give you a shot. Because if you can do, like, if you're a great rep, I'll give you a great opportunity to be a manager. Because if you can translate what you did as a great rep into a team of 6 to 8 people, great. Then you do that really well for 6 to 8 people, I'll give you a shot to do it for 24. And so on and so forth. And I think people just lose sight of that and they think it's time-bound. They think it's one good month, one good quarter. And it's just like, you know, it's a long game. Back to that constant learning, back to a lot of the things we've already talked about.

Yeah. Somewhere between 3 and 4 people in the last 6 months have called me up or texted me to be like, hey, I know I didn't listen to your advice, but I just wanted to tell you, you're right. This happened to me last night at an event. Uh, uh, somebody came up to me who's a VP of sales now and says, you know, like, I know we talked a year ago on the phone and you said that I should take this other role, which was like a learning opportunity, but like, I just applied for the VP of sales role and I got it and it's been pain. Like, I'm learning a lot. I feel like I'm growing. He's like, but this has been so hard. And I had a good chuckle because it's like the fourth one of these that I've had. And you can give the advice and people will take it or not.

But I mean, listen, man, I, when we were at Vonage, we had Twilio, $50 billion market cap, one of our biggest competitors on the API side. And we had RingCentral's $30 billion market cap. And there were always these moments where it's like, oh, I got hit up by a recruiter at RingCentral. Hit up by Twilio multiple times, talked to Mark multiple times. My whole thing, and I tell people this, is it's like, sure, that would have been nice. Do you, do you land there when Twilio's market cap drops 75%? Do you land there when RingCentral goes from $35 to $2? Literally $35 billion market cap to $2. If you try to time it to catch lightning in a bottle, odds are you're probably going to get it wrong versus like I stuck around at Vonage. Vonage had no sex appeal. You know, there was nobody at Silicon Valley cocktail parties being like, oh, Vonage. Even like when I interviewed at the board for ZoomInfo, they were like, Vonage. And the story I told is I was like, hey, I'm not some guy that's just been kind of coasting at Salesforce because they're a behemoth.

On a nice brand, yeah.

Yeah, every day I have to go fight against why we're not a consumer brand, why we're better than RingCentral, why we're better than Twilio. Like there is a level of grit and determination in that, but all that aside, the 6 years that I spent post-acquisition, it was all like, you know, just the amount of learning that I got to take in at a company like that where the head of FP&A or the CFO, I could be like, all right, you said these words on the earnings call. I had no idea what they meant. Walk me through it. And I think I forget who talked about this on some podcast, but like people talk about a run where it's like there's a place that you spend a period of time where you actually like get good. At leading people or get good at becoming a great seller. Like any of those things, like it just takes time. And so if there's one piece of advice, I'm like, it's hard. It takes time. That is where I do think LinkedIn has created this like SDR to VP in 2 months. Like you see all this noise that I think just makes people depressed. And then like, I know a lot of these guys because either they worked here, they were friends of mine from other companies. Oh, I'm a CRO of this company. CRO of one.

Yeah.

Literally one sales guy and it's him. And it's like, I hope that makes you feel good, but like what it does to others, if you will, is just creates this flywheel of bad advice. And more importantly, not just bad advice. And I'm not even saying my advice is good, but it's just the fact that like people want to get to certain things faster for whatever. So that like, oh, maybe my friends will be impressed. And then you learn. That your friends stop giving a shit when you're like 30. You know, it's like the biggest topic of conversation when you're like 23. Like, what are you doing after college? And then you get to a certain point, it's like your friends are your friends and nobody really cares if one of them, you know, sells golf clubs and one of them's CRO to a public company. Like, nobody cares. You're just friends. And I think you realize that too late in life. And there's this cohort of people that just, it's all they think about. And I think it causes them to make bad decisions. And I think it causes them to focus on the things that aren't that important, which is like, when am I going to get promoted versus like, I could live a great life in the role that I started at ZoomInfo, you know, as the SVP of RNG, whether I got promoted or didn't. My goal is to, at the end of that run, get to a place where I was really damn good at running an account management business. That's what I wanted because I'd run partners, I'd run new business, I'd never run account management. So I said, this is like the last piece of the stool that of, you know, sort of learnings in revenue leadership that I don't have. I did a great job at that for 5 years, whether ZoomInfo promoted me or not, somebody else would. And so I always go, and I'll finish with this, I know we're way over time. Hopefully you can find like 8 minutes of coherent good in this.

No, this is great.

I always use this, you know, with my senior leadership. I think about in a world of like, if I'm interviewing with Steve Schwarzman for one of his portfolio companies, what is the thing that's going to make me start sweating? What's the thing that either I haven't done or that I need to like pretend or fake it till I make it? Like, what is that thing? And then how do I go get good at it? And that really of like the career choice to go to ZoomInfo. Yeah, at the time, amazing company, still is great product market fit. But like when we sold Vonage to Ericsson, great payday, great earnout, really would have been a wonderful 2 years of just like they had summer Fridays. You're part of like this huge conglomerate.

Yeah.

You know, and like my boss at the time is much later in life. He's like, dude, I'm going to ride this out. It's amazing. I got 2 years earnout. They fire me, they have to pay it out anyway. And like, this is, this is amazing. I was at a point in time where I had no intention of leaving after the acquisition. I was like, I want the account management business. I want to basically run new account management partnerships. And they were like, we would love for you to do that. But the new business number is so important. We're going to pay you even more money and you go run new business. And so it would have been like a wonderful 2 years from like a work-life balance and like a type program. But like, that is the thing that just killed me is like, I've been running new business here for 5 years. Like, I need something different. Not from a promotion standpoint. I didn't even ask for more money. I just didn't want to be in a position in the Schwarzman interview where, have you ever run the account management business? No.

Yeah.

And I remember even in the first interviews I had with ZoomInfo, they were like, I was like, you guys know I haven't run account management, right? They're like, we want somebody with a new business mindset back to that, like bombard the customers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

A lot of transactions. They're like, we want somebody with a new business mindset. So the timing worked out well, but the reasoning for going into it just goes back to that overall piece of advice is just like, what haven't you done? What do you stink at? What don't you know? And go focus on that.

Yeah. The going back to your like whole LinkedIn thing, I just read Virus of the Mind. It's all about mimetics and like how these, like these things, these ideas go from person to person and just, it's the perfect framing for it. But we will, we're way over time, so let's call it there. This was a banger, man. I, I, this was a really awesome, uh, conversation. I'm so glad we got to do it. And, uh, there's a bunch of lessons that I'm hoping people take to heart because there's some great ones because that I think are so underrated in today's world. So appreciate you doing this and sharing so openly and vulnerably because it was great.

Yeah, man. No, I appreciate it. This was awesome. And good luck in the move. I'm out in San Fran at least a couple of times a month, so we'll have to meet in person.

Yeah, yeah. Let's do it. Thank you for listening to the Revenue Leadership Podcast. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe and you can find a link in the show notes and be Be sure to leave a 5-star review, share it with your network, and please join me next Wednesday for another great conversation.