On the eve of the beginning of summer, we looked at various industries with summer themes within the ZoomInfo database. We searched in ZoomInfo Pro by industry and state and divided the results by the total number of businesses in each state, as according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here are our results, a summertime snapshot of our database:
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At ZoomInfo we have a whole range of solutions that can be applied to your unique situation. Whether you are looking at an entire database of outdated contacts, missing information or just a gaping revenue hole, ZoomInfo has aided many clients in solving their issues and helping them on the track to a healthy return on investment. The following is a series on some of the ways we have helped companies grow.
Part I: Test Before You Invest
As ZoomInfo’s maestra of data Anncy Graziano has told us in the past, the first step in purchasing data is to test what you are about to buy. In a world where no data is perfect (though ZoomInfo is working day and night to change this) it is imperative that you have a sample to test against – not only your data but the data you are buying as well.
Consider the following situation.
A major computer company approached us with a problem. They had a massive prospect database that was missing a significant amount of decision-makers, which rendered it utterly impotent.
How could we help them?
This company was selling to small/medium businesses (SMB) firms that were large enough to require their technology solutions. We pulled a sample list for them from our database that centered on IT decision-makers such as Vice-President Technology, Director of IT and MIS Manager.
We further refined this list to focus on those companies of less than $50 million dollars in revenue and less than 500 employees, the “sweet spot” for this company and where they experienced their highest ROI.
The exported list numbered 10,000 contacts and was free for them to test within their database. They had a 24 hour turnaround on this list and purchased a full list of 35,000 contacts and had the highest returning direct marketing campaign in company history.
This is but one way ZoomInfo’s data solutions can help your business. Visit ZoomInfo’s product page to see our full offerings and what we may be able to do for you!
As our recent infographic illustrates, the job situation in America is still quite tough, though some industries continue hiring at a brisk pace. With a continuously updating database of 50 million business professionals, the ZoomInfo database holds a wealth of information to augment job searches with accurate business intelligence.
In this tough environment, the need to be proactive to gain an upper hand on the competition is important as ever. ZoomInfo’s wealth of information is being used more and more to dive deep into prospective employers, giving job seekers an invaluable tool for finding the correct decision-makers at the companies for which they hope to work. By using the available advanced search options, ZoomInfo can help seekers target the hiring managers they need to contact in order to get a jump on the competition, get a foot in the door and stand above the rest.
Search by the following parameters (and more) to gain the most up-to-date and in-depth business intelligence to help you get the job you want:
Using these tools to zero-in on who you need to contact and network with takes you one step closer to being hired. Click the link to learn more about ZoomInfo.
Here at ZoomInfo we are always referencing our automated system of gathering and assembling public business information available on the World Wide Web. Currently ZoomInfo holds six patents behind that allow our technology to function and gather the most up-to-date business information possible. The patents vary from our integration of a crawler with Natural Language Programming to the technology that automatically identifies sites and pages according to their function. Click here to read more about the patented technology that drives ZoomInfo.
In the engineering department of a company that relies on its technology for all aspects of its product offerings, there is a consistent need for us to both be improving upon our established products and processes as well as to be looking into the future to take our technology to the next level. Undeniably the engine of ZoomInfo is our technology and the innovations and improvements we develop now will be what propels us into the future. The pressure is on our talented engineers to not only complete their projects on time, but to be constantly focused on what they can do to improve and hopefully achieve the ultimate philosophical goal of our development, making the unknown known.
Amid the day to day tasks and resulting pressure to deliver that faces our engineering team, the issue that remains is one of keeping the department focused on the execution of current projects and yet fostering creativity at the same time. Collectively we realized there was a need for us to take a few days to sit down as a group to clear our heads and discuss what we can do as a team to move us forward. From this need, IdeaFest was born.
IdeaFest is a two day time-out from work where we allow ourselves to think outside the box and brainstorm improvements to ZoomInfo offerings. Two objectives were first established:
We started by brainstorming our ideas and creating a list of possibilities. From there, we formed small groups and dove into developing the ideas that appealed to us into actual prototypes of changes we could make to our technology. It showed us that even in a relatively short amount of time we could come up with projects that could have a real effect on our ROI.
After all was said and done, there were many great ideas put forth by our team. We evaluated the relative importance and feasibility of each idea and created a backlog to draw from. I’m happy to report that many of the ideas we came up with are currently in the pipeline and in the future will be used to improve the overall ZoomInfo user experience.
The value of taking time to hold an IdeaFest goes beyond just the innovations to our products and technology- it allows for collaboration and teamwork as well as giving our engineering team a stake in the planning and creativity in developing our core. Everyone coming together to offer their insights into where we are going technologically takes us to new places we very well may not have gone – not just as a department but as well as the company as a whole.
Eugenia Gillan is ZoomInfo’s VP of Engineering. In her free time she is also an accomplished swimming coach.
While the “Great Recession” of the late 2000′s officially ended in June of 2009, the millions of people still out of work can tell you that the negative effects on employment certainly have not.
We dove into data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to examine the state of jobs in America and where the hiring is happening.
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Following our recent webinar “The ROI of Targeted Prospecting,” we asked ZoomInfo President Sam Zales and fellow presenter Jim Lenskold of the Lenskold Group to answer a few questions they weren’t able to get to during the webinar:
Q: You touched Key Account Match functionality, would that work for all industries and how deep are you typically able to go with those requests?
Sam: ZoomInfo’s database (of 5M companies and 50M employees) covers a very broad range of industries (from business services to technology companies to finance and manufacturing firms, as well as government agencies, non-profit and education sectors). The Key Account Match service allows clients to utilize their own list of companies in their prospect databases to match to the 5 million in ZoomInfo, to identify the key decision makers at those companies. We’ve served clients who maintain prospect databases of hundreds of companies to those whose database contains millions of companies and our match rate and deliverability of contacts is market-leading.
Q: You mentioned that once you have established your segment types, “customized marketing can generate incremental impact,” does that mean I’ll need unique messaging and content for each segment?
Jim: Basically, yes. The benefit of creating multiple segments comes from generating increased effectiveness. Understanding the unique needs and interests of each segments, and creating unique messaging, content, and offers provides an excellent opportunity to generate incremental impact. Without the customization, you can use a common message but only choose to include or exclude each segment – missing an opportunity.
Q: You talked about the importance of Data Aggregation and Appending your database, do you find demographics such as title or Firmographics such as company type or revenue size are more critical to keep current?
Jim: Generally speaking, I would expect job title and an individuals’ contact info to change more frequently than firmographics. However, once you create your segments using analytic techniques, you can look at what drives the differences between segments and that will determine what matters most to you.
Q: In the Eloqua case study, you mentioned they found prospects that were early in the job tenure, were often more responsive. Are there any other common trends you’ve found across customers that show more activity or responsive among different segments?
Sam: Certainly adding decision-makers who have recently moved to new roles was a valuable input for Eloqua and a consistent approach to driving email deliverability. Segmentation based on industry keywords has provided a unique benefit to our clients whose target audiences fall outside of the traditional SIC or NAICS code system. For example, a client who searched for contacts at Virtualization Software companies found targets they never would have using SIC codes (that industry doesn’t exist in that system). Likewise, using keywords for titles and products to find an exact match to decision-makers who have worked with specific technologies or products make them more likely buyers to specific clients.
The voracious pace of information consumption brought on by the evolution of technology makes it increasingly difficult for a company to make market inroads, establish brand and eventually translate increased efforts into sales and revenue. In the high stakes of modern sales intelligence the difference between “Average” and “Best-in-Class” enterprises can mean millions of dollars in lost productivity, revenue and perhaps eventually a company’s existence.
In attempting to cut through the noise and stand above the rest, the core issue often boils down to simply connecting with the right people more often than your competitors do. The major key to this, other than a motivated sales staff, is possessing more accurate and detailed data than that of your competition.
A recent report issued by the Aberdeen Group draws insights from two of its research papers, Streamlining the Top of the Funnel: How Inside Sales Teams Source, Qualify and Close Business (March 2010) and Email Marketing: Customers Take it Personally (December 2010) where data was collected on the behavior and performance of ZoomInfo customers as well as other Best-in-Class companies.
Of the 319 end-user organizations providing information for the research, 30 companies indicated utilizing ZoomInfo as their provider of sales intelligence and showed that they improved their performance around various Key Performance Indicators as compared to the rest of the firms polled:
The findings show that ZoomInfo customers saw year-over-year increases that beat the industry average in overall company revenue, average deal size and saw increases in key aspects of sales team quota achievement. In addition, Aberdeen also reported the following:
Visit ZoomInfo to learn about our products, register for a FREE demo or talk to a live person about how our solutions can refresh your data to help your business grow and capitalize on your investment.
This post is part of an occasional series where our engineering team lets us take a look at their work. Previously, Roger talked about changing to Agile and Erin talked about Agile at Zoom.
Economizing the cache
ZoomInfo profiles are different from those supplied by other B2B business information providers in that they go “beyond the business card” – in addition to contact information, they contain corroborating background information (employment, college, board memberships, etc.) backed up by up to 10 years of web articles. This information helps our sales, marketing and recruiting customers identify the people or companies they are targeting, so the ability to access it directly from our applications is important.
The hundreds of millions of web pages that contain this information are stored in a multi-terabyte cache that grows continually as we crawl the web, analyzing new pages and finding new versions of existing pages. This adds value to our web applications by helping to corroborate the accuracy of the information that we display about people and companies – even if the pages that supplied that information have been updated or removed since we analyzed them. Storing these web pages, and keeping them instantly available to our customers, poses some scalability and reliability challenges.
One of our current infrastructure projects is to address these concerns by migrating our cache from its current Windows-based storage scheme to Apache Cassandra. In this post I’ll describe some of the present system’s limitations, look at how systems like Cassandra can address them, and discuss our approach to migrating data from the old system to the new one.
Windows machines: Functional, with issues
The current storage setup uses a small number of Windows machines, each with several terabytes of disk space. Web pages are stored in a combination of Microsoft Access files and a home-grown binary archive file format. Both file types hold zlib-compressed page data along with the page’s URL. Millions of new pages are added each day as we crawl the web. Read performance demands are several thousand pages per day across the entire cache. This system, though functional, shows a few warning signs:
The solution: New storage systems
Apache Cassandra is one of a number of newer database technologies, sometimes called “NoSQL,” that address these problems. In particular, Cassandra (originally developed by Facebook to power its Inbox Search) includes these features: Continue reading
Part of series where our customers share insights on how they get the most out of our tools. This week features Sharon Kay, business development representative at Technical Language Services and ZoomInfo Community Edition user. Here’s what she has to say.
ZI: Tell us a little bit about what you do.
SK: I’m in Business Development with a translation company called Technical Language Services. I market the services to business across many diverse industries in the US and internationally.
ZI: How do you search ZoomInfo most often? What parameters/search terms do use?
SK: I start with a vertical, say Pharmaceutical Companies, from there I use the Advanced Criteria to generate a list of companies. The Advanced tabs are great. I can narrow my search to number of employees (very important for me), privately held, Fortune 500, etc., and instantly I have an extensive list of companies. From there I click done, go up to the company name, plug that in and I get the contacts for that company.
ZI: Can you recall a specific example of when ZoomInfo Community Edition helped you overcome a challenge?
SK: Timing is everything in sales. So I hate when I fumble around looking for contacts. I knew of an RFP about to go with a chemical company and was able to find the contact person on ZoomInfo, introduce myself and services, got to quote on a few projects and then was invited to respond to the RFP. That doesn’t happen in the real world. And yes, we are the preferred vendor now.
ZI: Which single ZoomInfo Community Edition feature has helped you most as a business development professional and how do you use it?
SK: The contacts. When I get wind of something, either from the news, or TV or the boss, I can immediately go on ZoomInfo and find contacts and start calling. It’s that fast and easy.
ZI: What’s the most surprising search result you have found?
SK: I found a grade school friend, now the VP of Intellectual Property with a firm I was searching for contacts on. Too cool!
Try Community Edition today and get immediate access to millions of contacts.
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