Our Vision for Business Information — An Open Directory

By Yonatan Stern, ZoomInfo founder, CEO and chief scientist

ZoomInfo’s vision is to map the business world (organizations and the people who work in them) in near real time. Why? Because business success depends on the ability to easily make connections, conduct commerce and accelerate growth. Our “open directory” vision spawned from our steadfast belief that business information is not top secret, nor should people waste time searching for basic B2B information that is probably already in the public domain.

What is an open directory?

Basic business information must be “open” — meaning highly available with no barriers to entry (such as registration, paid subscriptions, etc.). ZoomInfo is determined to build an accurate and up-to-the minute map of the business world, which we call the open directory. It will include every company in the U.S. from a small one-person operation to a multibillion-dollar enterprise, and all the employees working for them. Directory information will include basic organization information, business background, employees’ job titles, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. This is an enormous undertaking and critically important for the business community.

Why an open directory?

Why is it that you can dial 411 and find almost any person in the U.S.? Other online sources make it easy, unfortunately, to find your home address, spouse’s name and home value. Yet you can’t easily find basic contact information for businesses. Why can’t you enter a Web search to find a person’s place of employment, their title and contact information? Wouldn’t that be simple, liberating and just plain efficient? And wouldn’t it be even better if such information permeated your other business tools like your smart phone, email, CRM system, Facebook or LinkedIn?

Why doesn’t it exist today?

There are two obstacles to building a true map, or directory, of the entire U.S. business landscape. The first is historical or cultural. A phone directory, maintained by phone companies, is something many people have for years taken for granted — thinking they have to be listed in it. However, company directories were considered proprietary and were not published, and businesses started to cloister information about employees and businesses, in part to protect themselves from other companies extending unsolicited job offers to their staffs.

The second reason is the sheer magnitude and complexity of tracking all businesses and employees in our fast moving and dynamic economy. In every minute of every business day, more than four companies are created or go out of business, and more than 150 people change jobs. With no “change of address” service or any other visible trace of the change, it is incredibly difficult to track these changes.

How can you create a comprehensive, accurate and up-to-the minute directory?

The simplest way to create such an open directory is to ask people and companies to post and update their information on some central repository which would be accessible to everybody. Many companies tried building such a central repository and invariably failed because it is devilishly hard to convince tens of millions of people to do something consistently. How many of us add the extra four digits to our ZIP code in our mailing address?

To date, the closest to a comprehensive business directory is the very successful business social network LinkedIn. However, it is not open, one has to be a member, it does not display contact information and it relies on individuals making updates to reflect their job changes, etc. Also, LinkedIn only includes a portion of the U.S. workforce, and is likely to remain that way since not all businesspeople feel the need to network or keep their information current.

Another solution is to create the directory by getting people to contribute business card information from their contacts. This is the approach taken by Jigsaw and others. Their sites are not open — they do not provide contact information without a hurdle (registration, membership, etc.). They include only a portion of the U.S. workforce and many participants have contributed business cards that are old and invalid.

What is ZoomInfo’s strategy to creating the open directory?

ZoomInfo’s strategy recognizes that the task of creating an open directory is of such magnitude and complexity that it requires a technological solution, and cannot rely on manual efforts or on the voluntary submissions. In the same way that Yahoo’s vaunted manual Web directory gave way to Google’s superior search technology, ZoomInfo has innovated breakthrough technologies to automatically capture information about businesses and employees from sources that are inherently fresh, accurate and are always updating.

How does ZoomInfo compile information about businesses?

Nowadays, most companies maintain a website as one of their main marketing tools. The trend is accelerating and companies that still do not have a Web site, will have one in coming months or years. ZoomInfo’s patented Web crawler scours millions of company websites on a weekly basis to gather details about its business, products, industry, contact information and employees. Many companies keep their websites updated and by visiting each company site on a weekly basis, ZoomInfo can track tens of thousands of company changes happening every month.

How does ZoomInfo gather and track information about businesspeople?

Tracking information about businesspeople is a far more complicated challenge than tracking companies, as no prevalent source exists (like company websites).

But there is a unique activity, common to nearly every working professional: sending email from his or her company domain. The day someone stops working at their company is the day they stop sending email using their company email address. To track this, ZoomInfo built a plug-in that works with popular email applications. It allows our users to automatically share business contacts with ZoomInfo.

Even though ZoomInfo needs a community of contributors in order to aggregate large amounts of information on every working person in the United States, this solution brings two very important advantages over sites that require you to manually upload contacts, or sites that reply on users to supply data about themselves.

First, each ZoomInfo contributor can share hundreds of records with a simple download of our plug-in, and we estimate that we will need only about 100,000 contributors in order to gain full coverage of the U.S. workforce. Such a leveraged mechanism enables ZoomInfo to extract information on tens of millions of people without the need to have tens of millions of people participating.

The second advantage is that each record comes with an accurate time stamp — verifying employment as of the day of sending the email. In addition, by nature of its source, business contact data extracted from email applications tends to have a higher level of accuracy and relevance.

Is the email plug-in the only source of information on businesspeople?

No. By continuously crawling the Web, ZoomInfo’s proprietary technology extracts a huge amount of information about people from millions of business Web sites, thousands of publications and articles, press releases, SEC filings and a myriad of other sources. All of this information is aggregated and forms a complete dossier about businesspeople, extracted from independent and objective sources. In our 10 years of crawling, we have aggregated billions of Web references about professionals and each profile includes all information found on the Web about the person. In addition, close to one million people have provided information for their own profiles on ZoomInfo.

Why would anybody use the email plug-in to contribute data to ZoomInfo?

As part of our ZoomInfo Community Edition programs, members who install our plug-in get free, ongoing access to the entire ZoomInfo Database of millions of just-verified, in-depth profiles and powerful tools to search and target — for as long as the plug-in is installed and active. ZoomInfo Community Edition is very attractive to individual sales people, recruiters, fund raisers, brokers, and any other professional who depends on making new contacts.

Is the open directory available today?

Parts of the open directory vision are available today and we plan on completing the vision soon. For free, anyone can search the ZoomInfo Directory for basic business information. We are also growing our community of professionals who are actively contributing their business contacts. During our market test, 25,000 people became active ZoomInfo Community Edition members. ZoomInfo Community Edition will be launched in late March, 2011, and we hope to quickly attain our target of 100,000 contributors that will help us gain complete, accurate and real-time information of every working person.

If the open directory is FREE how can ZoomInfo make money?

The open directory is free when used for basic company contact information. When a user types in a name or a businessperson’s name and a company name, he or she will get a list of matching people and their contact information. However, many customers use the ZoomInfo data in a commercial way to form lists of prospects or candidates by querying ZoomInfo using many different criteria. A typical commercial query can be: “Give me a list of VPs of marketing in pharmaceutical companies in the Boston area.” Such queries are supported by our ZoomInfo Pro product, which requires a paid subscription. Similarly, ZoomInfo supports many customers with their data needs, be it to append data to their internal prospect lists, cleanse their data of old or inaccurate records or provide them fresh information based on their needs.

Sincerely,