Nerdio Puts the Right Information in the Right Hands

Nerdio helps IT departments and managed service providers get the most out of their Microsoft cloud investments. The company applies that same commitment to innovation internally, in the way it runs its own go-to-market engine. For Amber Thompson, Marketing Operations Director, that means asking a harder question than most teams are willing to ask: not just how do we generate more pipeline, but how do we ensure every person on our go-to-market team has exactly what they need, exactly when they need it?

Until recently, the honest answer was: not well enough.

"When I saw GTM Studio, lightbulbs started to go off for me. I can bring in conversation intelligence data and data from across all of our different systems in a way that will make it so all of our teams have access to the same information. Context is everything, and that could really make a big difference for the team."

— Amber Thompson

Marketing Operations Director, Nerdio

Great Data, Wrong Hands

Before ZoomInfo, Nerdio was not lacking for data. The problem was that the data lived in silos, and the wrong people had access to the wrong pieces.

"We had a lot of great data already, but it was very disjointed," Thompson says. "Other teams didn't have access to the same level of information." Marketing was cut off from the conversation intelligence insights that lived on the sales side. Sellers and SDRs, meanwhile, were burning time bouncing between tools just to piece together enough context to know who to call and what to say.

SDRs and account executives had account lists to work from, and some level of intent signals to guide their prioritization. However, the depth of context they needed to prospect with real confidence was missing. And for account executives who spend most of their day in meetings, there was simply no time left to do the research themselves.

"Our sellers and SDRs were spending a lot of time going back and forth in order to do account research," Thompson says. "The amount of context and information that they had at their fingertips to do that better was missing."

The Lightbulb Moment

Nerdio partnered with ZoomInfo to bring its fragmented data together and put it to work across the entire go-to-market team. The turning point came when Thompson saw GTM Studio for the first time.

"Lightbulbs started to go off for me," she says. What she saw was a way to pull conversation intelligence, intent signals, and data from across Nerdio's systems into a single unified table, and then deliver that context automatically to the people who needed it most, before they ever picked up the phone.

But Thompson's instinct was to resist the temptation to overhaul everything at once. "There's so much that you can do, and it can be paralyzing if you try to boil the ocean," she says. Instead, Nerdio started with a use case they already knew worked: account blitzes.

Account blitzes are focused sprint weeks where the entire go-to-market team, account executives, SDRs, and marketing, aligns around a priority account list and goes after those accounts together. Nerdio already knew these sprints drove significant pipeline. The question was whether GTM Studio could make them even more effective.

The answer was yes. Using GTM Studio, Thompson's team built out account briefs that surface exactly what sellers need to know: relevant signals, suggested messaging, and key account context, all pre-assembled and ready to act on before the sprint begins.

"We've built out account briefs that basically tell our sellers exactly what they need to know about the account that's relevant to us, what they should say, and the signals, all of that is in a much nicer, curated way for them," Thompson says. "For our account executives, they're in meetings all day so they don't have time to do that work. This is going to make it so that they'll actually pick up the phone and make the call."

Beyond the blitzes, Nerdio is also testing agentic workflows through ZoomInfo, including champion switcher plays that automatically notify SDRs and sellers when a key contact moves to a new company that fits Nerdio's target prospect profile. And the team has connected ZoomInfo to Anthropic’s Claude via MCP, so that wherever a rep is working, in an AI assistant, in SalesLoft, or elsewhere, the data follows them there.

"One of the mistakes we've always made as marketers is trying to force sellers to work exactly the way we think they should," Thompson says. "The idea is that we should be getting the data in the hands of the sellers wherever they're working. ZoomInfo follows them along the journey."

Marketing Earns a More Strategic Seat

The impact of GTM Studio has not been limited to the sales floor. For Thompson and her marketing ops team, it has fundamentally changed how marketing contributes to the go-to-market conversation.

"Marketing ops is not just providing lists or reports on how things are going," she says. "We're actually having a much more strategic seat at the table when determining the target list, what should be included, and having a much more regular feedback loop and conversation across the go-to-market teams."

That shift is also changing how Nerdio thinks about team structure. Rather than hiring a single go-to-market engineer to centralize AI expertise in one person, Nerdio is taking a deliberately different approach. They are bringing on a Go-to-Market Architect whose job is to drive AI adoption across the entire team, so that strategic capability is distributed, not siloed.

"I see a lot of people hiring go-to-market engineers to try to replace humans on their team," Thompson says. "To me, that actually puts a lot of risk on a team. If they leave, there's not anybody that knows what to do. What we believe at Nerdio is that we are using AI to enable our entire team to be much more efficient, more impactful, and more strategic."

The Unlock: Context Delivered Automatically

Two months into the deployment, the shift Thompson points to is less about a single metric and more about a fundamental change in how the team operates. Reps are spending less time on research and more time on outreach. Marketing and sales are collaborating earlier and more substantively. And the feedback loop between teams has tightened considerably.

"The biggest unlock that clicked with me is what we can be delivering up front for the SDRs and the sellers," Thompson says. "That level of context that we could just automatically deliver, the time savings is the thing that really hit home with me."

She is candid about the change management dimension as well. Getting sellers to trust that the research has already been done for them takes time and reinforcement. Nerdio is addressing that by staying close to the reps, gathering feedback on the account briefs, and continuously refining the prompts and signals that feed into GTM Studio.

"The mindset shift is not just with marketing ops taking on more of that upfront responsibility," she says. "It's also with the sellers, having the trust to say, I don't actually have to do all this research. I can spend more time on the phone."

Building Toward a Central Brain

Looking ahead, Thompson's vision for Nerdio's go-to-market future is clear and ambitious: one centralized intelligence layer that orchestrates plays across every team, powered by the full breadth of data the company has available.

"At Nerdio, we feel like we should be operating off of a central brain where all of our information is together and we are able to orchestrate plays based off of that information," she says. "And ZoomInfo is a big part of that."

Her advice to peers just beginning their own GTM Studio journey is equally direct: start small, resist the urge to overhaul everything at once, and stay close to the ZoomInfo implementation team.

"Don't be afraid to engage the ZoomInfo team with feedback," she says. "Almost everything that I provided feedback on so far has actually been implemented, or is on the roadmap to be addressed very quickly."

For Thompson, that responsiveness is what makes the relationship feel like a genuine partnership. "I feel like I'm a true partner as part of their process," she says. "It's an exciting time to be in marketing ops at Nerdio as a result."