PayIt: Redefining Government Technology With Better Data Management

PayIt, the company modernizing interactions between governments and residents, allows state and local government agencies to offer frictionless customer transactions for a more modern payment experience.

Governments rely on PayIt’s solutions to process virtually any type of payment, including property taxes, tolls, utilities and parking tickets. The company — which got its start after Founder and CEO John Thomson faced a frustrating in-person trip to the DMV — now supplies its digital customer experience platform to jurisdictions serving over 100 million people across North America.

PayIt launched a major initiative to improve its GTM approach, creating a new Marketing Operations function that focused on cleaning up and restructuring its customer relationship management data.

Here’s how they solved the uncommon challenges posed by legacy public-sector prospect data, and with the help of ZoomInfo, set PayIt up for the next phase of its modern go-to-market journey.

Managing Complex Government Data

The myriad challenges of data governance, structure, and maintenance are well understood in the B2B world. But companies like PayIt, which serves state and local governments across the US and Canada, have further challenges that require particular solutions. 

For example, individual state governments have multiple agencies nested underneath them. In a typical CRM, there can be confusion about which of those entities represents the actual account — should it be the state government itself, or the state’s Department of Revenue?

Election cycles introduce another layer of complexity. Because the leadership of major agencies and broader administrations change regularly, keeping consistent, accurate records about key decision makers in government accounts can be more challenging than in business.

For PayIt, this led to a legacy database encompassing over 100,000 individual data points that lacked the structure and consistency necessary to fully implement modern account-based marketing tactics and multi-touch attribution systems.

“We were seeing a lot of inconsistencies, just because the way governments are set up is very different from B2B,” says Nadia Davis, Senior Director of Revenue Marketing and Marketing Operations. “So we had to get creative.”

“Our revenue marketing GTM strategy is solidly built on the ABM framework. It’s able to aggregate lead-level activities under the right accounts and append lead-level engagement insights at the account level.”

Nadia Davis
Senior Director of Revenue Marketing and Marketing Operations

Strategic Partnership, Exceptional Support

Finding partners that could address these unique challenges wasn’t easy. Relief eventually came when Davis and her team connected with ZoomInfo’s experienced implementation staff to tackle PayIt’s specific issues — challenges that other implementation teams would not have been able to solve.

“This was a truly challenging and unique data governance use case,” Davis says. “But even for something this complex, ZoomInfo had seasoned implementation people who had the expertise to help solve our problems.”

Better Data, Better Results

By merging duplicate records, assigning contact data to accounts, and purging irrelevant data, PayIt reduced the size of its database by about one-third, driving significant cost savings. 

PayIt also used ZoomInfo to put measures in place that prevent future duplicate records from entering its systems. “Our business development reps, who may inadvertently try to add duplicate records without checking the current database for an existing account, are now guided by clear rules that maintain database integrity,” Davis says. 

And PayIt embraced flexibility, simplifying its data management processes to pave the way for continued growth. For example,  being able to mass-update account ownership within ZoomInfo became a real time-saver for the MarOps team, since territory assignments were not built out in Salesforce. “It took mere seconds to reassign accounts from one sales rep to another, which was crucial for PayIt since our territories were constantly changing,” Davis says.

“Additionally, being able to mass update accounts’ lifecycle stages based on specific field criteria in Salesforce decreased our ABM tactics speed to market.” 

More Productive, Easier Forecasting

In PayIt’s system, BDRs are the hinge point between marketing and sales — a critical step in the buyer’s journey, where every efficiency can directly affect the bottom line. 

BDR productivity saw a notable boost after working with ZoomInfo, thanks to the creation of a single, unified scoring system in place of a confusing patchwork of scores. This streamlined approach not only made it easier for reps to prioritize their efforts but also simplified the forecasting process, and saved the company tens of thousands of dollars that might have otherwise been spent on added features for its MAP.

The result? Not just better data, but a more efficient process with clearly defined roles and team responsibilities. “Our BDRs now have deliverables and specific goals because we created a framework for account lifecycle insights reporting, which essentially lets BDRs know specifics like what type of outreach is needed,” Davis says.  

PayIt’s BDRs can now confidently predict whether they will hit their target number of meetings per month. This predictability has been a significant improvement from PayIt’s previous system, where BDRs lacked clear guidance and struggled to assess their progress.

The new system aggregates lead-level activities under the right accounts, giving PayIt a full 360-degree view of how each account interacts with its marketing campaigns. With such a comprehensive perspective, it’s easier to pinpoint which accounts are most likely to respond to BDR engagement, allowing them to maximize their efforts.

“For a traditional SaaS company, all you care about is people filling out your lead forms. That’s not the case with us,” Davis says. “Government employees don’t fill out forms — they are trained not to. For us, what matters is multi-touch attribution within an account.” 

Continued Innovation With ZoomInfo

Going from working with a disjointed legacy data structure into a streamlined, strategic data management process is just the beginning of a new era of innovation for PayIt. 

With a commitment to modern marketing operations, fueled by clean and well-structured data, the future for this innovative company — and the public agencies it serves — is very bright.

“We want to continue to manage all our processes in a scalable way, upholding the high standards we’ve achieved with the processes we’ve built,” Davis says.