Increased productivity and time savings through ZoomInfo Data Cubes

Capital One began as a monoline credit card company and has evolved into a Fortune 500 full-service commercial and retail bank with operations in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In 2005, Capital One strategically entered commercial banking, with its proprietary banking tech tools. Today, Capital One services an $800B+ loan portfolio across thousands of clients. Capital One’s Commercial Bank division has had a long-standing partnership with ZoomInfo that first began with EverString data, which was acquired by ZoomInfo and now continues to be a trusted data source for Capital One, today.

We sat down with Andy Ruffles, Director of Sales Operations and Strategy in Capital One’s Commercial Bank division who supports one of the largest business lines, Middle-Market Banking. His team supports over 150 sales reps, also known as Relationship Managers (RMs). Ruffles paints us the full picture of Capital One’s journey with ZoomInfo data, and how it has enabled his team to serve as a stronger partner to RMs providing them with the data they need to generate pipeline, increase leads, and close more business.

The Sales Operations & Strategy team’s number one priority is to enable RMs to be as efficient and effective as possible. Ruffles’ team does the heavy lifting to ensure reps can quickly get the information they need, when they need it, so they can focus on having more quality conversations that impact the business.

For Salesforce administrators, one of the biggest barriers to efficiency is data entry and this was the case for Ruffles’ team as well. Manually entering new contacts and new relationship data into Salesforce can be time-consuming and repetitive. To be able to focus more time on supporting RMs’ activities, the Sales Operations & Strategy team needed a solution that could streamline the data entry process.

Efficiency is at the core of the Sales Operations and Strategy team—especially where it concerns the RMs’ day-to-day. Prior to using ZoomInfo’s SalesOS, Ruffles shared, “Our reps would search one by one for data—whether that was to double check a name, or confirm information, particularly on new prospects. We wanted reps to be able to go to one place to quickly search for information, while also having confidence in the data.” Ruffles wanted a solution that would reduce the back-and-forth between web searches and business applications.

Part of Capital One’s Commercial Banking business targets small, regional companies, which puts them into a pool of competition with regional banks, national banks and other financial institutions not directly related to banking. To stay competitive in this saturated marketplace, RMs need powerful information at their fingertips.

“Getting great information to prioritize the RMs’ daily activities is paramount. To move the needle, we need solid intelligence at the starting point to figure out who we need to call on first, and then we can efficiently track the opportunity stages in our Salesforce,” Ruffles said.

While it’s easier to find information on huge public companies, it was trickier for the Sales Operations & Strategy team to track critical information on smaller privately-owned businesses to inform sales outreach. Not having this information readily available led to very manual processes. Ruffles shared, “In the past, I would carry out very manual requests on individual State websites to view relevant filings that would support sales outreach. Each manual request was very specific, often tedious, and costly as the requests added up.” As a result, his team was in search of an aggregated source of data that would indicate whether or not smaller-sized prospects were involved in acting lending engagements, or not. With this type of information, RMs would be able to find and act on potential opportunities.

Several divisions at Capital One, including Commercial Banking, Credit Card, and Merchant leverage the ZoomInfo database at scale via Zoominfo’s Data Cube. The Data Cube provides unlimited access to 150+ company attributes at the HQ and location-level. Capital One uses these millions of data points to complete company profiles at-scale with key firmographics such as employee counts, annual revenue, HQ location, and more. Capital One leverages this data to inform strategic decisions and initiatives across the business.

The firmographic data leveraged from the Data Cube is a foundational element of the Commercial Credit Card division’s lead generation program. “By receiving all of the specific criteria that meets Capital One’s ideal customer profile—whether that be location, industry, revenue, company size etc., our Card partners are able to quickly identify best-fit accounts and add them as leads to their CRM,” Ruffles said.

Ruffles also adds, “Ingesting ZoomInfo data directly into our systems allows us to easily build leads and map hierarchical relationships in a more centralized way to enable reps at-scale,” Ruffles said.

In addition to the core company data Capital One receives, the partnership with ZoomInfo’s Data Services team has also been a valuable, mutually beneficial relationship. Over the years, Capital One has provided strategic input around the type of data points that ZoomInfo collects, and in return, the Data Services team delivers white glove support for Capital One’s large, complex, and custom data requests.

One of these custom requests involves filling in the gaps in data with unique financial attributes across a large portion of small businesses. These attributes are then pulled into aggregated reports for RMs to better understand existing lending engagements.

“These reports help us build out our dashboards which our RMs leverage as a powerful prospecting tool,” Ruffles added. The RMs can run a simple reverse search in the dashboard—that drills into over 1 million rows of data—to pull custom financial attributes.

Another way RMs increase productivity in a big way is through ZoomInfo’s Salesforce integration in SalesOS, which reduces manual data entry by bringing data directly into their CRM. “Through time study analysis we’ve done, our RMs can spend 30-40% of their non-deal focused time engaging in prospecting work. With ZoomInfo now being our first fully integrated vendor directly in our Salesforce, we’ve eliminated that chair swivel between different websites, and allowed them to do all of that necessary research right within Salesforce. This has led to our business saving countless hours of RM research and data entry time and allowing them to focus more energy on the relationship building process,” shared Ruffles.