ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck on AI, Sales Strategy & the Story Behind Ticker Symbol GTM

One of the most competitive and fast moving areas in enterprise software today is go to market or GTM Intelligence. One key player in the space is ZoomInfo. It's the GTM platform that supports business growth with AI ready insights into buyers of its clients services using deep data analytics and advanced automation. Zoom info helps more than 35,000 companies worldwide get a complete view of their customers. In its most recent earnings, ZoomInfo posted around $307 million in revenue up 5% year over year, and it raised its guidance for 2025, but the market wasn't impressed. ZoomInfo stock price dropped nearly 8% following the announcement on fears of competition at high valuation at its more than 11 billion market cap. We sit down with ZoomInfo, founder and CEO Henry Shuck to discuss product differentiation, enterprise adoption, and so much more. Let's get into it. Henry, welcome. Thank you for joining from Boston with fabulous set of books in your background. Well, let's start with a bit of a fun one. Now in May, ZoomInfo went from trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol ZI to GTM, which I love clearly signaling your go-to market focus. But how did you grab that ticket? Did you have to wait for someone else to die before you could grab it? What was the process of getting it?

Actually, no. Look, when we actually went public, GTM was the second voted ticker that our executive team voted on. We didn't take it then, but it ate at me for five years. I always felt connected to that ticker. And the work that we do is focused on go-to market or GTM professionals, and we've released a slew of new products over the last year that really gets us deeper into the go-to market workflow. And in November, I reached out to my investor relations head and our head of communications and said, how much of a pain is it really to change our ticker? And they said, we'll go out and see if the ticker's available and it was available, which was great. But also interesting that there isn't a publicly traded platform that is designed to deliver software or data or workflow to go to market professionals. When you think about every business out there, you walk into any business and half of the team is working on the product or service that you're delivering. And the other half of the team is go to market sales professionals, account managers, marketing professionals, and to think of, and that exists in every company. And to think that in every company that construct exists, yet there's not a scaled publicly traded company that wanted that ticker, I think just highlights the opportunity for us.

There you go. It literally is for a public company, the equivalent of the domain name, right, for the website. So good for you for snagging it. Let's dig into your business model. Henry, talk to us about the specific kinds of clients you are looking to win. And I know you segment them in different ways, but break that down for us. Break that down for our audience.

Sure. So ZoomInfo serves 35,000 customers around the globe. The one thing that ties all those customers together is that they sell to other businesses.

(03:14)
They're businesses that sell products or services to other businesses, and that could be anything from a commercial cleaning company or a pest control company to a Fortune 10 technology company. And then we serve obviously their sales professionals and their marketing professionals, their account managers. And we think of our business kind of in two segments, upmarket, which would be companies with over a hundred employees and then downmarket companies less than a hundred employees. The downmarket segment of our business is largely transactional. There's a lot of self-service product led growth in that segment, and the upmarket business is much more hands-on, dedicated customer success managers, dedicated account managers, and then lots of opportunity to continue to grow in that upmarket segment. And then that downmarket segment. Just from a business efficiency perspective, we're trying to do everything we can to leverage AI and a product led digital self service motion downmarket that improves operating margins and then market. We're trying to put more people to help our customers implement our

Solutions. So I'd love to just walk through a really specific example of one of your core products, Henry, and I'm really excited for this. I have spent a big chunk of my career investing in running and on the boards of B2B companies, literally cleaning services. You provide an example. I was on the board of a janitorial services business, so this is music to my ears. Break down for us exactly what ZoomInfo would do for the sales team of a cleaning services business. What exactly are you solving for that sales team?

So let's think about a cleaning services business. I bet the board that you are on largely went to market. And when I say went to market, what I mean is got their next customer by probably driving around the streets in different neighborhoods and trying to drive into some industrial park, walk into the building, hope that the person who makes decisions about commercial cleaning was there. Maybe they have some relationships with property managers where they could get larger contracts, but it's very manual. It's a very painful, very analog

Process.

You probably go to an industrial park, you don't even know what businesses are there. You don't know if they manage their own commercial cleaning or not. And so what the foundation of ZoomInfo starts with data and it's data on a hundred million companies. Then above that data on a hundred million companies is data on 500 million business professionals who work at those companies. And then above that are signals that tell you when those companies are in market for your products or services. So if we come back to the cleaning company example, I cover let's say the Las Vegas metro area. And my job is to go get new cleaning customers in Las Vegas. Instead of driving around and hoping I bump into the right building with the right decision maker inside of ZoomInfo, I can say I'm a commercial cleaner commercial cleaning business in Las Vegas. Who should I be contacting today?

(06:12)
And it goes through that data asset. It uses AI to look at which companies would be the best fits for your business. It uses signals like maybe some of those companies are researching commercial cleaning businesses, they're on the web researching your competitors, or they're researching other commercial cleaning businesses and they're researching prices for commercial cleaning for businesses, or they just moved into their building and that would be a really great time for a commercial cleaning company to engage with them. We take ai, we look at all of those signals, and then we rank and prioritize the accounts and then we give you a digital way to engage with those accounts. So who are the decision makers? What's their email address, their phone number, how do you get ahold of them? How many locations does that business have? You walk into a location, you might think it's one location, it's actually 15, you would talk to that business differently. And so we're giving you that intelligence and then also helping you craft your first engagement with them. What do you say? What do they care about? If you're sending a message to the CEO, is he involved in philanthropy? Where did he go to school? Giving you all of that insight. So that first interaction is highly personalized and is engaging at exactly the right time.

And so when clients have come back to you and said, Henry ZoomInfo, we've gone from not having, having your product to using you, what hard feedback have you had really tangible feedback in terms of the number of days, months, weeks that taken them to shorten their sales cycle successfully?

Yeah, so this is one of the fun things about ZoomInfo is that at renewal time, what ends up happening is the leadership at a company will go talk to the sales floor and say, Hey, we're thinking about renewing ZoomInfo for the sales team. What do you think? And the sales team, our loudest advocates, and if we go back to the statistics, we're seeing our customers when they implement ZoomInfo, see three times the number of opportunities opened, they see their conversion rates increase by more than 50%. And it's pretty simple to think about that commercial cleaning example. If I'm just on the streets driving around, I might talk to two, three, maybe seven people in a given day. If I have ZoomInfo at my fingertips, not only am I connecting with significantly more people, but I'm connecting with the right people, I'm connecting with the right companies.

(08:40)
It's at the right time. So you see opportunity creation go up, you see conversion rate of those opportunities go up. You see sales cycles reduce. I think our last internal customer study said that our customer sales cycles reduced by over 60% because they're getting in front of the right companies at the right time. And so we really think about that top of the funnel. How many opportunities are we increasing for our customers? How are we converting those opportunities and at what dollar amounts are we converting those opportunities against the baseline of what they came in

With? Well, you touched on using AI to execute on providing that service. I know that you recently launched ZoomInfo, copilot. Walk us through that and how that's doing in terms of adoption.

Yeah, this is our fastest growing product that we've ever released. We released it about a year ago with the concept of how do we make every seller the company's best seller? And we thought a lot about what are the best sellers at a company doing? And those sellers tend to be the most creative sellers. And so they are going out and they're researching a company, they're thinking about those key signals that are happening to at a company that would say, Hey, this is a good time for me to engage. So the commercial cleaning example, Hey, maybe I hired a new facilities manager, a new director of facilities. Maybe I was researching facilities management on the B2B web. Maybe I'm hiring significantly more, and so I know I'm expanding facilities or I just opened a new facility. The best salespeople are out there trying to figure out is this the right time for me to engage with the company?

(10:17)
And so what we've done is we've taken information about the company. So we take, when we onboard a company onto copilot, we use AI to go learn as much as we can about the company, the products, who they sell to, how they sell. We read all their case studies, all their press releases, their website, any publicly available information. And then we create for them an environment inside of ZoomInfo that understands their business, understands their target market, understands the signals that matter to them, same way the best seller at your company understands those things, and then starts prioritizing and ranking the accounts you should be engaging with every single day based on new signals that come in. So for example, I'm going to get off this call and it's going to get published. ZoomInfo is going to grab the transcript of that call. It's going to process it. Maybe in this call I tell you I'm hiring more upmarket sellers,

Right?

That's a really interesting signal for a staffing firm that staffs salespeople for sales excellence companies. We're going to take that podcast and that's going to be a signal that ranks ZoomInfo in front of those companies that would sell to me based on the signals that I'm talking about here on the call. And then a plethora of other key digital signals that we're taking in and then using to get our customers in front of the right prospects who have a problem or a pain or a need that they could solve right now.

And you are coming up to that one year anniversary of copilot rolling out. So I imagine you're going to start to see customers who are early adopters of that product decide whether to renew or not. What are you seeing in terms of signals from renewal activity?

Yeah, this is maybe the most exciting part. When you roll out a new product, you have a lot of hope and optimism for what it's going to drive in your business, and you really don't know in an annual recurring revenue subscription business what's going to happen until those companies actually come up for renewal. We had a lot of competence that the copilot solution was better than our legacy solutions. We saw utilization increases. And so our customers who are using copilot, were engaging 40% more with the platform than our customers who are not using copilot. And those are early indicators that renewal rates should be better. And what we saw as we completed Q2, we saw the first cohort of our copilot customers go through a renewal cycle with us on copilot, and we're seeing very meaningful uplift in renewal rates of those customers versus the customers who are on legacy ZoomInfo products. What's exciting about that is through the back half of the year, every new business customer or 98% of new business customers came on to that copilot product. And so we're going to start lapping now renewal rates on significantly more copilot product than we had in Q2 or Q1, and we're hopeful that those renewal trends continue to keep

Up. Let's talk about some of the market reactions to these green shoots. Henry, the latest earnings came out on August 4th, showed an increase in total revenue of 5% year over year. You revised up with your guidance, but that your share price dropped in response to this. And when you take a look at what the market had to say, I've got several analyst reports here on my desk in front of me, there was a recurring theme still concerned about competition, whether it's from upstart young businesses that are coming out using AI and they're basically AI native, and then someone like Palantir who's moving aggressively into the corporate space and frankly has to justify its valuation. So what do you say to those analysts? What do you say to investors who are hearing this great news from you but aren't actually voting to put their money into your stock?

Yeah, very interesting market reaction. After our earnings look, we felt really good about the numbers that we put up, the execution across the business. We're continuing to improve net revenue retention, which was up two points in the quarter. Last time we moved net revenue retention two points in the quarter. The stock went up 25%. This time the stock actually went down. I run a company not a stock, and so I try to keep the team very focused on executing and continuing to execute. What I would tell you is what's really unique about ZoomInfo in a moment where every software company is kind of under AI pressure

(14:40)
Is that we have this really unique data asset that doesn't exist anywhere else. It's not something that an LLM can suck up and use inside of their platforms. That unique data asset is actually driving the fastest growing segment in our business. It's our operations business, which grew over 20% in the quarter and now makes up over 15% of our business. And that operations business is largely or completely about perfecting data inside of a company so that companies can use accurate data to build their AI agents and their ai AI software on top of. So a large strategic enterprise comes to us and says, Hey, we have an initiative to go build AI agents for our sales team, for our marketing team, for our analytics teams. But what we went into our CRM and we went into our data warehouse, what we found was data on companies that wasn't accurate, that wasn't complete, that didn't give us a full view of our total addressable market.

(15:45)
And then we found that a lot of our buyers that we would sell to don't even exist anywhere inside of those systems. And we don't have any signals to help us rank who our salespeople should be engaging with and why they come to us and they're buying our data, integrating it with their CRM systems, integrating it with their data warehouse systems, and then building AI agents on top of it. And I think the fact that that business has more demand than it's ever had and is growing significantly faster than our core business is a real AI tailwind for our business. And as companies continue to want to build their own internal AI agents and AI functionality, they're going to need to perfect their data in order to be able to do that. And the world's greatest B2B data assets sits inside of ZoomInfo.

So help us understand that a bit better because for a lot of the companies, at least that I've seen experience what you've described, which is the quality of their own data is unstructured. It needs a lot of cleansing. Often that cleanup process is quite manual, and you do actually need a team of people who figure out, well, what does clean data look like? What does it mean? So for AI operations, how much does that start to move you, if at all, from being a software provider to almost having to be a consultant for these clients to be able to execute on using it?

Yeah, that's a great question. In the upmarket business, particularly our operations business, we are deploying customer success managers, implementation managers into our customer's businesses to go plug our data into all of the different areas around the company.

(17:25)
Look, ultimately, we love when that happens because then we're plugged directly into workflow at the company. But I think the key differences largely when a company goes to try and cleanse their own data. Let's say I'm building an agent for support. I grab my knowledge base, I grab all of my support tickets, I grab all of my customer interactions, I put that all into the ai and maybe some of the cleaning that has to happen. There is, oh, I have old knowledge base articles. These things don't apply anymore. I don't want to just take every conversation that my support team has had. I want to take the conversation with my best support reps and put that into the agent. And so I can kind of manage that all internally with my first party data and go to market land. I actually don't even have the data internally.

(18:12)
It doesn't exist internally. I can't just clean it up. It doesn't exist. I don't know that OpenAI was a $200 million business last year, and now it was a billion dollar business this year. I don't have those growth stats. I don't know that they used to have a thousand employees and now they have 3000 employees. They did all of these acquisitions that doesn't just organically show up inside of your internal data. You need a third party partner that's out there pulling all of that data together, structuring it, and then making it available to your first party data.

You said something very interesting, which is the amount of proprietary data that you actually have sitting inside ZoomInfo itself. And one of the things that struck me is I feel as though ZoomInfo has blossomed in this broader conversation around ai. And when you went public, when you did in June, 2020, it was really sort of the go-go days of next generation tech businesses. But the truth is the foundations of ZoomInfo have actually been around for much longer. You founded the business then called DiscoverOrg in 2007. You've done a series of acquisitions. I saw you, you acquired ipro profile in 2015, ranking in 2017, never bounce, and then ZoomInfo, which became the namesake business afterwards. So how much have you applied AI operations internally? How much have you gone back and said, maybe we missed something along the way because we didn't have the technology to go in mind? What has been sitting around in our own system since 2007? Talk to us about the internal work.

Yeah, great question. It's one that keeps me up at night regularly. It's one that I'll wake up and wonder, are we ahead? Are we in the top decile or the top 1% of companies leveraging AI to optimize our operations today, we built a team of about 15 go fast engineers who are AI native engineers, whose job it is to build internal tooling and infrastructure for our teams to use. And a couple months ago, we rolled out at the company a centralized data layer that brought all of our product data together, all of our finance data together, every conversation we've ever had with a customer, all of the Zoom info data together underneath that, all of our email data, our calendar data, and then we built AI agents on top of it. Today, over two thirds of our company use this on a daily basis. They're building account plans.

(20:27)
They're building slides for customer meetings, they're automating a whole bunch of their workflow. It's driving significant efficiency across the business. This internal AI tool is the fastest adopted tool by an order of magnitude than anything we've ever released out to our teams. I've never released a software product internally at ZoomInfo where people stop me in the hallways and say like, oh my God, this is a game changer for what we're doing. I think what we're focused on now is like, okay, great. It's driving real efficiency in the business, but where is that going to show up in the p and l? Where is that going to show up in the numbers? And we expect that the leveraging of this tool, particularly across our go-to-market professionals, should drive our win rates, should drive significant sales productivity. And there are places where we're driving headcount out of the business because we're able to leverage ai. I talked about it on the earnings call. We had a team of 26 content creators that we took down to two people, and those two people are generating more content faster and engaging across the business in a more streamlined way because they've leveraged AI agents across that entire content creation and distribution pipeline.

Talk to us about the topic of acquisitions from a different perspective. Henry, would you like to go shopping for targets again? And if so, what would you be going after? And then can you

Look, I think right now the best company and the fastest innovating company in our space is ZoomInfo. We generate a lot of cash, and so we're doing a significant amount of share buybacks. To your point earlier about the stock not reacting to what we felt was really positive earnings, that's a great buying opportunity for ZoomInfo year to date. We've bought back 250 million of our shares since we started our share buyback program A couple of years ago. We bought back over a billion dollars of our company. And so the bar is high for m and a for us today, you have to be significantly more interesting and valuable than ZoomInfo itself. And we're biased a little bit here, but we know what the intrinsic value of the company is, and we're going to continue to be aggressive buyers of our own shares. In the meantime, look, we've done a handful of little tuck-ins where we find AI talent building AI product that needs to be part of a larger platform. I think we'll continue to do that as well.

I want to close Henry with some questions on life as a founder turned public company CEO, because it's a pretty unique position to have. When you founded ZoomInfo, I believe you were still at law school, is that right?

I was, yes.

And so what was the genesis of this and how did you, from a position of being a student go around and raise money because you actually raised from really blue chip investors. Talk to us about that process and what it was like to do it at a pretty early in your career.

I don't have a great innovation story here, unfortunately.

That's okay.

But when I finished my first year in college, in undergrad, I had no money. And I went on the UNLV job board, and I found a job in 2001 at probably one of the first entrants in the SaaS market. I worked there for five years. The business grew almost 10 x more than 10 x, but there wasn't much of a business there where there were like four people. The business was growing, but we weren't investing back in the business. And I was like, this isn't a place where I can build a career. So I went to law school and after my first year, I was kind of haunted by the opportunity in that space. And so I started a company that looked and felt a lot like that company, but operated in a slightly different space at the time. And I just was really confident that I could run a great business and invest back in the business and actually build something that was more than just a couple of people working behind computers.

(24:16)
We actually, the first acquisition you mentioned I profile was that company. We ended up acquiring it in 2015, but when we started the company, nobody was going to give me money, particularly in 2007. I had no real great history of operating. So we bootstrapped the business. My founder and I each put $25,000 on our credit cards. He got it from his grandpa. I, for some reason had a JP Morgan Chase card that had a $25,000 limit. So I maxed that out, and that's how we started the business. And it had to be profitable and it had to grow. And so we grew the business for the first seven years without any outside capital. And then in 2014, we brought in our first outside investors private equity firm called TA Associates.

And if you were to start ZoomInfo today from scratch, Henry, you started back in 2007 when AI was not yet a mainstream concept like it's today. If you were to start from scratch today, how or what would you do differently?

I mean, when we started ZoomInfo, a lot of the work we did was pretty manual. And so we had a team of 600 researchers who were cleansing data and updating data and collecting data. Obviously, we wouldn't have any of that today. We would use AI and agents throughout that entire process. We would deliver the product in a different way, would be an AI native search interface. I think probably those two things are the biggest things. You really wouldn't need manual research the way that you needed it in 2007, and then you would have a very different user interface than people got used to over the last 18 years.

So does it feel like the barrier to entry has gone down? I feel as though having the money and the wherewithal to go hire 600 researchers maybe for some time was a barrier to entry for you as a differentiator.

It was until we acquired ZoomInfo. And what ZoomInfo had built was this great contributory data model where they had hundreds of thousands of people sharing data from their own email systems with ZoomInfo for limited free access to ZoomInfo. And so today, that contributory network, including in a contributory network of over 10,000 clients that share data with us, not public available data that's not available on the public web, those two contributory flywheels are still very difficult to build even in the age of AI to gather that proprietary data.

Proprietary is definitely the word du jour in markets like this one. Henry, thank you so much for joining. Brilliant conversation. Please come back. We'd love to have you with updates and ZoomInfo,

Thank you very much for having me.

I'm Anne Berry. Thanks for tuning into After earnings, the show that brings you up close and personal with the executives behind the world's most interesting publicly traded companies. If you learn something today, don't forget to like, subscribe, and share with your friends. Our upcoming episodes will feature CEOs and CFOs from Block Potbelly, Udemy, and many more. We'll see you then. Come back. Same place.