How Zoominfo Beat Competition in a Crowded Market
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Hey folks, back again and today we’ll be covering how Zoominfo could potentially drastically improve the number of people creating accounts and becoming qualified leads. With that, let’s dive right into:
Who are Zoominfo?
What their current sign up flow looks like
What are login-less experiences?
How Zoominfo could improve their lead qualification rate
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Who are Zoominfo?
Zoominfo is a go-to-market intelligence platform founded in 2000 by Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown.
Originally created as a database of business contact info, the company has expanded to provide comprehensive data and insights on companies and decision-makers to help sales, marketing, and recruitment teams identify and engage with potential customers and candidates.
Zoominfo’s Current Sign Up Flow
When taking a cursory look at Zoominfo’s landing page not much stands out. Some marketing copy describing their software and an animated graphic, with a prominent ‘Free Trial’ CTA and a consent box confirming you’re ok with them contacting you endlessly.
What’s strong is its simplicity. There’s one very clear, and reasonably low commitment action - starting a free trial by providing your email (+ a secondary ‘Contact Sales’ CTA top right). However, once you enter your email this is where Zoominfo shows how strong their lead qualification process is.
Instead of simply asking for all your information upfront they understand that multi-step forms far outperform and next request you provide your full name, phone number and job title.
This, critically, gets users committing a small piece of information to develop a sunk cost, making users feel they may as well give you the remaining info and allows the sales team to better qualify users, prioritising outreach to decision makers.
Requiring users to sign up for an account before they can access a free trial may be a common practice for many SaaS companies, but it adds an unnecessary hurdle. This approach often requires you to commit a credit card for a trial before ever experiencing the value of the product. It’s also why 25-40% cancel their trial on Day 0-1 and even more simply don’t bother starting a trial in the first place.
If users are hesitant to sign up, there’s a strong possibility they go searching for alternative options. Instead if you can hook users immediately by showing the product without a sign up you can prevent them from considering other options and increasing your win rates.
What I was surprised to find out, however, is that once you go through this whole process you don’t actually get a free trial…
Instead, you’re shown an additional confirmation screen letting you know they’ll be in contact with a Free Trial CTA in the far right.
At this point I’ve lost most of my motivation to check out the product after being tricked into giving more info to get access, asked for personal details like a phone number and then after finally completing all this not actually having an obvious way to trial the product.
The reason for this is that they’ve done the math and understand that PLG is an INCREDIBLY tough mechanism to extract meaningful ACVs from customers for 3 reasons:
Most users don’t have a corporate card & independent spending power
Users are often blockers to buyers, not internal sellers. You need to get them to refer you to the decision maker.
Most end users won’t organically share the product, meaning PLG leads to single seat contracts (unless your product has a strong need for collaboration e.g. Figma, Slack)
Instead, Zoominfo realises that qualifying a lead on the phone enables them to get in front of the real decision maker a far higher % of the time, find out the core catalysts/reasons they’re considering using Zoominfo (is the org behind targets and needing to ramp) and find out the prospect’s individual pain points and current process, all enabling them to sell a far greater perceived value and larger $$$ package.
And so about 90 seconds after I put in my contact details I got a call. 2 minutes later, another. A minute after that a LinkedIn connection request from a Zoominfo SDR and 45 minutes after that a 3rd call. As I was writing this out 2 hours later a 4th call came in.
The reason for this? They’ve determined that urgency is absolutely critical in qualifying a lead. People are fickle, objectives change and people find alternative providers (i.e. competitors). Zoominfo’s own research shows that the odds of qualifying a lead drops 10x after an hour.
And this strategy seems to work for Zoominfo, boasting a $5-10b market cap and their CEO Henry Schuck publicly stating the reason they won in an ultra-competitive market is they simply had a better converting, more efficient funnel.
However, other products like Spotify & Rows show they might benefit from a different approach. After all there’s a reason why both companies switched from traditional landing pages to login-less experiences.
What are Login-less Experiences?
These are apps that allow you to dive right into the application without encountering any landing pages, testimonials, or marketing content, with Spotify being the most notable example so let's run through a case study.
Always present at the bottom of the interface is a CTA banner to sign up, reminding users they are still only using the preview version of the app but signing up will give them access to unlimited songs.
The result? Spotify’s conversion rate from free to paid topped 46% in Q1 2019 vs the standard freemium conversion rate of 2-5%. For a more direct comparison, Dropbox, once it reached 100 million active users, only boasted a 4% conversion rate.
As white collar workers have begun to wise up to tactics SaaS companies use to capture your wallet people are beginning to become more reluctant to sign up to new services. This has led to a wave of new companies trying to find differentiation through login-less experiences, even including companies with more complex, and longer ‘Time to Value’ products such as Rows, a next generation spreadsheet startup.
Similar to Spotify, Rows have publicly stated their conversion rate to sign-up rose 72% and the activation rate of people who converted from a ‘sandbox account’ is 30% higher than those who signed up from other channels.
How to Improve Zoominfo’s Lead Qualification Rate
So, could this sort of experience be applied to Zoominfo whilst keeping in-line with their sales-led approach to qualifying leads?
Well, actually yes. It seems rather perfectly suited for this. Their product means that it’s very easy to quickly find value in the product. There are no integrations or uploading code to your site, simply search for your ideal prospects and get back a list.
Imagine how powerful it would be if they gave me a taste of their leads database, showing me:
how many leads I could have
their powerful targeting features (e.g. leads likely to respond to your email)
intent signals (a Zoominfo differentiator)
Once prospects have built their ideal list Zoominfo could leverage ‘The Ikea Effect’ & sunk costs to ask for your email & phone number to actually see the leads & their contact info from your search.
And what if you could get them on the phone as they review their list? The chances of converting a lead become much higher if reps can then help by answering any questions the prospect may have or by showing them some of the power features like targeting to improve their list that a novice user may not know about.
Here’s what I think this could look like…
That’s it for today folks. This one took a lot of time and research and so if you have anyone who you think may enjoy this article, I would be incredibly grateful if you could share it with them.
I really admire Qualtrics, Snowflakes, Clickup and Monday.com.
Really great content. I like you explain their current GTM flow from both internal team and customers' perspective, point out what works today and what could be better. And then you went ahead and show the real example of what could be better. Brillant!