Give Your Sellers an Unfair Advantage with Zoominfo AI Copilot
In this episode of GTM AI, Jam Khan, SVP of Product Marketing, demoes Zoominfo's brand new AI Copilot.
[MUSIC]
Hello everyone and welcome to Go to Market AI,
the future of your Go to Market tech stack.
I'm your host, Sarah McConnell.
These days, it seems like every company has AI,
but on this show, we want to go a level deeper so you can see
first-hand how businesses are actually using AI to solve your business
challenges.
We're going deep into the use cases and showing you live demos of
the latest and greatest in AI technology.
Today, I'm joined by Jam Khan, SAP of Product Marketing at Zoom Info.
Jam, welcome to the show.
I'm so glad you're here.
>> Thanks for having me, Sarah.
Pleasure to be here.
>> I know you guys had an exciting product launch recently,
so I'm so excited to jump into the demo and see that live.
But before we do that, I'd love to learn just a little bit more about who is
Zoom info,
what do you guys do and who are you helping on the market?
>> Yeah, wonderful. Zoom info has been on this 17-year mission of
helping go to market teams,
get to their buyers first with the most context.
So our goal has been to gather as much data,
as much signal and make it available to sales and marketing teams.
So they can get to the right buyers,
address them at context and the more you know about the buyer,
the more relevant you can be.
That's been what the founding thesis was,
our founder Henry, when he started this out of his dorm room in law school,
17 years ago, and with this latest release to your point,
AI is now at a point where it can really make a huge difference in how this
information
can become more valuable to these teams.
That's the next iteration of what we're trying to do here with
Zoom info co-pilot is make all of this data and signal that we've become
sort of very famous for,
but make it that much more actionable,
that much more useful and the proof is in the pudding.
So super excited that this is the type of show where we actually get to show
you
what we're talking about.
Yeah, this is my favorite part and we could jump right into it is
seeing an actual demo of your AI and your use cases.
So I'd love to jump into the demo if you're ready.
Fantastic. You're able to see my screen here.
Yep.
So you put yourself right in the shoes of, you know, a seller,
you've got your target account list, you know,
you've got a quarter hanging over your head,
up and you've got all this information you have to sift through,
and you're working in an environment where there's less and less
information available from buyers.
You know, buyers aren't filling out forms.
They're not raising their hands until they're completely ready
and have pretty well made a decision.
Qualified knows this all too well.
You've built a whole sort of market motion around this.
So I'm showing you here is, you know, a target account list
that's tailored to a particular seller.
So in this sort of demo, this is my target account list
and it's prioritized by, you know, signal strength,
recency, and it's organized by the target accounts.
I should be like reaching out to you.
So you've already got, I'll take the example
or rely a quest here on top.
It's telling me that it's a great account fit.
It's in Salesforce.
It's a target account for me.
And here's why it's a good time to reach out.
In the last seven days, they've had a funding round.
They actively research sales and sales operations,
which in this case is what I'm like selling to them.
Dean Vecchio is recently promoted to Vice President of Sales.
These are all really good reasons to reach out.
So co-pilot is telling me, hey, you know,
based on your entire target account list,
this is a good one you should like focus on.
So we all know that today, buying groups are getting larger,
decisions are more like complex.
So you'll see over here that I've got the option
to find the buying group.
And when I click on it, there I'll take your eyes over
to the right side of the screen,
where you'll see a list of potential buyers
that comprise the buying group.
And at the top here, you'll see that we've taken
a lot of photographic information and information
we know about from our like third party data
to make an AI based recommendation
on who the right buying group should be.
So you've got your, you know, all the buying groups organized,
but these little stars here are where we're applying AI,
knowing what we know about what you're offering is,
what, you know, who makes the decisions
or like a request and giving you recommendations.
These can all be tailored now.
I can go in here and customize who's in the buying group.
But by default, the AI is giving you a really good starting
point and giving you recommendations
on who you should be reaching out to.
And based on your past history and success you've had,
you can also filter this down by who's most likely to engage.
So already see the AI already starting to work
through some of the toughest sort of, you know,
decisions and research elements
that a seller has to go through is,
who should I be reaching out to,
who's more likely to like respond?
And amongst this, I'll just take it up,
Joey and Julio here as examples.
I want to fire off an email to them.
Yep.
Give me a moment here.
Actually, what I'll do is I will cancel out of here
and move you over to, I had a draft here, say, excuse me.
I'll go over here, bring this up again.
And you'll see over here,
it's starting to compose a message for me.
And because of all the signal and data and contacts
that Zoom info has, and this is sort of what we're known for
is the breadth of data, both the first party data
we're getting from your CRM and map
as well as all the third party data we're known for,
we're able to aggregate that and put together
a really well contextualized message
that gives you a starting point.
Now, you know, you can personalize this yourself.
You'll see over here that you might say,
"Hey, I want this to be a little more friendly."
I'll go ahead and rewrite it for you.
I want to shorten this a little bit
because I feel like, you know,
I've seen that shorter messages have better responses
and I've got a good template for what I can already
like sort of send out to John.
I've left further options here where I can click on,
you know, "Pape, they've actively researched sales.
If I want to add some additional context,
I can do that as well."
And I can go ahead and have it drafted again.
And it'll continue to work with the personalization.
I'm giving it to give me a really good starting point.
And the difference between this and, you know,
there's a lot of AI email writers here.
It's all the context that is sucking in.
It's pulling in all the signal.
It's pulling in what it knows about your buying group
and it's creating a really like well contextualized
like email for me, as well as it's giving me
some good context on who all I should reach out to
so I can increase my odds of winning.
- Yeah, this is incredible.
I know just from listening to my SDR team,
what you heard from the start there of like,
"Oh, you know, Dean just got hired.
They did a run of funding."
Like it takes teams so much time to go find those signals
when they're in despair of places
and they're trying to research
and that already is such a time set for our team.
And then to your point of writing those emails
and having AI help draft those emails,
yes, they could go use a chat, UT,
but to your point that doesn't have any of the context
of what they're doing, who they are or like your own product,
which I think is so important to writing those emails
and our reps take so much time to draft emails,
even having AI help do that first draft for them
and having all of those signals
that are being able to be important.
Like what you just showed them like,
"Oh man, that would have taken our reps an hour."
Like if they were doing a really good job
of like doing their target account research and writing that,
that's a really time consuming process
that you just showed in a couple of minutes.
Fantastic.
It's pretty remarkable and you've sort of teed up
the next part of what I'm about to share,
which is even more exciting.
But to your point, it's about giving sellers
the benefit of speed and confidence.
And those are game changers.
I hope everyone wants to be in a deal first
and you want to approach your buyer with context.
You don't want to waste their time, you want to add value.
And a lot of times I think sales teams or sellers
get a bad rap because, you know,
"Hey, I got..." and you see it all the time on LinkedIn
and I have people calling out SDRs.
Like they sent me a poorly crafted email
and well, it's really hard.
You know, they're not...
It's not for lack of trying.
If you don't have the information,
you're just working, you know, a little bit blind.
You're trying to move fast,
but you're also trying to go in depth.
And this is giving you both speed and depth
without having to sacrifice quality.
Yeah.
And I'll slick in a second here and show you now
if I dive into a rely quest now.
You're getting all the details that
you're zooming for is known for, right?
So you know about the company, you know all the signals,
you know the contacts.
But I'm going to take you over here to the stuff
that's super new over here with Co-Pilot,
which is your account AI.
And this is just incredible
because you talked about the hours
you need to spend and do in research.
Think about, you know, doing a preparation
for your sales manager, your CRO,
who's coming in as an exec sponsor
and like, "Hey, I want to know about this account."
It's hours of preparation to get, you know,
your manager prepared.
I'm like, "What they need to know about the account."
And over here, all of it's summed up for you.
Really succinctly, everything you'd need to know
about this account for you to be able to engage
in a meaningful way.
What are their pain points?
Like, so you see over here, like,
these are the products they have.
This is the utilization.
These are the licenses that they've used.
You don't have time for the full report.
Here's a quick summary on who they are.
This is pulling in not just from, you know,
publicly available information,
but it's also looking at, you know,
our conversational intelligence.
So it's capturing, like, you know,
proprietary stuff that you'd have, like, you know,
between the conversations you've had
between the buyer and seller
that add a little more context.
So you know, "Hey, is this a happy customer or not?"
Like, you know, one of the recent discussions
has been around where they're in the renewal process.
You know, and I can go through here
and, you know, here are the important contacts
that I need to know about.
Here's general information.
Everything you need to know about the company,
company overview, products and services they have.
Here's the financials of the company.
If they're a public company, you'll get an entire,
their entire earnings call summarized for you.
How many salespeople are really good
at reading through an entire earnings call transcript
and, like, bleeding out what they really need to know?
This is, you know, AI is really, really good at this stuff.
It's good at taking mass amounts of information
and just making it very digestible.
So the sales teams, in the sales teams,
can do what they're actually really good at,
which is creating those human-to-human conversations,
getting back to why they got into selling to begin with,
which is not to be master researchers
or wizards that are using a lot of tech.
They're there at building wonderful human relationships
and adding value.
And this is taking all the grunt work out of the equation,
just making it really easily digestible for them.
- Totally.
I know we've heard throughout this AI era
that started in 2022,
there was, "A is gonna free up time for you
to do more high priority things."
And when it stands, you're like, "Yeah, well,
what does that mean?"
But then you show it here and you're like,
"Oh, Dear Boy, like, sellers aren't,
you know, listening to an entire earnings call.
They're not good at going through all of sales force
and pulling out, you know,
I've been an exec sponsor on calls
and gone in feeling unprepared,
because it's hard to go through the entire sales force instance
and the information in the earnings call
and prep me coming in blind on what to focus on in this call.
And those are activities that sellers don't wanna do
and we're like, "Oh, if AI can do this for them,
that is spring up their time."
Dear Boy, for high priority activities,
which is what we pay them to do is close deals
and build relationships.
So it's so cool seeing like actual use cases of that
because we've been hearing that for a long time,
but you're actually showing how that's being taught.
- You know, you don't and we've been,
this is how we've been using it as well.
You don't even need to have much of the conversation
with, you know, the seller ahead of time.
You jump in and, you know,
I was recently at Gardener CSO at Forrester Summit.
It's able to meet with, you know, customers' hours
where, you know, I quickly just pulled up our instance
of co-pilot, go through and I've got a full summary
of everything I need to know about the account.
And in some cases, the customer themselves didn't realize
that they're, "Oh, we're at 80% utilization.
I had no idea."
And I was able to speak with, you know,
with such command about the account
and would have taken me hours of chasing down, like, you know,
both the SDR and the CSM and the seller
to learn everything I need to know about the account.
It's all here summarized for me.
But even better, as I prepare for, you know, a meeting
or as if I want to know more about the account,
we've now taken the best of, you know,
what generative AI has really brought
to the sort of forefront,
like the chat GPT type of experience.
And, you know, I call it chat BTB.
It's right here in front of you
and you're able to interface with all this data
in a way where this is how we're, you know,
learning to expect how to interface with AI.
So, you know, we've got some prompts for you here,
but hey, tell me what I need to know
before jumping in a cold or live quest.
And here you've got it instantly just summed up, like, for me.
So...
- That is really cool that I wanted to know
it's right here and it's summarized for me.
- We've, I think there's such a cool part about
but this natural language and being able to,
so you see me able to just interface with AI
and ask it questions of that natural language
instead of having to like go in and pull reports
and figure out how we can build formulas and salesforce
to like pull this data,
being able to just use that natural language
and say, hey, can you just tell me what I need to know?
Or hey, can you just summarize this for me
and tell me a little bit more, it's so much easier
and just, I think, into with how we interact as people,
which just makes it such a key feature.
So, I was so excited for you to show that I could see it
on the right hand side and I was like,
this is so cool, it gets your point.
You're meeting with people, these conferences
and yeah, they are overview is fantastic
but you might wanna go a little deeper on something
and you need to pass the chat right there,
you're not in Slack or teams trying to ask
like four different people on the account for answers
and you can just do that for you
and save their time to do other things.
- Yeah, I mean, the irony of this is like it's,
it's sort of AI sort of humanized our relationship
in some way with the machine.
So, I mean, I'll do, you know,
I'm gonna just run a real-time experiment here.
I haven't tried this prop before, but, you know,
are they a happy customer?
Good thing to know before I jump on a call.
And here you find out actually,
so right here, based on the information provided,
it does not appear that it requires
to the completely happy customer of.
So, Skywing is, you know, I'm showing you
an in a demo instance of a fictional company called Skywing
and good stuff to know.
Hey, there's a slight lack of trust over here,
so there's a potential for non-renewal.
They've had some integration adoption challenges.
They're concerned about Skywing's security.
Negotiations are on pricing, implying
that this is part of, point of contention.
Really good context to know,
so you don't have, you know, the exec sponsor come in,
thinking everything's all great,
now I'm gonna ask for that renewal,
and you know what, I'm gonna increase the price on them as well,
all of a sudden, you take a different tone with them.
You know, you've got a completely different approach
and they're all things that, you know,
I mean, so many different use cases for this, right?
Account prep, exec sponsor, you have sales tone over
and new person comes in and we've got to catch up
on like the account.
Really everything that you'd need available to you
in a number of different ways.
And then with the emailer and with this chat,
it just makes it all very actionable.
And I mean, that's a part for me,
which is super exciting is we see so much AI at work
and it's solving a lot for us,
but you know, how much of it can actually be put to use.
And what I love about this is this is actionable.
This is stuff that you can use today.
- Yeah, this is incredible.
I love that real-time example because to your point,
like, yeah, as an exec sponsor,
I'm gonna wanna know if they're not a happy customer,
you don't wanna come in thinking
this is gonna be an easy renewal conversation,
it turns out not to be,
but also I think about our, you know,
we do our executive reviews with customers
and being able to even use like how it bolds,
like the sections, like those are really small things,
but really useful things for me
as an end user to see things summarize
with like a headline and a quick summary at the bottom.
Is my, you know, CSMs can now use this
to change their entire presentation
that we would give to that customer?
Because I know these are issues you're having.
I can bring in the right people to the conversation,
talk about integrations or safety concerns
I'm gonna bring on some of them or a team
that can reassure you about safety and security concerns.
So I get to see so many use cases
for just that one hot in general.
I'm like, oh yeah, I would use this.
Exactly.
And that was sort of the, you know,
the sort of founding thesis was, you know,
which customer should I talk to?
When should I talk to them?
What should I say?
It's what everybody in the go-to-market team really wants
to know if you're armed with that information,
there's so many different use cases
from the CSM point of view, a seller point of view,
you know, any one of the go-to-market team, you know,
I wanna know when I, who should I talk to?
When should I talk to them?
What should I say?
And then of course, who should I say it to?
And that's where combining a lot of that first party data
with all the third party, propriety data we sit on,
yeah, that's sort of what the magic equation is bringing in,
all the signal, all this data together.
You've got this wealth of information that you can tap into.
It's been, you know, the perfect storm of like AI
is in a place right now where it can really do
some great stuff with it.
And so it's never been a better time to put out
sort of a product like this.
Yeah.
The other one that's, you know, might be the last thing
I show you here as well is I talked to you
about the target accounts, the preparation
for these target accounts.
The other thing that we surface because we sit on
all this third party data is white space companies.
So these are, let me cancel out this right here.
These are all companies that aren't part
of your target account list, you know,
might, may or may not be in your CRM,
but they're exhibiting buying signals.
So this is all your opportunities that you may not be acting on
that you're missing out on because, you know,
you're using traditional methods of, you know,
prospecting based on losing your ICP.
I want to go after this vertical, you know,
I, you know, I'm looking at thermographic information,
but you know, they're buying signals that you're missing.
And so now you've got an opportunity to see all these counts
that are showing signals and, you know, in our, you know,
beta that we ran over 500 customers and over 20,000 users,
you know, almost half the pipeline was predicted by co-pilot,
which means they were buying signals there that, you know,
in many cases you didn't have visibility into
and you potentially would have like missed.
And that's what we're all going for,
whether we're in, from a marketing lens or sales lens,
we all want that first move or advantage.
You get to that buyer first, you get to control the narrative
and being able to have visibility in these signals
and act on them.
It's sort of the key to having that first move or advantage.
And that's been a lot of the guiding principle behind this
is how can we give GoToMarket teams a first move or advantage
so they can anticipate their next buyer
and approach them with a lot of confidence.
- Yeah, that's, that's incredible
that over half the pipeline was predicted by this.
So that's like, that's all I care about, you know,
I'm in demand, and I care about pipeline.
And I like having this white space area in particular
because, you know, we talked about target accounts.
Obviously those are very important,
but they are, they're not infinite.
Usually, most companies have a smaller, very honed
target account list.
That's what ABM folks really focus on.
But there are a lot of other companies out there
that match your ICP that might be in your Salesforce instance,
but just aren't focusing your SDRs on them
because they haven't, you know, up to this point,
you wouldn't have had the signals
that they are worth reaching out to.
So being able to come in here and easily see,
yeah, these are accounts I haven't been thinking about
that I can reach out to you.
And I still love that it gives you,
now's the time to reach out and here's why.
Those three little bullets there,
I'm like, man, that saves us SDRs so much time.
- It's the combination of knowing,
you're having visibility into this versus all the research,
then knowing what to say, also knowing who to say it to,
and then also having the chat ability to learn more
about it based on, you know,
everyone's got their own approaches as well, right?
Everyone's got their own methodology.
So if I can have a chat-like interface,
where I just wanna know particulars about it,
hey, tell me when they had their last funding round
because I like to take that angle.
Tell me, you know, if a new champion like Joy
and or if a champion left,
just all that information allows them also, you know,
to personalize their content and their approach,
whether it's via phone or, you know, via email.
- Absolutely, well, GM, this was fantastic.
Thank you so much for taking us through this demo
and your new co-pilot.
It's amazing.
I know you just launched this what, like a week ago
and very cool to see it in action.
- It's been super exciting.
Thanks so much for letting me show you a glimpse
of what this is and, you know, where the exciting part,
which is how like just tech and innovation works is.
This is this version of co-pilot you're seeing
is the worst version that you're ever gonna see
because we're only feeding in your AIs
and we're only gonna get better.
So only gonna get smarter.
I mean, we've just seen even a chat GPT, right?
The pace at which, you know, you see the innovation there.
You just see how fast it's moving
and the combination of that and, you know,
for us, the roadmap is just to continue to feed signals in.
We have a large sort of partner ecosystem we're investing in
so that we can get signals from our like partners
and in return, they get access to this information.
It just creates this wonderful flywheel
of being able to, you know, we want this value
to sit wherever people are working.
So whatever platform you're in,
whether you're in your sales engagement platform,
whether you're in your CRM, this will be available to you
and in return, right?
We understand those buying motions better
and that makes co-pilot richer.
It just creates this great symbiotic relationship
where, you know, we continue to just, you know, apply AI
to this increasing set of signal and data.
So we're super excited about where we can take this.
- Absolutely. Now I have a couple of questions
I would love to wrap with.
The first one being, you mentioned Zoom info,
it's been around for, I think you said 17 years,
but how long have you been building AI into Zoom info?
- So, you know, it's been years of, you know,
building AI and, you know, investing in it,
but I'd say over the last, you know, 24 months,
the vision of bringing co-pilot to life
has really been a very heavy investment in generative AI.
So we've had, you know, you know, prescriptive AI,
it has been predictive AI, it has been, you know, you know,
AI and we conflate the terms AI and machine learning
quite often and so without getting very sort of pedantic
about it, I'd say what makes this vision really interesting
is, you know, we're at a place right now
where generative AI is able to do, you know,
some things that have a exponential effect.
I think we've all experienced it in our lives, right?
Like everybody knows it has played around with chat GPT
in some way, shape or form, even though AI has been around
for, you know, years and years,
it hasn't really hit the public imagination until chat GPT
really, you know, brought generative AI to the forefront.
And so it's what that lens we're over, you know,
we've really doubled down on our view.
And, you know, this is, this version of Zoom info
with co-pilot is I think where, let's say,
it's truly an AI first offering versus AI being
behind the scenes making stuff better.
This is an AI forward offering.
>> Yeah, I love the way you worded that.
It's been there, you've been building it for,
there's been AI features sprinkled out the product
but this is the first time where it's actually been like,
hey, this is AI first, AI forward.
Now, what you showed today, is that currently available
to customers that they were to purchase Zoom info tomorrow?
>> Absolutely.
>> You know, our GA was last week as you noted,
May 22nd, so co-pilot's available.
We've already seen a tremendous amount of interest in it
launched last week, so yeah.
Ready for everyone in it.
It's sort of, you know, our customer base is Zoom info
because of this foundational problem it solves
really spans the gamut.
We've got, you know, your mom and pop shops
with small SMBs that use this to build as a foundation
of their business.
And then we've got large enterprises, you know,
the snowflakes of the world and, you know,
the abuse of the world that rely on this data as well.
Everybody needs buyers.
Everybody needs to know more about their buyer
and this offering is quite malleable
because it sits on our data combined with your first party
data and you sort of, you know, seeing how to suffer,
sort of manifests itself.
It's in a manner where any salesperson in any sort of
size organization can take advantage of it.
And, you know, we are that sort of, you know,
rare company that has a really healthy,
large enterprise business and SMB business
as well as a pretty strong PLG motion as well.
And I think it's because of the nature of, you know,
what we're offering, which is context and information
about your buyers, wherever they are.
>> Absolutely.
Now my last question for you is,
what's next on your AI roadmap as Zoom info?
>> So coming up next for us is, you know,
a really like healthy map of additional like signals
that are going to make all of this context richer, you know,
you know, more tangible.
It's just like I said, this is,
this is the worst version you're seeing right now.
And it's got a pretty cool like wow factor to it.
But additional, a lot of analytics as well for you to be
able to see the impact that this has been able to actually
tangibly measure, you know, the impact of signals
and how it affects, you know, opportunity conversion rates
without having to just, you know, come up with a lot
of convoluted RAM dashboards or investing heavily
in a lot of dashboards that'll let you see and measure
and really see the impact of what CoPilot's having.
And so our CoPilot analytics, that'll be, you know,
a fast follow to this will make a lot of this value
very tangible and measurable to our customers.
- Amazing.
Well, for anyone who's watching this,
if you want to see a full demo,
I know what GM showed today was just a taste of CoPilot's.
If you want to see a full demo of Zoom info
and what they can do,
you can obviously go to zoominso.com and request that.
Otherwise GM, thank you so much for joining us
on the show today and showing us Zoom info's CoPilot.
That was fantastic.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)