From $0 to $400+M: 10 Mistakes the CEO and Founder of ZoomInfo Made on His Journey to IPO (and Beyond) - The 2022 Edition
•Als PPTX, PDF herunterladen•
0 gefällt mir•83 views
In this session, ZoomInfo founder and CEO Henry Schuck shares how he built a business from scratch and grew it into one of the most successful IPOs of the 21st century. Join this session with Henry and SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin to learn where he went wrong, what he would do differently, and how to avoid making the same mistakes he did.
Empfohlen
Empfohlen
Weitere ähnliche Inhalte
Ähnlich wie From $0 to $400+M: 10 Mistakes the CEO and Founder of ZoomInfo Made on His Journey to IPO (and Beyond) - The 2022 Edition
Ähnlich wie From $0 to $400+M: 10 Mistakes the CEO and Founder of ZoomInfo Made on His Journey to IPO (and Beyond) - The 2022 Edition (20)
Mehr von saastr
Mehr von saastr (20)
Kürzlich hochgeladen
Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)
From $0 to $400+M: 10 Mistakes the CEO and Founder of ZoomInfo Made on His Journey to IPO (and Beyond) - The 2022 Edition
- 1. HENRY SCHUCK Founder and CEO ZoomInfo @HenryLSchuck JASON LEMKIN CEO & Co-Founder SaaStr @jasonlk 10 Mistakes in My Journey from Startup to Billion-Dollar Company
- 2. ZoomInfo at a Glance $967M $747 M Annualized Revenue Run Rate 2021 Revenue 11% Bootstrapped International Revenue Customers Initial Funding >25k
- 3. Mistake #1: Not Being Honest About Your Talent
- 4. Mistake #2: Thinking my CFO was my Accountant
- 5. Mistake #3: Not Appreciating GTM as a Strategic Advantage
- 6. Mistake #4: Not Getting Your Product and Engineering Teams on Sales Calls
- 7. Mistake #5: Not Realizing Your Voice is Important
- 8. Mistake #6: Not Knowing That You Have to Develop People
- 9. Mistake #7: Not Adding Great People First, Before Optimization
- 10. Mistake #8: Not Understanding Questions About Your Decisions
- 11. Mistake #9: Not Having the Right Account Structure
- 12. Mistake #10: Not Practicing Difficult Conversations
- 13. THANK YOU
Hinweis der Redaktion
- ZoomInfo Cheat Sheet: Founded Number of Customers Intl Revenue Initial Funding: Bootstrapped
- I was crazy vigilant about talent in sales. If a person wasn’t working out, I would move on immediately. But in areas where I hadn’t learned the skill (product development, engineering, marketing, etc.), I let things linger too long — even when I knew the talent was subgrade. This was a bad decision. Go see what good talent looks like. Take informational interviews. Be honest about whether your own talent lines up.
- For the first 7 years of running the company, I thought a CFO just did the accounting and paid the taxes. That was their function. I was lucky enough to have a board that pushed me into realizing that a great CFO of a fast growth startup is your most important partner. Our CFO built Sales Dashboards that helped us understand the business and the rhythms of the business. Alerted us when things were going well or poorly. Told us when we should invest behind a motion that was working. And when a manager was underperforming their peers. The CFO was a business driver, not an accountant.
- When we started doing M&As, I never thought about how valuable it was to have an incredibly efficient GTM engine. I didn’t appreciate this key asset and strategic advantage of our business. If GTM isn’t something you think about, that’s a major mistake. When I see two companies at parity, but one is running circles around the other in the marketplace, it’s because they’ve figured out their GTM motion. When looking at acquisitions, I have the opportunity to apply our GTM expertise to them. I can leverage real revenue by making them more efficient and increasing their revenue to lead. This gives us the advantage to spend money elsewhere, on other parts of the business. We’ve got more money to spread across the company, to make investments in a smart, strategic way, to grow faster.
- There’s so much that happens on a sales call. It’s magical. People are REAL. They get real honest real quick when you’re asking them for their money. They will tell you exactly what they think of your product, features, service, etc. If your teams that build your product are not in front of the customer when your sales teams are asking them for money — when they’re demoing the product — you’ll never have a great product. They’ll never get the direct customer feedback that inspires real improvement. Your teams will complain. They’ll say it’s a waste of time, that they’re busy. They may even threaten your product roadmap if you make them do it. Make them do it anyway.
- You have a voice. Your board, investors, etc., want to hear that voice. It was like I wasn’t trying to be heard. You build a board of people from Harvard, Penn, etc. They write you a big check. You end up deferring to them. You’re thinking “They’re the smartest people. They know what to do.” And they act this way — they treat you like an older son. It’s easy to fall into that role. You’re like, “Just tell me what I should do and I’ll go do it.” Thankfully, a board member (Randy) said to me, “That’s not how this should work. We’re not involved in the day-to-day. We don’t know how your company operates. You do. We’re here to advise. It’s your job to listen to our advice, but you decide what you want to do.” You have a voice. The board wants to hear that voice. You have to speak up and say things like, “I hear you, but what you’re asking isn’t going to work.” Or “I hear you and I’ll get there, but not today. We’re not ready.” That’s the importance of your voice.
- Guess what? You’re not going to be able to get that A+ player from Salesforce. Know what else? You have to be a great developer of people when you’re running a startup, when you’re a founder. You have to be able to take raw talent and turn it into real value by building leaders at your company. My Chief Revenue Officer was a professional poker player before coming to ZoomInfo; my Head of New Business Sales was a golf caddy; my President and COO started at ZoomInfo six years ago as a Director of Sales Operations. Above everything else, you’re a developer of people. Embrace this role. Invest in it. Learn how to be the best at it, because it’s going to be years before you’ll be recruiting the world’s best talent. For now, you’ve got to build it.
- When something is going well, add great people. You can figure out automation and optimization later. I had this valuable experience when we acquired ZoomInfo. They were a company in our space, but using an entirely different motion. All the things I thought about, I could see happening in this competitor. It was like an open book case study. At DiscoverOrg, we had underinvested in middle managers in our GTM motion. Instead of investing in management, we invested in automation. We automated a lot of management functions. We built an automated system where sales teams would never miss a call, etc. I saw that ZoomInfo had invested in managers, people who could focus, inspire, and manage teams. We saw that their outcomes were much greater than what was possible just from automation. They trusted in their people. They hired good managers who created good structure. We saw that this works. Good management can scale the company. Great managers can outperform any automation.
- Don’t confuse questions to understand how you’re coming up with an idea with disagreement in your conclusion. People want to see how you got there and if they would have gotten there in the same way. At the board level this happens all the time. Someone presents an idea. The board has a bunch of questions. You walk away angry that they don’t see it the same way as you do. For example, one time, my head of HR told me, “Cameron is against this.” Cameron was our CFO. And I said, “That doesn’t sound like Cameron being against it. It sounds like he’s asking questions to understand how you made your decision or to understand how you came up with what you’re proposing.”
- Be thoughtful about segmenting accounts, but also appreciate that it’s a moving target. You can ruin a customer relationship if you keep moving their account. You want to build a consistent connection for your customers. When you build your segments, get as much data as you can and be as thoughtful as possible. But also appreciate that things are going to change, new data is going to come in, new managers are going to present valuable new perspectives, and you’re obligated to resegment again when it makes sense. Example: We have a team of data scientists and former consultants working in our GTM organization. We’ve done multiple iterations of segmentation and only recently realized that segmentations in our Enterprise accounts were under optimized.
- Getting your messaging right on a number of things can make the difference between success and failure. This is especially important internally, on everything for a sales deck to an entire web site. I can’t just tell people what to do. That’s not going to work. I have to build a story, explain the purpose, be persuasive, explain why something is important to the business. This gets people aligned, gets them excited to do what’s being asked.