Henry Schuck

The information age is over. This is the age of GTM intelligence.

Most parents want their kids to win. I want my daughter Grace to get her WHOOPED this soccer season - and she's about to!! For years, she's been playing against kids a head shorter - she could show up, dribble through 3 defenders, and feel like A PRO. She literally doesn't know what it feels like to lose. Her first game was last Friday - she got smoked. When her friends asked her how it went she said “I’d rather not say.” I started chuckling - “No Grace, tell them” She's going to get beat all season. She's going to have to focus more and practice more. She can't let her team down - and she knows it. I said to my wife, Jessica that night: "This is the best thing that's happened to her all year." Why? Because getting your ass kicked is a gift! It’s the only way to get better at anything - you have to go play people who are better than you. You don't get better playing in the B leagues. It’s the same in business. You have to go find EVERY team that's beating you, study how they sell, study how they win, and then go prosecute EVERYTHING inside your own business that isn't as good as theirs. I look at the best companies in our space all the time. If they're beating us anywhere - any use case, any objection, any deal - I study how they sell, how they price, how they package, what gaps their products fill. Then I look around ZoomInfo and ask: What can we improve? Our product? Our sales motion? Our messaging? Our marketing? Then we go fix the thing that's not working. This is what built @ZoomInfo. And it’s about to make Grace a better soccer player too.

Two weeks ago my Mom - an Iranian immigrant - sent me this clip from a newspaper article in 1979. She was stabbed in a hate crime while out for an evening with her brother in Columbus, Ohio. My Mom came to America for a better life and got here when Iran and America were great diplomatic partners, the ground changed under her in 1979 and it has never rebounded to the way it was when she arrived. But a better life is what she worked to deliver for her, my sister and me - and now we get to provide that to our kids and their kids. To do that she worked 16 hours a day as a nurse - a day ‘off’ was an 8 hour day. Even though we saw it - she made sure we knew too “Henry, I work so hard - I gave up all my life for you - just get good grades and go to college” :-) It wasn’t easy work either on her feet, with no breaks, no "stock options". She just did whatever it took to keep our family afloat. I remember having this moment early on in @ZoomInfo when I was like WOW - I'm making more money than my mom and I'm only working 12 hour days when she had to work 16 hour days!! I felt so lucky. In a world where ‘work-life balance’ has become a mantra - I feel lucky to be able to work hard, I feel lucky to be able to honor the work that my Mom did every day - I’d feel wrong not doing that. Any work ethic I have came from watching her do the impossible without complaining or a safety net. Whatever I build, however far I go, I’m just applying the principles that I learned from her. Being able to work hard is a gift.

@TheCinesthetic The Other Guys (2010)

A movie that's in your top 25 list but unlikely to be in anyone else's?

Most CEOs walk into their board meetings trying to look BIG and BAD. I can tell you after ~45 board meetings, if you do that, you will get EATEN ALIVE! Try this instead… When I started I had no idea - after one of my early board meetings I went to Randy Winn (my PE board member and CEO of S&P Capital IQ) and said, “Randy, just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll go do it.” That was not the right approach(!!) Over time, I've refined how I've done them and I now have 4 golden rules. 1. Start every meeting with the last meeting's feedback. At the end of every board meeting, I call each director individually. What went well? What would you like more of? What concerns you? Then at the next meeting, I incorporate all of it. Boards notice when you listened. They notice even more when you don’t. 2. I write a 10-page memo before the meeting starts Every quarter, before I sit down with the board, I write a 10-page memo. What went well. What didn't. Where I'm focused. The metrics we said would improve: did they or didn't they, and why? I pull in EVERYTHING: product, GTM, retention rates, new business, customer conversations, employee calls. I prosecute that data until I understand all of it. Then I write it down cleanly, just the truth as I see it. 3. Pick one topic and go deep. In every board meeting we select 1 topic to really engage on with the board: new products, pricing and packaging, competition etc etc. And we pick just 1. The board's time is too valuable for surface-level coverage of everything. 4. Then give them the honest read. Not some polished BS, the reality of what's working, what isn't, and what I’m doing about it. Remember, your board might forgive bad results but they will NOT forgive stuff being hidden from them. P.S. this pic is with Todd Crockett and Randy Winn - both long time @ZoomInfo board members.

@kamilrextin @ZoomInfo @OpenAI @ChatGPTapp already done! claude.com/connectors/zoo…

@HenryLSchuck @ZoomInfo @OpenAI @ChatGPTapp Plz do Claude 🥹

@ZoomInfo is expanding our partnership with @OpenAI with our @ChatGPTapp connector. Open to ANYONE - free sign up gets you 100 free credits. We've added Intent, Contact and Company Enrichment, Find Similar Companies, and Account Context that marries your first party calls, crm, and zoominfo data together. Use it to build a call or email audience, filter that audience with intent, write an email to engage, and leverage your call history to be specific with our outbound. Start Building today here: chatgpt.com/apps/zoominfo/…

Great Use Case every GTM team should be running. Close a deal, find their competitors, enrich with your buying committee, send it to the seller who just closed it.

7/ ▶️ Watch how they built it youtube.com/watch?v=atCeMd…

@GutsSellsTech will do the call in whatever language you want. you pick.

Asked for Zoominfo pricing and the SDRs pushing for a meeting, emailed me “we only conduct our meetings in English therefore you’ll need another English speaking colleague to join with you” Unreal 😭

@m_sett @ZoomInfo Google rolling out a fix now - should be at +25% of users - shut down the browser and open it back up. issues.chromium.org/issues/5009756…

@ZoomInfo any intentions on fixing your chrome extension? This is bad

@jasonlk Love that you went with “a presidential term” instead of “4 years” at the end here - 🤌😙

Salesforce is the greatest B2B company of all time. Founded in 1999. $1B in revenue by year 10. $10B by year 19. $42B by year 27. No other enterprise software company has ever built a business that large, that durable, with that much compounding. It took Salesforce 19 years to get to $10B ARR. It took Anthropic 4. Here's what the revenue trajectories actually look like side by side: Salesforce: Year 5: $100M Year 10: $1B Year 15: $4B Year 19: $10B Year 27: $42B OpenAI: Year 8: $2B Year 9: $6B Year 10: $25B Anthropic: Year 3: $87M Year 4: $1B Year 5: $30B Anthropic went from $87M to $30B in about 15 months. Salesforce went from $87M to $30B in about 22 years. Both are real businesses with real enterprise customers. Salesforce has 150,000+ customers. Anthropic now has 1,000+ spending over $1M each, a number that doubled in under two months. This is not about one being better than the other. Salesforce built the template that made enterprise cloud software possible. Every B2B company that came after it, including the AI companies, benefited from the playbook Benioff wrote. But the speed is different now. Usage-based AI revenue scales with compute, not headcount. Cloud marketplace distribution replaces years of building a direct sales force. And the product is horizontal from day one, not vertical. The first $10B in B2B used to take a generation. Now it takes a presidential term.

@KyleAsay_ 😂

Imagine the AI SDR outreach to Anthropic execs right now: “Hey noticed you went from $19B to $30B ARR in the last month - that’s great but I think you could do more. We can help you improve outbound by rotating your mailboxes to improve delivery so your buyers actually know who you are. Can I send over how we’d double your growth rate in 6 months? p.s. it’s the same approach we used to get one of our customers from $3M ARR to $4M in just 60 days!”

@willahmed 🙇🏽

You have no experience. You’ve never started a company. You’ve never had a full time job. Nike is going to kill you. You’re a kid. You don’t have technical skills. You shouldn’t build hardware. Apple is going to kill you. You can’t build hardware. You can’t measure heart rate non-invasively. Athletes don’t care about recovery. Under Armour is going to kill you. It won’t be accurate. You don’t listen. You’re an ineffective leader. You can’t recruit great talent. You’re going to have to pay every athlete. You can’t measure sleep non-invasively. It’s too expensive to research. Athletes are a small market. The product costs too much to make. The product costs too much to sell. Your valuation is too high. Consumers aren’t going to want it. Hardware is too hard. You should measure steps. Fitbit is going to kill you. You can’t build a marketing engine. You can’t raise enough money. You need a real CEO. Google is going to kill you. You can’t be a subscription. You can’t build a brand. You can’t do consumer in Boston. Your valuation is too high. You shouldn’t make accessories. You shouldn’t make apparel. Lululemon is going to kill you. You can’t predict Covid. Stay in your niche. You are going to run out of money. You can’t build a health platform. Amazon is going to kill you. You can’t measure blood pressure. You can’t get medical approvals. The market is too small. You don’t understand AI. The market is too competitive. It won’t work internationally. The supply chain is too complicated. You can’t build an AI. You can’t raise enough money. It’s too competitive. Healthcare isn’t going to want it. … Just keep going ✌️

At @ZoomInfo, I stopped running weekly C-suite meetings. Like most enterprise orgs, they were failing in obvious ways and so we replaced them with something else... A daily 1-hour meeting with my full exec team. Weekly exec meetings can fail in several predictable ways: - Problems had 6–7 days to grow before anyone talks about them - They become political - execs pre-align in side conversations, then show up “aligned”. They’d say things like “I’ve already talked to James about this…” as a way to avoid the proper back and forth new initiatives deserve. - The meeting itself becomes this performative theatre of head nodding By the time issues showed up, they were harder and more expensive to fix. So we tried something new. Our daily standup has hard rules: Same execs, every weekday, anyone can add a topic to the agenda, no slides and DEFINITELY no pre-alignment. And we got rid of all standing 1:1s between execs. If our CMO and our CRO had a topic that had to be discussed, the daily standup was where to do it. (If you were executing on an initiative together that meeting was fine to continue) And we only cover four things: 1) What are the metrics on the key initiatives we are running? 2) What’s blocked right now? 3) What decision actually needs to be made? 4) What’s coming down the pipe that requires cross-functional coordination - no surprises? My favorite part about this is our weekly standup would fill about 30 minutes - and we’d be out of topics. Now, every 1 hour, daily meeting goes the full hour, every time. And it became the end of "getting up to speed", “we’ll take that offline” or “Oh my goodness, I didn’t know that was happening?!?” at ZoomInfo! After that, a couple of things happened almost immediately: First, issues showed up earlier - you can’t hide for a week when you’re checking in every day. Second, accountability became clearer. If inputs didn’t change and progress didn’t happen fast - and everyone could see who was responsible. Third, everyone had context for everything that was happening - every important decision was front and center for everyone to see and be a part of. If you've got other ideas for improving communication in large orgs, I'm listening.

@GovernorShapiro @MassGovernor

BREAKING: I just signed a bipartisan bill giving bars the option to stay open until 4 AM as we celebrate FIFA and America250 right here in Philadelphia. Celebrate responsibly, Philly. 🍻🇺🇸

@JaakkoPaalanen @claudeai @ZoomInfo This is the most commonly suggested next step @KeithEnright7 suggested the same. I might try it.

@HenryLSchuck @claudeai @ZoomInfo Or set up a live camera to the freeway which tracks the names —> sent to Claude etc 😀

I keep an index card on my desk and write down the names of trucking companies I see out my window... (Yes, it's weird) I now use @claudeai and @ZoomInfo's MCP integration to help. Let me explain. Every time I pass a business or a truck on the street I wonder to myself: "How do these guys get new customers? I bet they have to find xyz people at abc companies" and then I write the company name down or text it to myself and go look into it when I'm back at the office. My new office sits in front of a freeway, so when I need a break I look out the window, I see all these trucks with logistics company names on them (a great segment for us) So I write them down on an index card - and once a week I hand it off to one of our sales leaders and go "hey, make sure we are going after these". Then it dawned on me... I could just take a picture of that messy index card, upload it to Claude, connect it to ZoomInfo's MCP integration, and in seconds have it: - Identify each company - Check if they're already customers - Enrich with employee size, HQ, and buying committee - Pull contact info and LinkedIn profiles for sales and marketing leadership - Prep me for a first call with account research We went from chicken-scratch on an index card to a fully enriched target list with meeting prep - on my phone, in minutes. Check out how I do it in the video below.

@pitdesi Growing 40%+ at over $1bn in revenue and accelerating. They’re not feeling it.

Figma got crushed on this one :/ Anecdotally seeing more companies task design work to the product team already.

Use it free now: lnkd.in/enWJikEH

Find accounts actively researching your category and hiring to solve problems YOUR PRODUCT SOLVES - in <4 minutes... No heavy ABM motion, no weird back and forth between marketing and sales. Not properly prioritizing your accounts with signals kills your conversion rates, drives down sales productivity, and eats up your cash flow. Most sales teams give up on “warm” leads from marketing and end up building their own lists - and those end up being based on firmographics - industry, company size, title - booorrrinnnnggg. I take three data sources and married them together in GTM Studio: 1. G2 intent data - who's actively researching ZoomInfo right now (thanks Godard Abel and Eric Gilpin) 2. CRM data - excluded existing customers (don't waste your reps' time) 3 Job posting data - filtered for companies hiring roles that mention "prospecting" or "cold calling" Think about what that means... A company is on G2 researching your product, they're not a customer, they're mid-market, right in your sweet spot. AND they're actively hiring people whose job it is to prospect. That's a company with BUDGET, NEED, and URGENCY. The whole thing took me ~3 minutes. Then I added the buying committee with a few clicks so my sellers have names of people, not just company logos. This is what GTM Studio was built for - taking signals that live in different places and combining them so your team focuses on the highest-likelihood opportunities.