When your business is serving the incredibly diverse array of mid-market companies in the U.S., amassing a supply of reliable data can become a seemingly endless game of cat and mouse.
The information you need for effective go-to-market is out there. But the challenge is chasing down the data — company size, revenue, location, industry and more — across a mishmash of state and local sources.
That’s the problem Capital One’s Commercial Banking business faced before it partnered with ZoomInfo. Today, with ZoomInfo’s Data as a Service delivered into Snowflake, Capital One’s team is able to run a modern go-to-market motion, reclaiming vast amounts of prospecting time for its sales professionals.
“My job is to bring the information to our sales teams as easily as possible,” said Andy Ruffles, director of sales operations and strategy at Capital One Commercial Banking. “Now, instead of 100 different sales teams coming to me with requests, we put the data in one place. We give them a report, and they can get it themselves — it becomes more of that self-service model.”
Ruffles discussed the commercial banking team’s digital data transformation recently in an interview with theCUBE at the Snowflake Summit, alongside Amit Rai, ZoomInfo’s SVP of DaaS.
Better Data, Better Results
“When we started our journey with Capital One, they actually had information for only 15% of their low-end customers,” Rai said. “When they partnered with ZoomInfo, now they were able to segment close to 70% of their low-end business — from 15% to 70%. And that resulted in massive ROI.”
Sales reps were also using spreadsheets to track customers and prospects, causing a disjointed and manual process to be even more tricky. Ruffles knew something had to be done, and he worked with Rai and ZoomInfo’s data services team to transform their manual process into an easily accessible and constantly updated digital data repository.
Capital One uses Snowflake as a customer data repository, where ZoomInfo can provide information on 32 million active businesses in more than 100 million U.S. locations.
“Once you have that data, now you can do predictive modeling, now you can do net-new acquisition, now you can serve the existing customers,” Rai said.
“We’ve had a long journey with ZoomInfo that started with a very simple use case and led to a much more streamlined and collaborative place,” Ruffles said. “The next step is connecting third-party data with our first-party data and suggesting to our sales team where they should be going using automation.”
Designing a Successful Data Strategy
Accenture data shows that 81% of businesses don’t have a strategy that makes full use of their valuable data. Rai contends that success in data strategy often hinges on strong internal alignment with the business’ commercial drivers.
“More and more, chief data officers are aligning themselves to revenue outcomes, because sales and marketing is the bloodline for a company. That’s how the company grows,” Rai said.
Combining the power of platforms like Snowflake and ZoomInfo can help companies and teams of all sizes predict growth and bring better alignment to sales, marketing, and operations by creating a unified source of truth for goals, metrics, and customer personas.
“Customers that use Snowflake and ZoomInfo are able to be prescriptive and proactive, rather than reactive,” Rai said.
Want your GTM engine to run as smoothly as possible? Request a demo today.