Customers that did not, we had a tough time with.” Henry Schuck, CEO and founder of ZoomInfoĪnd so their customer success function was born to prevent churn: their bucket from leaking. “Customers that made it through the first year of renewal stayed forever. In the early days, before the concept of customer success and customer relationships really took off, they were selling a lot but losing more customers than they should have. But closing a deal is never the final step-in fact, they learned it was more like the midpoint, Schuck says. Having spent several years himself making calls, conducting demos, and nurturing leads, Schuck knows that having a tight product-market fit is essential when doing direct marketing and sales.
#Building your client base software#
Building a platform on top of that data application was the next step, putting the software in software-as-a-service. The foundation of ZoomInfo is data: names of companies and decision-makers to connect salespeople, marketers, and recruiters with the right candidates. ZoomInfo, a data and insights platform for sales, marketing, and recruiting professionals, has an $800 million run rate, 3,000 employees worldwide, and 25,000 customers today. That’s the inside scoop from ZoomInfo CEO and Founder Henry Schuck. You can have the best, customer-centric product in the world, but without the right GTM strategy, it’ll never make noise. Make customer success a cornerstone of your go-to-market (GTM) strategy And that first customer is still a customer today, Pace says.
With that experience and insight in his pocket, later in 2013, he closed his first enterprise deal for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That first customer signed on for $27 a month, but it wasn’t about the money, it was what that first sale represented: validation from a customer of the value Auth0 was driving for them.
“I cannot explain to you how happy I was at that time,” recalls Eugenio Pace, co-founder and CEO of authentication platform Auth0, which Okta acquired in 2021.