ZoomInfo Technologies : Acquires RingLead to Help Companies With Comprehensive Data Quality Management and Multi-Source Enrichment

Data quality is important to every company. Without it, software and platforms just aggregate information that might be correct and might help a rep find the next best buyer.

Businesses need a clean, complete, and actionable data asset to inform engagement and drive intelligent automated workflows that increase sales efficiencies and close more deals.

Yet for the last two decades, efforts to automate sales and marketing motions at B2B companies have stalled, often because of bad data. Until recently, just having access to accurate intelligence about all of the companies in a business' total addressable market was a big gap in go-to-market efficiency. ZoomInfo changed that by creating access to more data than most organizations could have ever imagined.

But go-to-market teams still face real challenges integrating, managing, and activating a variety of different data sources across different systems - each with different standards, classifications, values, and varying degrees of quality and completeness. In short, they struggle to create an engagement-ready data asset.

That's why I'm excited to announce that ZoomInfo has acquired RingLead, a leader in data orchestration that helps organizations manage their first- and third-party data assets. Through comprehensive data quality management and multi-vendor enrichment, RingLead helps bridge the gap between a company's intelligence layer and the engagement layer.

RingLead is a leader in data orchestration - in other words, organizing and combining data from different sources and then feeding it into workflows.

It's one thing to activate a clean data source in isolation. It's a completely different thing to merge it meaningfully with a variety of other data sources and first party data that is often incomplete, inaccurate, duplicate, decayed, or continually entering systems of record from a variety of access points.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation platforms, and data warehouses are critical tools for go-to-market teams. But if left unmanaged, bad data enters your platform - and stays there.

Or a system might actually be full of duplicate records that get routed to multiple reps, creating confusion, redundant efforts, and ultimately inefficiency and frustration. They might leave holes in data that make engagement, segmentation, and personalization impossible.

When we talk to our customers, they say data enrichment is an absolute must-have. Then the next set of logical questions typically follow: How do I route the appropriate lead to the right sales team member in real time? How do I make absolutely sure that the data I need gets to the right system or person in order to orchestrate a campaign, execute a marketing or sales play, bring in a partner, or deliver the perfect customer experience? We've partnered successfully with RingLead over the past several years to bring these solutions to market for customers of all sizes and across all industries. We saw the opportunity to accelerate our ability to deliver customer outcomes by bringing our two organizations together.

For sales, marketing, and revenue operations teams, RingLead is an addition to ZoomInfo that will have immediate impact.

Why did ZoomInfo Acquire RingLead?

Data quality management and data orchestration are critical prerequisites for effective go-to-market. Period.

But they are also mandatory for businesses that want to run automated go-to-market motions at scale.

At ZoomInfo, we are trailblazing how companies leverage insights to run automated sales and marketing plays to empower their go-to-market teams. Internally, we've assembled a number of solutions to initiate data-driven plays from a centralized revenue generation function that sits within the sales organization. This team drastically improves our sales team efficiency, effectively serving up opportunities on a silver platter. But a lot goes into ensuring that our go-to-market teams have what they need to be successful, and RingLead has the ability to streamline a lot of those disparate processes.

RingLead works to eliminate persistent data-quality problems through drag-and-drop and rules-based workflows that accomplish the following:

• Lead-to-account matching, which links together data from different systems and helps prevent duplicate records.
• Data enrichment for filling gaps in records, which establishes cascading rules for handling multiple sources of enrichment data and provides contextual and actionable insights.
• Data cleansing, which ensures that data values are up-to-date and accurate and that decayed records are flagged and removed.
• Data normalization to create consistency at the form-field level across different data sources.
• Data deduplication, which merges and removes duplicate records, saves money on database storage costs, and increases rep productivity.
• Routing and scoring to improve lead follow-up through drag-and-drop workflows or customized, build-your-own flowcharts.

The best part is that RingLead can perform these functions on multiple data sources. If a customer uses multiple data providers, for example, RingLead allows for input through the various data providers' APIs. It also sets up hierarchical rules to determine what data sources should be used to enrich which fields in a particular order, what taxonomy of values to map to, and more.

RingLead is a leader in Data Quality, Lead-to-Account Matching, and Routing grids on G2. We expect that as we accelerate RingLead's development and expand its integrations, RingLead will move even higher in these categories and establish leadership positions in additional categories related to the management and handling of customer data.

What the RingLead Acquisition Means for Customers

Data management challenges cost the average organization $15 million per year. Leads that aren't followed up on in the first five minutes are eight to 10 times less likely to convert. Whether you run demand gen, marketing operations, sales operations, or revenue operations, your team will convert and win more deals when they have clean, enriched, and appropriately routed data.

RingLead does that by orchestrating data flows and decreasing dirty data. Let's look at some practical use cases:

Streamline Lead Routing

Combined with ZoomInfo Enrich, RingLead's data cleanse and routing capabilities can simplify rules on which reps get certain leads. For example, RingLead can automatically assign round-robin routing for emerging global accounts. Meanwhile, for U.S. accounts, Enrich can determine which state a company is actually headquartered in, allowing RingLead to efficiently route leads based on whether a customer has regional sales territories. Drag-and-drop features in RingLead make these rules easy to implement and adjust.

Reduce Inconsistent Data

ZoomInfo FormComplete helps eliminate unnecessary fields for online visitors to fill out on a web form by pulling information from our database. But that doesn't stop some visitors from entering information inconsistently, such as phone numbers with or without parentheses for area codes. RingLead can standardize the information in these fields so that phone numbers (and other details) appear the same consistently, which helps marketing ops teams avoid duplicate records within a CRM system.

Prioritize Multiple Data Sources

Research by Salesforce has previously indicated that marketing departments used a median of 15 data sources. With that in mind, imagine a lead comes in, but various data sources used by the customer list different revenue numbers for the account. This can create confusion on how the lead gets routed - it could go to a mid-market rep or an enterprise team depending on revenue, for example. RingLead can prioritize which data source gets pulled from first to determine accurate revenue, saving time with lead-to-accounting matching for marketing and sales teams.

Update Salesforce Records

Revenue ops professionals who are overburdened already with Salesforce monitoring and duties will find an ally in RingLead. For instance, daily worries about whether new SDR records will make it to Salesforce in a timely manner can be decreased using RingLead. In one action, RingLead and ZoomInfo can normalize and enrich lead data, route the lead to the appropriate SDR, and send a record to Salesforce in near real time.

Bringing Applications to Life with Better Data

When go-to-market motions begin with a data- and insights-first mindset, sales and marketing applications come to life. When data and intelligence are delivered seamlessly to the sales and marketing tech stack, it allows for insights to inform sales motions and to trigger automated workflows that enable efficiency and scale.

Even though the first sales and marketing automation systems have been with us for decades, many companies have yet to use, or are just beginning to use, true, insight-driven automation in their go-to-market processes. It's not because the applications didn't exist, but rather the data needed to drive automation on prospects didn't exist at the level of quality and completeness that was needed to succeed. The movement to make sales and marketing more efficient through data-driven automation is a long-term trend that will continue to accelerate.

With our acquisition of RingLead, ZoomInfo is better positioned to deliver an engagement-ready data asset - automatically cleansed, deduplicated, normalized, enriched, and routed according to the diverse needs of various go-to-market motions.

Learn more about RingLead and find out how ZoomInfo's resources can help you close more deals.