Ep437: Tal Raz | VP of Product Growth, ZoomInfo

Sure. So again, it's really great to be here. I'm really excited, and for sure it's been quite a journey. And really looking forward to what the future is holding for us. And it's just the beginning. Four and a half years, but every day feels like it's a new beginning. And so yeah, I started. I joined ZoomInfo. I was the seventh employee at the Israeli side. Today we are 280. And my role wasn't really defined. It was more of a 'we are starting to hire in Israel, we know you from the past, come join us and we will do great things together.' And it's exactly, it's exactly describing the first few months of my role. It was understanding who we are, what we are doing, and setting the goals. It was really focused on the marketing organization and translating the marketing initiatives to numbers, tracking them, and finding opportunities. And also finding problems. And usually numbers will reflect you if there are problems. And at first, basically we were finding problems and fixing them, and by that creating opportunities. And about six months after I joined ZoomInfo, we had our first acquisition.

Sure. So ZoomInfo is an intelligent platform with business information about companies and about people inside those companies. And what we do with that huge database that we have is that we are delivering it to our customers in the most sophisticated ways wherever they are, and helping them with 360-degree support to go to market. And the main focus currently is sales. We are expanding to additional markets, but basically sales departments can find inside ZoomInfo everything that they need to reach their next customer, everything that they need to expand inside existing customers, and intelligence, every data that you can think about that can help you, that can save you time, and helping you focus on selling, on talking with your customers, on reaching them, on breaking the ice with them.

Yeah. So our data is gathered from multiple data sources and not just one. So for example, LinkedIn, you are in charge of the data that LinkedIn has on you. You are the one that updates it, and you can not update it for five years or you can update it every day. ZoomInfo gathers its data from multiple data sources, and it matches it, and it's comparing it, and it's making sure to always have the most updated data. And we give you data not only about the person, we also give you data about the company. So if it's intent data about who they are interested in, if it's technology data, what technologies this company is using, if it's scoops, if it's promotions, if it's funding, everything that you can think about that can help you personalize the message to the people that you want to reach out. And all usually sales, they are working on an account, and inside an account they have a buying committee, they have a few people that they can reach out to and create a lobby for their product. And ZoomInfo is not connecting you only to one person, it's connecting you to your buying committee inside an account. It's showing you accounts that are localized to accounts that you have been successful with selling to. It gives you scoops every day, online scoops and information about events, and it's connected to additional tools that you are using, like your Salesforce, your marketing automations. And we have a Chrome extension that will go with you wherever you browse online, and basically to have the ZoomInfo data with you everywhere you are. You don't need to go to LinkedIn and search for a person and see his data and be dependent on if he updated or not. It's everything everywhere. And you can go ahead and you can have actions upon it. So you can trigger actions, you can build workflows. You can say, 'Every time a new VP of Sales is being promoted in the California area of companies that their revenue is more than 100 million dollars, put them inside the workflow, send them an email from me.' Which is amazing. It's time-saving. It's an amazing automation.

Sure. It's a great question, and it's a, ZoomInfo is a really unique place that allows you to grow that way, almost year over year to be promoted. I never felt that I have any glass ceilings above me, something is denying me from being promoted. Like I told you at the beginning, my role started from numbers, from building pipelines of numbers and tracking conversion rates and identifying opportunities. And every time we saw an opportunity or we fixed a problem, my role expanded to be the owner of that problem that we just fixed, or to be the owner of the tool that we just implemented. And from numbers, from analytics, it really fast became more of an operational role. And with the role of operations, you have the ability to be everywhere. You have the opportunity to support everyone with reaching their targets, with understanding where we are going as an organization, where the marketing and product departments are going, on what we are going to be measured on, and what are the needles that we want to move. And as operations, you basically support the team to achieve those targets and to move those needles. So I started to build teams, teams of different professionalities to support every step of the marketing funnel and of the product funnel. So for example, we had an analytics team, we had a website development team, we had more of a business application team that's supporting implementation of tools. And as the company grows, the responsibilities grow. And it's for sure been an amazing journey and an amazing place to be, when every time we are growing from acquisition to acquisition, from emerge to a more, how the leadership is trusting us and letting us be responsible on more and more fields, and letting us experiment things that we think will work. And if they are not working, it's okay, we can fail if we are learning from our mistakes. And it's kind of, I can't point exactly on what made it such a good growth in my specific role, but it's definitely connected to the growth of the company. As the company grows and as we continue to support the growth of the company from the marketing and from the product operational side, they all just expanded.

It's been amazing. If you would ask me five years ago if I see myself as VP of something or even a director of something in such a successful company, I would probably say no, no chance in hell. I'm a mother, I have two boys, and I will not find a company that will support me being a mom and my career, no chance in hell. And also, how can I combine being a mom and having a career? And it kind of happened, it kind of happened step by step. It started from a mom position. I was working until four. I was living 15 minutes away to pick up my kids every day. And then as the responsibility grew, I started to join meetings after they go to bed. And I saw that people are trusting me and trusting my word and giving me more and more responsibility. And I started to notice this, that as I have more responsibility on the job, as I do more amazing things that I'm enjoying, I become an even better mom. So even if I'm one hour less with them, when I am with them, I am much more there. I'm much more fulfilled. I'm having much more fun with them. I appreciate the time that I have with them. And I managed to find that balance of having a career and being a mom, and being a much better mom because I have this other life of ZoomInfo. And I never imagined that I would manage that amount of people or would be responsible for so many things in the company. And I still can't really understand the size. I just know that we are having fun, and I know that we are growing, and I know that I love all the people that work around me, my reports, my peers, my managers. And it definitely makes it much easier. I hope I answered your question 100%.

Yes. And it's also helped me to much more appreciate my work and my road inside ZoomInfo. Because at the beginning I was, 'Oh my god, I hope it's okay that I'm going home at four. I hope it's okay that I'm picking up my kids. I hope it's okay that I need to leave because I have this and that.' And I was feeling that I hope my employer is okay with me being a mom. But really quickly I understood that my employer is amazing with me being a mom, really supporting me with finding the balance, and never holding me from being promoted because I'm a mom. Vice versa, they appreciate how I can balance, how I can multitask, how I can be in two places and really be in the two places at once. And I never felt that it held me back.

I think having the ability to manage your own time. And for me, for example, it was really helpful. No one tracks how many hours I'm on the floor or how many hours my laptop is online. I am tracked on getting things done, on understanding what I need to do, what my team needs to do, and to make sure that we are doing that. And it's okay if we start at 10 AM. It's okay if we go to pick up the kids at four. It's okay if we take a few days off. But we understand what we need to do as a group. We understand what our deadlines are. We understand what the road is that will take us there, and we can commit to times and basically go and achieve it. And this is why I think that having work-life balance is really individual. It's how you define the balance that you need. If you need to go to the gym three times a week, cool, go, please go. If you need to pick up your kids three times a week, go, have fun, do that. As long as you understand what is expected from you and you are doing that, and you are able to manage your own time and be flexible with your time. And for sure, ZoomInfo, that is the culture. That is our culture. We are looking for people, and we are hiring people that are able to manage their own time, that can be self-managed, managers for themselves.

Yes, I am.

For sure it was literature. Okay. Yes, I really liked it. I even did like five points of the Bagrut exam in literature. And I want to say it was a combination of the teacher and the experience of reading a book, of going to another dimension while you are reading it, of experiencing someone else's thoughts or someone else's feelings and feel connected to it or not feel connected to it. So just to disappear for a couple of hours and read the book. I love it. I wish I had more time to read, but when I was in high school I had more time to read during the literature studies. So amazing, for sure my favorite.

You will have, and I'm sure that it's a pretty unique role model, but I'm addicted to the Kardashians. And so my role model will be Kris Jenner, the mom. Okay. And I think she's amazing. I think she is an entrepreneur. She is an inspiration for me of how to do business and how to manage business and how to set people for success. She built an empire from basically having kids, which is amazing. I love her personality. I love how she does business. I love how she pushes for things. And so for me, she's the role model. I'm trying to convince our marketing team to bring her as a speaker to the ZoomInfo Summit. I hope it will work for me.

And for sure it's 'let's have fun.' And nothing that we are doing is not worth it if we are not enjoying it and if it's not connecting us. If we are not having fun, right? We can talk about growth, we can talk about personal growth, we can talk about professional growth, but it's not worth it if we are not enjoying it. So if you come to visit us in the office, you will always see me walking on the floor and screaming, 'Yalla, let's have fun!' And let's enjoy it. Every release should be a party. Every success should be a party. Every failure, we should learn from it and then have a party. So for sure, I'm trying to put the fun into everything that we do.

Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you.