A Conversation With Arjun Pillai: What You Need to Know about ZoomInfo Chat

sailee.sarangdhar

sailee sarangdhar

Senior Content Manager

Imagine a chatbot that identifies your website visitors and their company, qualifies them based on your criteria, engages them based on data-driven insights, sets up meetings, and even notifies your sales team when they are ready for a conversation. 

That’s what you get with ZoomInfo Chat thanks to our recent acquisition of Insent.ai.  Our new chat product empowers sales and marketing teams to engage and convert prospects that visit their website in real-time through chatbot and live chat. 

We spoke with Arjun Pillai, former founder and CEO of Insent.ai, and now vice president of strategy and growth at ZoomInfo, to get his insights on how ZoomInfo Chat works, what sets it apart from other chat products, and how it helps align sales and marketing teams. 

What is ZoomInfo Chat and how does it work?

Pillai: To put it simply, ZoomInfo Chat is a B2B conversational platform that does three things: 

One, every time someone is on your website, ZoomInfo Chat will accurately identify either the person or the company that’s visiting up to 50 to 60 percent of the time.

Once the identification is done, the chatbot can qualify your prospects based on your ideal customer profile while they are still on the website. 

Finally, the chatbot also alerts the right people on your sales team of a prospect’s presence on your website either natively or through Slack. Your team can then engage with the prospect via live chat in real-time. Call me biased, but this is my favorite feature.

ZoomInfo Chat helps our customers move sales conversations up the funnel. 

What are the immediate and long-term benefits of implementing ZoomInfo Chat?

Pillai: The short-term benefits of implementing ZoomInfo chat stem from our customer’s ability to capture net new leads directly from their website. Typically we see our customers adding somewhere between 10 to 20 percent more net new leads at the top of the funnel.

In the long run, ZoomInfo Chat helps our customers facilitate the process of becoming truly buyer-centric. 

For example, buyers don’t want to submit a form on your website and wait 24 hours for you to get in touch with them. ZoomInfo Chat integrates directly with the forms on your website to convert form fills into meetings. No back and forth, no two-week scheduling time, no form dropoffs. Our customers typically see about 35 to 40 percent of their form fills turn into meetings.

You are putting the customer experience at the center by enabling buyers to interact with you the moment they are ready.

What is unique about ZoomInfo Chat?

Pillai: Over the past 20 years, marketers have mastered email marketing. However, conversational marketing tools, such as chatbots, can still be a struggle. 

The big difference between email marketing and conversational marketing is that chat is a lot more personalized. And if you want to personalize, you need to have data. That’s where ZoomInfo’s best-in-class data comes in and sets us apart from other conversational marketing tools in the market.

To name some examples, we have the world’s best IP to company matching solution. When somebody is on the website, we can identify which company IP they are visiting from. When somebody gives us their email by completing a form, we have the ability to enrich the information in your database, so you know who that person is. 

Then we have Scoops, we have News, we have data on what technology has been installed by your prospects. All of this contextual data helps marketing and salespeople with lead scoring, understanding the prospect’s intent, and to have contextual conversations with them. 

This is what was missing from chat.

How will ZoomInfo Chat impact the way sales and marketing teams operate?

Pillai: ZoomInfo Chat is one of the ways we aim to help customers align their sales and marketing teams. 

Typically, marketing teams handle the configuration and messaging aspect of chat, while the internal end users who connect live with customers are sales development representatives and account executives — the sales team. 

It helps sales and marketing work together in creating an effective conversational strategy that translates into more customers. 

What are sales and marketing teams missing out on by not implementing ZoomInfo Chat? 

Pillai: You have your best prospects on your website right now, and they want to speak with you. There are very few tools out there that help you make the most of those visiting your website in real-time. By implementing ZoomInfo Chat, you are essentially switching your go-to-market strategy from being reactive to proactive. 

Companies that don’t implement ZoomInfo Chat are missing out on gaining the additional customers they would have converted had they taken a proactive approach.