Why ZoomInfo Acquired EverString

Whether you are an outbound seller cold-calling new accounts, a customer success manager preparing for this month’s renewals, or a marketer running a targeted email or advertising campaign to generate leads, the insights that come from your company’s data drive decisions and action. 

Data is at the core of every go-to-market motion.

As shown below, Contact, Account, and Intent data sit at the foundational level of the technology and execution stack.

Today, we announce the acquisition of EverString, and with it a fortifying of our core account, firmographic, and contact profile data. 

About EverString

EverString is an artificial intelligence-powered, business-to-business (B2B) data solutions provider that has built a comprehensive company data graph that profiles the long tail of very small businesses and also the complex hierarchy linkages between businesses and their related entities, including those with multiple locations and subsidiaries.

Their customers include Fedex, iHeartMedia, Staples, Snowflake, GroupOn, Nokia, and Seagate.

While legacy providers of business data are repurposing credit, risk, or legal datasets for go-to-market teams, the combined EverString and ZoomInfo Data Cloud will be the first-ever business identity graph of its size, accuracy, and completeness. It will be purpose-built for go-to-market teams to identify actual buying centers rather than legal entities with no purchasing power.

Another Step Towards Solving the Multi-Sourcing Problem

We are in the early innings of a major transformation in how businesses worldwide go to market. 

High-quality data, intelligence, and insights are undeniably going to be the foundation for how companies execute on their go-to-market strategies. But, the struggle most businesses must go through to source and manage data to execute on those strategies is exhausting. Especially in the enterprise.

That challenge requires sourcing, integrating, normalizing, matching, managing, and maintaining many different types of data. Each type of data is nuanced and data providers often specialize in one particular type of data. And their delivery methods are as ancient and varied as can be imagined.

So, you see enterprises buying data from a multitude of vendors with different specializations and attempting to stitch it all together through a complicated system relying on data analysts, engineers, and product managers.

They get:

• Company data from one vendor 
• Contact data from another 
• Tech stack data from another 
• Intent data from another 
• Investor and funding data from another 
• Company IP Address data from yet another 

And the data provider that works for their U.S. teams, most often doesn’t work for their international teams so they bring in other sources or resources to fill those holes. Each one restarts a process of understanding the nuances and integrating, normalizing, matching, managing, and maintaining that unique data source.

This multi-sourcing approach is inefficient, costly, and introduces a complex web of operational challenges and compliance vulnerabilities. Most importantly, this fragmented data is of little value in silos. It has to be integrated, unified, validated, cleansed, enriched, deduplicated, and delivered to the right people and systems, at the right time, in the right form for it to unlock the value it was intended to create. 

A Complete Data Solution

When ZoomInfo and DiscoverOrg came together almost two years ago, it was like two pieces of a puzzle coming together to deliver a more complete offering. The accuracy and depth of DiscoverOrg’s data for Enterprise and Mid-market companies combined with the broad coverage of ZoomInfo’s contact data for small businesses created a world-class intelligence offering. Each party brought something unique to the table. We were a textbook “better together” story. 

In a similar fashion, EverString brings another important piece of the puzzle. They provide coverage of SMBs so small that many don’t even have their own websites. Their focus on this very long tail of small businesses, complements the enterprise, mid-market, and small business coverage already included in ZoomInfo. With the data from EverString, ZoomInfo will provide data on virtually every high-level parent company, local parent company, franchise, and satellite office in America.

EverString brings 100 Million company records, 70 Million contact records, 120 Million location records, and over 1 Million corporate linkages to the table to give ZoomInfo customers a more complete view of the targets in their total addressable market. This broader data set enables better search, scoring, and account assignment, and provides greater access to buyers and buying centers. 

We expect that our combined company data asset will be 5x larger than it was prior to this acquisition.

Foundational Data for Sales and Marketing

The main problem with legacy foundational data is that it’s not very good. In many cases it was imported once and never updated. And so, we see a lot of companies coming to ZoomInfo with this bad foundational data in their systems and saying things like:

• “Our CRM is a mess. Can you clean it up for us”
• “Our reps are adding new accounts all the time, but they usually don’t input many details…Look at all these blanks…how do you build a list filtering on a field with a 7% fill rate?”
• “Our employee counts and revenue are so inaccurate that nobody trusts them — the other day Walmart showed up as having 12 employees.” 
• “We can’t even assign owners properly to accounts. One of our strategic account reps got upset the other day because we didn’t know that XYZ Corp was a subsidiary of HIJK Corp and a new rep gave them the wrong pricing and lost the deal”
• “We provide HVAC cleaning and maintenance services to physical facilities and I need locations for the local offices in the Chicago metro area.”
• “We would like to completely purge our CRM of all the incomplete and inaccurate garbage that’s in it and re-seed it with accurate and complete data.”

These problems (and many others) are Just. Not. Necessary.

Together, we believe EverString and ZoomInfo will put an end to these constant refrains. 

Better Data Matching & Enrichment Results

Another lift we get from the EverString acquisition is in regards to data enrichment projects for our customers. ZoomInfo has long offered data enrichment services to fill in missing data fields from lead forms and cleanse outdated data in customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation systems. 

While our customers have been pleased with the quality of the data we are able to enrich, we have historically only been able to enrich a portion of their data. This resulted in a missed opportunity to deliver value and, in turn, resulted in missed revenue opportunities.

In multiple enrichment tests across millions of worldwide entities that we conducted during diligence, the EverString company graph used alongside ZoomInfo significantly improved match rates. 

As an example, a large multinational telecom provider that targets very small businesses had been using ZoomInfo for enrichment and we had previously delivered a 47.3% match rate on a sample data file. When we ran that same file against ZoomInfo and EverString combined, we achieved a 98% match rate. This combined strength will enable us to meet nearly all enrichment requests that come our way, provide a more complete service to our customers, and generate immediate incremental revenue for previously unmatched records. 

There are three reasons why EverString is able to generate a lift on enrichment:

1. Machine Learning Powered Matching: EverString’s machine learning powered entity resolution (aka matching) algorithms are designed to accept and process multiple identifying inputs from a customer’s file, such as phone number and address, alongside the company name and website, improving the likelihood of returning a matching record.
2. Historical data matching to update outdated records:  A big problem for go-to-market teams is that they know that the data in their CRM and Marketing Automation systems is bad (according to Oracle, often 50% bad), but they don’t know which 50% is bad, and which 50% is good. EverString maintains a database of inactive and outdated records and related data points that are used to match the outdated data received from customer CRM and marketing automation systems to current company records. Or to confirm that a record is, in fact, a defunct business. This enables sales and marketing teams to effectively trade in their data coal for data diamonds.
3. Record Completeness: EverString is able to generate nearly 100% fill rates on core firmographic fields such as employee count, revenue, industry and other industry classifications such as NAICs and SIC codes. They accomplish this by leveraging deep learning models that extract, process, and analyze the data available about a company on their websites and other sources in context to infer the appropriate data values. The completeness of their records ensures a positive result when a matching record is found. Combined with ZoomInfo’s depth on technographic, intent, and company attribute data, millions of key prospect and company records take on a 360-degree profile.

More Precise Segmentation for Better Outreach

We expect that ZoomInfo and EverString will be able to provide a much richer and more complete profile of keywords and attributes that will help go-to-market teams build more targeted audiences and leverage predictive account scoring. 

While industry, NAICs and SIC codes are useful segmentation criteria today, a new way companies are identifying their ideal customers is by leveraging granular keywords to improve precision in identifying and scoring lookalike accounts. 

As an example, social networks and e-commerce companies like Pinterest and Instagram are very different businesses and use very different services and technologies than enterprise software companies like Salesforce.com, SAP, or Oracle. And both of those types of companies are very different from Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts who develop video game software. Yet, all of these examples fall into the same SIC code, 7372 which is “Services-Prepackaged Software”…not so helpful for sales and marketing teams.

ZoomInfo and EverString help companies use keywords to home in on the subsets within generalized sectors to target the types of businesses that are the best fit for their products and services. By using keywords, companies targeting B2B Enterprise Software could pump up the account scores for Salesforce, SAP and Fujitsu and reduce or ignore the scores for B2C companies like Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. 

This level of granularity in segmentation allows our customers to target their outreach to companies that are the best fit for their products and services.

Onward

We don’t accept that go-to-market intelligence should be as complicated as it has been for so long. And while other players in the market continue to amplify the message that managing your data is complicated and messy and requires professional services and long and expensive consulting projects, we remain focused on becoming the single source of truth that companies can rely on to simplify and streamline all their go-to-market data needs.

ZoomInfo combined with EverString will deliver to the market, the first unified, single source of truth for sales, marketing, and all other go-to-market functions. We are confident our new combined offering will unlock significant incremental value for our customers and continue to fuel our own growth engine.

To learn more about EverString and other strategic ZoomInfo acquisitions, please visit our Acquisitions Hub!

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