ZoomInfo is an important and indispensable tool that any B2B business should be using as a part of the outbound sales process. It allows you to obtain critical data relevant to leads and sales and then automatically filter that information to your CRM, creating a robust system that then enables you to automate your entire sales funnel and build a sales pipeline. It’s no secret that we love ZoomInfo, but let’s talk about why we love ZoomInfo Workflows. 

There is no question that automation can make a massive difference in the sales process, and this is where ZoomInfo Workflows comes in. They help sales teams save time and effort on prospecting, allowing team members to focus on tasks that are lower in the sales funnel. If correctly set up and monitored, ZoomInfo Workflows can pull prospects with custom firmographics directly into your CRM, allowing for automatic lead generation and data recording without running the manual search filters yourself. 

Here’s where we underscore the caveat of if correctly set up and monitored. Automation can also lead to problems if something goes wrong. Automated sales processes require no human interaction in and of themselves, but that certainly doesn’t mean you can just “set it and forget it.” For ZoomInfo Workflow automations to work properly, you’ll need to follow our five specific tips below.

Why Take Advantage of ZoomInfo Workflows

When used efficiently, workflows enable you to minimize the effort of manually entering firmographic data into ZoomInfo over and over again, so you can focus on following up with prospects and building relationships. Workflows have three steps, with specific techniques you can use to optimize them:

1. Select a trigger: What has to happen with a prospect for a campaign to trigger? Do they show intent to buy a product or engage a service like yours?
2. Apply a filter: What specific customer attributes are relevant for that particular market? What demographic or income levels does a business have to exhibit to hit your target?
3. Choose an action: What specific marketing actions will you take once those conditions are met? 

By setting these workflows to export prospects to your CRM, your business will benefit from subsequently prioritizing lower funnel activities, which involve increasing sales and building customer loyalty for existing customers. Concentrating on these areas — instead of spending time prospecting — will likely prove a better use of your resources. 

Image via ZoomInfo

5 Ways to Make the Most of ZoomInfo Workflows

1. Understand Intent

Key to winning a sale is making the first offer. As soon as you know someone is potentially interested in your product or service, you will want to be the first to connect with them. As such, you have to be an expert at understanding a customer’s intent and reaching them before the competition does.

Linking ZoomInfo intent workflows to your CRM can enable you to be the first business to connect with a customer, thus encouraging them to jump into your sales funnel before finding the competition — or before the competition can find them.

Mastering intent therefore means intelligently using intent data. Your system gathers intent data when prospective buyers search the Internet for a solution, and stumble across product reviews or information. ZoomInfo can specifically feed this information into your workflow, enabling you to capture a customer’s data and properly pitch them on your product or service. 

The most critical directive for your business is to properly understand what actions and intent may trigger a prospective lead and sale. You will need to customize your ZoomInfo Workflows to accurately capture this data. 

2. Customize Messaging

Above all, avoid generic messaging in your emails to prospects that come out of ZoomInfo Workflows. They have been chosen for very specific attributes or intent and you want to make the most of that. Be sure to customize the messaging so they understand that you know what you’re talking about. This helps to build trust before you even try to get on the phone or book a meeting with them and makes maximum impact. 

In your email content, you can:

• Specifically refer to the behavior in which a lead was engaging, increasing the odds that you will grab their attention by referencing their personal behavior.
• Refer to the broader characteristics of the lead, such as their location, specific industry type, or any other business quality.
• Engage in A/B testing, especially in the subject line, to ensure you find the most effective and impactful message.

3. Appropriately Monitor Credits

If you use ZoomInfo, the odds are good that you have attempted to find information on a prospect and asked yourself, “Why did ZoomInfo use all of my credits?” This depletion of credits can be a massive challenge with ZoomInfo Workflows. If you don’t appropriately monitor your settings, you can run through a year of credits in less than a month. As such, you need to properly and creatively monitor your credit usage. 

Fortunately, we have some highly robust tips that can help determine how many credits you are spending. These tips include:

• Regularly review your credit usage in the Admin Portal. Doing so will ensure that you are not spending too many credits on a specific industry, and that any particular individual within your organization isn’t overusing the credits you purchase.
• Work with your entire team to customize your filters and advanced search options, limiting your credit usage only to areas where the use of credits is truly necessary.
• Ensure your entire team takes ZoomInfo University training, allowing them to learn best practices surrounding credit consumption.

If all else fails and you need more credits, you can purchase additional bulk credits within the ZoomInfo system, but this isn’t ideal.

4. Create Descriptive Syntax

ZoomInfo Workflows can be extremely helpful for automating the importation of prospects and more effectively targeting your advertising campaigns. However, a workflow will only be helpful if you know which workflow you are using within your CRM.

The syntax here is critical. Everything can’t be named “ZoomInfo Workflow,” or you will completely lose track of which workflow is responsible for which lead or piece of data. Remember, the names of the workflow you create are internal only; they can be as highly customized or technical as you prefer, and more customization is probably better. Make the names extremely specific, including intent topic, date, industry etc., and ensure that everyone with access to your workflows knows what the names are referring to. This specificity reduces internal confusion and ensures your entire team fully understands the conventions being used.

5. Map Your Fields to the CRM

You will need to create custom contact fields (or properties in HubSpot’s case) in your CRM to map the ZoomInfo information over to. We have a list of suggestions in our article on integrating ZoomInfo with Google Analytics. We also recommend creating a ZoomInfo Tag field, as this will be very useful in your CRM. All of this information will be automatically recorded in the CRM for future reference and you won’t have to flip between the two platforms to find all of the data you need. 

Here is an example of what it will look like when you map the ZoomInfo contact fields to your CRM fields, including those new custom fields.

ZoomInfo Workflows are incredible. They are powerful, robust and capable of providing real assistance in the quest for effective sales automation. However, they are only truly effective if you are using them properly. These five tips are just the start of guaranteeing that you get the most use out of your ZoomInfo account. If you need more assistance with ZoomInfo, we’d be happy to chat.