Henry Schuck is the Co-Founder and CEO of DiscoverOrg a platform for finding, connecting, and selling to more prospects using a accurate high-quality contact database. The company was founded in 2007, and Henry has led it through rapid growth going from the original three employees to over 500 today.
Henry is the list expert, so put your seatbelts on. We have a great conversation about lists. In this episode, he shares the story of how he and a friend founded DiscoverOrg and how they grew the company. They even had to refine their product to meet their own sales needs. Once they got the process down, their sales numbers went through the roof.
Episode Highlights:
- DiscoverOrg is a sales intelligence tool that profiles who's who in about 175,000 corporations.
- They use a mix of proprietary technology and a team of 300 human researchers.
- Maintaining the data is one of the most difficult aspects.
- It takes 70 hours to count to a million. They profile almost 3 million contacts across their database.
- Henry has been in this space for more than half of his life. He began with a small intelligence company called iProfile.
- Then he went to law school.
- In 2007, Henry and a friend from iProfile started DiscoverOrg and grew it organically.
- They were missing projections by 6 million dollars in 2010. They started thinking about how to plug that hole.
- Working backwards to reach a goal. They found the resources they needed, but they needed to build the list datasets for themselves.
- They realized they needed a team of English speaking humans to solve their information gap in their lists.
- They would score fits on a scale of 1 through 5 using what they called fit rank. Then they would have the human team build out the lists of the companies that fit.
- Knowing what companies and people to talk to and their contact information and what tools they use and then target the approach to them.
- Once they got the processes into place to deliver high quality information, they blew their sales numbers out.
- The biggest lever you have to pull is the data you feed your SDR team allowing them to focus on messaging and follow up.
- You want your datatool to cleanse and maintain the numbers, emails, and contact info.
- This is an investment that pays off through everything in your organization.
- They looked at performance metrics to see how many calls needed to be made to hit sales numbers and then worked backwards to provide that amount of contacts.
- If a company doesn’t respond, you still continue to call them. They are still in your market. Organization priorities are constantly changing.
- List fatigue and a 30% attrition rate. Refreshing the lists is absolutely critical.
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