Privacy, Signals, and Data Cleanliness in an AI Future
Anthony Kennada sits down with Jam Khan, SVP of Portfolio Marketing at Zoominfo to talk about data privacy, third part intent signals, and the importance of data cleanliness in the future with AI.
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So you've spent the last, I think, what, three and a half four years now
working for some of the leading brands in
Go-to-market kind of data, of course, you know, six cents now, Zoom info.
And there's been a lot of talk lately on just chain or a lot of changes around
consumer data privacy, some new legislations coming in place
that are affecting how we in the Go-to-market side of the business are
handling data or really evolving our data strategy. It was curious if you can
give just
having studied the market, obviously, living this every day, just a state of
the union on
data within the Go-to-market organization, whether that's first party, third
party, any kind of party, really.
All the parties.
I mean, I think it's safe to assume that privacy laws aren't getting any more
lenient, right? When you start to see a trend,
it usually keeps heading in that direction and you know, when it comes to
privacy laws, you already see like there's
way stricter in Europe, like in California, they're stricter than the rest of
the country.
And I think we're still going to see always, especially in the US, a real bias
towards like enabling B2B.
I mean, business to business is a huge part of our like economy. So there's
always going to be,
you know, a fine line between privacy and compliance. So if you're a data
vendor that is
obtaining your data in a compliant way, you're not violating privacy, you still
need access to data.
And first party data isn't going to always cut it. You think about scenarios
where you're entering a new market.
Your CRM is not going to have that full rich set of contacts and accounts to
call on.
You're going to need to enrich your third party sources. Obviously we live and
breathe that world ourselves here in Xiuminfo.
But, you know, there is, ideally, you want the best first party data.
But, you know, you have to rely on a mix of second and third party data.
And just ensure that you're doing it in a compliant way that isn't violating
user privacy.
You know, where the lines get blurred is that in B2C, you see often a lot of
that violation of privacy and a lot of sensitivity there.
B2B, you know, the nature of the intent is very different. You're a business
trying to sell to another business.
You're not getting into the personal details of the buyer. So that's where I
think the overall compliance and privacy laws
are also going to be very different when it comes to B2B versus B2C because the
motivations are very different.
Right. Right. Right.
You know, one of the things I've heard you say in the past is this, we think
about creating this data to work,
that the term intent could potentially be a little bit loaded.
There's been a lot said lately about this idea of signals or signal-based,
go-to-market selling, work, whatever it is, signal-based something.
How should go-to-market teams be thinking about putting their data to work to
inform decisions and inform actions?
Yeah, it's funny, right? What's old is new again all the time and intent became
a really interesting way
to drive a more efficient go-to-market motion. If you want to spend or you want
to direct a lot of your efforts into
people that are showing their propensity to buy, it makes a lot of sense. The
thing is, intent is really great at
demand capture. But, you know, as we've seen, like a lot of the buying decision
gets made now on your own,
and there's so much information available, by the time you're catching intent
signals, you might already be too late.
As much as this research that buying groups are getting larger, also the vendor
selection is getting smaller.
So, you know, used to be, you'd have a bake-off and like, let me invite three
or four vendors and you didn't know enough about them.
You know, so much now, by the time you shortlist your vendors, you're probably
shortlisting them to,
I think some force of research is showing that like, you're shortlisting them
to like two people.
So, if you don't have this brand recognition, you can't just rely on intent,
which is showing you a
very far along the decision-making process or a spike. But what we are seeing
now is that a lot of what's out there are really interesting signals
that give me an indication that, hey, maybe I should reach out with relevance,
relevance more than personalization.
So, if I see that, you know, a company just got a funding round, may have no,
you know, there may be no indication that they have an intent to buy.
But it's a very good indication that they're probably going to be doing
something.
They just got a funding round. And if I know my audience, if I know my ICP and
I see like, hey, this company should be somebody who should buy it for me.
They would never show up as a classic intent signal.
As a seller, come with context and use that signal. And there's a number of
signals like a champion moves or, you know, you had a geographical expansion.
None of these would fall into the classic categories of intent. They fall much
more into the demand creation bucket.
And that's where I think signals are a really interesting way of looking at
things.
And I don't want to be another marketer guilty of just, hey, let's name the
problem. And it solves it.
These signals have always existed, but we have a lot more of them. I just think
we've over-indexed so much on just intent, which, you know, you're kind of over
-insight handing a discount code to somebody who's walking into like the store.
They were probably going to buy anyway.
How about the person who isn't even realize that there's a solution to their
problem?
But there's a lot of signals out there that are indicating that they should be
made aware of it.
And that's where I think sales and marketing can start to really align on like
how do they interpret these signals and act on them?
Super, super compelling. I want to stay on the demand creation conversation we
can actually go before we get to that.
We need to talk about AI because it's been four minutes and we haven't said
those words. Those initials, yeah, those letters yet.
You know, one of the things I've been thinking about is as we're stepping into
this new world of not just some of the, you know, generative modeling, but also
the agentic kind of workflows that could be triggered.
Your AI output is only going to be so good as the data that you input into the
model.
And again, be it first, third, but whatever it is, it seems to me that go to
market teams who aren't investing right now in getting their data in order.
Are at risk of being left behind completely when this generational shift in
computing is literally just beyond us.
And really is a lot of the use cases for go to market teams start to come to
life.
What's your take on on that data readiness for this AI reality?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I've gone through my own seven stages of grief for the AI
and I've settled on acceptance.
It's like anything else when something's new, everyone's trying to figure out
what to do with it.
It goes through a stage like over hype and you're going to look at a tech as
always being like a panacea or a solution to my problems.
It is there. It is super useful. It's just like nobody talks about SaaS anymore
like it's an interesting thing.
Like if you're building a business, you're not expecting it to sit on a desktop
somewhere.
It's going to be a cloud business. It's going to be mobile friendly.
AI is just going to be how we interface with a lot of data in a very
interesting way and it's going to level the playing field for a lot of folks.
The complexity of using a piece of software is now going to be reduced to like,
hey, I'm just going to interface and talk to it more like a human.
I don't need to be an expert in Photoshop. I can just go and use a few prompts
to get going much further along.
It's going to be super powerful, but it ultimately AI is. It's a computing,
especially with ChatGVT.
It is a generational shift in how we think about computing and using harnessing
larger amounts of data.
But it also means you're going to get a shortcut to doing stuff and that
initial layer of probably human verification.
You're going to rely more on computers to do stuff. You're going to lose a
little bit of that error checking that maybe you did as a person.
And so the quality of the data becomes even more important. It's better
ingredients, better pizza, better data, better AI, better outcomes.
And so I think you're going to see people still have this back and forth
because you're not going to be ready and you're going to see this a lot right
now.
Like, hey, AI is not going to take over my creativity. It's not going to take
over my content writing. It's not trying to.
But it is a real productivity enhancer. When you apply it to the right data set
, it can be a game changer.
It can really just get you out the door so much faster and so much more
productive.
It's a matter now of just how do you continue to make sure for the use cases
you're looking at you have a reliable data set.
Right.
Well, you were on stage earlier today talking about effectively how we move
from this world of cold outreach to more of warm or kind of relational type of
context with with prospects.
And my ears perked up in a very biased way when I heard that because I sort of
interpret that as marketing and sales together have to really build the focus
on building meaningful relationships with their audience or with their audience
of would be prospects, would be customers or what have you.
Can you just talk a little bit about that because as you were even as you are
articulating the signals idea, you made the core the connection of signals from
a demand creation perspective, which I think is underappreciated because many
folks I think tear point assume it's who is ready to buy today versus who
should we be talking to.
And I think that's a big difference for for good marketing.
It is. I mean, we always talk about in market. It's great, but in your job, I
think, as a marketer again is to educate people who aren't in market yet and
should be.
And so, you know, as someone starting up a business, they aren't a ton of
people right now in market for your business because they don't even know what
exists.
And so, if you rely on in market, you're talking to a very, very small subset
of early adopters who believe the story you're selling, the real challenge is
making people aware that hey, there's a better way to solve this like problem.
And I think that's where thinking about signals beyond just in market and
thinking about what are the signals I can use to create demand and how can I
educate people with relevance.
And the other thing on this topic that came up and even as I was talking real
time, sort of the wheels returning in like, you know, it's it's the medium.
So whether you go outbound inbound, you know, they're all tactics. The reason
cold calls don't work is just as a society, we don't talk on the phone that
much anymore.
I mean, I barely talk to, I mean, I hardly talk to my wife, I text her more. I
talk to her in person. I don't call on the phone very often. Most of our
communication is texting. If she called me, I wouldn't consider it a cold call.
But I'd probably be like, hey, is it urgent? I'm busy writing that. I eat cold
things and so I think in general, it's less about like whether it's cold
calling, calling is about finding the right medium to engage.
And then can I produce content that has like relevance? And you know, whether
you look it inbound or upon it is all it's a means to get to your like customer
We're living now in a world where we tend to subscribe to stuff. But that's
that's that's our medium of of consuming information.
We don't wait for something to come in or wait for somebody to reach us. I want
to learn about something. I subscribe to a podcast. You know, I subscribe to
channels on YouTube. Everything's a subscription these days.
And the reason I think that's become so favorable is you kind of pick and
choose what you want to consume. And so as a content creator, how am I?
We always talk about like how do you make content that people that's worth like
painful right now? The idea is into like whether the gate or ungate your
content. The idea is how do I connect with my buyer?
Yeah. In a way, the way you really warm them up is by building trust and
credibility. And I think the tougher not to crack is like what's the right
medium that reduces that friction between the seller and the buyer?
They may want to talk to you, but they're still hesitant like I don't want to
get on the phone or the sales guy because they won't let me go then. I don't
want to buy this like I don't want to subscribe to this newsletter because I'm
just going to get spam.
I think we're still figuring out the medium. But the biggest difference between
cold and warm is how much do I know about my buyer and we know we can know so
much about them today before we before the first time you ever have a
conversation.
The signals are there. So it's a matter and this is where AI is super useful
because it can correlate mass amounts of signals and produce some really good
insights.
I can't inform how you create content, how you deliver it, how you can engage
with your audience.
That's awesome. Well, look, we are here at the better together conference. And
so I want we're asking folks this question.
What are two solutions in your tech stack today that work better together for
you? And it could be anything, any software here?
Yeah, I mean, this is going to sound sort of self-serving, but again, you want
to practice what you like for each and for us it's all about how do we know
everything about our buyer?
Are we intrinsically feel that like if you know more about your buyer, you're
going to be able to offer a better buyer experience. And so for us it's
marrying as much data as we can.
And so the two biggest sources of data for us are our own data that we set on
Zoom info and the data we have within Salesforce.
And when you connect those two and the more you connect the better you are. So
we're seeing, you know, if you connect conversation intelligence and you know
we connect sales engagement, all these insights lead to better outcomes.
But just between your scram and between, you know, the third party data that
should be there but isn't there that's within Zoom info, we pull those two
together.
And the level of insight that we have about a buyer is phenomenal. So those two
are just really good sort of, you know, pairing.
That's awesome. That's great. Jim, thank you so much for being on the show. I
appreciate it.
This is awesome and thanks for having me, of course.
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