Bootstrapping to $14M, Solving Serious Pain in IT Lead Generation: DiscoverOrg CoFounder Henry Schuck (Part 5)

Sramana: How do customers use your product?

Henry Schuck: The product is geared for technology vendors who sell into large, midsized and small businesses. Our service puts all of the IT decision makers on an organizational chart along with their direct dial phone number, email address, job description and exact title in front of you. If you are a rep at a technology company and you try to sell into Nike you can just go into our database, click on the org chart for Nike, and you will know who reports to who, 92% of the time you will have a direct phone number, and 98% of the time you will have a verified email address. You will also have a verified background report on what the company uses in their infrastructure such as SharePoint, Exchange and SalesForce.

You will also have a run-down of real time projects and initiatives taking place at the company. You will know if they are moving from one version of a platform to another, or you will know if the company is looking for WAN acceleration services. When you move through the org chart and you find your decision maker you can pick up the phone and call that person directly. You know what they are responsible for and you can have an engaging conversation with that individual.

Companies spend a lot of money on sales people yet those people spend 4 to 5 hours a day doing research on potential companies versus doing what they were hired to do which is to sell the product or service. We let sales people do sales and we do research. From a marketing perspective all of the data is constantly updated. Every contact is updated once every 90 days. Our list is constantly scrubbed and updated. We cover companies in the US and Canada.

Sramana: Are companies that forthcoming in sharing this type of data with you? I would be surprised to know that they are willing to share information regarding IT projects.

Henry Schuck: Not every person is willing to share that information. We gather around 70 to 80 initiatives and projects a day. We certainly don’t have it on every company but we do gather it in a lot of organizations.

Sramana: Is your data higher quality for larger companies than it is for smaller companies?

Henry Schuck: It is deeper for larger companies because there are more people in IT, but for smaller companies we are able to cover the entire IT department. We probably won’t be able to cover every IT person at Goldman-Sachs but we will have every IT person at a smaller company whose IT department is only 5 people big. We get all the IT decision makers at the larger companies. At the smaller companies we have everyone.

Sramana: What is the smallest sized company that your database covers?

Henry Schuck: We don’t cover companies with less than 400 employees. However, there are some fast growing technology companies that are outliers to our rule. Those are folks like Pandora and CraigsList. We will cover those companies.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping to $14M, Solving Serious Pain in IT Lead Generation: DiscoverOrg CoFounder Henry Schuck
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