Henry Schuck

Grace’s Dad | Jessica’s Husband | Founder & CEO @ZoomInfo Nasdaq Listed: GTM

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

The information age is over. This is the age of GTM intelligence.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

@gaetano_nyc Yo - big agree - but what would you say this has changed to - what are you recommending now - is it different than before?

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

I also don't think watching game tape is enough here - it's helpful to know where to go do work, but there are plenty of times I watch a seller show something to a customer and think "Yeah, but I would have done it like this, that's why it didn't land." It's not until I'm the one pitching the thing that I really know what works and doesn't.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

There is so much that internally I think is going to crush in front of a customer - and it’s not until I’m right in front of them pitching that thing that I know for sure if I was right or wrong about it.

Once I’ve gotten that feedback live enough times - I know what expectations to actually set and hold my team accountable to - if I haven’t done it, then, often, despite my best efforts, the loudest or most recent voice wins. Actually selling gives me a spine to push the gtm org forward.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

Most “AI Champion Tracking” is just a job-change alert with an email sequence attached.

That's not what RevOps wants. Or what an AI agent should do.

The problem isn't automating the outreach. It's that the automation breaks the moment it encounters the real world.

Think about what happens when someone changes jobs:

1. Were they even a champion?

Working at a customer doesn't make them a champion. Did they advocate for us internally? Did they love the product? Were they frustrated with us?

That isn't in a CRM field. It's buried in emails, call transcripts, and years of interactions.

2. What did we actually do together?

A great outreach email should reference our relationship, the problems solved, and outcomes delivered.

Not: "Congrats on the new role! Would love to reconnect."

That requires understanding unstructured data across the customer relationship.

3. Where did they land, and who owns that account?

Is their new company a customer or prospect? Does it exist under a different name in Salesforce? Was it acquired? Is the account already owned?

Now apply our territory, segmentation, and routing rules.

4. Who should reach out?

An Account Manager if it's a customer. The account owner if it's an owned prospect. Otherwise, route to the right AE.

But should round robin consider existing pipeline, opportunity load, or rep capacity?

Here deterministic workflows fall apart.

5. What about the account they LEFT?

You just lost a champion at an existing customer.

Who owns that relationship? Who else could become a champion? What should the account manager do next?

A good champion-tracking play needs to manage BOTH sides of the move.

Now imagine trying to build all of this with a few prompts and an AI agent.

It will look amazing in a demo.

Then it hits your messy Salesforce data, fragmented email history, fuzzy account ownership, custom routing logic, and relationships absent from structured data.

And it breaks.

This is why a GTM Context Graph is so important.

You need a living understanding of customers, relationships, conversations, ownership, and business rules.

The agent is the last mile. The context graph makes the agent useful.

Without it, you're just automating the same incomplete process RevOps has been fighting for years.

With it, champion tracking becomes an always-on, intelligent motion that identifies real champions, understands relationships, routes intelligently, personalizes outreach, and protects the accounts those champions leave behind.

This is what RevOps, SalesOps, and Demand Gen leaders actually want. Not another dashboard. Not another sequence. An outcome.

We built Agent Teams at ZoomInfo, powered by our acquisition of https://t.co/LDOReRJN8x, to connect agents to the GTM Context Graph and execute these motions end to end.

Champion tracking might be the best example of why the future of GTM isn't just agents.

It's agents with context.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

@LearnToToad You’re an idiot in so many ways.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

@lennysan @hectorserrranoo @WisprFlow How many cmos got the X posted interview forwarded to them with “must do”

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

@BenyaminHolley @joshwhitfieldai Plug in the https://t.co/BFvZLOTg5F cli - free credits at sign up - lower cost per enrichment and unlimited enrichments throughout the year

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

8 months ago one of my posts on LinkedIn got 1.23M Impressions- hundreds of reactions, ~200 reposts.

I demo'd taking a spreadsheet, adding it to Claude, and having @ZoomInfo's MCP run enrichment on top of it. It was the best performing post I've ever had.

Why? It was SUPER innovative, 8 months ago. Spreadsheet skills in Claude were fairly new, people weren't using it this way yet - people's minds were blown 🤯🤯. "Could it really be this easy to do enrichment in an LLM?"

I was thinking about this post on my drive home and thought about how embarrassed I would be posting the same thing today - 8 months in today's innovation cycle is the equivalent of at least 4 years pre coding agents.

'Innovation' used to last for years - now it lasts like 2 months - tops.

We rebuilt our EPD teams over the last two years, and they had to rebuild our back and front-ends, our culture, and our processes so that we could move 10x faster.

Reminds me of a quote from Through the Looking Glass - which is more true today than it has ever been:

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

I feel that everyday. I bet you do too.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

@C4219866 oof, what a tax.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

You CANNOT fix CULTURE with PROCESS.

Earlier this year, one of my sales managers slacked me a new Google Form. Every sales engineer (SE) would have to fill it out before every customer call. FOREVER.

I get why he created it.

A rep on his team showed up to a call the prior week unprepared. The SE was there too, just as unprepared. He spent the call asking the customer questions we should have known the answers to before we ever dialed in.

They wasted the customer's time.

So he did what most managers would do: "I'm going to create a process so this never happens again - so now before an SE or an AM gets on a call to show the product, they have to fill out this form."

Then he spent his Saturday - his Saturday - building a 14-question intake form. Required for every SE. Before every customer call. FOREVER.

That is not the answer. You don’t fix unprepared reps with a form.
You build a culture where nobody shows up unprepared in the first place.

Every process you add is a TAX.

And you CHARGE that tax to every person on your team who never had the problem - every day, forever - to fix the one person who shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Stack enough of those and you end up with processes on top of processes and everything slows down.

Some processes are worth the tax. Most aren't. This one wasn’t, so I told him to kill the form and do this instead:

Before you build a process, say the standard OUT LOUD.
Get the team on a call, tell them what happened and tell them what the standard is.

In our case: “Competing with ZoomInfo should be a DAUNTING experience for ANY of our competitors. This is NEVER acceptable. Showing up unprepared to a customer call doesn't live up to that. Full stop.”

Point back to that standard every time someone misses it. Let the people who can't meet it self-select out.

Manager: "But Henry, what if it happens again?"

Then it happens again. And you have the conversation again. Louder this time.

Process fixes broken systems - it doesn’t fix broken standards. Start with the standards.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

@au_epstein did he say this?!? where! I'd love to listen to it.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

@briansowards all the tools are there, it's the culture that drives whether they use them or not.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

@DJ_CURFEW I'm still a noob and doing most of my stuff locally.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

@JuneYi That’s exactly what it looks like.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

I get both sides of this - but really what I want to know is where should I spend more money and what should I take money away from - and spending on AEO is necessary spend - you can't just not show up or show up poorly in the LLMs, so whether you can tie that to a revenue line or not - it's a new line item, build it into your budget. but beyond the minimum spend necessary here to not suck, how much more should i put behind it to drive revenue - hard to decide that without attribution, and not a great way to deliver it.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

@pengsonal @MonidHQ @typesafeai Zoominfo people search is free on https://t.co/BFvZLOTg5F

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

we comin'

[Scott Martinis @scottmartinis]

Claygents are way behind... Zoominfo is significantly better out of the box.

More connectors, skills that sync with GitHub, and observability

Claygents or always on agents should be able to use functions

Agent observability is incredibly bad in most GTM agents for users now. If clay makes it easy for users to headlessly debug agents they can overtake many other agent platforms

Think about how to use OTEL from Claude cowork and chatGPT

Agents need a dedicated HITL layer or UI to be broadly useful

Agents, workflows, and always on agents should have a business goal and metrics that they optimize towards

Clay should have a semantic and outcome attribution layer that sits on top of their data warehouse similar to databricks and snowflake

Clay should embrace a zero copy pointer model to sit on top of client data warehouses like palantir does to win big dogs

There should be a way to build simple claygents on top of functions inside the mcp by reps and have the reps debug them, and promote them into always on agents

Extracting context from a website is ok at best. You need call transcripts to get good at this.

The context layer should really sit on top of the data warehouse and have dedicated subtypes. IE ICP isn't just a thing, it's a semantic extrusion of the account object with a relationship to products.

Need a way to build predictive models in platform

Workflows shouldn't exist in platform by end of next year, something like @bot should babysit a version of current workflows instead and learn on top of them

Clay should unlock a push to deploy

Clay needs agents workflow and function as code parity with deepline

Clay really needs some form of backend git for agents, skills, workflows, functions, context and possibly memory to win

Make clay easy to use and debug in grokbot, duet, and dot

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

@Jeff_Holmes I stopped taking rideshare from the airport - it’s just so much easier and less of a hassle to hop into a taxi. Never had an issue

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

@kylecnorton The only way to make this work is for it to feel like a partnership - you and the buyer partnering together to get the deal done.

[Henry Schuck @HenryLSchuck]

“Great. What do you think the internal review will ask about? It feels like you’re pretty excited about the opportunity - why wouldn’t other people internally be as excited? What can I get you to be able to do the internal review - I’ll send this and that and this - and then why don’t we get together early next week and you can tell me how that review is going.”