VP Sales & GM, ZI Marketing @ZoomInfo, ex-VP & founding team @ppl_ai, talking ABM, enterprise SaaS & bay area sports.

New York, NY
Joined March 2009
Ben Daters retweeted
we comin'
Replying to @ENowoslawski @clay
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
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Ben Daters retweeted
Kruk & Kuip through the years 🥹
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Ben Daters retweeted
An Amazon customer in Texas was not enthused when her first drone-delivered order was dropped into her swimming pool. After hearing the loud buzzing of the drone arriving, she ran outside to record the delivery, and to her surprise, it landed in her pool.
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Ben Daters retweeted
Earlier today @OpenAI selected @ZoomInfo as a launch partner in Codex for Work, built for go-to-market teams. Sellers, Marketers, RevOps, and GTM Engineers run ZoomInfo skills right in Codex: find target accounts with buying signals, build contact lists of decision makers, map buying committees, prep meetings, and score pipeline, all on verified data. The work happens where you already are, grounded in data you can trust. Learn more at GTM.AI ; connect to Codex here: lnkd.in/efgjhHGR
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Man Clay got SO much more expensive with new "better value" pricing. 2x-3x more for us, I think. When pricing gets more complicated, it almost always means it's also gotten more expensive. At least for most.
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Ben Daters retweeted
Find accounts actively researching your category and hiring to solve problems YOUR PRODUCT SOLVES - in <4 minutes... No heavy ABM motion, no weird back and forth between marketing and sales. Not properly prioritizing your accounts with signals kills your conversion rates, drives down sales productivity, and eats up your cash flow. Most sales teams give up on “warm” leads from marketing and end up building their own lists - and those end up being based on firmographics - industry, company size, title - booorrrinnnnggg. I take three data sources and married them together in GTM Studio: 1. G2 intent data - who's actively researching ZoomInfo right now (thanks Godard Abel and Eric Gilpin) 2. CRM data - excluded existing customers (don't waste your reps' time) 3 Job posting data - filtered for companies hiring roles that mention "prospecting" or "cold calling" Think about what that means... A company is on G2 researching your product, they're not a customer, they're mid-market, right in your sweet spot. AND they're actively hiring people whose job it is to prospect. That's a company with BUDGET, NEED, and URGENCY. The whole thing took me ~3 minutes. Then I added the buying committee with a few clicks so my sellers have names of people, not just company logos. This is what GTM Studio was built for - taking signals that live in different places and combining them so your team focuses on the highest-likelihood opportunities.
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Ben Daters retweeted
We’ve been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Marketing and Sales Data Providers for B2B, Q1 2026! According to @Forrester’s evaluation, ZoomInfo is "a top option for organizations seeking a full ecosystem provider across sales and marketing." Check out the report to learn why we got 5/5 scores across data quality and validation processes, AI data readiness, and 18 other criteria: bit.ly/4rzDbTK
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We were Clay's largest user at one point in time, hitting their platform 17.3 million times per week. Last month we replaced them entirely with a $200/mo Claude Code subscription. I can't write code. Neither can James, my VP of Growth who built the replacement. Here's the full story. Clay is a GREAT product and I TRULY think most people should use it. But we hit their ceiling. 50,000 row limit per table. 12.5 million row cap per workspace. Tables that take days to actually delete. Clicking "run all" thousands of times and waiting days for things to clear out. So When you're processing millions of leads, all the above become the bottleneck of your entire business. James had never touched Claude Code before. Three weeks after learning it, he built our entire core system. With Clay, processing 1 million leads took 27 hours. And it would error out often enough that we would always have to plan on hitting the “run all rows” button again on 20+ clay tables. IYKYK but Our new system waterfall enriches 1 million leads in 5 seconds. 272,000 leads PER SECOND. AND On top of the core engine, we vibe coded a Google Maps scraper that pulls leads zip code by zip code across all 32,000 US zip codes. AND An AI lead finder that hits 95% contact match rates where Apollo gives you about 30%. AND Ad library scrapers for Google and LinkedIn. AND An AI campaign analysis system. AND An auto-refill system so clients never run out of leads mid-campaign. One we started building with Claude, we just couldn’t stop Now we have the data ready for clients sending 5 million emails a month within 1 week of signing the contract. I put together the full system blueprint -- every tool, the tech stack, a Clay vs custom comparison, and a 6-step playbook for building your own. Plus a video walkthrough where I show you the live system and how each tool actually works. Retweet or Reply CODE below and I'll DM it to you.
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