How Zoom enhanced alignment and achieved transformative growth with Demandbase

Executive summary

Zoom, a global leader in video and communication solutions, sought to streamline their account-based marketing (ABM) and sales operations to maximize impact. They teamed up with Demandbase to address their challenges. As a result, Zoom significantly improved marketing and sales collaboration, while leveraging intent data to make more-informed decisions. The outcomes included a 6.25x uplift in opportunities from ABM efforts and a 36% lift in sales conversions for targeted accounts. This Zoom success story highlights the power of Demandbase in driving both organizational alignment and revenue-generating results at scale.

Introduction

With a mission to transform real-time collaboration experiences to improve communication, Zoom continues to lead the industry with innovative technology. Yet, like so many organizations, they recognized the need to evolve their ABM and sales strategies to reach key audiences more effectively. Zoom turned to Demandbase for a solution to its challenges, seeking to improve marketing precision, scale personalization efforts, and enhance sales prospecting.

The challenge

Marketing challenges

Zoom’s marketing teams faced two core hurdles:

• Fragmented targeting efforts due to siloed workflows and lack of shared criteria for ABM campaigns.
• Personalization and scalability gaps caused by limited insights into whether accounts actively researched Zoom or industry competitors.

These challenges prevented cohesive strategies and reduced the effectiveness of Zoom’s campaigns. Without intent data or a unified go-to-market approach, it was difficult to engage accounts in personalized, meaningful ways that moved the needle on revenues.

Sales challenges

On the sales side, inefficiencies emerged in identifying high-opportunity accounts, including:

• Lack of actionable insights regarding intent and account positioning limited the ability of sales teams to prioritize prospects.
• Disjointed workflows between marketing and sales teams hindered seamless collaboration during outreach.

Together, these problems slowed pipeline progression and prevented targeted accounts from moving further and faster down the funnel.

The solution

Marketing activation

Zoom leaned on Demandbase to strengthen its ABM efforts, and Demandbase helped deliver the following solutions:

• Unified targeting through intent data: Demandbase allowed Zoom to identify accounts showing high intent signals, helping connect marketing and sales teams around common, clear priorities.
• Personalized campaigns at scale: Using Demandbase, marketing warmed up high-intent accounts with tailored campaigns across key channels, such as display and paid social.

These innovations empowered Zoom’s marketing teams to coordinate more effectively, with a shared dataset driving stronger campaign alignment and elevated return on advertising spend (ROAS).

Sales activation

For Sales, Demandbase became an essential part of their workflow, enabling:

• Prescriptive account targeting: Demandbase supplied Zoom’s sales teams with precise, prioritized lists of high-propensity accounts. These lists were enriched with detailed insights, enabling reps to personalize prospecting efforts.
• Proactive opportunity identification: Intent data helped Sales uncover unknown “in-market” accounts before they entered the RFP stage. Teams reached out to key decision-makers earlier in the buyer’s journey, maximizing the chances of success.

By integrating Demandbase into both Salesforce and a custom propensity-to-buy model, Zoom equipped their Sales teams with actionable insights to proactively engage target accounts.

The results

Marketing transformation

Zoom’s relationship with Demandbase revolutionized their marketing reach, resulting in the following:

• A 6.25x uplift in opportunities was observed for accounts targeted with ABM campaigns, validating the precision of Demandbase-guided targeting.
• ABM campaigns achieved engagement rates of 90% for Tier 1 accounts and 80% for Tier 2 accounts, helping Zoom capture the attention of typically difficult-to-reach audiences.
• Within a personalized pilot campaign focusing on high-intent accounts, Zoom generated a 32.25x uplift in pipeline from those accounts alone.

Sales success

Sales teams experienced similarly impressive gains, including:

• A specialized pilot with sellers targeting Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Revenue Accelerator solutions yielded a 36% lift in converting engaged accounts into opportunities.
• Incremental revenue gains were particularly strong, with exposed accounts demonstrating a 300%+ improvement in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) compared to the control group.

Together, these marketing and sales wins underscore Demandbase’s ability to deliver measurable gains across Zoom’s organization.

Key takeaways

The Zoom-Demandbase relationship demonstrates the power of alignment between marketing and sales. By leveraging a shared platform and data, Zoom achieved results that would have previously been out of reach. The key operational takeaways from the collaboration include:

• Unified targeting: A centralized approach allowed Zoom’s marketing and sales teams to focus on overlapping high-value opportunities.
• Dynamic personalization: Tailoring engagement strategies based on intent data drove stronger connections with accounts.
• Enhanced efficiency: Automated workflows streamlined processes and reduced the risk of manual errors.

These practices propelled Zoom beyond operational silos and into a new era of precision and collaboration.

Looking ahead

As Zoom continues to refine their ABM and sales approaches, it plans to deepen its relationship with Demandbase. Future plans include:

• Expanding integration across tools: Zoom intends to leverage even deeper integrations between Demandbase and their tech stack to enable dynamic, ongoing optimization.
• Enhancing global campaigns: Following the success seen in North America, Zoom plans to replicate and expand its strategies globally, and tailor campaigns to fit regional nuances.
• Refining personalization: Aiming to go beyond their current levels, Zoom plans to increase the specificity of their intent tracking and personalization efforts to reach buyers with even more timely, relevant content.

Conclusion

By aligning marketing and sales on shared priorities and deploying data-fueled strategies with Demandbase, Zoom unlocked unprecedented levels of precision and performance. From closing key personalization gaps to streamlining workflows, Zoom’s results were transformational, with both marketing and sales seeing multi-layered improvements in pipeline growth and revenue impact.