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Leah Daniels

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Company: ZoomInfo, Waltham, MA
Company Description: ZoomInfo is a business information search engine used to quickly find information about industries, companies, people, products and services. ZoomInfo is used by sales and marketing professionals to identify business opportunities, by recruiters to locate talent, and by anyone conducting in-depth research about products, services and businesses.
Nomination Category: Sales Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Director or Manager of the Year

Nomination Title: Leah Daniels, Sales Manager/Retention and Growth

Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since January 1 2008 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Smashing both quarterly and 2008 year-end sales quotas were just two milestones
for Leah Daniels, ZoomInfo Sales Manager/Retention and Growth. She spearheaded
renewal/win-back programs as the company quickly entered new markets and tripled
new-business client growth compared with the same period a year earlier. These
achievements came despite internal reorganization of department personnel and
the associated learning curves. The key points:
-individual and team year-to-date are ahead of projected on-target earnings,
-doubled the market potential for ZoomInfo in five quarters, improving upsell to
new audiences while maintaining core customers,
-growing new market for corporate sales despite slowing spend in that segment.

Corporate recruiting clients had been the main audience for ZoomInfo in 2006-07,
delivering a targeted, loyal customer base. And although the company had charted
a course to reach new clients, that transition had to be accelerated when a
slowing economy forced cuts in recruiting budgets. Leah directed a shift that
doubled the size of ZoomInfo’s markets in less than five quarters, observes
Bryan Burdick, the company’s president. That change meant serving an entirely
new audience in sales/marketing -- users with different needs, knowledge and
skills. Remaking a core business is never easy. ZoomInfo required a more complex
compensation structure, so Leah devised a program that rewarded sales reps based
on how many calls resulted in demonstrations, or led to in-person meetings. A
corresponding change in lead-generation steps cut the process of updating and
passing along leads from days to hours. The Pre-Sales team learned how to map
accounts and shorten buying cycles by addressing key players. Additionally, Leah
oversaw creation of a “farm team” that trained reps in customer service,
ensuring their success in sales by giving them a deeper understanding of
ZoomInfo operations, customers and markets.

The “Hunter” sales team model for Pre-Sales turns leads over from one group to
another – a challenge when selling a subscription-based data product into a
slowing market, such as recruiting. Yet Leah’s team (individually and as a
group) is ahead of anticipated on-target earnings, overcoming a 10 percent
additional workload that resulted from personnel shifts.

ZoomInfo is the most comprehensive source of business information, using
semantic search tools and data recombination to assemble profiles on 45 million
people and 5 million companies. The company sells annual subscriptions to this
data and related search capabilities. In 2007-08, the company shifted its focus
to tailor data and search tools for enterprise-level sales/marketing and
corporate research, and developed other products for different markets and needs.

List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

http://www.zoominfo.com/About/news/press-release-article.aspx?articleID=09_24_08

Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the nominee:

During more than eight years at ZoomInfo, Leah Daniels has helped the company
quadruple in sales and number of employees. She has worked on marketing and
product management, and knows the marketplace for business data, search
technology and its customers in extreme detail. She holds a BS degree in
Psychology/Sociology from Boston University. Also, Leah somehow found time to
get married in fall 2008.