ZoomInfo Scales SMB Onboarding with EverAfter by Base AI's Digital Journey

ZoomInfo, a global leader in go-to-market intelligence, helps revenue teams connect with ideal buyers through actionable data. With thousands of customers across every segment, its Customer Experience Operations team is focused on one mission: accelerate time to value while keeping every onboarding experience consistent and high quality.

The Challenge

For years, ZoomInfo onboarded every customer with the same proven 90-day framework covering implementation, adoption, and success planning. It still works well for mid-market and enterprise customers, where longer timelines and layered teams benefit from a guided cadence. For down-market SMBs, small teams running lean, the same time investment didn't fit.

“These customers move fast,” said Nate Alcorn, Manager of CX Operations. “Their window for value is measured in hours and days, not weeks. When we asked them to schedule a kickoff, wait a few days, and then follow a 90-day nurture path, we were unintentionally slowing them down.”

What was breaking:

• Multiple scheduling steps, kickoff calls, and email threads before customers could even start.
• Contract to completed kickoff took 5 to 7 days on average.
• Adoption and early usage showed no meaningful lift for the SMB segment, despite the quality of the experience.
• Onboarding managers spent hours curating next steps, managing inboxes, and chasing updates for accounts that preferred to self-serve.

The goal became clear: keep the framework, modernize the delivery. ZoomInfo set out to build a digital experience with the same structure and quality, that let SMB customers start, and finish, at their own pace.

It wasn't about effort, it was about leverage. Our hours were high, but our impact wasn't. We needed to re-allocate our people to where human interaction truly moves the needle.

The Solution

ZoomInfo spent about a year and a half exploring the market. The hard requirement was its deeply customized Salesforce onboarding object, the backbone of the internal process. Most tools wanted ZoomInfo to move into their system and away from it. ZoomInfo needed the opposite: a no-code, customer-facing view of that data, synced both ways with Salesforce, that the team could maintain on its own.

It really felt like EverAfter by Base AI was the only one that was going to be complementary to what we have built internally.

The result is the ZoomInfo Digital Journey Portal, powered by EverAfter by Base AI: a self-service onboarding hub for down-market customers on the Professional edition, built on the same framework ZoomInfo's onboarding managers run by hand.

• Kickoff call, reframed: The live kickoff is replaced by a self-service Kickoff and Planning module, so customers can start within hours of signing.
• Five modules, one blueprint: Kickoff and onboarding planning, technical configuration and integrations, admin user training, end-user training, and long-term adoption strategy, mirroring ZoomInfo's standard onboarding.
• Customers set the pace: At the start, each customer picks hyper-fast, efficient, or nurtured onboarding and a target go-live date. Timelines, deadlines, and module content update to match.
• Synced with Salesforce, both ways: Use case, tech stack, and timeline fields read and write to ZoomInfo's custom object, which auto-adjusts deadlines and progress and triggers personalized email nudges when a customer falls behind.
• Embedded in the product: A white-labeled portal customers reach from inside ZoomInfo through single sign-on and in-app Pendo prompts.

The Results

We were able to scale efficiently, to pull back human resources and let customers self-serve without watering down the experience.

Within 40 days of launch, time from contract signature to completed kickoff dropped from 5 to 7 days to 1 to 3. Customers who used to move through onboarding over several weeks now complete key modules in days. “They sign the contract, and within hours, if the customer is ready, they can start on their onboarding experience,” Nate said. Once SMB customers reach the second module, technical configuration, they are far more likely to finish the entire flow.

ZoomInfo kept the same engagement volume while removing the manual work of scheduling calls, managing inboxes, and pushing webinar attendance. Onboarding managers now spend that time on strategic accounts, and every SMB customer still gets a high-quality experience. Asked to sum up the impact in one word, Nate didn't hesitate: “Scalability.”

What's Next

ZoomInfo sees the Journey Portal as the first step in a company-wide move to digital-first success. “We see a world where all customers will get a version of the ZoomInfo Journey Portal, and they will get different journeys depending on what stage they're at,” Nate said.

• Shared managed spaces: A collaborative workspace for managed onboardings, with real-time visibility for customers and onboarding managers.
• Post-onboarding journeys: Extending digital experiences into the adoption and expansion phases.
• Cross-team collaboration: Bringing the model beyond onboarding to Customer Success teams and expanded onboarding motions.

“Human-led experiences are great; digital-first experiences are great too,” said Nate. “This isn't less of an onboarding. It's just as legitimate.”