What were the challenges that sales and marketing teams faced with regards to customer data enrichment before Clearbit's entry into the market?

The joke we had is that the pre-Clearbit world of enrichment was really just a bunch of people selling CSVs. 

At that time, for example, ZoomInfo sold a lot of CSVs—but they didn't have a Salesforce integration, didn't have a CRM integration, and didn't have a marketing automation integration. They sold PDFs, and that was what the ‘data’ business was. 

You can even go as far back as Dun & Bradstreet—they started as a company of couriers and lawyers in different cities, writing notes down in a notebook, and copying those notebooks. That was the origin of the Dun & Bradstreet product.

When we started, there were a handful of people offering built-in integrations. There were the FullContacts of the world. There was a handful of companies in the B2C space that were a little bit more integrated in the DMPs. But on the B2B side, it was still a lot of manual entry, and a lot of CSV work: you had to buy a CSV, clean it, de-dupe it, and then upload it into Salesforce.

That led to the second phase of Clearbit’s product market fit, which was when we launched no-code or low-code data integrations.

We launched that because of the trend of people taking our APIs and then trying to pump that data into Salesforce, or into Marketo, or onto their website, wherever they were using it. 

We followed that trend, and built integrations for those people. So, you had plug and play integrations, and the thing that was different is we had a really nice real time API. On the back end, we were able to enrich on the fly. If you added a new record to Salesforce, it was enriched immediately. The rest of the market would do that once a day via a cron job.