By Lisa Heay, Marketing Planning Manager at Heinz Marketing
If you’re running an account-based marketing initiative in your organization but not using an account engagement tool, you’re missing out. 6sense is one of the best in the biz—their Account Engagement platform has the power to elevate any sales team, showing them exactly which companies are in the consideration and decision phases of their buying cycle.
Essentially, 6sense is a tool to help you figure out who is interested in buying your products and services so you can prioritize follow up at the right time. They are able to pull data from a variety of sources in order to show a holistic view of intent and where a company is in their buying journey.
It’s able to collect first-party data, including:
- Known visitors to your website,
- Campaign activity from your marketing automation platform, and
- Sales opportunities from your CRM system,
And combine it with third-party data, such as:
- Research activity on keywords relevant to the customer, including those that are researching competitors, pulled from over 3.5 million B2B websites,
- Digital advertising impressions, and
- Anonymous web visits—they work with vendors to curate IP addresses to come up with company names that might be searching your site and are not yet in your database.
All of this data is handed to 6sense’s data science team in order to build a model tailored to each customer with the most prevalent patterns and trends. They evaluate against the customer’s existing customers to determine what they did prior to becoming closed-won opportunities. Did they all fill out a form, then download a whitepaper, and then visit a specific website URL before moving to closed? 6sense will look for those trends in order to surface other companies that are following the same pattern.
There is no influence or interpretation here—the data speaks for itself. 6sense is able to pull historical sales cycle activity for SFDC to see what has worked for the client before in order to predict what will happen in the future.
Sales is then able to see which companies fall into awareness, consideration, or decision phases of their buying journey, and can slice and dice the data by demographics like industry or location, or behaviors like keywords searched, etc.
Something to note as security is at the top of everyone’s minds in 2020 is that 6sense, because it’s an account based platform, is fully GDPR and privacy compliant. Alerts are shown at an account level, for example, “A visitor from Zillow came to your website”. It’s up to you to drill into your opted in contacts at that account (or utilize other tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator) and approach them from there!
I’ve only just scratched the surface! Check out 6sense.com for more information on their capabilities, and read user reviews on G2.com and TrustRadius.
