The 6sense Account Engagement Platform helps B2B organizations achieve predictable revenue growth by putting the power of AI, big data, and machine learning behind every member of the revenue team. 6sense uncovers anonymous buying behavior, prioritizes accounts for sales and marketing, and enables them to engage resistant buying teams with personalized, multi-channel, multi-touch campaigns. 6sense helps revenue teams know everything they need to know about their buyers so they can…
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Infor Birst
Score 3.7 out of 10
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Infor Birst offers multi-tenant cloud BI for deployment in a public or private cloud, or on-premises. It provides an in-memory columnar data store and a BI layer comprising a reporting engine, predictive analytics tools, mobile native apps, dashboards, discovery tools, and an open client interface.
If you want to create a more targeted ad approach to your marketing strategy, you need 6sense to do it well. If your team is not willing to look at things from an account based approach and are stuck in the old school way of thinking about MQLs, then this may be a tough sell to sales.
Birst is well suited for an organization looking for a cloud-hosted analytics solution that is contained within one package. It is able to connect to a very wide variety of different data sources, and has options for either light or involved ETL procedures, depending on the users experience with preparing data. As with any BI project, it would not be suitable for an organization where there is no dedicated team to maintain and manage the project.
Product support: They are constantly adding new features and innovating.
Customer success: Everyone who uses the platform internally is in a customer-facing role and there is a massive amount of self-service and regularly-scheduled live training available.
Orchestration: We are able to orchestrate account and content acquisition with ease to add qualified accounts to our CRM and kick-start contact acquisition for sales.
Advertising: The advertising capabilities continue to grow. You can retarget individuals as well as run several different types of banner ad campaigns. They also recently added in-platform support to create LinkedIn campaigns.
Birst is an platform that provides connectors to some of the applications we use, but also allows us to bring in data from disparate systems to perform ETL and integrate all of the data for analyses. It makes no assumptions about your data, which is good for us, as we have a lot of customizations to many of our systems.
Sales Alerts - could provide more information, allow for more orgs to be identified, creating them based on keywords is beyond challenging as I cannot use keyword groups and instead must add each keyword manually.
Geographic areas - would love to be able to provide one zip code for a segment and ask for a radius of 20,50, etc miles around it, or even just ask for the geographic area relative to a specific city (DC Metro area, as an example)
RevCity/User Community - it's good and a nice start but the system doesn't provide reminders regularly to go check it out. Most of the posters tend to be 6sensers, and several questions can go unanswered.
We have several resources and, although 6sense is valuable, I do not believe it's being used widely enough by the sales team due to lack of training and its complexity. I wish there was a simplified guide for use and more 1-on-1 training.
We have been able to overcome any of the drawbacks we've found with Birst easily and it has fulfilled almost all of our analytic needs to date. Having seen their roadmap it would be highly unlikely we would move away from this platform any time soon. You simply can't beat the functionality that Birst provides for the price and the things I see coming out of the company solidify that our decision to choose Birst was the best possible choice. We have never regretted the decision.
The platform is pretty straightforward as far as creating new segments and what's available to do so. The launch of digital advertising has greatly improved in recent months which has been great for our digital team. Adding or removing users and updating integration points is pretty easy as well. Reporting has also been recently updated which makes reporting on usage and ROI much easier too.
I would like to see additional usability put into the ETL scripting. Recently, Birst added a nice function reference inline to formula creation which has kept me from having to return to documentation so much. The same in ETL would be very beneficial. The interface problems related to the Flex framework are being addressed in a rewrite to HTML 5, but for now they are still a hindrance to a higher usability rating.
We frequently experience -103 errors due to us using the Live Connect functionality, which does not seem to handle even minor interruptions in connectivity, and treats all future connection attempts or data requests as errors, even if the issue does not exist any longer
Everything runs very fast and smoothly. The only process that I wish was faster would be processing the data after uploading new data or making changes to the existing data model. It can take 15-20 minutes (roughly) to upload and process new data once you start getting into 10's of millions of rows. Given my experience with how long it takes me to pull the same data using SQL Server Management Studio, I don't think Birst is unreasonably slow - but for me to give a higher rating, I would want it to be unreasonably fast
Their Customer Success model is delivered as advertised. We're very satisfied with the availability of support. They care as much about our success as we do. We also had an issue where we believed there was an issue in a piece of functionality. They continued to dig until they found the problem and immediately put the fix into a patch.
When we have an issue that is stopping our business from proceeding, I want answers sooner than later. While Birst does have a published response time for each case level, we always wish it could be quicker. What response improvement could there be with a larger support team? In response to first question: Blackhole of issues - Birst needs to improve upon closing issues that resolution was dependent upon code fixes or enhancements, perhaps someone to add a comment on all case tickets at least every 60 days. Escalation - I always have the ability to electronically or via phone escalate a ticket. I also have my Customer Success Manager through whom I can escalate topics.
I have attended two different training sessions. The first one was my initial training on the system. It was well paced, clear and concise. If there were questions that were not able to be answered by the instructor, he took down the question and actually followed up and provided us a response quickly. The second session was specific to the dashboard and report design components. This training was very good though there were some attendants who had little or no experience and their questions slowed the class.
It was too fast, too complex, no one could follow along. If you miss a step, you're lost for the rest of the time and there is SO MUCH to learn and keep up with.
Although I found the online resources helpful, a lack of appropriate examples for certain tasks key to report creation and advanced modeling make the online training/documentation less than perfect. For an inexperienced BI professional, the online training would not enable a streamlined launch of the product.
Have clean data! Birst flexibility allows - Start small, then introduce functionality and complexity along the way. If you try to present all the functionality [bells and whistles] and wow them, but bad data is uncovered, the end user blames the new application and turns away.
Bombora gives you the data raw, you then determine where you want to integrate it and pull it in. More control, but more work. Also, you need a strong understanding of what you want to do. Demandbase seemed pretty much an Ads platform that uses intent. I love the website personalization that Triblio ABM/ABX Platform offers, but it is a marketing tool. It doesn't offer the same prospecting benefits.
During the vetting process, we looked at 14 different products (one of them internal) to see if they would fit our needs and whittled it down to this one over a three month period. We did not contact sales for all of them (sales sites were enough to rule out some), but did have a lot of demos with a significant portion of them and reviewed several of the major industry studies as well. We had representatives of both user interests/design and the technical backend on the evaluation process.
The major features we were looking for a product that we could embed inside our own SaaS application, connect to a sharded Postgres database, had multitenancy and allowed for customer generated reports/ self-reporting. Some of the minor "nice to have" features we were looking at was scheduled reports, especially if we could plug it into our own scheduling system (for CAN-SPAM compliance), internationalization, and support.
In the evaluation, Birst hit all of the must-haves and enough of the nice to haves that they made it down to our final two and the trial was the clincher to make it our final choice.
we can see that loading a lot of data can cause a noticable slow down in performance. Birst support indicated that they don't really consider anything less than 30 seconds to be an issue, but that is not the case for our customers, so we have had to change some of implementation to address this
6sense has provided me with a more targeted list of clients to go after, thus allowing me to increase my pipeline.
6sense has made cold calling a much warmer experience by identifying keywords our potential clients are searching for.
6sense has enabled me to have a more targeted approach when it comes to going after potential clients resulting in a higher win rate for me and my team.
Being a manufacturing company we tend to lag behind technologically. But having all the data for different ERP systems in one place has been an eye opener for the executives. It has lessened the need to convert some legacy ERP systems.
Having such a simple reporting tool is a great asset to some of our sites that have traditionally had trouble gathering data from AS400 systems.
