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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Adobe Marketo Engage
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Adobe Marketo Engage (acquired by Adobe in 2018) is a marketing automation platform whose basic features include email marketing, drip nurturing, landing pages, and lead scoring, but other editions offer additional advanced features. Typical customers are B2B firms with complex sales cycles.
The only other tool that I have used that is similar to 6sense is Marketo. However, I do not think that this tool was useful either. Again, this tool would be better suited for a BDR. This is not a tool that has helped me as a salesperson. It is very vague and oftentimes …
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 …
SR Consultant - Martech Strategy and Marketing Operations
Chose 6sense
6sense was able to give me more account based intelligence and then to take that intelligence and orchestrate it in meaningful/practical applications for both sales and marketing.
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.
The best thing with this tool is how they use rich behavioural data, built -in intelligence and sophisticated journey flow to identify and engage our best customers and accelerate the customer experience. The support team has been very phenomenal and outstanding for the last 1 year I have not been delayed any response to my question.
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.
The ability to clone entire programs and campaigns should not be underestimated as a marketing manager. This is a stand-out feature that other automation tools can't do (yet) in my experience.
myTokens: Campaign-based/local variables that can be used in emails and landing pages for everything from basic text, rich text, email scripts, CSS, scoring, and more. Set up your emails and LPs with myTokens and you'll be able to create an entire campaign without opening the email or LP editor. Clone program, update myTokens, test, and launch.
Engagement Programs: let you quickly create basic email nurture tracks with ease. Currently EPs can only send on a cadence of once per week, but future product release announcements suggest variable cadence will be possible soon.
AB Testing: using Email Programs and AB Test or ABCDEFG Test is simple to set up and report on. Manually chose the winner of your test or have Marketo choose automatically.
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.
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.
In some aspects, the tool can feel quite clunky in parts. But with the rich feature set it has, it's understandable. There is a lot of room for improvement for the user interface. The system itself doesn't have a slick or modern feel, so the usability could feel nicer to use with these areas considered.
Marketo provides different way and abilities to connect. If you are having product support or unexplained errors you can get someone on Marketo support 24 hours a day. One of Marketo's greatest assets in my opinion however would be the community. Often times our company is just looking for case success stories from someone else. In the community you can search for problems you are currently facing and see others having the same issue and solutions for those issues. If not, you can pose a question to the whole community and champions of the product and others can chime in to provide suggestions to fix your needs. The community is truly a 24/7 place to get your answers quickly.
There are times when it is slightly slow for us, where we sit on a screen waiting for it to load. This could be our internet since we have had the same issue occasionally with other systems, but it is enough to make you crazy.
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.
On multiple occasions we've had Marketo support (technical and license based) issues. Technical issues were minor and resolved within a day. License based issues (even things encouraged by Marketo for partners, like provisioning another license) took WEEKS. They actually took so long to respond that the client we were working with withdrew from the contract because they were no longer convinced Marketo was capable of supporting their business. As an agency trying to sell the software, you can only explain away so much before they just made us look silly.
Our account rep stopped out in Lincoln, NE to ensure we were properly set up and running. This was very much appreciated. I was very, very new at this point, so I can't comment very much on the extent of what was taught because I was still brand new to the company and the system
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.
I had never used Marketo prior to taking this job so online training was my starting point. I was able to follow along, it was interesting and quickly and efficiently taught me what I needed to know without a lot of fluff. It was far from boring and really helped me get my hands dirty with Marketo.
1. Have a content marketing plan to run in parallel with the marketing automation installation--you'll need a lot of content to make full use of Marketo's capabilities. 2. Work with sales (and ISRs) to define and document a workflow--build your Marketo installation around how you do business--not figure out how to apply your business to the tools 3. Spend time of data cleaning--both an initial project as well as a strategy for ongoing data management. We found some change manaement issues (no more appending ZZZ to the first name to identify contacts who have left the company, for example, or prohibiting the entry of "info@company.com" email addresses). 4. Find some champions in the sales and ISR teams. You'll have both fans and detractors--work with the fans to build some success stories
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.
Prior to Marketo, we used SharpSpring. I will say that SharpSpring is more intuitive to use than Marketo, but it has much less functionality. If you have the time to really learn Marketo, it has much more to offer as well as many more options to customize the solution to your exact needs.
We look at scaleability in a few different ways. First, the speed while using Marketo has remained relatively the same as our database has grown. Though I would say Marketo is slow at times, it has not gotten slower over the last few years. If anything, it has improved, and they are working to improve it. Second, the amount of programs we have developed in Marketo has exponentially grown as well. Marketo has allowed us to drastically increase our output without having to drastically increase our headcount.
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.
