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…
N/A
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Marketing Cloud is an AI-powered, cloud-based digital marketing platform within the Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem. Marketers can segment their audience, deliver personalized messages, track campaign performance, engage leads and accounts, and optimize strategies based on real-time insights.
I think it's more suited for people or the access that we have. Sales intelligence and the predictive model. It's more suited for people on the demand gen side, the actual iframe itself. Then sales intelligence is for our sales team. It makes sense for demand gen and ABM analysts have access to both, but truthfully, our source of truth and bread and butter is the predictive model.
I rated this a seven because I love Salesforce, and it is excellent on the sales side. However, the marketing side has some pros and cons. It is terrific for keeping track of lead, customer, and dealer information, but it is not easy to automate workflows, integrate other software, or create well-designed emails. It is also straightforward to generate reports, which is very helpful in keeping track of lead progression to better market those leads and turn them into customers.
It makes my job a lot easier in terms of sales is an art as well as a science. It provides that science and the methodology of understanding who is the best people for me to reach out to and at what time should I prioritize certain companies for Q4 versus immediate. It kind of helps balance with my book of who's worth engaging with and getting out in front of versus those that I can probably schedule something for down the line and continue to nurture.
The only thing that I can think of, and it's not something that I particularly find annoying, but I know that executives, when they do have pushback about the tool, the thing that I hear them say is that they want that ability to see not just how 6sense is impacting from an attribution standpoint, the sale, they want to see more broad attribution capabilities within the tool. I actually think that having a marketer's level knowledge of the technology, I think it probably could be accomplished. That's a possibility that I think would make it an even easier sell internally or externally.
I rated 6Sense a 10 because it has become an indispensable tool for our sales and marketing teams. The platform’s ability to identify high-intent accounts and provide actionable insights has significantly improved our targeting and engagement strategies, resulting in better conversion rates and a more streamlined workflow. Its predictive capabilities give us a competitive edge by allowing us to reach prospects at the right time with personalized messaging. Additionally, 6Sense’s seamless integration with our existing tech stack and CRM makes it easy for our teams to collaborate and align on shared goals. The value it brings to our business development efforts ensures it remains a crucial part of our growth strategy.
As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch
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.
You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.
Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.
Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.
We hardly needed any support but in the initial days we got some had to contact support for the product understanding, the suppor t was prompt and they were very quick to resolve any issues. The support team is very helpful and gives a lot of importance to unresolved issues.
They are really responsive and more than not solve the problem or give you insight to how you can manage the solution yourself. I do find however sometimes a long delay on the more complex issues when they need to loop in other departments. but overall a good experience with support
The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.
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.
Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.
From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.
6sense sales team spent a lot more time with me building out a use case and example to take back to my team. I appreciated the support and felt confident in getting the help I needed to implement the tech.
I think that all of the marketing platforms I have evaluated and used in the past serve different markets and purposes. Salesforce Marketing Cloud was more palatable to our team because of our existing tech stack where we had Salesforce CRM already deployed and in use. Compared to Marketo and Hubspot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a bit dated in terms of the UI/UX and the overall experience but still meets the needs of our organization. Mailchimp, however, isn't even playing in the same arena and is meant for small organizations and companies that don't have a need for a full fledged offering that SFMC brings to the table.
Prior to this, we had no solution and literally were doing things on paper in a world where technology is outpacing paper. Having this process optimized has made it easier for the sales and marketing people to change information. From the training perspective, it has allowed us to see holes in where we could create additional support training, so the ROI here has been a lot more than just the optimization of a process.
I would say prioritizing accounts that 6sense is telling us to do has increased our win rates, has increased our meeting rates, our SDRs, prioritizing six QA from 6sense has greatly increased the amount of meetings they've been able to book. Then from there, open opportunities. Almost all of our closed won opportunities had extensive outreach via marketing. That was because of our knowledge of them through 6sense.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to more efficiently reach out to a higher number of prospects.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to nimbly communicate important messages in a timely fashion to facilitate conversion.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to track who is opening our messages so that we can stop sending to those not interested and focus on the most engaged audiences.
