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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Cision Communications Cloud
Score 7.5 out of 10
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CIsion Communications Cloud is used for identifying key media and influencers, connecting with audiences, monitoring traditional and social media, and analyzing outcomes.
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.
For a small start-up, the cost-benefit to add lift to press releases [and] particular milestone accomplishments is definitely there with the Cision [Communications] Cloud. Much of what we do, by necessity, is done internally without the benefit of outsourced press folks, so the Cision [Communications] Cloud ease of use and reporting is very important.
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.
Their upgraded press release templates and ability [to] pull in an entire, completed release makes the [process] faster and easier, and allows for more graphics, such as company mastheads, [are done well].
The media tracking offers the ability to find relevant placements across the entire country.
The journalist database streamlines the process of finding relevant reporters to directly connect [to] on news releases that are relevant to their beats.
The process of setting up, creating, and distributing a release is seamless, easy to use, and not labor-intensive.
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.
In the media influencer database, the classic Cision allowed us to do a zip code radius search to really drill down to the neighborhood level. That's because we do localized media advisories and press releases for events at neighborhood schools. One part of a big city like Chicago really doesn't care what's happening in another part of Chicago that's too far away. The zip code radius search was a feature in the classic Cision but not with the current Cision Communications Cloud. We've asked for this to be restored several times, but nothing's happened. In fact, we were told to use DMA — which actually goes wider in a search (bigger than a city), not more narrow as needed. This reflects a basic misunderstanding of what we need.
Another missing feature involves a merge field when sending out an email press release through Cision. This is the "select insert field" button in the upper right that's used to personalize a release with the media contact's name and other information. This is key for localization of the release. Many media outlets won't run a release unless it's local. While "county" is a feature in the influencer database when putting together a media list in Cision, "county" is not available to insert into a press release as a merge field. Counties are important because this is how many newspapers and health departments are organized and identify themselves. I've asked for this to be implemented, to no avail. As a workaround, we've had to use "contact city" or "outlet city."
After refining a media list in Cision using filters, I've had to download the list and take it offline to see the big picture, screen for duplicates, etc. While there is a button on the bottom left intended to help with this, it doesn't do the trick. That's because there may be multiple contacts with the same email address. In addition, one media contact may represent numerous media outlets, so this same contact could show up several times. It would be nice to have a better way to see the whole list online and eliminate both duplicates as well as those who previously opted out.
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.
While I am happy with the product performance overall, TrendKite's recent merger with Cision is cause for concern. When we first signed on with TrendKite, I spoke with several users and the best response I received was that the company was a startup and we could expect there to be hiccups along the way as the company grew and the platform got more robust. That has certainly been the case. However, now that they have merged with Cision — a company that has grown too fast, has not focused on improving its product and has poor customer service — I have concerns that TrendKite will lose some of the qualities that have made it a great company and great product to work with.
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.
The flexibility and customization of Cision Communications Cloud (TrendKite)* is among its most important features. Changing the dashboards, using keywords in the saved searches to pull out the best stories and the integration with marketing automation tools gives me confidence that I will able to continue using this tool well into the future. The future implementation and integration of the media contact database will complete the suite, making list management and email marketing programs much smoother. *This review was written before Cision acquired TrendKite. TrendKite is now part of Cision Communications Cloud.
Generally, Cision performs well day to day, but it's got some annoying bugs that slow down usage/require user workarounds which is inefficient. More seriously, a few months ago, as a result of a major system upgrade, certain critical functionality was not working and I was unable to use the service for more than a day when I had time-sensitive work to execute
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.
For Cision TrendKite in particilar, support always responded, but it was sometimes slow. For some of our booleans and search queries, we would need help refining and excluding terms/phrases that weren't relevant to our client or campaign. This sometimes took 1-2 days just to get a response back, which sometimes was too late when a last-minute report was due. This was only with the support staff, not necessarily our customer success manager or sales rep.
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.
The online training sessions available for the Cision Communications Cloud are helpful and informative. There's more than one option - initially, I signed up for the live webinar classes on basic functions and that is what I recommend other new users do as well. If I have specific questions or something I want to learn more about, I can search the online database and find article or online training videos to get the information I need.
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.
It's a similar product. I think Meltwater sells itself as being a bit more niche, but I have not found many significant differences between Meltwater and Cision. Meltwater's sales process is a very high pressure and their prices are inflated.
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.
