Item: 6sense
Rating: 10
Author: Jana Gauvey

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have 2 divisions using 6sense (out of 4). Marketing had been considering an ABM solution but originally the plan was to make the decision within a year. Then our Customer Success team came to us and started talking about CDP data. We investigated 3-4 different platforms and narrowed our choices down to 2. We had a plethora of reasons we wanted to look at data in aggregate - our CRM and MAP systems while operating together, did not have data centralized in a fashion that was able to create reports or gather full information from both, marketing wanted a better understanding of which organizations were visiting our websites, and we wanted to be able to provide our sales team with additional insights on accounts beyond what we knew at that time.

Generally speaking we wanted to:
1. Be able to better target advertising and marketing messages based on interest
2. Help sales more effectively approach colder accounts with information that would help them get net new customers
3. Begin working on a move to ABSM across the organization

Pros and Cons

Unlimited keywords - our organizations target a LOT of things so allowing us to segment, group, and identify a lot of keywords is particularly useful.
Provide insight to sales in a simplified manner - a few solutions we looked at the data was too hard to read or understand.
Segmenting - allowing us to create data based on demographic, geographic, or intent data as well as model-based data is great.
Onboarding - the team met with the right people at the right time and kept us all informed before launch.

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.

Return on Investment

Increase in website visitor knowledge - from 10% of known website visitors to 70%
Sales Enablement - we don't have hard #s yet, but several reps have expressed how this tool is head and shoulders above anything they have used previously

Account Identification

We have been able to identify organizations visiting our websites. For one of the two divisions, we have a regular ad program running targeting accounts that have been to our site to encourage them to come back. We've also focused the alerts for that division to show them only website visits and contact engagement, allowing them to focus on accounts that are more aware of us/have some experience with us prior to making a call.

Our other division created a BDR team around the same time we implemented 6sense. This team uses the tool to help them more effectively target and uncover warm prospects at non-client accounts.

AI-Powered Predictions

While we use these capabilities, the adoption of them has not been comprehensive. We are using this data to help better identify organizations that are more likely to purchase and marrying that information with our MQL program to help sales target contacts at organizations more likely to open an opportunity.

Marketing is using the data beyond that to help identify organizations to target to move up the funnel for various projects. From event marketing to advertising and more.

Alternatives Considered

Demandbase, RollWorks and ZoomInfo MarketingOS

When it came down to it, we were caught between Demandbase and 6sense. Both tools would have fit our needs, 6sense did a better job overall of selling us on the tool itself, how it can be used, how they use it, and what their future vision entailed. Having the ability to add unlimited keywords was definitely putting them above the competitors. RollWorks was too single-solution focused on advertising, and the ZoomInfo tool was in its infancy at the time and the user interface was not friendly, and was outside of our CRM (which was a non-starter - any tool we used needed to be able to be accessed from within our CRM).

Key Insights

Do you think 6sense delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with 6sense's feature set?

Yes

Did 6sense live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of 6sense go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy 6sense again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Uberflip, ZoomInfo SalesOS, Oracle Marketing

Likelihood to Recommend

6sense is well suited to organizations that want to help their sales team with increased insight into accounts. Both those to target as well as those that may not yet be in market but are researching the keywords relative to the solution offered. It's a good tool for marketing organizations to more effectively target based not just on demographic data but also on intent data or where an organization is within a buying cycle. It is better suited to organizations that provide one solution or target a focused set of demographics. It is also good to help see whitespace within your system - you can ask the system to check for organizations you do not have within your CRM to help find net new companies.

6sense struggles a bit with our model, partially because we are focused at an organization-level rather than a solution-level. Our organization provides several solutions and creating a model for each one is not economically feasible. This is partly on us trying to have it be all things to all types of sellers, but also partly on the inability of the system to better identify all intent signals from key intent signals. If your organization provides a lot of different solutions it may be better to either not bother with the model (at first) or to focus the model on one specific offering or demographic set. The system could be better about data for contacts and organizations overall - a few instances of providing organizations that are not in our CRM but were actually just older domains for a company.

6sense Review - One year into it

Overall Satisfaction with 6sense