Kazoo’s employee experience platform transforms the way companies approach human resources (HR) by fully empowering employees and managers to drive key HR processes.
With Kazoo, employees have a central, single source for feedback, goals, performance discussions, check-ins, and more.
Incoming Kazoo CMO Casey Carey wanted to help his sales team shift its timeline to help buyers early in their journey and focus efforts on accounts that were the right fit for Kazoo’s platform.
Carey’s team’s combined use of 6sense and Bombora:
- Uncovered 25% more in-market businesses
- Netted an 8% lift in buying stage model performance
- Identified 77% of opportunities in Buying and Decision stages
The Challenge
Kazoo’s leaders knew that to rise above the crowd in the HR platform space, they’d need to out-market — not outspend — the competition. Historically, the company had taken a “tonnage” lead-generation approach, using form-fill gates to collect email addresses, sending copious nurture emails, and engaging in a heavy outbound calling game.
But when CMO Carey joined the team, it was clear the company couldn’t achieve the growth it needed if its revenue team didn’t make some fundamental changes.
To make that shift, Kazoo required intent data to understand buying stages and areas of interest to ensure its sales and marketing teams were maximizing their efforts.
Finding the First Tools
Already familiar with B2B intent data provider Bombora, Carey appreciated its ability to evaluate and detect surges in potential customers’ level of interest. To help outbound SDRs prioritize their accounts, he decided to test using Bombora data, combined with Kazoo’s own first-party data, to craft a rules-based model to predict buying stage.
That test quickly generated an almost 3x improvement in engagement, including reply and contact rates, making it clear they were now targeting the right accounts.
“We’d been debating forever about what our core industries were, and the model actually helped us understand that,’” Carey says. “We could put those arguments to bed and say, ‘Let’s use the data to tell us where we win most often and focus our efforts there.’”
It was the win Kazoo needed to start using Bombora intent data across more areas of the business. But stakeholders quickly realized that their small team didn’t have the bandwidth to really put the data to its best use.
The 6sense Solution
That’s when the team learned about 6sense and realized the solution they had in mind already existed. Using lookalike functionality, 6sense helped Kazoo uncover new accounts that resembled ones with which they’d already had success.
Not long after, Kazoo saw a significant lift: 41% of won opportunities hailed from accounts 6sense had identified as a strong fit.
“Your website activity, your email clicks, other engagement points with your brand … that’s a fraction of what your available market is doing,” Carey says. “Being able to open the aperture and unlock the insights around those activities that are happening, and being able to tap into them, is super powerful. It’s revolutionizing how we think about B2B marketing.”
Next Steps
Now was the time to decide whether to keep using 6sense and Bombora together, or to invest solely in 6sense. Casey asked for the 6sense team’s help in testing whether:
- He was getting enough additional insight from Bombora to justify the cost, and
- Whether using both solutions together was introducing complexity or making things simpler
The test revealed that combining the two solutions had resulted in larger returns than using either platform alone. Using Bombora and 6sense together:
- Uncovered 25% more in-market businesses
- Netted an 8% lift in buying stage model performance
The new model has accurately predicted the accounts most likely to convert to revenue. In fact, 77% of opportunities created were ones that 6sense identified as being in Decision and Purchase stages.
The Results
As a result of its new, data-driven approach to selling and marketing powered by 6sense and Bombora, Kazoo ensured it was targeting in-market accounts in the right industries, with the highest propensity to buy. This made for some amazing gains in a span of 18 months:
- Increased domain authority by 32 points
- Organic traffic up 307%
- Increased brand surge 454%
- Only 23% of MQLs disqualified (down from 80+%)
- Improved MQL-to-win rate of 14 percentage points
6sense + Bombora: Better Together
Thanks to a partnership between 6sense and Bombora, Bombora’s Company Surge Intent data is now included with all 6sense platform subscriptions.
The Bombora Company Surge + 6sense Kickstart package allows 6sense platform customers to use Bombora intent data to:
- Create dynamic audience segments for their account-based strategies
- Refine their 6sense predictive models
- Provide additional intent data points to sellers
Combined with 6sense’s native keyword-based intent, Bombora intent data can help identify more in-market accounts and generate higher conversion rates from 6sense’s patented buying stage predictions to pipeline opportunities.
