If you’re in sales or marketing, you likely use at least one dashboard on a daily basis, whether to see which accounts are showing buying intent, which keywords your prospects are researching, or which stage of the buying journey they’re in.
This information might be spanned across several different views, but what if you had all this critical data (and more) in a single dashboard, allowing your sales team to effectively prioritize their work based on account, timing, intent, and keyword? For Sisense, this was the vision, but they had struggled to find a partner that delivers the account insights and data they needed to make it a reality.
Finding the Right Platform for Integration
As the pods go about their daily prospecting and outreach, they are heavily reliant on intent data and signals. Of course, Sisense being a robust data and analytics platform, placed heavy emphasis on finding not just any account engagement solution, but rather finding the right solution that provides actionable insights they could easily integrate into their Sisense platform.
Before 6sense, Sisense struggled to find an account-based sales and marketing solution that was able to integrate seamlessly with their data platform. Account data previously was completely independent and couldn’t integrate into their system. Ilan Hertz, Sisense Head of Marketing Strategy and Operations, says that now with 6sense, “they are able to do magic with the data.”
6sense lights up Sisense’s Dark Funnel so they have complete visibility into buyer intent, and whether or not those accounts are known or unknown. 6sense also uncovers what accounts care about by identifying the keywords they’re researching, then predicts where accounts are in the buying journey so Sisense’s pods know exactly when to time their outreach. And while 6sense delivers rich dashboard and visualizations within the platform, Sisense wanted to be able to seamlessly extract 6sense’s data and predictions and integrate it into their own platform.
Sisense integrates data from a number of sources to fuel their sales team, including Salesforce, Marketo, and Google Analytics (to name a few). This had historically been working fine, but “the 6sense data really took things to the next level,” says Ilan.
Intentional Engagement
The Sisense sales team has been hyper-focused on tracking intent signals for named accounts to then help them prioritize and time their outreach appropriately — and to have consistent visibility across the board. The 6sense Account Engagement Platform has added a whole new level of insights to Sisense’s martech stack, allowing them to get a full picture of their named accounts’ activities and behavior.
The sales team is most interested and focused on understanding what kind of solutions their accounts are researching, and then catering their outreach accordingly. With a strong intent solution under their belt, the Sisense team is equipped with both solid account data and actionable insights to help them engage the right buyers at the right time with the right message.
The “pods” have their own proprietary dashboards called POD Enablement Dashboards where they work on their named accounts. The idea of these dashboards is to provide sales reps with full visibility into how their named accounts are engaging with Sisense, and also to give them a complete view of all intent signals and interactions to help them then frame their calls, emails, and tactics. These dashboards are where 6sense fits into the picture.
Sharon Krepner, Sisense Marketing BI Analyst, is the brains behind these dashboards, and continues to find new ways to empower their revenue teams with actionable insights. Here’s a view of the POD Enablement dashboard:
In the Account Engagement Overview, you can see 6sense data present in this dashboard in a few places. The first view shows the intent signals that the account is showing, which is aggregated data from Google Analytics, Marketo, and 6sense. 6sense provides the intent and predictive data based on all keywords that have been searched by those accounts, and also metrics from their media campaigns. The Sisense team also uses the 6sense API to bring rich account data into Google Analytics in order to layer 6sense’s insights and predictions onto their Google Analytics data.
The sales reps select and prioritize accounts for outreach by splitting the data into different time frames and sorting by volume and recency. This allows for them to stay up-to-date with changes as soon as they’re identified, and adjust their account engagement tactics accordingly.
Sales Drills Down Deeper
Sisense also incorporates 6sense buying stages (Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Purchase) in their Account Engagement Overview dashboard in order to represent the latest predicted buying stages for their named accounts, and the data refreshes on a daily basis. The Sisense sales reps are even able to slice and dice the data in several different ways; if a rep wanted to only reach out to their named accounts in the Consideration stage, they can click into the stage and filter the entire dashboard to those specific accounts, and can then drill down on that particular list. Each buying stage calls for its own unique messaging, so reps use this capability to tailor their outreach according to where their accounts are in the buying journey.
The Account Engagement Overview dashboard gives the Sisense sales team a holistic view of activities, but there is actually one more dashboard that the sales team leverages, which goes one step further: their Activities Drill Down dashboard, as seen below:
Here, sales reps can go deeper into intent signals and start to get a sense of what exactly the particular account is searching and which topics they can address in their outreach. Some of their indicators are:
- Website activity (data for anonymous visits sourced by 6sense and known visits sourced by Marketo)
- Interesting moments (touchpoints from accounts by persona such as who clicked an email, attended a webinar, filled out a form, or downloaded an asset, all sourced by Marketo)
- Searches (keywords searched based on intent data from 6sense)
- Clicks (6sense display campaigns)
The dashboards and analytics as a whole are mostly utilized by upper management for visibility purposes and tracking on a larger scale, while the interesting moments and other indicators are primarily leveraged by the sales team. The indicators serve them on a daily basis at an operational level, as the whole Sisense sales team is using 6sense.
With so much flexibility in how they choose to prioritize and the granularity of their data, Sharon shares that the sales team has seen great success.
What does the future hold for Sisense, when it comes to 6sense?
The Sisense team is also looking forward to leveraging 6sense Sales Intelligence to enhance their sales efforts. While they currently create their stellar custom dashboards to help aggregate rich 6sense data and insights into custom views, the ultimate goal is to have reps use Sales Intelligence to further drill down into account buying centers, keywords, engagement levels, and more!
