Breakthrough Day 1 Recap: Daring to Be More

October 17, 2023 —

6 min

Editor’s note: This is the first of two Breakthrough 2023 daily recaps. You can find the second recap here.

The first full day of Breakthrough, 6sense’s annual customer conference, got off to an inspiring start by challenging sellers not just to “do more,” but to “be more.”

Our “Be More” theme challenges sellers to change the way we work. Keep setting big goals and reach them by using the right tools.

The right tools:

Help you focus on the best opportunities.
Handle mundane but important tasks so you can stay focused on fun and creative work.
Free you from the tyranny of late nights and weekend work.
Respect your humanity and help you be a high-performer without burning yourself out in the process.

Chief Revenue Officer Latané Conant told the crowd gathered at the Omni PGA Resort here in Frisco, Texas, “It’s how we reimagine how we work, how we invest in the long term, and how we have a ton of fun doing it.”

Here’s what “Be More” looks like:

Drumroll for Our Latest Product…

Rafa Flores, 6sense VP of Product – CDP, introduced our Data & Audience Workflows tool, which is already making a positive impact in beta testing. We can’t wait to roll it out to more of our customers in the coming months!

Data & Audience Workflows make it much easier to:

Cleanse and update data
Automate data enrichment
Use that improved data to add audiences to multi-channel campaigns

To make these complex processes simple, we’ve designed an easy-to-use drag-and-drop canvas you can use to build and adjust workflows.

A sneak peek at the intuitive workflow builder coming to 6sense.

“You can shift things around. It won’t break anything,” Rafa says.

This is a big, big deal because it allows you to be fast, flexible, and less anxious about potential breakages. As data comes in and you analyze which campaigns are working best, you can quickly optimize your efforts.

Customer Presentations

As proud as 6sense is of our continued growth and innovation, our favorite part of Breakthrough is hearing how our customers are excelling.

Of more than a dozen sessions held, we’ve selected five to recap. Take a closer look at how these customers are using 6sense and other technologies to BE MORE.

Allego: Revolutionize Your Intent-Based Advertising

Building and scaling a retargeting machine requires attention to detail. Allego’s Craig Simons (Director of Growth) and Julia Kornerup (Marketing Associate and 6sense admin) know this well.

Allego has a broad offering that encompasses sales readiness, coaching, conversation intelligence, content management, and more. Since customers might be in the market for any standalone or combination of products, the team needed a way to not only find prospects that are showing interest — but understand what products they are interested in buying.

With 6sense, Simons, Kornerup, and the team collect signals to identify who is interested in different product lines. These signals include:

Pages visited on the Allego site
Keywords searched
Visits to third-party review sites

With this intelligence, the team can segment prospects and serve them with ads related to those products and the problems they solve. If a prospect clicks, they’re retargeted with additional ads and content. But, as we all know by now, clicks aren’t the only indicator of ad success.

Kornerup explained, “We know that just because we don’t get clicks doesn’t mean that the ads didn’t have any impact.”

The Allego team has created their own Buyer Stage Movement Report (BSMR), which shows progress for all accounts — calculating the difference in movement between the programmatic audience and everyone in the CRM, as well as movement quarter-over-quarter.

With this data-powered approach, the team saw:

20-30% of accounts reached by programmatic ads increased in buying stage (93-108% above baseline)
12% increase in audience impact rate
10% increase in account engagement, on average

Allego recommends starting with a single intent model, and as you collect more data, you can get more focused over time.

Simons said, “The more granular your area of interest ads and targeting, the more relevant and the greater impact you’ll be able to drive from your campaigns.”

Twilio: Playbook for Sales Rollout Success

Jessica Smith, Head of Sales Development at Twilio, reiterated just how crucial sales and marketing alignment is when building out a GTM playbook. “As buyers become more educated and are interacting with brands through multiple touchpoints, ensuring a strong client experience comes from alignment,” she said.

Smith and Laura Bowers, Twilio’s Senior Sales Enablement Business Partner, know this takes a slow, steady, and strategic approach — which they covered in their Breakthrough session.

They began by understanding the biggest challenges faced by each team, which probably sound familiar:

Poor account prioritization
Minimal visibility into buying teams
No single source of truth

From there, they set out to create an ABM-powered playbook, complete with ongoing training sessions. Robust intent and engagement data captured by 6sense formed the basis for Twilio’s 90-day pilot program. The initiative generated over $3 million in pipeline and more than 100 new opportunities.

With proven results, Bowers, Smith, and the team did a full rollout that included:

Intent-based prospecting
Automated notifications for timely prospect engagement
Customized email and ad messaging

Clear, documented expectations created more accountability while breaking down barriers between teams and individuals. Less manual work allowed the team to focus more on prospects instead of repetitive tasks. Now, no high-intent prospects fell through the cracks. More than 75 sales meetings were booked within the first week of the global rollout.

Beyond alignment, Bowers and Smith discussed the importance of sharing wins and providing ongoing training for AEs, SDRs, and others. They regularly highlight new use cases to make sure everyone uses and optimizes the tools at their disposal.

Bowers said, “There’s never been more valuable data at your fingertips than 6sense. 6sense is the key to your sales kingdom.”

FullStory: Getting all the Juice out of MarTech

According to Gartner’s 2023 Marketing Technology Survey, the average MarTech utilization rate for 2023 is a mere 33%.

In their session, Jen Leaver, FullStory’s Director of ABM & Integrated Campaigns, and Sarah Sehgal, Director of Demand Gen, discussed how to maximize use of 6sense.

The duo showed how they layer 6sense Profile Fit — which scores every account based on how closely they match their ideal customer profile (ICP) — into lead scoring models. One of their insights was that while “Strong Fit” accounts only made up 32% of top-of-funnel, they drove 77% of qualified pipeline.

“They may be fewer, but the whole adage of quality over quantity, we’ve proven that with the 6sense data,” Sehgal said.

Other valuable uses:

FullStory also uses 6sense buying stage predictions to change how it markets to prospects based on where they are in their buying journey.
Combining 6sense data and dashboards with their own custom-tailored Business Intelligence dashboards to show sales reps which accounts and contacts they should prioritize.
Using 6sense reporting capabilities to show the pipeline impact of marketing-influenced accounts, especially those identified as 6sense Qualified Accounts (6QAs).

“We’re able to lean into 6sense’s reporting capabilities to show that when our sales team is prioritizing 6QA accounts and decision and purchase stages, we’re able to open more pipeline, we’re able to progress those deals faster, our deal sizes are much higher,” Leaver said.

Leaver and Sehgal showcased how the average number of days to close a deal went down from 184 to 109. Showing the lift is what drives adoption and acceptance.

Anthology: Crushing LinkedIn Advertising

How do you make your brand stand out in a crowded market? Joshua White and Doug Calvelage of Anthology conquered this familiar challenge with a global, “always-on” LinkedIn campaign.

By combining 6sense custom audience segments and LinkedIn’s native ad targeting, they drove $12 million in marketing-contributed pipeline. White, Sr. Manager of Global Demand Gen, and Calvelage, EVP of Marketing, shared their process.

In addition to competition within the education technology space, Anthology experienced a slew of other obstacles:

Niche markets
Small budgets
Long sales cycles
Broad geography

They needed a way to get to prospects first, then target them with confidence. This involved three key steps:

Splitting audience and accounts into top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel segments
Developing persona-specific LinkedIn ads for buying team members
Merging 6sense segments with LinkedIn targeting

The results were higher reach and click-through rates. And while total ad costs were also high, Calvelage said this can be a good sign if accompanied by high reach and engagement.

Precise targeting is just one half of the equation, though. Ad content must be relevant to each targeted segment.

White summed it up well. “Is your message aligned to the problems that each persona is facing? Some campaigns, yes, you could do a one-size-fits-all messaging approach, but you’re not really going to get the results that you truly want. Talking to somebody about their issues, their pain points and how you can help solve them is really the route to go to get effective engagement.”

NVIDIA: Making Sense of Data

Among the 485+ employees that make up NVIDIA’s enterprise marketing ecosystem is a revenue marketing team of 20 people.

Part of the team are NVIDIA’s self-proclaimed “Batman and Robin:” Ari Capogeannis, Sr. Director of Revenue Marketing, and Katie Gatrell, Manager of Revenue Marketing. In their session, they discussed how they use 6sense to provide clarity to sales reps overwhelmed by 10,000 net-new names showing activity every month.

They put together a scalable solution called “Lead Class” that focuses on contacts that show a combination of strong lead and account signals. They then use 6sense across all the data “so that we can actually bubble up what matters,” Capogeannis said.

Stronger data analysis also helps NVIDIA spot surges in demand for products and among specific industry verticals. Providing that data to the finance team helps marketing get the budget it needs to go after those opportunities.