"Marketing is harder and harder these days because buyers want to remain anonymous."
M7: How does leveraging smart technologies like AI help marketers have an edge over others and achieve on-time targets?
LC: We need every advantage we can get in order to be successful and AI provides that advantage. Marketing is harder and harder these days because buyers want to remain anonymous. In fact, 90 percent of B2B buying behavior is digital and anonymous. Buyers also buy in teams, so the buying journey and process is very fragmented across many people. According to Gartner, it’s typical for a buying team to have more than 10 people involved. Adding to that, buyers are resistant. Every member of the B2B buying team requires highly personalized multi-touch and multi-channel engagement to take a meeting.
But our current systems are built for known static data, which only 12% of marketers have confidence in.
Revenue-generating teams should look for platforms that allow them to uncover buyer behavior, particularly the anonymous behavior, so they can stop spending money, time, and energy on the accounts that aren’t even in-market. Instead, through AI and big data, that money, time and energy can be used to uncover their “dark funnel,” or the rich information that is being done on your company and/or solution in the dark. Next, they must prioritize. Look across behavior to determine and group buying teams. Look for changes in behavior over time to fully grasp which accounts are in-market, ready for an upsell, or have potential to churn. AI can deliver these insights with a high degree of accuracy so you can know when accounts are getting ready to open opportunities. Enabling you to focus your time, salespeople and BDRs on the BEST accounts. Once you have uncovered anonymous behavior and prioritized timing, it’s time to engage. Engaging is about orchestrating multi-touch, multi-channel, highly personalized messages at scale. This is where AI really shines. It tells us the best time to use display ads vs. email vs a direct mailer and even triggers actions across channels. It also ensures we are personalizing appropriately so if someone has consumed the demo it offers them another piece of content so they aren’t served the demo AGAIN. Based on their behavior, buying stage, persona, and company we can dynamically deliver the best experience. Teams that use this approach see unbelievable results and are beating out their competition with 40 percent more opportunities, 5x larger deals, and 1.5x faster cycle times.
"Engaging is about orchestrating multi-touch, multi-channel, highly personalized messages at scale. This is where AI really shines."
M7: How does 6sense’s Account Based Orchestration Platform help revenue teams to compete and win in the age of account-based buying?
LC: I had my team do some research on the typical results b2b sales and marketing teams see from their efforts. The picture is not pretty. In fact EVERY minute:
- DOZENS of interested buyers will visit your website but only ONE will identify themselves.
- Your most important prospect will receive 2 NEW EMAILS. They will likely delete them both without opening.
- Your sales reps will spend ONE-QUARTER of their time on leads who have no intention to buy.
- Your BDR team will make just over 6 calls. They will book ZERO meetings.
No wonder marketing and sales teams get misaligned. This is not competing or winning.
Account Based Marketing is all the rage - It requires selecting the best accounts to go after, detailed insights into accounts and personas, highly personalized multi-channel engagement, alignment with sales, and the ability to track “real stuff” like increased engagement, pipeline, and revenue. ABM makes a lot of sense vs. traditional tactics that result in millions of unopened emails that get sent each year, thousands of dollars spent on swag at events that don’t lead to an opportunity, etc. However, the dirty little secret is that it’s impossible to scale without GREAT customer insights and orchestration capabilities. This is why you hear a lot about ABM pilots and not about ABM at scale.
6sense brings sales, business development, customer success, and marketing together on one platform that provides an unprecedented level of insights and the ability to take action.
6sense delivers ABM at scale by providing (at a click in an easy to use UI):
- an understanding of best accounts to go after based on your business objective, technographic, firmographic, and real-time behavioral information.
- insights into the key personas to engage, the topics they care about, and where they are in their buying stage.
- orchestrated engagement across tactics from email, to display ads, to direct mail.
- alerts for sales with relevant details like when to call, what to say, what accounts are doing anonymously/in the “dark funnel”, and what marketing activities are working.
- tracking and metrics around how campaigns perform, if new personas engage, if you influenced opportunities, and if you gained net new opportunities.
This means sales and marketing can get BACK to sales and marketing, aligning on a business objective, messaging, and the experience you want to deliver for prospects - one you can actually be proud of. One without useless forms, spam, and cold calls. And because our platform provides transparency, reduced mundane work, and competitive advantage, prospecting actually becomes fun!
M7: What is the “dark funnel” and how can marketers embrace that?
LC: So, the dark funnel is all of the data, information, people, and research that is happening right now for our product or solution that we have no insights into. You have to zoom out and think about the complexity of this cycle and how it’s changed. First of all, B2B buyers want to remain anonymous for as long as possible and our trick to making them not anonymous was to have some sort of gated content or to maybe try to run them down at a trade show or scan them but that doesn’t work anymore. All of our systems are set up for contact or a lead which is one person. What we find now is buyers buying in these teams, so you have to be able to understand how one person on the team is interacting with another person, how to put them together and how their collective research and desires come together. And again, all of that’s happening anonymously. So, the dark funnel research just went from one person to ten peoples’ research.
The other challenge is, in order to engage with buyers because they get so much noise and are so inundated, in fact in B2B we send about 300 billion emails a year, there’s only 7.7 billion people in the world and that’s not even B2C, so that doesn’t mean they’re on pottery barn’s list. So, our email motion in being able to break out of the noise is incredibly difficult. Hence, we have to have more touches and more capabilities and all of those emails and things that we’re sending are all in this dark funnel, we don’t truly understand how they’re getting consumed. So what ends up happening is we as marketers have to do a lot of guessing in how we design our programs and how we engage with customers and when you can start to really shine a light on the dark funnel and understand that rich research and the buying team and most importantly understand where they are in their journey, understand the timing. Rather than spamming you can start to really personalize in engagement and experience based on what they care about, who they are and most importantly, where they are in the buying journey.
"6sense brings sales, business development, customer success, and marketing together on one platform that provides an unprecedented level of insights and the ability to take action."
M7: To what extent does having a deep insight into a prospect’s buying journey help marketers in sales conversion and closing deals?
LC: Marketing is hard, selling is harder, and being a business development rep is the HARDEST. Business Development Reps and AE’s are expected to make hundreds of calls and send tons of email a week, but how do they know the contacts they are calling on aren’t random? Are they even in-market? How do they know when the best time to call is or what to even discuss without knowing the contacts needs? With outbound efforts, BDR’s and AE’s want opportunities, not just activity, but they don’t have a good way to make the right connections with the right content in order to be successful.
To reduce turnover and give outbound sales teams the best chance of success, we have to give them insights, with a robust group of digital signals to show if an account is actually in-market to buy or beginning the early stages of research. And with potential buyers leaving a digital footprint in the form of intent signals across the internet, both known and anonymous interactions with your website, as well as thousands of other 3rd party sites, we can take the guesswork out of identifying which accounts to target and what topics or competitors those accounts are searching.
Deep insights from 6sense help marketing, sales, and BDRs understand where each account is in their buyer journey and focus efforts on those who are actively in-market or in the early stages of research for our product or service. This lets the sales team know the ideal time to engage and what the account is interested in, taking the conversation from a cold call to a productive, meaningful one, driving higher conversions, win rates, and average deal size.
M7: 6sense recently launched Account-Based External Media Campaigns Analytics. How is it enabling media campaign effectiveness?
LC: The days of a four martini lunch and a deal are long gone since buyers don't want to talk to sales until they are 70% through the journey. Because of this shift, B2B digital ad spend is projected to hit $6.08 billion this year. It is an effective way to reach buyers in target accounts if done strategically with insights and proper measurement.
This feature focuses on digital agencies and the brands they work with. They use 6sense and all the rich insights on behavior and keywords in their campaign planning. It enables them to micro-segment and take an audience first approach vs designing a campaign and then finding an audience, flipping the campaign planning process on its head. 6sense also allows agencies to compare campaigns across different channels - tracking reach, engagement, and influence of these campaigns on accounts they are targeting for their customers.
Innovative agencies are partnering with us to deliver for their customers and they are seeing high returns on their investment.
M7: What is your favorite quote?
LC: “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” - Mick Jagger