Always be 'prmping' - 6sense pitches sales the cure for information overload

6sense pitches sales the cure for information overload

We've left the age of information and entered the age of intelligence, said Latane Conant, CMO of 6sense, at the company's Reveal event this week. The event announced its new platform for sales teams - Revenue AI for Sales - focused on providing this intelligence. 

Conant said the new platform does four important things that will help sales teams prioritize in-market accounts and provide the insights needed to engage with them the right way:

1. Built for an anonymous world - 6sense research shows that 97% of B2B research is anonymous.
2. Includes the most relevant dataset for B2B.
3. Leverages applied AI.
4. Offers an embedded, simplified workflow - essentially, less clicking.

There are four main components to Revenue AI for Sales: prioritize, research, multi-thread, and personalize ("prmp"). 

Prioritize: First, not every account is the same, so prioritizing in-market accounts is critical to give sales focus. The platform includes a dashboard that shows in-market accounts in order of priority and provides recommended actions to take.

Research: A new Chrome extension enables salespeople to go to a company website and get access to 6sense contact data and insights. The extension also enables the salesperson to push contacts to the CRM or add them to Salesloft or Outreach cadences.   

Multi-thread: The Persona map is a visual map of all the people in the buying team for an account. It includes all contact details, activities, and talking points, bringing sales and marketing information together in a single location. The map provides a clear view of how well the salesperson performs at multi-threading (reaching out to multiple people on the buying team). 

People and company pages include everything from company hierarchies to job insights, firmographic, psychographic, and technographic data, intent signals, and more.

Personalize: The final piece - personalization, is all about delivering relevant, personalized messages. In this case, it's using conversational email, which 6sense announced two years ago.

Putting AI into everything

Generative AI is one type of AI that is used in sales and marketing tools today. In 6sense's new Revenue AI for Sales platform, we see five types of AI. Viral Bajaria, CTO and co-founder of 6sense, discussed what is needed to bring intelligence to information. 

He said we start with the idea that we need a lot of data, but it's important to recognize that it's about the "right type of data." Five types of AI help with the "right" part:

• Descriptive AI - what is happening?
• Diagnostic AI - why is it happening (e.g., trends)?
• Predictive AI - what's going to happen next?
• Prescriptive AI - what should I do next?
• generative AI - what should I say?

Bajaria argued that descriptive and diagnostic AI are table stakes; they should be a part of every solution a salesperson or marketer uses. In 6sense's new sales platform, the dashboard, which includes the hot account list, leverages predictive AI and continually updates based on the data. The persona map uses prescriptive AI, providing insights into which contacts to reach out to and the next steps. And then, conversational email is built on generative AI, recommending the right email to send. 

He also made a good point by saying that while a lot of data is available, it's the right data that matters to your business. All the data in the world doesn't matter if it's irrelevant to your work and the accounts you are trying to reach. 

Strategy shift

Ashleigh Ford, Director of Marketing Operations at Trend Micro, is an early user of the new platform, and she joined the event to talk about how her team has used the platform to improve their work. Ford said the decision to switch to 6sense's Revenue AI for Sales wasn't just about implementing new technology; it was an overall strategy shift. 

Trend Micro is in a very competitive industry (cybersecurity), and wanted to put more emphasis on prospecting. The challenge faced was that over half the contact data was missing from the new accounts handed to the sales team. Ford explained: 

"Prospecting is hard, especially in competitive industries. As we shifted some of our sales motions, we took a hard look at the data within our account structure. Some of our sales teams were handed new accounts where 56% of the contact data was missing.

The data science, machine learning, and AI behind 6sense's platform was a major factor in the decision to switch to 6sense Revenue AI for Sales. Our sales teams can now see all that intelligence – both prioritized accounts and contacts in personas that are buying from us. It's given our sales teams a targeted place to start versus trying to figure out what to do with all the data on their own.

My take

There has always been a lot of innovation in marketing technology, but now it's sales turn. I talked about Outreach's integration with Snowflake as one example, but that's just a sample of what they are doing to support sales teams. Another example is product demo software, which is growing and is now an official G2 category.

Demandbase is also building more capabilities to support sales. Jon Miller told me they saw 380% more engagement from the Sales persona on Demandbase TV, demonstrating the need to support sales teams more than ever.

As for AI, it's becoming clear that most types of AI are becoming table stakes. As a result, tech vendors - both marketing and sales, should have roadmaps that include all different types of AI, depending on what they are building. 

6sense is hitting it from all angles, but what makes their new product even more relevant is that everything is in one place, reducing the time and effort to move between systems to find the right information and activate on it.