Produced by:
Driving revenue growth through
Account Intelligence
Stefano Iacono manages marketing in Europe for 6sense, the leading account intelligence platform for B2B organisations. In his interview, Stefano provided valuable insights into the major trends reshaping B2B buying behaviour and shared actionable advice for sales and marketing leaders looking to adapt. You’ll hear how 6sense’s AI and data science helps teams identify and engage high-value accounts demonstrating early signals of interest, and learn about innovations 6sense is pioneering to combine predictive analytics with emerging techniques like conversational AI.
Can you give us an overview of 6sense and what problem the company aims to solve?
6sense was founded 10 years ago to help B2B companies more effectively identify who is truly ready to buy at any given moment. Our founders were demand generation consultants who realised that sales and marketing is extraordinarily difficult if you don’t know which accounts are primed for engagement. So, at its core, 6sense focuses on predicting buying signals. We leverage AI and data to provide intelligence on which target accounts are demonstrating early signals of interest. This enables sales and marketing teams to focus their efforts on the warmest, most sales-ready accounts rather than wasting time with accounts that are cold or disengaged. Over the past decade, 6sense has expanded from just identifying buyer intent signals to providing an end-to-end platform connecting sales and marketing. We now offer technology to help teams orchestrate personalised multi-channel campaigns, craft the right messaging, and track engagement through the entire customer journey. In a nutshell, 6sense aims to eliminate guesswork so B2B revenue teams know exactly who and when to target to drive more pipeline, higher win rates, and maximum deal sizes. We empower organisations to remove inefficiency and ensure every sales interaction is focused on accounts poised to buy.
Why is an account-based approach so important for B2B marketing and sales teams today?
The B2B buying process has grown more complex – deals now involve more stakeholders, with cycle times increasing as buying groups expand. 6sense research shows there are now an average of 10+ stakeholders in every B2B buying decision.
However, research shows 84% of deals still go to the first vendor engaging accounts extensively. So, there’s tremendous advantage to being first to reach accounts that are signalling readiness.
Legacy lead-based systems lose the broader account view – teams chase individual leads instead of coordinated targeting of entire buying groups. This reactive approach loses deals.
Account-based sales and marketing mirrors reality – you cannot close complex deals by only engaging a sole buyer. This approach strategically coordinates engagement of whole buying groups within target accounts.
By recognising and engaging accounts poised to buy first, revenue teams secure an enormously advantageous position vs. chasing individual leads. The data clearly shows first movers win. An account-based focus delivers the coordination to consistently win.
Can you give us an overview of how 6sense actually enables customers to execute account-based strategies? What kind of platform and capabilities do you offer?
At its foundation, 6sense provides a technology platform focused on account intelligence and orchestration. We ingest and analyse billions of B2B signals and interactions to identify accounts demonstrating an empirical likelihood of making a purchase. This intelligence powers account selection, alerting sales and marketing to pivot resources only where there is established buying interest. Beyond surfacing ‘ready-to-go' accounts, 6sense enables users to build targeted, multi-channel campaigns tailored to each buying group. So the platform coordinates personalised messaging across everything from email nurtures to sales motions for maximum effectiveness, surfacing the right content to different stakeholders. We also offer a suite of accelerators, best practice playbooks, and tools to simplify execution. And we’ve built an amazing community called RevCity where over 8,000 customers and partners share insights on the forum. It creates this incredibly fast feedback loop – within hours you can get answers from 6sense experts or other users on anything from technical issues to campaign advice. The end goal is making account-based selling simple to manage, day-to-day. We handle the heavy lifting – from analytics to orchestration and ongoing optimisation – so revenue teams can move more quickly and confidently. The tech disappears and it just becomes your operating model.
Let’s dive deeper into 6sense’s capabilities. Can you outline the key technologies powering your platform?
We separate 6sense’s capabilities into three main buckets:
- Capture: This collects both first-party data on known interactions like engagement with emails or website visits, and expands visibility into the “dark funnel” account activity happening externally, like research across the wider web or peer reviews. So we’re capturing a 360-degree view of all the digital signals demonstrating engagement.
- Target: Our AI models ingest all the captured signals and analyse account populations to predict buying intent. The models benchmark which accounts have the highest statistical likelihood of becoming sales opportunities within 90 days based on where they are in their journey. Testing repeatedly confirms our AI’s accuracy – accounts predicted to be in a buying stage convert at 9X higher rates that those that aren’t.
- Boost: These are the orchestration and execution capabilities. Campaigns, advertising, events, configured sales plays to engage each buying group, and personalised with what matters most to them right now, based on their profile and predictive score. Execution channels span digital and human engagement.
The end result is complete visibility into target accounts, paired with the intelligence to engage with each based exactly on their current disposition and needs, for maximum impact. Teams accelerate pipeline development and conversion rates by leveraging the indicators generated from 6sense’s AI predictive insights.
What advice do you have for sales and marketing teams struggling to collaborate amid dysfunctional lead handoffs?
The key is moving beyond finger-pointing to genuinely understand likely valid concerns on both sides. Have earnest dialogues to pinpoint exact disagreement points – is it lead volume, follow-up standards, qualification criteria, conversion rates or something else? Define terms clearly, and openly discuss what success looks like based on transparent mutual expectations.
While technology like 6sense’s account intelligence, and process focused SLAs, can streamline coordination - you still need open communication between your teams.
Revenue growth depends most on a collaborative spirit and mindset between sales and marketing, underpinned by shared buyer insights. Those insights provide the foundation and vehicle to optimise execution.
In summary, achieve clarity, agree on accountability and where to make compromises, and champion a shared mindset that puts the human partnership (backed by technology) at the centre. This transforms dysfunction into seamless productivity.
The B2B buying journey has changed drastically over the past 10 years with buyers doing much more anonymous research digitally and avoiding sales calls. How should marketers adapt to this new customer behaviour? Can you share any advice or examples of best practices?
The reality is that buyers have become much more wary over the last ten years and a lot of this has developed as a response to marketers’ overaggressive lead capturing and spamming tactics. We’ve conditioned buyers to shield their information to avoid harassment from desperate sales reps.
This anxious focus on lead volume drove us to gate educational content behind forms, depriving buyers of what they actually need to educate themselves and make buying decisions. Then we bombard anyone who does share details, cementing distrust when buyers aren’t ready for that pressure.
The solution is to rethink content strategy and leverage new technologies. We have to earn engagement through valuable education without gating content or creating friction in the buying journey. Buyers will reach out when ready. Patient relationship building matters more than short-term lead targets.
Platforms like 6sense allow us to identify in-market accounts even when buying groups are anonymous. Our AI distinguishes true signals from noise, so revenue teams know precisely when and how to engage target accounts to give themselves the best chance of success.
The imperative is that we need to adapt to the way B2B buyers engage, leveraging tech to uncover those account readiness indicators we used to get (or assumed we were getting) directly from marketing generated leads. This evolution will enable a return to the fundamentals of relationship selling.
In your experience, what are the most important marketing metrics to focus on to demonstrate business impact?
The fundamentals have not changed in years – pipeline and revenue are a key metric for B2B success. Teams that obsess over vanity metrics like leads or campaign click-throughs quickly lose credibility.
There’s a hierarchy to keep in mind. Board-level metrics like pipeline influence, deal cycle velocity, and win rates, matter most. Discussing tactical metrics fails to connect marketing activities to executive priorities.
Next are operational metrics aligned to team goals. For us that includes metrics such as pipeline sourced and early qualified account-meeting conversion rates and velocity. This ties data back to the health of the funnel.
Finally, campaign metrics matter predominantly to marketing teams themselves, rather than leadership. Metrics like clicks and views are important but have the smallest business impact.
The key is leading with business metrics that marketing influences when discussing effectiveness. Boards and the broader company ultimately care about your impact on revenue and pipeline. Vanity metrics may excite marketers, but they miss the core point – driving growth and sales impact. Anchor on that north star above all else.
AI expanded into the mainstream last year with ChatGPT capturing attention. As an AI-focused company, is 6sense capitalising on the hype and emerging innovations - things like generative language models?
AI may be getting more public attention but foundational machine learning has powered 6sense for over a decade. The core of our platform relies on big data analytics and predictive modelling.
However, we absolutely see opportunities to apply cutting-edge techniques like generative AI to advance our capabilities. We recently launched a conversational email assistant that leverages language models to automatically engage target accounts, almost functioning as an additional sales rep.
The tool identifies in-market accounts then engages with personalised email conversations until a sales meeting is requested or the AI can no longer effectively respond. This gives overburdened sales teams a supplemental way to reach accounts at scale.
We’ve seen game changing early results. Different customers creatively adapt these innovations based on their needs. Last quarter over 10% of pipeline originated from this AI email assistant that didn’t even exist months ago.
It’s incredibly exciting to enhance proven technologies like our AI with new techniques like conversational interfaces. While AI is getting more public glory today, robust platforms have leveraged data science for years. Combining those foundations with cutting edge advances unlocks immense potential that’s still largely untapped.
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.
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