Produced by:
Driving revenue growth through
Account Intelligence
A TechPros.io
Interview with
Stefano Iacono
European Marketing Director
🎙️Listen to the full interview
in the Enterprise Thought Leadership podcast,
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Stefano Iacono leads marketing in Europe for 6sense, the leading account intelligence platform for B2B organizations. In his interview, Stefano provided valuable insights into the major trends reshaping B2B buying behavior and shared actionable advice for sales and marketing leaders looking to adapt. He explained how 6sense’s AI and data science helps teams cut through the noise to identify and engage high-value accounts demonstrating early signals of interest and discussed 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 realized 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 personalized 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 organizations 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 evaluating intricate solutions. This elongates cycle times as buying groups expand.
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 signaling readiness.
Legacy lead-based systems lose the broader account view – teams chase individual leads instead of coordinating 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 recognizing 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. 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 analyze 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 personalized 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 optimization – 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 campaign emails or website visits and expands visibility into the “dark funnel” account activity happening externally like content downloads or peer reviews. So we’re capturing a 360-degree view of all the digital body language signals demonstrating engagement.
- Target: Our AI models ingest all the captured signals and analyze 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 – predicted accounts convert at 9X higher rates.
- Boost: These are the orchestration and execution capabilities. Campaigns, advertising, events, configured sales plays to engage each buying group personalized to what matters most right now based on their profile and predictive score. Execution channels span digital and human engagement.
The end result provides complete visibility into target accounts paired with the intelligence to engage each based exactly on their current disposition and needs for maximum impact. Teams accelerate pipeline development and conversion rates leveraging leading indicators generated from 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, along with faulty assumptions causing misperceptions and strain. 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 SLAs streamline coordination through process, this alone doesn’t solve tension. You still need open communication even when disagreeing, aiming to find compromises that balance empathy with accountability.
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 optimize execution, but don’t intrinsically fix clashing priorities. Nurturing mutual understanding and ownership enables the algorithms to drive progress powered by unified commitment to goals. In summary, achieve clarity, coordinate tightly through accountability and compromises, and champion a shared mindset that puts the human partnership at the center backed by aligned technologies. 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 behavior? Can you share any advice or examples of best practices?
A lot of the change in buyer wariness is self-inflicted by 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 progress their journey. 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 gates or friction. 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 clarifies true signals from noise so revenue teams know precisely when and how to engage target accounts as opportunities emerge.
The imperative is adapting to modern buyers while leveraging tech to uncover readiness indicators we used to get directly from lead contacts. This evolution enables 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 contribution above everything else. 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 to what executives care about.
Next are operational metrics aligned to team goals. For us that was accelerating transitions from first meetings to follow up conversations. This ties data back to the health of the funnel.
Finally, campaign metrics matter predominantly to marketing teams themselves when optimizing and reporting to leadership. Metrics like clicks and views are important but have the smallest business impact.
The key is leading with business metrics 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 capitalizing 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 modeling – not the viral sensations like ChatGPT.
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 carries personalized 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 still largely untapped.
6sense is on a mission to revolutionize the way B2B organizations 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.
6Sense are changing the world of marketing, one customer advocacy programme at a time.
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