Discovery is fundamental to success. As our CRO Latane says, customers often “buy in a time capsule,” solving only for their immediate pain points. Our job is to ensure they continue to grow with us as new challenges arise. Initial implementation involves getting our consulting team to map out the plan where different stakeholders come in at different times.

We recently launched what we call our mutual success plan - a documented engagement between our customer success organization and the customer. This is crucial because account-based marketing is a journey. A lot of work goes into that initial setup, understanding go-to-market goals, and determining strategic priorities. As teams evolve and people change roles, this plan helps educate new team members on the investments and internal conversations that have gone before.

The plan helps teams understand what success looks like and provides a foundation to point back to. Not everyone has key numbers identified initially - sometimes it starts with anecdotal benchmarks. But having this structured approach helps create the groundswell of buy-in from individuals.

One of the biggest advantages right out of the gate is having cross-team visibility. There's been long-standing friction between marketing and sales - marketing invests time to get leads and accounts ready, sales picks them up and might disqualify them for various reasons, and the cycle continues.

When customers come on board, they often feel pressure to have everything figured out - their content, channels, strategy. But it's actually about getting tactical use cases enabled so we can start to create momentum and gain visibility for cross-team conversation. The platform empowers both sides - giving marketing visibility into behaviors indicative of a sales-ready lead so they can increase quality pipeline, while giving sales visibility into what marketing has done to warm these accounts up, guiding their conversations.

Those who do incredibly well at championing account-based marketing internally understand they're the center point of managing up, down, and across the organization. When building the business case for C-level executives like the CEO and CFO, it's crucial to demonstrate how this impacts efficiency - focusing on the right accounts with time and spend.

There needs to be alignment on top-line ROI conversations and goals, which from our perspective means increasing quality pipeline, improving conversion rates, and reducing go-to-market waste. We can then demonstrate the incremental lift by showing what signals and decisions wouldn't have been possible without 6sense.

For example, our conversational AI email tool helps with headcount efficiency, automating work to drive sales readiness so SDRs can engage at the right time. This allows teams to be more efficient while maintaining quality engagement.