Anyone who has ever trick-or-treated knows how to read a street. Dark houses get skipped. The ones that went all out on decorations get the visit.

For sellers, a 6sense Qualified Account (6QA) is a house with jack-o’-lanterns and one of those 8-foot-tall skeletons in the yard. Intent activity, content engagement, and ideal customer profile fit have lined up, which tells you it’s worth knocking on the door.

It’s not a guarantee. You might get candy corn. But you’re more likely to get a full-size Snickers than from a random house.

Working 6QAs beats knocking on every door on the block, and you’ll spend a lot less time standing on porches where nobody answers.

What is a 6QA?

A 6QA is an account that matches your ICP and is actively in the Decision or Purchase buying stage. 6sense predicts an account’s buying stage from intent signals and updates it as new activity comes in. The five stages are Target, Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Purchase.

Several other factors go into the call, including how many in the buying group appear to be engaged and the amount and types of engagement. Qualification happens at the account level, so a 6QA tells you which company to focus on.

From there, 6sense recommends contacts based on an analysis of who is likely to be in the buying group.

6sense customers who concentrate their efforts on 6QAs see these differences compared with non-6QA opportunities and deals:

Average opportunity value is 99% higher
Average deal value is 46% higher
Close rates are 8% higher
Sales cycles are 27% faster

This guide covers the full workflow, from the first coffee to the handoff:

Checking for new 6QAs and choosing your focus
Researching the account and its history
Finding the buying group and matching people to persona cadences
Working your tasks and prepping for the next day
Handing off a meeting the AE can run with

Step 1: Check for new 6QAs first thing

Use the first 30 minutes of your day for a morning scan. Check for new 6QAs, then answer email and LinkedIn messages. If your team tiers its accounts, start with the top tiers.

Set a response SLA and hold yourself to it. SLA stands for service level agreement, which is a commitment to respond within a set time. At 6sense, we set ours at 24 hours for new 6QAs.

A spike in intent means someone at that account is researching right now, and a slow reply gives a competitor the chance to land the first conversation.

Step 2: Pick your daily focus

Before you start outreach, decide which accounts and which campaign get your attention today. Write the answer down. A named focus gives the day a purpose, and it keeps you from drifting into whatever landed in your inbox last.

Step 3: Research the account

Ten minutes of research makes every call and email sharper. Start with the company:

What do they sell, and who do they sell to?
Do you work with similar companies in their space?
Are they hiring for marketing or sales roles?
Did they announce a new product recently?

Then check the account history. If the account was a past opportunity, find out who your team met with, why they met with them in the first place, what the opportunity notes say, and why it ended up closed/lost.

A former evaluator already knows your story, so your opening should reflect what changed since then.

Two kinds of tools speed this up. An AI research assistant like RevvyAI, a 6sense conversational AI tool, can answer plain-language questions like why the account qualified today and what they have engaged with.

We use Sales Intelligence account dashboards to view details like recent activity, technographics, timeline, and contacts to reach. The questions that matter most are which personas at the account are engaging, and what they are engaging with.

Step 4: Find the buying group

Deals are a team sport. Buying groups average more than 10 people, and each member cares about a different problem. A finance leader worries about ROI. An operations leader worries about integration and workload. A practitioner worries about whether the tool makes the week easier or harder.

Your job is to help the group reach comfort and consensus. One enthusiastic contact can’t carry a deal alone, because every person who has a say needs their own reason to say yes.

Start with the contacts 6sense recommends, then check that the roles that show up in your deals are covered: the executive sponsor, the people who will use the product daily, the technical or operational owners, and the adjacent teams who will feel the change.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a fast way to round out the group:

Filter by current company and enter the 6QA account
Add keywords in quotation marks, which forces an exact phrase match on the prospect’s profile
Build your phrase list from your own product and competitor names, category terms, and the job-function titles that appear in your closed-won deals

Step 5: Match each contact to a persona cadence

Outreach cadences tailored to specific personas earn their keep in four ways:

Messages land with more relevance
Calls get easier because you know the pain points
Multithreading becomes routine
Outbound prospecting gets streamlined

In your sales engagement platform (such as Salesloft or Outreach), build one email cadence for each persona that matters in your deals, plus a separate one for contacts who evaluated you before and moved to closed/lost.

Add each contact to the cadence that matches their role. When you sort a list of prospects from one account, expect them to fan out across several cadences. That’s multithreading, which enhances your odds of closing deals.

A strong outreach cadence mixes phone calls, personalized emails, social touches, and automated follow-ups. Open personalized emails with a challenge that fits the persona, double down on that challenge in the follow-up, and close with a case study that includes a proof point.

Step 6: Work your tasks by channel

Your sales engagement homepage is home base. A few habits keep the day moving:

Stick to one channel at a time: all calls, then all emails, then all LinkedIn
Finish every due step in one cadence before starting the next
Use filters for due date, cadence, account, and time zone to set your order
Aim to clear every task by end of day

A workable rhythm splits the day into prospecting blocks and task blocks. By lunchtime, you should have finished about half of your tasks and acted on your 6QA report. Use the break to compare one good call with one rough one. What would you repeat, and what would you change?

Step 7: Set up tomorrow before you log off

Reserve the late afternoon for next-day prep:

Add prospects so their first steps start tomorrow
Update accounts with accurate emails and phone numbers, especially mobile
Listen to recorded calls, yours and your peers’
Review your top-tier accounts
Review the objections you hear most and rehearse your responses

Step 8: Hand off a meeting the AE can run with

A booked meeting is the first stage of the sales process, and it only counts once the conversation happens and the prospect confirms they want to continue. Your notes decide how fast the AE can move from there. Before the meeting, capture:

Which 6QA signals triggered the outreach, and what the account has been engaging with
Who you’ve reached so far, and which roles in the buying group are still unreached
Any early read on need and timing from your conversations
The history from past opportunities, including who the champion was last time

Later stages reward this work. An AE needs a champion early and a multi-threaded evaluation with the economic buyer identified by name and role soon after.

Every stakeholder you’ve already mapped shortens that road. Each person in the group needs their own reason to say yes, so the earlier someone starts building that comfort and consensus, the better the odds the deal holds together.

A note for managers

You can make this routine stick:

Publish an SLA for new 6QAs and review it in team meetings
Protect the prospecting and prep blocks on your reps’ calendars
Coach from recorded calls, since peers’ calls are a free training library

Consistency compounds. A rep who runs this loop every day builds a bigger, warmer pipeline of conversations than one who goes all-out on Monday and coasts the rest of the week.

Ready to see how this works in practice? Explore 6sense Sales Intelligence or Book a demo.

Step-by-Step Guide for BDRs Working 6QAs