If your team is still manually building audience lists, you’re not just doing extra work — you’re working from data that’s already out of date. B2B marketing automation, account-level orchestration, and real-time segmentation used to require stitching together half a dozen tools and a lot of tribal knowledge. 6sense Intelligent Workflows changes that equation significantly.

This adoption playbook designed by 6sense Principal Strategy Manager Sean Manning walks through how Marketing, Sales, and RevOps teams can use Intelligent Workflows to build dynamic audience segments and activate outreach channels — without the manual coordination that slows everything down.

What is Intelligent Workflows?

Intelligent Workflows is made up of two components that work better together than they do apart:

  • Audience Workflows (AWF) — automated, AI-driven audience segmentation that activates the right accounts across your channels based on real-time intent, engagement, and firmographic signals
  • Data Workflows (DWF) — data orchestration that keeps your CRM and downstream systems accurate and current, so the audiences you’re building are based on reliable information

Together, they replace the static lists and manual handoffs that quietly kill GTM velocity.

Why dynamic segmentation matters

Static segmentation has a shelf life problem. By the time a list is built, approved, and activated, the buying signals that informed it have moved on. An account that was in Awareness last week might be in Decision this week — and without real-time segmentation, you’re serving them top-of-funnel content while a competitor is already in a demo.

Intelligent Workflows closes that gap by letting buyer behavior drive segment inclusion automatically. When an account’s buying stage changes, the workflow responds — no manual update required.

Swimlane’s small demand gen team used Intelligent Workflows to ensure every enterprise prospect engagement was timely, relevant, and consistent — without manual campaign coordination.

“We target enterprise accounts with the right message at the right time, automatically — that’s huge for a small team.”

Dorothy Milazzo VP Demand Generation, Swimlane

The playbook: Crawl → Walk → Run

One of the most common reasons teams don’t get value from a revenue intelligence platform is that they try to do everything at once. Intelligent Workflows is designed for progressive activation — start with one workflow, prove the value, then expand.

Here’s how that progression looks in practice.

Crawl: Activate one workflow that matters

The goal at this stage isn’t comprehensiveness — it’s momentum. Pick one high-impact use case and run it.

Good starting points include:

  • Display advertising to in-market accounts
  • Paid social targeting (LinkedIn, Meta)
  • Pushing qualified contacts to your MAP or sales engagement platform
  • AI email activation for initial outreach

Steps:

  1. Build your audience. Use 6sense’s AI, intent, engagement, and firmographic filters to define a segment suited to your chosen use case. The key here is letting the data drive inclusion — not a manually curated list.
  2. Build the workflow in 6sense. Map the actions you want to trigger when an account enters your segment. This is where you connect the segment to your activation channel.
  3. Launch and set your baseline. Before optimizing anything, establish your benchmarks: reach rate, open rate, click-through rate, and — for bottom-of-funnel plays — meetings booked.
  4. Optimize based on performance. Once you have data, refine. Adjust segment criteria, swap creative, test messaging. Don’t let the workflow run unmonitored.

Crawl exit criteria:

  • Workflow is live and actively monitored
  • A designated owner is reviewing performance regularly
  • You’re iterating based on KPI data

Walk: Pair an Audience Workflow with a Data Workflow

Once you’ve got one workflow running, the next step is connecting your audience activation to your data layer. This is where things start feeling less like “a campaign” and more like a system.

Adding a Data Workflow ensures that the accounts and contacts feeding your Audience Workflows are accurate — enriched, updated, and not bloated with stale records. New accounts can be created in your CRM automatically when they meet your ICP criteria, and existing contacts can be enriched without anyone filing a data request.

Steps:

  1. Define your paired objectives. What’s the Audience Workflow trying to accomplish? What data conditions need to be true for that workflow to perform well? Those answers point to your Data Workflow design.
  2. Build both workflows. They can live in the same Intelligent Workflow or as separate workflows — either works. The important thing is that they’re coordinated.
  3. Launch and benchmark each independently. Track KPIs at the workflow level so you can diagnose performance issues cleanly.
  4. Optimize continuously. KPIs for audience and data workflows can drift in different directions. Watch both.

Malbek scaled from 12 generic campaigns to 145+ personalized ABM campaigns annually and cut opportunity creation time from 28+ days to 14 — by building AI and automation into the foundation of their GTM motion rather than layering it on top.

Walk exit criteria:

  • One Audience Workflow is active
  • One Data Workflow is active
  • A workflow owner is monitoring both and optimizing regularly

Run: Always-on orchestration across your GTM engine

At this stage, Intelligent Workflows isn’t powering a campaign — it’s powering your go-to-market motion. Audience Workflows and Data Workflows are active across marketing, sales, and RevOps, connected to your full tech stack: MAP, CRM, SEP, LinkedIn, Meta, Google, web personalization, and chatbot.

The “Run” plays are where the compound value of Intelligent Workflows really shows up:

  • Full-Funnel Engagement — Serve the right content to accounts at each buying stage, automatically
  • Competitive Takeout — Identify accounts researching competitors and serve targeted messaging before they make a decision
  • Re-engage Dormant Accounts — Bring top- and bottom-of-funnel accounts back into motion
  • Drive Event Attendance — Automate pre-event outreach and post-event follow-up with decision logic that adapts based on whether someone attended

When a competitor exited the market, FireMon used 6sense Intelligent Workflows to launch a coordinated competitive takeout campaign in 10 days — scaling their ABM motion from 10 to 100+ accounts without overwhelming their lean team. “This is what we’ve been training for.” — Amy Yuan, Director of Marketing Operations

Blue Yonder generated 12x ROI on LinkedIn advertising through an always-on strategy powered by 6sense Intelligent Workflows.

“The ability to orchestrate audiences with Intelligent Workflows is table stakes for us now, and we couldn’t live without it.”

Austin Hellman Digital Marketing Manager, Blue Yonder

Steps:

  1. Identify objectives, audience, and tactics. What are you trying to accomplish? Who needs to be in-segment for that to work? What channels and programs will you activate?
  2. Confirm your integrations are live. All platform connections — MAP, CRM, SEP, LinkedIn, Meta, Google, web personalization — need to be active before you build workflows that depend on them.
  3. Build your audience and data workflows. Same as Walk, but now you’re coordinating across more systems and more plays simultaneously.
  4. Launch and benchmark. Track KPIs per workflow. At the Run stage, you should be monitoring pipeline created, meetings booked, and closed-won revenue in addition to engagement metrics.
  5. Optimize on a regular cadence. Refresh persona prompts quarterly. A/B test subject lines and CTAs. Promote variants that improve KPIs by at least 10%.

Run exit criteria:

  • At least one out-of-the-box GTM workflow template is active, or 3+ independent Intelligent Workflows are running
  • Performance is monitored and optimized regularly
  • You’re tracking both engagement and revenue impact

Who owns what

One of the easiest ways to stall a workflow program is ambiguity about who’s responsible for what. Here’s a clean division of labor:

  • Marketing builds segments, activates workflows, and owns performance measurement
  • Sales aligns outreach with the signals workflows surface and provides feedback on lead quality
  • RevOps maintains data hygiene, enforces governance, and builds the dashboards that everyone else uses to make decisions

Workflows work best when all three teams are in the room during design — not just at handoff.

Start simple, scale deliberately

The teams that get the most out of Intelligent Workflows don’t try to activate everything on day one. They pick one meaningful use case, nail the execution, learn from the data, and expand from there.

If you’re not sure where to start, the Crawl plays — display, paid social, AI email activation, or pushing contacts to your MAP — are designed to deliver value quickly while building the foundation for more sophisticated orchestration down the road.

Sean Manning is Principal Strategist on the 6sense Strategic Services team. Sean has over 15 years Marketing experience, including successfully implementing an ABX engine with 6sense as the central nervous system. At 6sense, Sean enjoys working with our customers to develop Strategic GTM motions that allow them to get the most value possible from their 6sense instance.