The Retail industry is at a crossroads. Retailers have exited the turbulent COVID-19 years to enter now a period of massive transformation with advancements in AI, yet also significant headwinds of a looming recession. Opportunities and threats are shifting, yet the one constant in retail is focusing on superior customer experience to weather the storm.
Lily AI offered a timely solution for retailers looking for immediate ways to recession-proof and grow their businesses. Lily AI bridges the gap between brand-speak and customer-speak by injecting the customer’s language directly into product listings and retail technology infrastructure. This approach transforms merchandising, marketing, product management — and, ultimately, the consumer shopping experience.
Though overall demand for Lily AI is high, navigating profitable and sustainable growth as a Series B startup comes with its challenges — especially in a volatile market. But Jessica Brandt, Lily AI’s Director of Demand Generation, knows that investing in the right tools can help revenue teams scale with confidence. She shares how Lily AI leans on intelligent tools like 6sense Revenue AI™ for Sales to empower sales and marketing team members to prioritize, take action, and keep winning.
The Challenge: Diluting Focus and Not Prioritizing the Right Accounts
Before using 6sense, Lily AI realized their Salesforce database:
- Lacked many accounts that fit their ideal customer profile (ICP)
- Lacked account insights into behavioral data such as recent activities, buying stages, and signals, as well as reliable technographic data
- Had poor ICP fit accounts that were assigned to sales, and
- Contained accounts that hadn’t been accurately segmented or prioritized
Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) were unknowingly splitting their time between great and not-great accounts, ultimately spending valuable time on the wrong accounts and using a cookie-cutter vs. customized approach for each.
The Solution: Sharpening Go-To-Market Strategy with 6sense Data
Lily AI enriched and analyzed their target account lists to eliminate those unfit accounts and further prioritize the strongest ICP fit accounts. Then, the team imported this updated list into 6sense and synced with Salesforce so sellers could move forward with a clean, accurate list of accounts to prioritize.
6sense empowered Lily AI’s sales and marketing teams to:
- Prioritize accounts based on buyer intent and recent activity
- Instantly sync target audiences for advertising across channels
- Tailor marketing campaigns and sales outreach based on account buying signals and trends
- View reports showing pipeline influence impacted by sales and marketing
- Drive go-to-market (GTM) efficiency with a well-integrated tech stack
“I don’t think there’s a single account that our sales team has worked and had traction on where they didn’t rely on 6sense information,” Jessica says.
To drive the most value to sales and SDRs, Lily AI incorporated daily and weekly alerts from 6sense, notifying them of activity and buying signals.
Jessica touts that 6sense works holistically with Lily AI’s tech stack to help drive efficiency and solve many challenges.
“6sense doesn’t drive GTM strategy on its own; it’s a tool to drive GTM strategy into action,” Jessica says.
Part of this strategy involves partners. Lily AI’s partner business development team relies on 6sense data to drive strategy around partner nurturing motions. For example, by using 6sense to evaluate their customers’ tech stacks, Lily AI has the data to better understand which potential partners to nurture for integrations and prioritize partner outreach.
“I don’t rely on 6sense to tell me who our universe is. I rely on 6sense to prioritize and analyze the universe, and that’s critical because we need to focus on the right accounts and the right people at the right time,” Jessica says.
The Results
Before 6sense, Lily AI was unable to prioritize accounts in a data-driven way and was further unable to personalize outreach efficiently and effectively.
Since implementing 6sense in May 2022, Lily AI has seen success in the following areas:
- Accounts in later stages are 9.5x more likely to lead to an open opportunity within three months
- 18% of their CRM accounts are strong profile fit, resulting in 69% of won opportunities since using 6sense
Jessica calls out 6sense as a “brilliant tool for start-up, high-growth companies that are figuring out the market and need to operate quickly and dynamically” and a valuable tool that drives insights into action.
