Flexential offers a comprehensive suite of IT solutions designed to keep businesses safe and their applications running. With over 20 years of experience, they provide customizable solutions for high-density computing, including colocation, cloud, connectivity, data protection, and professional services. Their FlexAnywhere™ platform, with 41 data centers across 19 markets, provides a 100Gbps private network backbone to meet the most stringent security, compliance, and resiliency challenges of their customers.
Ashley Hirschbek is the company’s Director of Demand Generation. She sits in the Revenue Marketing organization with a focus on digital marketing, end-to-end campaigns, and facilitating collaboration and partnership between marketing and sales on go-to-market initiatives.
Her extensive experience in the data center and IT infrastructure industry gives her keen insights into the needs of Flexential’s prospects — their pain points, the messaging that resonates with them, and the products they need. She’s also an ABM expert, helping to onboard multiple technologies throughout her career.
But Ashley needed help understanding where buyers were in their journey so she could prioritize sales and marketing activities. Flexential turned to 6sense to pinpoint exactly where accounts are in the buying journey and bring the full revenue team into lockstep.
The Challenge: A Lack of Comprehensive Insights
“Before 6sense, we had some, but limited, visibility into behavior and engagement of key accounts,” Ashley says.
When Ashley joined Flexential, their MarTech stack included tools providing insights on account activity and intent, but they were lacking a predictable model for prioritization from the data. “It was tough to prioritize who to be going after,” she explains. The team could see which accounts were visiting their website but deriving the plan of attack still involved manual processes, making it difficult to quantify results. “It wasn’t well aggregated. We didn’t have a tool that provided us comprehensive insights and recommendations in one place,” Ashley says.
Flexential required a platform that could uncover the right accounts, enable sales and marketing to prioritize their activities, and enable personalization without the need to create bespoke campaigns for every single account. “One of the reasons that we switched to 6sense was to address the challenge of scale and automation,” Ashley says.
After a detailed buying process — complete with a business case comparing the strengths, opportunities and capabilities of every vendor — Flexential decided 6sense would take their ABM efforts to the next level. “6sense provides really comprehensive training and onboarding,” Ashley says. “Sometimes you’ll see MarTech vendors slowly step back after onboarding. They don’t provide the same type of value as 6sense or aren’t as invested in your success after the deal is done.”
The Solution: Serving the Right Messages to the Right Accounts
6sense is accurately identifying the ICP for each of Flexential’s product lines, enabling them to create more accurate funnels and forecasts. “They each get their own dedicated funnel and treatment,” Ashley says.
6sense empowers Flexential to immediately narrow down the accounts within their ICP that are showing intent. “Now we’re going to work on these accounts because they’re worth our time. We’ll optimize our resources and budget to focus on who has intent,” she says.
From there, the team can get even more granular and understand where each of those accounts showing intent sit in the buying journey. “Who’s at the top of the funnel, who is in education mode and who is in consideration at the bottom,” says Ashley.
Flexential uses this account modeling for a dynamic advertising strategy across a variety of digital platforms, and for targeting alignment across the larger go-to-market organization. It also enables “actionable dialogues with Sales team on what their targets are engaging with, how we’re doing in terms of buying stage velocity by regional or individual patch, and how Marketing is effectively providing air cover.”
Ashley says that 6sense is “getting the right messages at the right time to the right people based on the journey stage, all while optimizing our budget and making sure that everything is extremely cost effective.”
The Results
Since becoming a customer in 2023, Flexential has seen impressive results with 6sense.
While keeping the same exact advertising budget they have seen:
- A 5x increase in messages served to their target audience
- A 3x increase in number of accounts reached within their ICP
When asked how 6sense makes her job easier, Ashley said: “It takes the guesswork out of who to go after and what message we should be serving. Our AI-driven advertising model drives personalization and has the residual effect of improving performance across marketing channels outside of 6Sense Display.” The best part? This model has ultimately supported pipeline acceleration for Flexential, with ‘hot’ accounts now being prioritized by Marketing have contributed to 187% more pipeline than cold opportunities.
