Sumo Logic, a cloud-based machine data analytics company, has been on a steady growth track for years and hit a major milestone in 2020 — going public on the NASDAQ Stock Market.
A critical piece in their success? The 6sense Account Engagement Platform. “As a user of 6sense,” Steven Fitz, Sumo Logic’s Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) noted, “it’s one of the most effective tools I’ve seen in my career.”
But part of Sumo Logic’s success with 6sense comes in how they set their team up for success:
- collaborating across the revenue team from the start
- orchestrating open conversation across marketing and sales
- demonstrating the platform’s benefits to encourage buy-in
- monitoring metrics
- leading by example
- highlighting wins and discussing losses using data
The Challenge
Sumo Logic is part of a large and very competitive SaaS industry — cloud and data analytics providers where the total addressable market (TAM) is huge. With such a competitive market, Sumo Logic knew one of its key differentiators would be aligning its sales and marketing forces.
Originally, the team planned a multi-phased rollout of 6sense with marketing as its initial use case. However, the team decided upon a full revenue team roll-out, with sales and marketing walking in lockstep.
CRO Fitz and Suku Krishnaraj, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), are highly collaborative, and wanted to use 6sense to support collaboration across the revenue team.
Better Together
Fitz believes in creating harmony between the sales and marketing organization, and a big part of that is candor. The Sumo Logic revenue team meets weekly to address emergent topics, identify gaps, raise issues and pinpoint resolutions.
Although sales and marketing may have distinct roles, they jointly evaluate how they are engaging with prospects across buying stages and if they are seeing the right conversation rates at each step along the way.
6sense has become a key part of this conversation, as Krishnaraj states: “What started as a marketing initiative is now the backbone of how we drive pipeline conversion.”
Knowing Where to Fish
When evaluating the 6sense platform, the one-platform-does-it-all approach — as well as 6sense’s actionable insights — resonated with Sumo Logic.
For the enterprise sales team, the 6sense Account Engagement Platform has been instrumental in increasing efficiency. Managing hundreds of accounts isn’t at all easy, so the actionable insights they gain from 6sense help them understand where to spend their time and energy to deliver the most effective results.
“Today, our data indicates we are significantly more likely to convert accounts that 6sense has identified as in-market,” Krishnaraj added.
Making It Work
Fitz shared some insights on SumoLogic’s sales adoption experience:
- The 6sense signals are critical — no explanation needed — but what matters is that your team understands the value they’re getting from the platform.
- Make sure you articulate to your sales team why the platform is crucial to their day-to-day: 6sense insights guide you to engage with the right people at the right time, at scale.
- Measure, measure, measure: Once adoption is off the ground, continuously track your metrics
- Create success storyboards: Highlight your teams’ successes, who’s seeing value and share that story with the revenue team — this creates a movement.
Fitz leads by example – spending time in the 6sense platform to see activity in the market as well as identify any missed opportunities. For instance, if an account is in the Decision or Purchase buying stages as indicated by 6sense’s AI-powered predictions, the rep should be actively prospecting to key personas at the account, as well as be aware of any competitors in the evaluation.
And he regularly analyzes both wins and losses to gain perspective on both sides so he can help guide sales reps with more robust insight. “You’ve got to take action — sales is about contextual, prescriptive action.”
The Results
“Modern prospecting is about leveraging the right tools and assets out there, and 6sense is a critical part of that stack for our team, with key insights to leverage so you know where to focus your efforts. If you’re not using that, ask yourself why,” says Fitz.
Together with their teams, Fitz and Krishnaraj built a solid foundation for SumoLogic to succeed by using 6sense with:
- cross-team collaboration
- data-based buy-in
- continual checking of metrics
- open conversation within the team
- using the platform they ask others to use
- celebrating wins and analyzing losses
Smart data coupled with a smart approach for SumoLogic paid off in positive results.
