The buyer’s journey has changed in a way which leaves many sales and marketing teams struggling to find insight from within what we call the Dark Funnel. However, many technology companies are starting to build solutions to address the radical new way customers engage and buy today by collecting and organizing intent data as well as building systems to scale these processes. Phil Tran, Sr. Manager, Marketing Operations at SailPoint, an Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity software company that delivers identity governance to enterprises of all sizes around the world, sat down with me to talk about what led SailPoint to 6sense and how their ABM strategy has improved by uncovering, prioritizing, and engaging with demand to drive more revenue.
Sailpoint Stops Wide Net Fishing Accounts
“Before 6sense, we were kind of wide net fishing and going after any and every account we could think of,” Phil Tran, Senior Manager of Marketing Ops at Sailpoint, said.
Now, 6sense provides Sailpoint with the ideal customer profile (ICP) and the intent activity behind accounts. This information enables prioritization and alignment between sales and marketing.
“The great thing about 6sense flexibility is that it allows us to track our third-party, external media campaigns,” Phil said.
Sailpoint is no longer casting a wide net, and marketers are instead using 6sense data to target the right accounts, at the right time.
From Basic to Premium
Before 6sense, SailPoint was just covering the basic tech stack with a CRM system, marketing automation platform, website, and some smaller add-ons here and there. And even though they saw success, their conversion to opportunities wasn’t growing at the same pace as engagement. “We realized that we were turning a lot of wheels in accounts and segments that weren’t within our ideal customer profile and who wouldn’t be the best to convert to customers,” explained Phil.
So in the evaluation of their marketing strategy, they saw the need to align their marketing and sales groups to a set of accounts that they knew were a fit and in-market. They also wanted to spend more wisely when going after those target accounts, not just wide net fishing. In order to do that, SailPoint decided to back their strategy with a platform that would allow them to score all of their accounts and provide the ideal customer profile against their set of customer accounts.
The other piece that was important to SailPoint was being able to understand that intent. With a lot of providers in this space using only one source of intent, SailPoint liked that 6sense has its own modeling that isn’t preset on the number of words that they have to select. This provides a lot more flexibility into SailPoint looking at different things and adding keywords as their product and space continues to grow. Another key differentiator for Phil is 6sense’s ability to pipe all of that information, the actual scores itself, both the fit and intent scores, back into their CRM system. “With 6sense allowing us to push the fit and intent scores back onto our account records, we’re then able to report, execute and prioritize by account scores on top of our traditional segmentation. It really allows us to slice and dice the way we want,” Phil explained.
A Unified Front
Since implementing 6sense, Phil says his sales and marketing teams have much stronger alignment. They have built a better target account list, and they definitely feel like everybody is marching along the same path and going after the same set of accounts. “6sense allows us to be much more strategic in our execution – going after accounts and launching campaigns based off of the data that we’re getting from 6sense. And it’s trickling downward into opportunity creation and pipeline velocity and then ultimately closed-won opportunities.”
SailPoint is very positive and values what they’re getting from 6sense. After continuing to monitor and track the results, and proving ROI, they look forward to scaling their ABM efforts by building campaigns against the insights they’re seeing at higher volumes.
A Partner, Not Just a Platform
Phil says the 6sense team has been great to work with. From getting on the phone with the customer success and product team to provide input, to seeing his feedback being taken to heart in new releases that come out, to working with the team to find workarounds and temporary fixes when immediate fixes aren’t available, the team is always hard at work trying to get product features that are important to their customers in place.
“6sense definitely listens to their customers around different use cases and requirements. The product is advancing as quickly as the customer needs it. That’s definitely been a relief and a good sign that 6sense is doing the right things and moving in the right direction.”
