2026 Breakthrough Awards Winner: Innovation through Integrations

SAP’s integration of 6sense was, at its core, a data architecture initiative. Facing fragmented signals, inconsistent contact records across millions of entries, and no unified view of buying behavior, SAP embedded 6sense as a core layer of its data infrastructure rather than deploying it as a standalone platform. The result is a connected ecosystem between SAP’s CDP, Adobe stack, CRM, and engagement tools creating a cohesive view across account, contact, & profile intelligence for buying committees, enrichment, and acquisition.

SAP at a glance

SAP’s Customer Contact Data Quality initiative required a cross-functional centralized view of buyer activity across thousands of target accounts, spanning one of the largest and most sophisticated marketecture in enterprise software: CDP, Adobe stack (AEP, AJO, CJA, and AEM), CRM, Outreach for sales engagement, and a global master database. Connecting 6sense across the ecosystem, rather than a series of point projects, earned SAP the Innovation through Integrations award at 6sense’s 2026 Breakthrough Awards.

The challenge: intelligence trapped outside the ecosystem

Signals lived in a silo. Before the integrations, valuable intent and behavioral signals were isolated outside SAP’s core data ecosystem, making it difficult to incorporate buying behavior into audience segmentation, journey orchestration, and prioritization.

Records were inconsistent at scale. Contact data across millions of entries was uneven, and manual enrichment was time-consuming, inconsistent, and impossible to scale across thousands of target accounts.

There was no unified view. With signals, contact records, and engagement data living in separate systems, SAP had no single view of buying behavior, and moving data between systems depended on manual exports and rework.

Missing SAP Buying Committee members. SAP dynamic buying committee framework identifies, at a persona level, what role a person plays based on the account journey stage. Their analysis identified numerous gaps by role and by account.

The solution: an ecosystem, not a series of point projects

Integration 1: Five 6sense data packs into the CDP. SAP ingested 6sense Predictive, Intent, Web, Technographic, and Segment data directly into its CDP environment through S3 delivery. This unifies external buying signals with first-party customer and engagement data, building buying-stage intelligence into the foundation of the data model as a centralized base for audience creation, analytics, and activation.

Integration 2: APIs for coverage and hygiene. SAP worked closely with 6sense’s product team to design and implement the People Search and Enrichment APIs across its internal systems and data operations workflows. API-driven contact acquisition replaced inconsistent manual processes, improved buying committee coverage on strategic accounts, supported executive data quality programs across CRM, CDP, and sales systems, and powered downstream segmentation, orchestration, and prioritization.

Integration 3: 6sense inside the engagement layer. The Outreach integration extends the same data foundation into SAP’s engagement tooling, so signals flow into existing workflows instead of moving through manual exports. SAP and 6sense collaborated on numerous SAP-requested enhancements, including expanded sequence visibility, favorites API support, exact sequence search, tag management improvements, record ownership assignment, and account normalization, making the integration significantly more scalable for enterprise use and supporting SAP’s broader Sales Intelligence rollout.

The results: a connected intelligence layer

  • One foundation for audiences. Five 6sense data packs now sit within the CDP, combining external intent signals with first-party data for richer, more accurate segmentation.
  • Cleaner data at enterprise scale. Automated enrichment created a scalable process for maintaining account and contact records across CRM, CDP, and sales systems, reducing manual data management.
  • Buying committee coverage. Enrichment feeds directly into building and maintaining complete committee-level contact maps for strategic accounts.
  • An automated pipeline built to last. Reduced manual data movement and a durable ingestion architecture support long-term scalability across the ecosystem.

Together, these capabilities give SAP a 360-degree view of the customer: which accounts are in market, which buying committee members to engage at each stage, and when to reach out based on their pain points. Sales and marketing teams alike get the same insight, regardless of where they sit in the organization.

“By combining audience orchestration, enrichment, account intelligence, and CRM activation, SAP created a scalable framework that allows marketing and sales teams to act on the same signals, target the same accounts, and measure performance from a shared source of truth, 6sense. These integrations have accelerated SAP’s broader Customer Contact Data Quality initiative and continue to serve as the foundation for future AI-driven workflows and revenue generation programs.”

Jacquelyn Hurdle Senior Director Account & Audience Data Strategy, SAP

What’s next: closing the loop with Adobe

The next chapter is already in the works: a custom Segment API connecting audiences and buying-stage intelligence from SAP’s CDP and Adobe Experience Platform directly with 6sense. Once live, it will automate audience delivery between internal CDP systems and 6sense, let audiences refresh dynamically rather than be rebuilt manually, and provide a scalable framework for future Adobe journey orchestration initiatives. It is a cornerstone of SAP’s broader Digital First Experience strategy, and the foundation for future AI-driven workflows and revenue generation programs.