Editor’s note: This is the first of two Breakthrough 2022 daily recaps. You can find the second recap here.
Yesterday was the first full day of 6sense’s annual customer conference Breakthrough, and it was truly awesome.
At every turn here in Scottsdale, Arizona, we saw unbridled enthusiasm and optimism in our customers. They’re brimming with advice and fresh insights, and already jonesing to Proceed with Confidence back to their day jobs. And we still have two days left of the event!
We’ll share some terrific insights and testimonials from our customers in a moment, but first, we want to share an important announcement we made at the event.
Welcome to RevCity
6sense did its part to share the confidence by unveiling our new and improved customer community, RevCity! RevCity is a vibrant destination for self-service enablement, technical help, and peer networking. It’s a go-to resource for customers seeking advice — or to share their own successes and tips.
Check out our friendly, frictionless vision for RevCity as told by our Senior Director of Customer Marketing and Communities … or visit the city itself. You’ll love the view!
Customer Presentations at Breakthrough
Now, circling back to our beloved customers. Every year, their presentations are what we look forward to most. Yesterday’s schedule featured more than a dozen customer sessions, each revealing how organizations are smartly using 6sense technologies and best practices to innovate and generate reliable growth and high-quality pipeline.
Of the many sessions, we selected five to recap in today’s post. Let’s take a closer look at how these customers are proceeding with confidence into 2023 and beyond…
Aprimo: Small Team, BIG Impact
You don’t need a lot of headcount to ensure success … take it from Dina Otero, Sr. Director, Demand Generation and Growth at 6sense superstar customer Aprimo.
Though Otero’s team was small — herself, one employee, and one intern — they managed to yield huge results.
Previously, Aprimo’s revenue team relied on what Otero called “old-fashioned” marketing techniques: cold-calling target accounts, spray-and-pray tactics, and a heavy focus on vanity metrics as a measure of success.
The “saving grace,” she explained, was that Aprimo already had 6sense in place. “I knew that 6sense was going to be the engine that drives our demand generation machine forward,” Otero said.
By using 6sense as a linchpin in her team’s ABX efforts, Otero was able to turn around Aprimo’s demand gen program.
“Every ABX playbook needs to target, engage, activate, and measure — and 6sense is at the center of these for us,” Otero said.
Aprimo used 6sense tools and integrations to target accounts with customized ads and emails based on buying stage, used persona mapping and engagement data to find the right leads, and created a personalized omnichannel strategy.
The results were, in a word, spectacular.
- 131% increase in top-of-funnel conversions
- $4.1 million in new name pipeline
- 425% increase in SQP quarter-over-quarter
- 2.5x increase in SQP generation
Otero and her team took a crawl, walk, run approach to shifting their strategy, and she recommended that approach to everyone — start small and scale. Pilot programs are critical, she explained.
And what happened to that tiny team that Otero oversaw? It’s grown, thanks to the success it’s generated for the company.
“Those numbers gave us a case to go to the exec team and make a case for a bigger team,” she said. “Employee number seven starts tomorrow!”
Five9: Revenue Success is a Team Sport
“Much like sports,” the Five9 team explained, “coordination and teamwork are needed for revenue success.”
Our 6sense customers know how important revenue-team alignment is for an ABX approach to work. Jayashree Rajan, Five9’s VP of Digital and Demand Gen, and Matthew McWard, Five9’s Sr. Manager, Demand Gen, shared how those efforts paid off for them.
Rajan and McWard told us Five9 shifted to an ABX approach using 6sense for four main reasons:
- The highly competitive market required they diversify their approach from inbound
- A disparate martech stack left them without accurate, timely insights for sales and marketing
- Those systems weren’t communicating, giving them no way to coordinate data
- A need to optimize spend across relationships and contracts
In implementing 6sense, Five9 deployed a plan to ease its martech struggles, prepare prospects for sales, and yield better ROI. And the company’s achievements encouraged further use.
“To prove the data worked, we launched competitions with our BDR teams and drove over 20 meetings for each RVP,” McWard explained. “BDRs started showing AEs how to identify accounts to go after. And when BDRs get promoted, it’s a trickle down effect — those same BDRs are hitting their quotas because they’re finding opportunities in their territory. When sales wins, we win.”
In a personalized campaign for retail, Five9 saw a 3.52x increase in average account engagement. A similar campaign for healthcare yielded an account click-through-rate of 63%, and a co-branded partner campaign influenced $180,000 in pipeline for an investment of only $1,000.
Our most successful customers take a careful, planned approach to rolling out their strategies, and Five9 was no exception. Here are recommendations from Rajan and McWard to help other organizations achieve similar success:
- Partner with sales through your ABX journey
- Identify use cases to tackle and roll out sequence
- Celebrate the early wins to encourage adoption
- Maintain momentum via regular check-ins, reports, and support
“6sense is the ‘One Tool to Rule them All,'” Rajan said, “giving access for all sales and marketing to align on in-market accounts.”
Zuora: All Aboard for Multi-Product ABM
Leading enterprise monetization platform Zuora’s Sam Gong (VP, New Business) and Alex Fleming (Sr. Director, Growth Ops) shared their experience working with 6sense to manage their target ideal customer profile as they expanded their product offerings.
Gong and Fleming explained that as Zuora evolved beyond a single product, it needed to expand its ICP to capture distinct demand for its billing and revenue solutions, and its monetization platform.
At the same time, Zuora was undergoing a major brand transition. So the team doubled down on the shift and took a fresh look at how they were educating their prospects. (Hint: no more forms!)
“The most important aspect for marketing was retooling the customer experience,” Gong explained. “We wanted to tell our digital story without our competition telling it for us.”
Working with 6sense, the Zuora team mapped out a way for its models to better capture its ICP for each solution — rather than lumping everyone under the legacy product and missing out on potential sales. This meant adding another layer of change: moving from old-fashioned MQLs to 6QAs (6sense Qualified Accounts), a shift that required getting everyone on board.
“We now have the ability to surface signals that are product specific that Sam’s team can follow up on and pitch the right products,” Fleming explained.
Just like Five9, Zuora had a solid plan in place before launching this transition: preparation, pilot, and then general availability. Still, the team learned some lessons along the way:
- Engage all stakeholders early
- “Overeducate” on models
- “Plan for global, work local”
- Prioritize the customer experience
While that knowledge was hard-won, Gong and Fleming remain confident in Zuora’s success. None of the changes they undertook — such as figuring out how to diversify their ICP, shifting branding to match, and changing the way they approached marketing — was small, but they’ve yielded big results across the business.
Brightcove and 2X: Mach 10 Marketing Fueled by Advanced Personalization and Marketing
The dynamic duo of Theo Hildyard (VP Global Demand Gen & Field Marketing, Brightcove) and Domenic Colasante (2X) blew us all away as they shared how 6sense Service Partner 2X supported Brightcove as it aimed for (and achieved!) marketing personalization at scale.
Brightcove had a laundry list of pain points in its digital marketing strategy and execution, including:
- A lack of centralized reporting
- Delays in campaigns due to an overextended team
- Loose segment targeting, and
- An underutilized tech stack
Brightcove’s goal was video-first personalization at scale, with the aim of remedying the problems they had identified. Hildyard and Colasante explained the strategy Brightcove and 2X personalized each stage of the buying journey to coax prospects through the funnel.
Here are some of the 6sense-powered secrets to their success:
- Moving from static to dynamic account lists
- Moving from static to dynamic HTML5 ads
- Moving from siloed tools to an integrated martech stack
And the impact was great:
- 1.6x increase in engagement rate
- 55.6% decrease in cost per engaged account
- 40% reduction in bounce rate
Plus, 2X’s involvement relieved some of the pressure on Brightcove’s team, providing a reduction of 48.6% in labor costs against benchmark, time to launch shifted from months/weeks to days/hours, and Brightcove saw increased Tier 1 account engagement.
“Dynamic buying insights have allowed rapid pivots where a new or improved campaign has been launched in a matter of a few hours,” Hildyard said.
To Be Continued Tomorrow…
Our brains (and hearts!) are full from today’s presentations, but there’s more to come! Check back tomorrow for more tools and tips from our customers, showing how they’re proceeding with confidence into the modern selling and marketing future.
