With the right data powering the entire revenue team, it’s possible to make significant changes at record speed. That was the case for 6sense customer MX, a solution that enables financial institutions and fintech companies to gather, enrich, present, and act on transactional data.
Using 6sense’s data, MX created:
- a 60% increase in net-new pipeline acceleration
- just-in-time information updates to prioritize outreach
- unification across sales and marketing
The Challenge
MX’s sales and marketing teams needed to find the right end-to-end account-based marketing (ABM) solution for their needs.
On the sales side, MX had a named accounts model, but their outbound efforts were a shot in the dark. They didn’t know which accounts were interested and their insights were limited to first-party data at an account level that didn’t give the information, prioritization, and scoring the sales team needed to succeed.
On the marketing side, MX’s display efforts were bringing in leads that were not within their target audience.
The Right Fit
In evaluating the right solution for their needs, MX found that 6sense — complete with first- and third-party data sources, orchestration, and display capabilities — fit the criteria for their ideal, account engagement platform.
Next Steps
As the MX team began to see data insights coming in, they also began to realize what they needed to focus on. The question became: How can we execute on this data?
What they found was that further along the sales cycle, the more that organic stakeholders were doing research in the Dark Funnel™. As this started to become more prevalent, the MX revenue team began to focus on equipping sales with the right content based on the research being done and adopted a highly personalized method to their outreach.
Finding a Path
MX was hyper-focused on:
- which accounts were new and showing engagement
- which current target accounts were increasing engagement (and how to accelerate them), and
- which were decreasing engagement, indicating deprioritization (and how to reposition their offering)
This exercise proved beneficial, allowing the team to pivot messaging to accommodate changes as soon as they were identified and adjust their priorities on a day-to-day basis.
Their primary goal was to identify behavioral changes as soon as they happened — through 6sense intent and predictive insights — then prioritize their efforts to engage with the right people at the right time.
Feeding a Hungry Sales Team
With two main customer segments — financial institutions and fintech — MX segmented each vertical in 6sense and set up separate Slack channels with updates. That gave sales the latest information at their fingertips so they could strike much faster.
The MX account reps were hungry to jump on new activity, and 6sense’s trigger notifications supplied the sales team with the insights and context they need to plan and prioritize their next actions.
The Tinder of Sales
As Bryce Nobles, Growth Manager at MX put it, “I think the reason we have so much engagement with 6sense across the team is that it’s so easy to digest. They don’t need to decipher anything… it’s just ‘here’s some new activity… Go!’”
Nobles jokingly called this mobile-optimized aggregate of rich 6sense data and insights that piped right into Salesforce the “Tinder of sales.” Anywhere a sales rep was, they could see increase / decrease in engagement and take the appropriate action right away.
“We went from blindly trying to target specific accounts without knowing the level of engagement — to having 6sense show us not only engagement scores but also a full understanding of how our accounts were engaging with us, allowing us to go after the right accounts at the right time,” he said.
Putting the Teamwork in Revenue Team
The MX sales and marketing teams aligned in their initiatives as well, with marketing focusing on three main goals as they related to sales: increasing stakeholder engagement, better positioning MX toward their target accounts, and providing best-in-class experiences.
Sales actively helped drive marketing efforts and provided the marketing team with key insights, and the marketing team heavily utilized targeted display for several different audiences.
The MX marketing team ran display in line with sales initiatives by:
- Targeted segments of accounts to drive pipeline acceleration efforts.
- Matching up accounts to stages in the sales lifecycle and targeting with stage-based display.
- Warming up accounts for new sales reps with display-ad momentum.
The Results
The results speak for themselves: After onboarding 6sense and leveraging an intent data-driven playbook between marketing and sales, the MX revenue team saw a 60% increase in net-new pipeline acceleration.
When asked about the greatest benefit of 6sense, Wallgren was clear: previously there was a discrepancy between the perceived engagement on their accounts, and what was actually happening across first- and third-party data sources. Now with solid data to back them, MX saw:
- a 60% increase in net-new pipeline acceleration
- just-in-time information updates to prioritize outreach
- unification across sales and marketing
Nobles was quick to share 6sense’s biggest impact in his day-to-day. Before, sales and marketing each had a very one-sided perspective of the other, and the two teams were not aligned in their initiatives.
“What 6sense does is that it provides us a super simple, intuitive way to get targeted really quickly — it forces sales and marketing to be aware of recent engagement and marries the two forces to drive awareness to both sides of the fence, ultimately driving better results.”
