Earlier this week, thousands of B2B professionals and leaders flocked to Austin, Texas to attend Forrester’s annual B2B Summit North America. Their ambition: to learn how to accelerate profits and growth by making bolder, smarter decisions in a shaky economy.
6sense was at Summit in force, and had plenty of bold, smart insights to share.
Our leadership team, and a few of our customers and partners, presented to standing-room-only crowds about why alignment between B2B sales and marketing teams is now more important than ever … and how AI-powered solutions (like 6sense’s new AI Writer capability) can bridge those crucial gaps and drive revenue autonomously, with little human involvement.
For folks who weren’t able to attend the shindig in person, here’s a rundown of the sessions led by 6sense and our customers and partners.
‘Welcome to the Age of Intelligence’
This session, led by 6sense’s Chief Market Officer Latané Conant and VP of Brand & Digital Experience Michael George, explored how B2B revenue teams can further drive dramatic, predictable revenue growth — and why it requires a redefinition of what we expect from our technology to get there.
Powerful tools like revenue platforms, account identification & engagement technologies, and emerging game-changers like generative AI can transform how revenue teams find and engage prospective customers, they said.
Armed with the right solutions, marketers and sellers can now communicate with prospects in truly relevant and resonant ways — and at scale. Scaling is especially important, Latané explained, because revenue teams are now being asked to accomplish even more than before with even less than before.
These days, it’s not uncommon for revenue teams to put in extra hours on weekdays and weekends in an effort to meet ambitious sales and marketing targets, Latané said. But even when employees are giving more than their all — and risking burnout along the way — there’s a catch.
“Even if I work another weekend or another night, or another dozen weekends and nights, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’re still not going to fundamentally put a dent in all the pipeline we need to fill. We have to force ourselves to work differently.”
This is where groundbreaking innovations in artificial intelligence are scaling marketing and sales actions in ways that make meaningful and measurable impacts on revenue, Latanè and Michael said.
Here are several takeaways from their presentation:
- AI simplifies and improves marketing efforts, particularly when it comes to personalization and outreach
- AI can assist with account enrichment, providing a more complete picture of contacts and accounts
- Technologies like 6sense’s Conversational Email create more personalized and high-end experiences for potential customers
- And capabilities such as Conversational Email’s new AI Writer feature can craft personalized engagement at scale in ways humans never could
Before we get to the goodness that AI Writer can generate for revenue teams, let’s level-set on what Conversational Email is. This technology was built to address underworked accounts and the friction they can create between sales and marketing. These accounts typically fall victim to insufficient follow-up, forgotten leads, and missed revenue opportunities. When teams are busy juggling tasks and opportunities, these are the balls that get dropped.
Conversational Email gives revenue teams the power to re-engage accounts with timely, relevant outreach so they’ll never miss another revenue moment.
6sense’s new AI Writer technology empowers teams to do this at a massive scale by using AI to reply to emails and automatically generate email copy based on specific use cases. And the AI can be customized to write emails in a company’s unique voice, or address the bespoke needs of a buyer persona.
“It’s really super easy to train,” Michael said. “We just feed the documents and it learns our content, learns our tone, it learns how to speak the way that we want to speak. It learns our vocabulary. It learns to connect those dots.”
And the future of the AI Writer capability is looking especially bright, Michael said.
“You can imagine what it’ll be like when we can just say, ‘Write an email to the Head of Demand Gen at ABC Company’ and the AI will know exactly where that contact is in the buying stage,” he said. “It knows what they care about, knows what content they’ve been consuming, and knows the right CTA to put on the page. That’s going to be pretty exciting and that’s where it’s going.”
You can learn more about Conversational Email and AI Writer in these resources:
- The New AI Writing Tool in 6sense’s Conversational Email Makes it Easier to Craft Winning Campaigns
- How AI Drives Pipeline Opportunities Through Personalized Email Marketing
- Four Use Cases for Conversational Email’s AI Writer Tool
‘You Can’t Spell MASSIVE PIPELINE GENERATION without Generative AI’
In this session, Ami Arad, 6sense’s Principal Product Evangelist, demonstrated Conversational Email’s new AI Writer technology. Here are three highlights from the session:
- The solution can be fine-tuned to reflect a company’s brand voice and product information, and craft emails that are personalized, engaging, and concise
- It improves email marketing by handling responses and creating conversations until the recipient is ready to book a meeting
- It creates more engaging and personalized email content, moving away from generic corporate messages
A born entertainer, Ami — who some might consider as being “vertically challenged” — concluded his session with a fun one-liner: “With the new AI writer at the end of the day, what you’ll be left with are emails that are exactly like me: Friendly, professional, witty, and short.”
‘How AI Aligns Marketers with Buyers, Sales, & Self’
This session was led by Kerry Cunningham, 6sense’s head of research and thought leadership. A former SiriusDecisions and Forrester analyst, Kerry is an expert in the design and implementation of demand-marketing processes, technologies, and teams for a wide array of B2B products, solutions, and services. He’s also developed a wealth of expertise in the alignment of marketing and sales organizations.
He revealed three ways in which modern marketing teams are rarely aligned — and how AI can help fix them:
- These days, buyers are teams, not individuals … and without AI, they’re hard to detect. AI can consume and process massive amounts of signal to detect patterns and buyers
- Marketing must be internally aligned. AI can reveal which leads aren’t worth pursuing and which have the highest likelihood of conversion
- Marketing and sales should be aligned. With a tool like AI-powered email, teams can find leads that want to engage, setting up sales to be much more productive
“Salespeople are naturally disposed to ask for more and more leads, even when those leads don’t turn into opportunities and revenue,” Kerry told attendees. “Aligning with sales sometimes means not giving them more of what they think they want, but instead producing what they really need.”
This is when AI can become transformational for a revenue team. “A solution like Conversational Email can sift through all the leads and contacts to find those that really do want to engage live, setting up sales to be much more productive,” Kerry said.
‘How to Do Frictionless, Revenue-Generating ABM’
This session, led by Twilio’s Senior Manager of ABM John Krouse, focused on the importance of aligning sales and marketing teams, and using data insights to drive operational efficiencies.
Here are three insights from Krouse’s session:
- ABM can be divided into two sides: consultative (unlocking new potential with account-based data) and execution (driving and unlocking pipeline within the marketing organization)
- ABM is the “connective tissue” that binds different parts of the organization together, helping teams work more efficiently and effectively
- Aligning sales and marketing teams is crucial for ABM success; this can be achieved through regular trainings, resources, and playbooks
This approach allows organizations to identify areas of improvement and drive growth, he said.
‘Generating Pipeline with Generative AI’
In this session, two leaders at Vendavo — Steve Hastert, director of revenue marketing, and Rich Fong, senior manager for sales development — discussed how they used a synthetic AI personality named “Lisa” to handle email outreach and lead generation.
6sense Conversational Email’s AI Writer tool powered “Lisa.” Here are three insights from their session:
- Combining generative AI with traditional sales techniques can significantly improve lead generation and conversion rates
- Lisa was responsible for sourcing 13% of meetings generated, 16% of marketing opportunities generated, and 33% of marketing opportunities that went to closed-won deals
- Using AI for targeted outreach campaigns can provide a more personalized and effective marketing approach
Using the AI email writing tool also accelerated the testing process for new messaging ideas, Steve explained. The team quickly tested new ideas against human-written content and optimized their messaging for better results.
Further, “Lisa” handled the grunt work of reaching out to lower-priority accounts, giving Vendavo’s SDR much-needed bandwidth to focus on higher-priority accounts. “The advantage of AI is it can do so much of the leg work,” Rich said.
Wrapping Up
We’re still fired up after the Forrester B2B Summit and are proud to have been part of the game-changing insights alongside other industry leaders. Learn more about what we’re up to:
