If you work in the revenue-technology space, I’m sure you’ve read our CEO Jason Zintak’s blog post from the other week — or saw the Times Square billboard, or the social media storm, or read the press — about the exciting news that Slintel is now part of 6sense.
But I wanted to personally express how thrilled I am to have the Slintel team join us, and explain why this acquisition makes so much sense for our customers, partners and people..
When we founded 6sense, we embarked on a journey to find the best data assets available and present them in a way that made them understandable and actionable for revenue teams.
Data is at the core of our platform’s DNA. It’s the fuel that powers our customers’ growth engines. In every conversation with fellow entrepreneurs building AI/ML systems, my go-to question/statement is “What’s your data moat?”
What 6sense Looks for in a Data Company
Over the years, we’ve looked at a lot of data companies and developed a stringent process and selection criteria for our acquisitions. But when trying to determine the quality of data we’ve found a few things that matter most:
Transparency
At the top of the list is how transparent the company is with its data. What are its data sources? Is the company transparent to its customers and the acquirer?
Accuracy
Then we have accuracy and coverage of data, which are critical for building a foundational set of trustworthy data that customers can use to build a GTM strategy. There will always be a margin of error in data, so it’s all about minimizing errors while providing the broadest coverage.
Intelligent Processing
Now you need a way to process all this data. This is where Big Data Processing and Machine Learning come in. Is the company simply purchasing the data wholesale and reselling it with a simple process on top, or does it have unique ways of processing data that surface actionable insights for customers?
Combining data accuracy and coverage with intelligent processing is 6sense’s secret sauce. We were seeking a partner company that perfectly matched our data-first DNA and was willing to work together towards a greater vision.
A Match Made in Big Data Heaven
When we met with the leadership at Slintel, everything just felt right as they ticked all the boxes on our list. More importantly, they left our revenue teams wide-eyed with desire for the real-world use cases that could be unlocked with the application of Slintel’s technology.
Out of all the companies we’ve looked at, none were as transparent and upfront as Slintel about their capabilities — while also sharing certain areas of improvement.
Slintel was in the top two for minimum rate of error while delivering the broadest coverage of data types for B2B customers and a proprietary process for continually growing it. Slintel technographic data has evolved over multiple years for every account’s technology usage — now mapping more than 16,000 different technologies to 15 million companies every week.
Slintel has unique ways of extracting insights from multiple sources to find an accurate fingerprint of the technology being used, who the buying team is, and delivering actionable insights on accounts for their customers.
Turning raw data into something useful is the hard part, and this proved to us that Slintel understood how to do the serious work of big data processing and machine learning.
If we were to go and build all of these amazing technographic, psychographic, and contact data capabilities from scratch, we’d do it exactly how Slintel did it.
Common Vision + Complementary Talents
Matching company culture is even more important to us than technology, however. We believe that the cultures of the companies you’re merging should be aligned on a common vision and values.
Even if nothing else goes right from the product integrations (which is very unlikely!), at least we can get the people right. We’re always looking to add great people across our entire organization, and Slintel is filled with incredibly talented folks who are experts in their field.
Both of our teams are hungry for growth — 6sense has been tracking for 100% YoY growth for a few years straight now. Slintel is at an incredible 400% YoY growth. We’re both shooting for something bigger and want to keep that hunger alive, building the next part of the RevTech Revolution together.
And we’re both willing to make mistakes, own them, and find solutions to them. Building a hyper-growth company can be messy and mistakes happen — but it’s how you carry yourself and each other through it that matters.
What we also love about Slintel is that the company isn’t exactly like us, but brings complementary offerings and expertise to the table:
- Slintel is a market-leading GTM Intelligence product, while we’re a best-in-class account engagement solution with big data and AI at the core.
- Slintel’s team members are experts in SEO, inbound strategy, and product-led growth, while we’re great at targeting the right accounts and closing enterprise deals.
Don’t Try to Fix What Isn’t Broken
Our philosophy when it comes to acquiring companies is, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
We don’t want to disrupt a rapidly growing company like Slintel. It has very strong GTM motions and a really happy customer base. For now, Slintel will operate independently and continue to grow its business quickly with as much support as we can provide.
Combining data accuracy and coverage with intelligent processing allows 6sense to deliver on our promise to “know everything so you can do anything.”
We’re taking a phased approach to our integration with Slintel. We’ll start with bringing Slintel’s modern contact and technographic data into the 6sense platform for customers and partners.
More phases are coming soon, which we’ll reveal at our customer conference Breakthrough in December!
