Marketing and sales teams have a lot of tools to choose from today… but how many do we actually need? And which ones? Think back on all your experiences ramping up or scaling your operations. How many tools have you purchased that ultimately failed to deliver ROI? How many serve similar purposes or target the same audiences? And how many require an outside agency or specialist at an added cost?
In our recent report with Heinz Marketing, we found that 40% of C-level respondents and 50% of all respondents believe their tech stack is too bloated, too complex, or too expensive.
We’ve all been there — whether you’ve inherited a tech stack so bloated you can’t tell what’s what (and what half of it’s for, or if you’re even the appropriate owner for it by budgetary standards) or a failed attempt at seeing value in a new tool with big promises diminished leadership’s faith in your team’s technology needs. These problems, though frustrating in different ways, present the same underlying issue: You can’t get what you need with what you have.
So why hasn’t our approach to tech stacks changed?
In her book No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls., our CMO Latané Conant details some of the reasons holding otherwise savvy, forward-thinking marketers and salespeople back from trying something new and moving away from the legacy or cobbled-together tech stacks and processes of yesterday:
- My company is too big.
- My company is too small.
- It sounds like more work than my team can handle.
- We already have a lot of technology.
- We can’t attribute it all, and even though my attribution isn’t perfect, at least I understand it.
- I’m a “relationship seller” and it works just fine.
- My executive team will never go for it.
Unlike cooking or water polo, if you don’t try in marketing or sales, you can still fail. In an increasingly competitive landscape, it’s time to get set up to succeed, rather than sticking to one (or more) of the points above.
Scale your ROI, not your tech stack
Equipping yourself and your teams with repeatable, scalable sales enablement tools can be a challenge, particularly when it comes to showing value across the board. That’s why it’s more critical than ever to have technology that tells you everything you need to know about your target accounts, the buying team, the competitive landscape, specific customer pain points, what they have in their tech stack, and how engagement is changing throughout the deal cycle.
You want to have everything you need to give you the greatest competitive advantage — and to prove ROI internally. But “everything” doesn’t necessarily mean every imaginable tool. Consider a solution that gives you access to that elusive “everything” (i.e., insights, capabilities, next steps) and makes selling more intuitive and involves less guesswork.
One platform to rule (i.e., identify, target, and sell to) them all
The 6sense Account Engagement Platform is unique in that it has an embedded Customer Data Platform (CDP) to capture and process all the data needed for strategic account engagement, and AI-driven orchestration capabilities to do the heavy lifting.
A CDP takes all of a person’s interactions with a company that are normally spread out across multiple tools and systems and brings them into a single data warehouse, giving you a 360-degree view of an account. This allows you to better target advertising and promotional efforts with personalized communications aimed at the entire buying team.
An embedded CDP vs. a standalone CDP
An embedded CDP brings in not only known first-party data, but also layers that data with anonymous first-party data and third-party keyword data from the anonymous buyer journey within the Dark Funnel™. With a standalone CDP, you’re starting from scratch, without the ability to uncover all the customer and prospect data hidden in the Dark Funnel.
The more data you collect, the smarter your system becomes, because it has repeat buying patterns to learn from. You want as much historical and ongoing activity data as possible from the start, and an embedded CDP makes that possible.
Targeted ads made easier with self-service functionality and guidance
One of the areas many marketers end up overspending and underdelivering on is advertising. Between LinkedIn and Google ads, it’s all too easy for marketers who don’t pony up for agency support to target the wrong buyers with the wrong content at the wrong time. But you shouldn’t need an ad expert or a web of tools to make paid advertising work for you.
6sense supports display ads served straight through our platform, retargeting ads, and via external display providers. (In fact, while most other vendors only support Sponsored Content posts on LinkedIn, 6sense Segments for LinkedIn ads supports all ad types.)
Case study: Sage Intacct
Our customer Sage Intacct was looking to consolidate three different pieces from their tech stack into a single vendor. They had a fit modeling application, an intent detection application, and display advertising — all important for the business, but unnecessarily disparate. The benefits of having everything integrated within the 6sense platform made not only everyday operational sense, but also budgetary sense.
As Nick Ezzo, their VP of Demand Gen, said, “Through 6sense, we were able to consolidate all of those into one platform that interoperates with the different pieces, so we have a fuller picture of what’s happening.”
