Editor’s note: This is the second of two Breakthrough 2022 daily recaps. You can find the first recap here.
Yesterday, we detailed just some of the incredible stories of transformation and success our customers shared at our Breakthrough conference.
Today we’re back with recaps of five more remarkable customer stories:
- HR Acuity and Postal talking about efficiency in growth
- Cisco Secure diving into ABM success tips
- Morningstar on demand gen
- Marathon Health on going small to go big, and
- Drift on breaking up with your ABM program (don’t worry, there’s a happily-ever-after ending!)
But before we dig into those terrific sessions, let’s share some game-changing news we announced yesterday.
6sense Conversational Email
Ignored and underworked accounts are a major source of GTM waste. Critical outreach lacks the right message, happens too late, or simply never happens at all.
We’re putting the power of AI behind the future of email, and were delighted yesterday to share the results: 6sense Conversational Email. We conducted a deep-dive of a reimagined email experience — one where marketers can…
- Craft personalized, intent-based emails
- Intelligently converse with contacts who respond, and
- Loop in sales at the right moment
… all at scale. Customers involved in our beta program reported incredible results, such as:
- 50% reduced deal cycle time (marketing-sourced opportunities)
- 1.5x increase in average deal size (marketing-sourced opportunities)
- $900K of new pipeline generated in four weeks
You can learn more here. (And if you need a primer on conversational email, don’t worry — we’ve got you covered.)
Comprehensive Sales Intelligence
We also announced significant data enhancements to our existing Sales Intelligence capabilities.
Customers will soon experience a newly designed, intuitive, and highly integrated application that provides the most comprehensive resources for prospecting, contact data, prioritization dashboards, and sales insights for B2B sales teams.
Building off the powerful capabilities of Slintel (which 6sense acquired last year) and launching in Q1 2023, our improved Sales Intelligence will feature even more robust data that reflects significant investments in:
- Global contact data
- Intent data (such as third-party data, anonymous web visitor insights, company data and firmographic data), and
- Pre-intent data (such as psychographic and technographic data, and company data)
- And more
New Contextual Advertising Capabilities
Since announcing Contextual Advertising earlier this year, 6sense has developed over 100 new custom contextual topics catered specifically to B2B advertisers. Now, advertisers won’t need to settle for using contextual segments that are largely designed for consumer marketers.
Contextual advertising for B2B:
- Provides a better ad experience for the buyer
- Eliminates wasted ad spend on buyers that aren’t likely to engage
- Prepares for the loss of third-party cookies and associated targeting
- Respects user privacy by targeting audiences without using behavioral or data profiles
Customer Presentations at Breakthrough
Whew! We announced even more new or improved capabilities yesterday (which you can read about here), but let’s bring the spotlight back to our beloved, groundbreaking customers.
Ready to catch up with five more sessions and learn how to power up your revenue team? Let’s go!
HR Acuity and Postal: Fueling Your ABX Engine
Efficiency is the name of the game, explained Postal Founder and CEO Erik Kostelnik as he and Brian Boisier, Digital and Marketing Operations Manager at HR Acuity, kicked off their session.
It’s not that companies don’t want growth — it’s that they’re looking for smart growth, they said. And that’s what both Postal and HR Acuity were able to use 6sense to achieve.
“Use all of your data,” Boisier recommended, laying out HR Acuity’s strategy. The company used 6sense to create two vital intent segments: “Very High Intent” (intent across at least three different data sources) and “Medium Intent” (intent across only two different data sources).
The segments really helped sales and marketing focus their attention on likely-to-close opportunities:
- 70% of new opportunities influenced by 6sense came from the Very High Intent segment
- 30% of new opportunities influenced by 6sense came from the Medium Intent segment
- 77% of closed/won revenue came from the Very High Intent segment
Postal’s thinking was similar. “Within a large TAM [total addressable market],” Kostelnik explained, they wanted to “focus on accounts with the greatest potential to drive value.”
This philosophy supports the sales team — identifying accounts with high potential lets sellers know they are spending their time wisely — and marketing directly supports those same accounts to drive engagement.
Like HR Acuity, Postal reaped the benefits of creating an account-based campaign centered on intent:
- 14x ROI
- 41 qualified opportunities
- 72 accounts with gift redemptions
Kostelnik and Boisier shared their key takeaways to proceeding with confidence in any economic climate: making the most of all your data, building omnichannel campaigns, and involving the entire revenue team.
Cisco Secure: ABM Is Not a Tactic
Data protection leader Cisco Secure’s marketing team came out in force, bringing Jamie Stroupe, Alex Bessa, Carlos Teran, and Adam Sardinha to drop their ABM knowledge.
Here were their top four tips:
1. Establish short, medium and long goals.
Everything in an account-based marketing strategy depends on a deep and reliable understanding of the accounts and audiences you are targeting, so set yourself up for success by knowing what your engagement plans are.
2. Collaborate and align sales, marketing, and beyond.
From the very first interaction, marketers and sales reps must work together to build a sophisticated, personalized campaign across multiple channels.
3. Invest in tools, templates, and processes to maximize all channels.
Build the ship as you sail, adding tools as needed. Efficiency will come with time. As you perfect these programs, learn and move to the next challenge.
4. Leverage technology to deploy ABM programs more quickly.
Here’s how their 10-month campaign turned out:
Reach:
- 73,000 accounts targeted
- 64,000 accounts reached
- 31,000 accounts engaged
Global Programs:
- 36 digital display campaigns
- 22 email campaigns
Value-Add:
- $42 million in influenced pipeline
- $15 million in closed-won revenue
Evolution is important, the marketing team told us. Be willing to change over time.
Morningstar: Demand Generation
By building an ABM program powered by 6sense, Morningstar transformed the GTM story from product-led to customer-centric, racking up quick wins and taking its pipeline numbers to new heights.
We were excited to have Uran Kabashi, Director of Demand Generation & ABM and Paul Infante, Sr. Digital Marketing Manager stop by to tell us all about it.
Demand Gen is relatively new to Morningstar, Kabashi explained. With some internal shifts, marketing had a great opportunity to develop new strategies.
That included prioritizing marketing efforts based on what the customers were actually interested in instead of pushing various messaging to see what sticks, Infante added.
They were able to do this by incorporating intent data and segmenting from 6sense, which “allowed us to modernize our digital strategy by being better ‘listeners’ and tailoring or personalizing our messaging,” he said.
Infante and Kabashi knew they’d have to lead with data to convince stakeholders. So they started small, using the information they gained to prove the merit of their approach and sharing wins with sales to drive adoption.
The value showed itself quickly: Within six months, they saw a 2.66x lift in purchase opportunities.
Using a buying stage-based framework paired with customer-focused, hyper-centric targeting, Morningstar yielded results that proved the value of 6sense and the demand gen team to the company:
- $5.45 CPM
- 0.51% CTR on engagement campaigns (vs. 0.30% benchmark)
- $263.28 CPL on lead gen campaigns ($586.03 without 6sense)
The results have been so impressive that the team is moving forward with ABM across all the company’s business units and increasing digital spend.
“6sense is a transformational part of our growth,” Infante said. “We’re using 6sense intent as our compass.”
Marathon Health: Building Micro Omni-Channel Campaigns with 6sense
Marathon Health’s growth marketing team was small. One person, to be exact. But that person, Troy Purdue, Director of Growth Marketing, was determined to find a solution that provide big capabilities.
Purdue found that in 6sense, and had an immediate high and low. The high? “With 6sense enabled, we could finally see accounts with activity in our market everywhere!” he said.
The low? The workload for those opportunities was too big for a one-man band. Overwhelmed by the potential number of prospects, Marathon Health decided to go micro, creating MSA-based segments using zip codes, allowing them to market at a city-specific level.
After identifying accounts, Marathon Health used intent signals and AI scoring to:
- Evaluate the accounts’ buying stages
- Orchestrate with Salesforce, and
- Market for engagement across multiple mediums
By narrowing the number of accounts, Marathon Health was able to define market-specific playbooks and monitor the success or failure of marketing activities faster.
Its omnichannel approach included customized targeted digital ads, direct mail, conversational email journeys, SDR outreach, and additional channels such as events and Google ads.
This micro omnichannel effort has yielded:
- 211% increase in bottom-of-funnel accounts
- $66 million in net new pipeline attributable to marketing (up from $0 — yes, really!)
Drift: Time to Break Up With Your ABM Program?
If Breakthrough had a “best theme” award for customer presentations, it absolutely would have gone to Justin Keller, VP of Revenue Marketing at Drift, for his whip-smart presentation on when it’s time to break up with your ABM program.
Sometimes, things — relationships, bread, ABM programs — get stale and we need to move on. “What is stopping you from just breaking up with your ABM program and reinventing it?” Keller asked.
In the center of Drift’s ICP stood 250 accounts it had identified as important, but, Keller said, they weren’t getting the attention they deserved. “If these were truly the most important accounts to us, we need to treat them like it,” Keller said.
Breaking up with your ABM program doesn’t mean ditching ABM entirely.
Keller suggested starting over and focusing on the relationships you’re trying to build with high-value accounts. Connect with them, get to know them, and let them know you’re serious.
What happened when Drift broke up with its ABM program and started over, showing those accounts they really cared?
- Ad performance: 5x average CTR
- LP engagement: 23% engagement rate, 50% capture rate
- Opportunity creation: 4 opportunities, $267,000 in pipeline, 33x ROI
- $1.1 million influenced pipeline in under three months
The major life lesson in this — in business and in personal relationships? “Show people that you care,” said Keller.
In Case You Missed Us…
We can’t possibly capture the level of awesome that is Breakthrough in general, and our customer presentations in particular, in these brief recaps.
If you couldn’t attend Breakthrough, there’s good news. On Tuesday, Nov. 1, we’ll host Virtual Breakthrough, which will feature three hours of live-streamed content and access to on-demand sessions from our live Breakthrough event.
The best part? It’s all free. Sign up here!
A Final Word
Certainty and confidence are absolutely achievable when you’re armed with the right tools. 6sense’s platform — and our new capabilities and improved customer community — can help get you there. Check them out.
Let’s proceed with confidence!
