6sense helps our customers Proceed With Confidence in any climate, but as we planned this year’s Breakthrough customer conference, it became clear that we needed to rethink elements of our annual customer Breakthrough Awards.
Our customers continually innovate and use 6sense in unexpected and truly clever ways. Their collective performance and success over the past year challenged us to create new award categories and craft new methodologies for identifying and measuring their ingenuity. It was exciting!
This year’s 6sense Breakthrough Awards recognize customers based on organizational impact, platform knowledge, and creative use of 6sense tools. Let’s meet the winners!
Winner of Fastest Time to Value: Intercom
Finalists: HR Acuity, FullStory
Intercom purchased 6sense in December 2021 and its marketing teams were using the platform just a few months later to segment their account base and launch targeted display campaigns.
In mid-April 2022, the sales team got in on the action. It used 6sense and opened 50% more opportunities in Q2 than it had in Q1. In total, the revenue team:
- Created 1,793 new target accounts
- Added 1,150 new contacts
Winner of Data Clean Sweep: Zywave
Finalists: LoanPro, Circle Internet Financial
The Data Clean Sweep Award honors customers that began their journey with 6sense with self-described “dirty data” and then leveraged 6sense’s enrichment and orchestrations to improve data quality.
Zywave stood out because cleaner data allowed its team to proceed with confidence, leading to increased sales adoption from roughly 40 users to now more than 130.
Their efforts resulted in:
- Larger average deal sizes
- The likelihood of opening an opportunity once it reached the Purchase stage jumped from 2x as likely as the overall pipeline to 4x more likely.
Winner of Efficiency Experts: Brightcove
Finalists: Qualtrics, Florence Healthcare
Prior to implementing 6sense’s dynamic segmentation, Brightcove ran a static account list, built individual campaigns one segment at a time, and manually enriched account profiles. It also took upwards of two weeks to build and launch personalized campaigns, which made it impossible to efficiently personalize outreach at scale.
After implementing 6sense’s dynamic account list functionality and partnering with 2X, a 6sense marketing firm partner, Brightcove:
- Saved as much as 200 hours per quarter by automating target account enrichment
- Launched 27 personalized campaigns in the same time it previously took to launch just one
- Decreased their cost per engaged account by 55.6%
“One of the things that we’ve found particularly difficult these last few years is this idea that anonymous activity on our website is where the action’s at,” said Theo Hildyard, VP of Demand Generation, after Brightcove received the award. “Knowing that we’re not the only people that are experiencing that is really helpful, and it’s making me feel confident about what we’re doing.”
Winner of Sales Success: HPE
Finalists: Intercom, Postal.io
This award honors a company whose sales team eagerly adopted 6sense and used it to drive quantifiable game-changing impacts on revenue, such as fewer days to close, higher win rates, and increased deal values.
This year’s winner, HPE, reported the following sales metrics:
In North America
- More than a 35% improvement in win rate on 6QA (6sense Qualified Account) opportunities versus non-6QA
- Deals closing 83 days faster for 6QA opportunities
In EMEA
- 40% improvement in win rate
- Deals closing 54 days faster
Another impressive result: After digging into its largest account — representing two-thirds of its annual revenue and quota — HPE discovered the account showed interest in a technology they weren’t yet discussing. This led to a huge net-new opportunity.
“I’m confident that what we did isn’t just going to help HPE,” said Jay Johnson, Sales Experience Instructor, after he accepted the award. “It’s going to help anyone else who’s struggling.”
Winner of Ecosystem Fusion: Ivanti
Finalists: FullStory, Clari
Infusing the power of 6sense intelligence into the apps and tools that revenue teams already use makes it simple to spot opportunities and prioritize efforts.
This year’s Ecosystem Fusion Award winner, Ivanti, has more than 450,000 accounts as a result of many acquisitions. With that many accounts, it was critical that Ivanti’s revenue team prioritize its efforts where it would have the most impact.
A few key integrations added 6sense insights to existing tools:
- Salesforce and DOMO: A single dashboard for BDRs gives them all the data points and action steps they need to follow. This not only saves BDRs a considerable amount of time, but it has also greatly sped up sales adoption.
- Outreach: The data passed from 6sense to Outreach results in simplicity and speed for BDRs. Time previously spent manually searching for and analyzing data is now dedicated to outreach efforts.
- Eloqua: This integration allows Ivanti’s revenue team to run consistent, targeted campaigns to LinkedIn using in-market audiences generated by 6sense.
Winner of Nimble Marketing: Postal.io
Finalists: Springbuk, Cisco
The award for Nimble Marketing celebrates the accomplishments of lean marketing teams of 10 or less. Through creative segmenting, smart CRM integrations, effective technology integrations or more, 6sense helps small but mighty teams generate big results.
This year’s Nimble Marketing winner is Postal.io. Its goal was to make sure the organization was at the table for any opportunity that looked like a good fit. Its revenue team accomplished this by setting up 6sense orchestrations that automatically found accounts matching their ideal customer fit criteria and then created accounts in Salesforce. Those target accounts were then nurtured with display ads and SDR prospecting.
The team also engaged the entire revenue organization to assist with:
- Outreach
- 6sense display ads
- Gifting
This collective effort generated 34 qualified opportunities, 67 accounts with gift redemptions, and qualified pipeline worth 100x the amount they spent on the campaign.
Winner of Ad Campaign of the Year: CODE42
Finalists: Cielo, Micro Focus
The entries we received for this award were especially fun because we got to see the rich creativity expressed by our customers’ marketing teams.
The recipient of this year’s award, CODE42, really stood out. Its team leveraged 6sense targeting capabilities and predictive model to focus solely on accounts that were in-market with a Moderate or Strong profile fit. This narrowed the pool of accounts to roughly 2,000 — down from nearly 7,000 the team would have previously tried to target without this intelligence.
The comprehensive campaign ran for the first half of 2022 and used:
- 6sense display ads
- Paid social on LinkedIn using a synced 6sense segment
- Direct mail gifting
- A landing page microsite
- A sales sequence for sellers to get the word out
Winner of ABM Campaign of the Year: Cielo
Finalists: Sumo Logic, Qualtrics
This award recognizes masterful account targeting and audience selection based on 6sense data, extraordinary efficiencies, and cost savings.
Cielo, this year’s winner, said it account-based strategy can be summarized in one word: collaboration.
Cielo knew that sales and marketing needed to share the same vision if it was going to reach its global growth goals. Its team spent a lot of time up-front building a steering committee with cross-functional members that acted as both guides and advocates in sharing their progress, wins, and opportunities organization-wide.
Its team also recognized that Cielo’s ABM journey represented a shift in strategy – not just a shift in technology – and conducted training, support, and listening sessions with BDRs and BDLs to ensure they were comfortable with the new approach and tool.
And the results of all those efforts? In Q2 alone:
- 61% of their open opportunities were 6QA opportunities
- The 6QAs drove a 59% increase in average deal size
- Win rates increased from 12% to 32% using 6QAs
- Always-on, stage-based campaigns have more than doubled the amount of net new influenced pipeline
