Figuring out your ABM strategy, getting your team on board, and implementing your MarTech stack can be a daunting process. So at 6sense, we really strive to understand our customer’s pain, their needs and goals, and how we can help them achieve those things with a platform that unifies revenue teams.
Our partners at Aprimo, a company that develops and sells marketing resource management and digital asset management technology for marketing and customer experience departments, know just how big of an undertaking starting over can be. We sat down with Ed Breault, VP, Head of Marketing and Uran Kabashi, Global Demand Generation & ABM Manager to discuss the pains and gains of their ABM journey.
Aprimo has 20 years of history whose clients are big brand names. After experiencing rapid growth for years, they were acquired in 2011. Then in 2016, Aprimo divested and reemerged into the market, however, after being hidden under a different name for five years there was zero brand awareness. Even though Aprimo had a lot of customers, they were operating as a startup, rebuilding product and becoming a SaaS company in the cloud. Everything was brand new and foundational elements were being built from analyst relations to influencers, to their team, to their website, to the martech stack they would be using. And while Aprimo felt that they were executing their marketing strategy, they needed to make investments to leapfrog into market leading.
Shooting in the Dark
Aprimo was facing some mean competition from industry giants. So they started to listen to what was happening in the market space and gather win vs loss data so they could become more strategic and more surgical in their marketing tactics. But even then they were using data from firmographics, ICP, and their sales peoples gut reaction to which accounts were hot and worth pursuing on that particular day. They had no way of prioritizing and targeting accounts that were actually in-market vs ones that were not.
Enabling the C-suite to Understand and See Value in ABM
Account selection and fueling the pipeline acceleration playbook were the main goals when Aprimo implemented 6sense. And with the layers of data that 6sense provides – such as intent scoring and profile fit – Aprimo is able to find and prioritize tier 1 and tier 2 accounts. As a result, Aprimo has been able to close several top tier accounts after getting high intent signals through 6sense.
In fact, Aprimo is now anticipating inbound leads early in the funnel, lining up campaigns to launch even before a form is filled out. With their engagement score increasing, an increased hit rate of 40%, and increases in quality pipeline, the CEO is paying attention and using 6sense himself to see what accounts are in-market and what Aprimo is doing to target those accounts. Ed added, “Boardroom level discussions are now completely data-driven when talking about market opportunity whereas what’s commercially meaningful is not the Total Addressable Market, but the Total Addressable In-Market.”
Bringing Together Revenue Teams
“The level of ROI and adoption in such a short amount of time has been amazing. Sales is seeing the results from 6sense with quick wins increasing their trust in marketing and the ABM program,” said Uran. And instead of working in a linear fashion, marketing doing their thing and then sales following up to close the deal, the two teams are now working in lock-step. Aprimo’s main playbook called Challenger Targeting is focused on uncovering and influencing the buyer early before the deal is already baked or an RFP is issued. With the revenue teams united and able to see high intent signals on the 6sense platform they are actually marketing to accounts before the prospect becomes known in the funnel.
Aprimo understands how to do ABM right. By investing in a platform that can get them in front of qualified accounts who are in-market with tailored content before contact is ever made, they are staying ahead of the competition and closing larger deals faster than ever before.
Learn more about how other 6sense customers are using our account-based orchestration platform to generate more opportunities and close better business faster.
