As the global leader in 3D measurement, imaging, and realization solutions, FARO Technologies, Inc., helps manufacturers eliminate costly errors, builders construct astonishing projects, and law enforcement establish better cases.
In their first month using 6sense to support their revenue team’s work, FARO saw:
- 5.32x lift in account engagement
- 101 new accounts engaged
- Improved alignment across the revenue team and top leadership
The Challenge
FARO had always been a product-centric, engineering-led, sales-driven organization, which had contributed to the company’s success over 40 years. The downside was that the focus had been skewed too heavily toward selling hardware products, and not enough toward customer experience.
In marketing terms, this showed up as piles of disparate emails landing in the inboxes of customers and potential customers. Communication happened when sales requested it — not when it was relevant or useful to the customer.
In addition, marketing was focused on passing over large quantities of new leads to sales, even if that meant buying lead lists instead of uncovering and engaging accounts that were truly interested and in market.
Not surprisingly, the quality of marketing-qualified leads left a lot to be desired — less than 0.78% of the leads marketing handed off to sales ever resulted in a sale.
And sales had its own communication issues. “We might have had eight or nine different sales reps calling on an organization and negotiating different terms,” explained Lisa Cole, FARO’s Vice President of Marketing.
The result was a confusing and disjointed experience, which hindered the company’s ability to effectively guide customers through their long buying cycle — and it showed.
Even though FARO’s customers made a major purchase every one to three years on average, and 70% of the company’s business came from repeat customers, 80% of their customers hadn’t purchased from them at all in the prior two years.
Time for a Change
At the root of all these problems was FARO’s lack of an account-level view of existing and potential customers. Despite having 22 technologies at their disposal (many of them duplicative), the revenue team didn’t have the insights needed to uncover demand and provide a relevant and engaging customer experience.
And that meant that instead of capitalizing on the opportunities in front of them to improve sales and marketing’s success, FARO was stuck buying its way to revenue growth through traditional tactics like hiring incremental sales reps and exhibiting at face-to-face events.
A new leadership team came on board with the goal of effectively repositioning FARO from a product-centric company to a customer-centric solutions provider, starting with a new go-to-market strategy.
Revealing Invisible Interest
After deciding which existing technologies which to keep, the FARO team needed to decide how to tighten data integration across the tools in their portfolio to create a more holistic view of prospects and customers. Next, they determined which capabilities they needed in order to leverage their large existing customer base and implement a new go-to-market strategy — and 6sense was an obvious choice.
When first getting started with 6sense, Cole wanted to start leveraging FARO’s large customer base while also lighting up the Dark Funnel™ to reveal previously invisible interest and engagement and to do it at scale.
Cole and her team started using 6sense to transform their digital advertising strategy. With 6sense’s intent data and predictions, Cole was able to more accurately target key accounts that were identified as in-market with the right messaging at the right time.
This new, targeted approach netted big results: in the first month, engagement soared to 5.32x what it had previously been.
Engagement Changes Everything
What’s more, the engagement they began seeing was more meaningful than what they’d seen before. Previously, the most visited pages were generic — the home page, opt-out forms, etc. But customers began visiting pages relevant to their current moment in their buying journeys.
The Results
Within a month of deploying 6sense, the results were already turning heads:
- 5.32x lift in account engagement in 30 days
- 101 new accounts engaged in the same period
- Improved alignment across the revenue team and top leadership
With 6sense’s insight data behind them, FARO Technologies was able to set a smarter new course for their revenue team.
