Qlik, an end-to-end data management and analytics platform, was looking to move to an account-based marketing (ABM) approach.
Bringing 6sense on board was a key part of its ABM shift, leading to:
- a 30-40% decrease in time spent sorting and following up on leads
- alignment of sales and marketing on a single source of truth for their ABM approach
- insight and actionable data on account fit and needs
The Challenge
Before taking an ABM approach, Qlik treated all leads the same because they had no way to prioritize. They also had more leads than they had the capacity to process and follow-up on.
Qlik needed a solution that would score their prospects, allowing them to shift their focus to hunt high intent/high profile accounts.
Working Smarter, Not More
Because prioritization was a top need for Qlik, they started with 6sense Predictive Lead Scoring.
Moving to focus only on those A and B leads was an obvious switch that led to a big win in terms of balancing the team’s limited resources.
Since they were spending time only on those leads most likely to convert, it freed the team up to do additional outbound prospecting. In fact, with AI-driven insights, Qlik was able to reduce the team’s time and effort spent sorting through and following up on leads by 30-40%.
“Using Predictive Lead Scoring has evolved our process to ‘this is the way our business is run now’,” Corey said.
Sharing the Plan
With the marketing team on board with 6sense, Qlik could take the next step toward an ABM approach. Moving to a joint sales and marketing initiative gave the company a chance to retain and reinvigorate the sales team with the knowledge they could gain from 6sense.
Since part of Qlik’s strategy is uncovering new business – people who are in the analytics market but don’t necessarily know about Qlik and their solutions –Corey’s team targeted those in-market accounts through campaigns. They then passed that intelligence to the sales team directly in Salesforce so they could better prospect to those accounts.
“We want to go after the accounts that are hungry and looking for information now,” Corey said.
The sales team found immediate benefit from 6sense intelligence and orchestration. They could get data-driven answers to vital sales questions like:
- Who’s in our ideal customer profile (ICP)?
- Which accounts should we focus ABM efforts on?
- Who’s on the buying team?
- Which accounts are in-market?
- Which competitors are in this deal?
- What is the next best action?
Armed with data from 6sense, sales and marketing could use the answers to these mission-critical questions to plan their strategies.
Using the Tools
As a data and analytics visualization platform, Qlik takes 6sense data and brings it into the application used by the sales and marketing teams. There, they can narrow down their addressable market and accounts.
For Business Development Representatives (BDRs), the ability to click on ‘strong profile fit’ and select the buying stage quickly narrows down the set of accounts they should be targeting, taking their list from around 3,000 to 200.
They can then further pivot off of an industry sector, narrowing that list down even more.
Corey explains that users can hyperlink from that list of accounts directly to the Salesforce product view, opening up that black box to show why accounts are scored the way they are and why 6sense says an account is in-market or a good profile fit.
And if that weren’t enough, Qlik’s sales team gets intelligence on the demographic info, keywords being searched, behavioral activity and personas that are engaging at that account level.
The Results
Shifting to an ABM strategy can be tricky, but as Qlik experienced, having solid data from 6sense offered tremendous benefits to their team:
- one-third less time spent managing potentially unqualified leads
- unification of the revenue team one data source for ABM
- transparent, usable data around prospect fit and in-market status
From drowning in unqualified leads to a sharp, data-driven way to gain insight into their best prospects, Qlik’s partnership with 6sense revolutionized their ABM approach.
