Hyland Maximizes ROI and Reduces Ad Spend by 6 Figures Using 6sense

As a leading provider of enterprise content management and business process management solutions since 1991, Hyland owes their 30+ years of success to the top-notch talent and technology they invest in. 

Two of Hyland’s main growth drivers are 6sense and 2X, a Tier 1 6sense services partner that specializes in helping B2B sellers get the most from our platform. 6sense powers Hyland’s account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, while 2X’s Marketing Resource Center (MRC)  provides extra 6sense-certified talent to help the Hyland marketing team boost ABX campaign scale and efficiency. 

Kelly Webb, Account-based Marketing Manager at Hyland, shares how using 6sense and 2X produces impressive results, such as a 60% increase in account engagement and campaign click-through rate (CTR%).

The Challenge: Targeting the Masses

Before implementing 6sense, Hyland’s account-based marketing strategy used a traditional waterfall model, meaning business development representatives (BDRs) would find a lead, qualify it, send it to the next person, qualify it again, turn it into a sales-qualified lead (SQL), and then hope it’d convert into an opportunity. 

Kelly explains, “There was no intent data analysis nor data analysis taking place during campaign planning and segmentation strategy.” 

As a result, campaigns weren’t‌ personalized because they were mass-targeting accounts available in the database. 

“If you do not have a sales intelligence predictive model type of technology, it’s hard to prioritize your budget, your resources, and understand what your universe of accounts care about,” Kelly says. 

So, Hyland brought on 6sense to help marketers see intent at an account level and build campaigns to find people within accounts.

The Solution: Infusing 6sense Data into ABM Efforts

Since implementation in 2019, 6sense has been at the core of Hyland’s hyper-personalized, omnichannel digital marketing engine. 

“Right now, we leverage 6sense as the nucleus of our go-to-market strategy, so we’re able to infuse all the data and account prioritization into everything we do programmatically,” Kelly says. 

Here’s an overview of how Hyland and 2X use 6sense’s prioritized targeting insights to execute display advertising: 

1. 6sense syncs Salesforce data, matches accounts to audiences spotted within the 6sense platform, and creates audience segments.
2. Hyland’s sales team members approve the segments that marketers build using 6sense and Salesforce. 
3. The list is further enriched with firmographic and intent data. This segmentation enables Hyland revenue team members to deliver hyper-personalized ads and trigger web chat playbooks. 

6sense enables Hyland’s marketers and sellers to go even deeper by building ideal customer profiles (ICPs) for each vertical.

Verticalizing ICPs

“Through our adoption of  6sense, we have evolved to now create both persona and account segmentations. We then infuse those segments into all of our programs. This is what’s possible when you have that visibility into priority accounts,” Kelly says. 

First, Hyland builds segments according to which buying stage accounts are in. 6sense intent data allows marketers to narrow down accounts in the decision and purchase stage, which is passed on to ‌account executives. 

Then, in collaboration with sales, Hyland has their team from 2X create personalized 14-step sales cadences using keyword and Bombora topic data in 6sense. This includes email, phone calls, LinkedIn inMail, and web video. 

Finally, 6sense segments serve as the trigger for Hyland’s marketing efforts, guaranteeing that marketing and sales are targeting the same group of accounts with aligned messaging throughout the buyer’s journey. These precisely targeted marketing efforts maximize engagement and conversion opportunities.

Driving Results with an Efficient Platform Ecosystem 

6sense keeps messaging aligned throughout the buying journey by integrating with multiple supporting platforms, including Salesforce, Salesloft, LinkedIn, and Drift. 

1. Salesforce: Integrating with 6sense allows Hyland marketers to see intent at an account level and build campaigns around those accounts. This provides a single source of truth to help prioritize outreach efforts. 
2. Salesloft: Salesloft feeds account intelligence from 6sense into Hyland’s internal sales dashboard. The integration uses 6sense alerts to trigger account escalation to SDRs once an account qualifies as a 6QA. The integration tells sales which accounts show intent, what pages they visit on the website, account scores, and key contacts. This enables sellers to follow up in a contextual and personalized way. 
3. LinkedIn: 6sense gives Hyland visibility into how LinkedIn campaigns influence account movement, accounts reached, and accounts engaged. All of Hyland’s LinkedIn campaigns use 6sense segments for account targeting, providing Hyland with a holistic view of each customer’s journey before and after engaging with LinkedIn ads orchestrated by 6sense. This integration has led to a 20% increase in average engagement in web traffic. Additionally, this integration has removed the need for manual set-up and export of audiences, saving about 150-200 hours of work per quarter. 
4. Drift: Using Drift’s integration with 6sense, the website triggers chat conversations with visitors from targeted accounts, using Drift chat playbooks that are personalized based on the current 6sense segment of the visitor. The bot’s conversational playbooks are designed based on intent keywords from 6sense and historical web visit data to make sure the language used by each bot relates to topics web visitors are interested in. Further, the CTAs/recommendations served by the bot in chat dynamically change based on the account’s 6sense buying stage.  

Hyland was able to lean on the LinkedIn + Drift expertise of their 2X team to make sure these platforms were synced seamlessly, and orchestrating LinkedIn ads with the Drift chat playbooks has sparked remarkable results: 

In comparison to the prior three months, visitors from Hyland’s Linkedin Ad campaigns… 

• Increased Drift chat frequency 1,384%, 
• Resulting in 341 meetings booked, and
• A less than 10% cancel rate for those meetings.

“We’re really transforming our whole business to a demand-gen and ABX model, and the technology we’re using to enable us to do that is 6sense,” Marc McNabb, VP of Marketing Operations and Strategy at Hyland, says. “Their platform is now the lynchpin for our marketing processes. We consider 6sense as our underlying infrastructure, and 6sense data now flows through all our technology processes, informing how we work now and in the future.” 

However, the success of Hyland’s ABM strategy and elaborate platform ecosystem wouldn’t be possible without 2X.

2X: Hyland’s Activation Arm 

2X helps marketing teams operate with greater impact without breaking the bank. 2X has over 50 marketing professionals working with Hyland, which has been instrumental in supporting Hyland’s optimization of the 6sense platform. 

“Hyland has already made a number of investments in different technology platforms. But they wanted to have 6sense become the beating heart and orchestration method for all of those platforms and how all those motions work together,” Nick Salvatoriello, Director of Partnerships and Strategic Alliances at 2X, explains. 

As a Tier 1 6sense Services Partner, 2X provided the marketing resources to build Hyland custom scorecards and buying stage tracking systems to gauge the health of their campaigns. 2X also develops Salesloft cadences that Hyland’s sales team members to respond to behavioral intent shown in 6sense. 

“2X is a huge support system. They activate all of our ABM ads and LinkedIn. All of our paid media through 6sense,” Kelly adds, “They are our activation arm for all of our digital media.” 

The Results

With support from 2X’s marketing experts, 6sense has helped Hyland shift to a proactive ABM approach guided by market intent data. Hyland now sees ongoing optimization of campaigns and maximized ROI. 

In addition to substantial cost savings, amounting to a six-figure reduction in their advertising budget, 6sense has helped Hyland achieve: 

• 60% increase in account engagement and campaign click-through rate (CTR%)
• 87% increase in engaged accounts 
• 91% of accounts reached in marketing campaigns 

“It’d be very hard to do my job efficiently and effectively without 6sense. It would be like going back to what I call ‘90s marketing,’ that spray-and-pray mentality where you’re hoping somebody knocks on your door,” Kelly says.