Marketing

6sense Revenue AI™ for Marketing

Who We Help

CMO

Unite your revenue team and drive strategy across the business.

Demand Gen

Focus on in-market accounts and take the guesswork out of demand gen.

Digital

Reach the people and accounts that matter to your business.

How We Do It

Account Identification

Accurately match anonymous and known buyer behavior to accounts.

Intent Data

Uncover 3rd party buying signals at the keyword or topic level.

Predictive Analytics

AI-driven buying stage predictions align teams on the best time to engage.

Data Enrichment

Enrich accounts, leads, and contacts with accurate firmographic data.

Smart Form Fill

Autofill and shorten forms with automated, real-time form enrichment.

Audience Building

Create audiences for segmentation, activation, and analysis across channels.

Advertising

Reach target buyers with display, video, retargeting, and social ad campaigns.

Conversational Email

Leverage AI to craft personalized emails that qualify & convert accounts at scale.

Orchestrations & Workflows

Scale data operations with accurate engagement of accounts and contacts.

Create Your Very Own AI Email Assistant

Use AI to craft relevant, on-brand email campaigns that compel conversations and get more meetings booked.

Learn More
Sales

6sense Revenue AI™ for Sales

Who We Help

CRO

6sense gives sales leaders the intel they need to deliver on big revenue goals.

Inside Sales

When working hundreds of accounts, knowing where to prioritize is critical.

RevOps

Use clean, complete data and scalable processes.

How We Do It

Contact & Company Data

B2B contact data and account & buyer insights to engage prospects.

Account Intelligence

Arm reps with account insights in CRM & SEP for prioritization and personalization.

Prioritization Dashboards

Dashboards that help sellers uncover which accounts to engage and when.

Chrome Extension

Access Revenue AI insights directly from LinkedIn and other B2B websites.

Predictive Analytics

AI-driven buying stage predictions align teams on the best time to engage.

Buyer Intent Data

Uncover 3rd party buying signals at the keyword or topic level.

Prospecting Workflows

The insights sellers need in the tools they use, everyday.

Get Started for Free

Access FREE credits to unlock relevant contact info, and see our packages for teams of all sizes.

Start for Free
Solutions

Solutions

Industries

Business Services

Drive efficiency with a data-driven approach.

Financial Services

Acquire loyal customers with rich secure data.

Manufacturing

Modernize revenue creation with AI-driven data.

Technology & Software

Drive growth and boost customer adoption.

Transportation & Logistics

Boost conversions with targeted audiences.

Data

Our Data

6sense delivers a complete dataset for B2B – including contact data.

Data APIs

Real-time enrichment and personalization anywhere.

Data Packs

Reduce manual processes to achieve database connectivity.

Ecosystem

Integrations

Explore our powerful integrations with leading technologies.

Become a Partner

Let's do more than just work together – let's revolutionize B2B.

Agency Partners

Need some help? Get support from our partners.

Dive into 6sense Revenue AI™

Reinvent the way your team creates, manages, and converts pipeline to revenue.

Explore Platform
Resources

Resource Library

Resource Library

Dive into various topics and content types.

Blog

Short insights, designed to educate.

In-Market Demand Report

Know which companies are interested in you.

Guides

Follow our in-depth articles & how-to’s.

6sense for 6sense

See how the 6sense team uses 6sense.

Revenue Makers Podcast

Steal playbooks from industry-leading brands.

Research

Events & Webinars

Reports & Ebooks

Tools

One Pagers

Glossary

Videos

TalkingSense

The Science of B2B

Pipeline Generation Tuesdays

6sense Named a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for ABM for the 3rd Year in a Row

No email required to get a copy of this objective evaluation of the ABM vendors.

Read the Report
Customers

Customers

Meet Our Customers

See how companies like yours leverage 6sense to drive efficiency.

Customer Stories

Dive into the success and journeys of our customers .

Customer Reviews

Read real reviews to understand what 6sense can do for you.

RevCity

Connect with your peers, share successes, and learn about 6sense.

Knowledge Base & Support

Explore our help articles, product updates, and submit support tickets.

WE GET YOU. WE GOT YOU.

Introducing the 6dimensional Success Model™ – a methodology that empowers customers to unleash their full revenue potential and and achieve extraordinary outcomes.

Explore Our Success Model
Company

Company

About 6sense

Learn about our company values, vision, employee benefits, and more.

Leadership Team

Dreamers and data nerds; Meet the leadership team behind 6sense.

Careers

We want 6sense to be the best chapter of your career.

Newsroom

Read press releases, thought leadership, company announcements and more.

Community

Dive into the communities 6sense hosts and takes part in.

Become Our Partner

Let’s do more than work together. Let’s revolutionize B2B together.

Explore Our Partners

Template is not defined.

How To: Build an Effective Revenue Plan to Achieve Your Business Goals

We got hold of ACME’s revenue plan and the step-by-step process of how they built it. Apply the framework to build your own revenue plan.

February 3, 2023 —

The 6sense Team

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

Step 1: Identify Your Revenue Goal

Chapter 3

Step 2: Analyze Past Performance to Define Benchmarks

Chapter 4

Step 3: Apply Benchmarks to Your Revenue Target

Chapter 5

Step 4: Allocate Your Resources

Chapter 6

Step 5: Build a Ramp-Up Plan

Chapter 7

Leverage AI for Watertight Revenue Operating Plans

Chapter 1

Introduction

Selling and marketing are harder than ever. Old-school tactics are pushing modern buyers away, leaving revenue teams frustrated, inefficient, and unable to compete. In No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls, Latané Conant delivers the recipe for scalable, repeatable, data-driven sales and marketing strategies that work today.

In this How-To, we provide a practical, tactical dive into some of the strategies outlined in Chapter 4.

In her book No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls, 6sense CMO Latané Conant outlines her vision for a revolution in sales and marketing. But revolutions aren’t achieved without strong planning and the willingness to adapt. And few things require better planning — and a willingness to adapt — than a company’s revenue plan.

A revenue plan is a framework for how a company expects to make money. A great revenue plan starts with and responds to data.

As Conant writes, “I like to call it a revenue operating model (rather than a revenue model), because this isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. What you’re creating is a living, breathing plan. You make assumptions and you operate against those assumptions. So as you learn more and assumptions change, your plan has to adapt accordingly.”

This process begins with a hard look at past performance. Don’t worry if you can’t immediately fill in every metric we’ll soon be discussing. You may have gaps that will need to be filled in with best guesses or industry benchmarks.

The goal is to create a starting point — and this How-To can help.

Meet ‘ACME Corp.’

To properly illustrate how you might apply these insights to your own business, we’ll periodically shine a spotlight on the activities of “ACME Corp.”, a fictitious company that’s presently creating its own revenue operating model.

Since ACME exists solely as an example for our story, it doesn’t much matter what industry ACME is in, or what industries it serves, or how many people it employs. Its purpose is to simply illustrate how choices can affect its pipeline targets and revenue growth. (Put another way: It’s all about the money, honey.)

Five Steps to Creating a Revenue Plan

Sales processes differ from company to company, as do revenue models. For our purposes, ACME’s revenue operating model is based on an account-based sales funnel. However, the principles we’ll see ACME use can apply to any company’s plan.

We’ve divided this process into five key stages; we’ll provide how-to steps to take for each stage, They are:

Identify your revenue goal
Analyze past performance to define benchmarks
Apply benchmarks to your revenue target
Allocate your resources
Build a ramp-up plan

Chapter 2

Step 1: Identify Your Revenue Goal

Our entire process starts off with a deceptively simple question: What’s your revenue goal? It might be based on:

A percentage increase of last year’s performance
Hitting a revenue number you define, such as $100M in annual recurring revenue (ARR), or
Achieving a revenue goal defined by your CEO and board

In any case, unless you’re a brand-new company, your revenue goal is your target end-of-year ARR, minus existing customer revenue and pipeline.

Example: How ACME Determines Its Revenue Goal

As we mentioned earlier, we’ll turn our attention to the fictitious ACME Corp. to highlight how a company like yours might approach its revenue operating plan.

In the case of ACME’s revenue goal, the company’s CEO wants to increase its revenue by over 50% this year … so she sets a goal of $25 million net-new ARR for the year.

With the revenue goal set, ACME’s revenue leaders must determine whether they can realistically hit it with their existing resources. (More on this later.)

This means the next step in the process is looking back at its historical sales performance.

Chapter 3

Step 2: Analyze Past Performance to Define Benchmarks

The basis of any revenue plan is to:

Know the revenue number you need to hit
Determine what you need to achieve at each stage of the buying journey to get there

Thanks to Step 1, you have your organization’s revenue goal. To understand what you need to achieve at each stage of the buying journey, you need benchmarks around likely performance. This should be based on your historical data, or if you don’t have any — external benchmarking.

If you’re using historical performance, to ensure your metrics are meaningful, you should analyze data that spans your typical sales cycle. This could range from three months for transactional deals, and up to 18 months for long deals.

Your team should be interrogating the data to discover key benchmarks for sales cycles, conversion rates, and average deal sizes. To give you an idea of how to approach this task, let’s see how ACME Corp. is doing it.

How ACME Defined Its Benchmarks

As we learned above, ACME has its revenue goal of $25 million net-new ARR. However, it still needs benchmarks around each stage of the buying journey to map out how the revenue team can achieve that.

ACME assesses historical data that spans its average deal cycle of six months, looking back to analyze past sales cycles, conversion rates, and average deal sizes to create metrics for each stage of their buying journey.

Account-Based Buying Journey Stages

By looking at the typical account-based buying journey, you can define the stages where you’ll need metrics to benchmark your performance. Here are the account-based metrics your team can review historical data for:

Number of accounts in the Target Account List (TAL)
Number of accounts in TAL that are in-market
What % of accounts reached by marketing engaged with ads or content?
What % reached the Awareness & Consideration stage?
What % became a SQL or 6QA (aka a 6sense-Qualified Account)
What % accepted a meeting with a BDR?

What % booked a meeting with an account executive?
What % became qualified pipeline?
What % signed a deal?
Average deal size
Time between each stage (and overall sales cycle)
Know the revenue number you need to hit
Determine what you need to achieve at each stage of the buying journey to get there

As we’ll see in the next step, you don’t need metrics for every single stage … but the more benchmarks you have, the more accurate your revenue operating plan will be.

Chapter 4

Step 3: Apply Benchmarks to Your Revenue Target

Knowing your sales cycle, deal size, and average conversion rate from engaged accounts enables you to start making predictions and a basic plan. Say, for example, your:

Average deal size is $200,000
Conversion rate from engaged account to customer is 10%
Sales cycle is six months

Since 1-in-10 engaged accounts are expected to sign a deal, we can assume that an engaged account has an average value of $20,000 in six months.

But you can go beyond these basic benchmarks to dive deeper and look at what numbers to expect at each stage of the buying journey. Here’s how ACME did it.

How ACME Applied Its Data to Plot a Plan

Once ACME uncovered the historic data for conversion at each buying stage, it became a math exercise to determine how many accounts ACME needed at each buying stage in order to achieve its revenue goal of $25 million.

Analysis of ACME’s past data revealed:

It had been effectively reaching 80% of its In-Market Ideal Customer Profiles (IICP) with marketing messages
Of those, 30% began conducting serious research
Of those, 15% became a 6sense Qualified Account (6QA) / sales qualified lead
Of those, 75% booked a BDR meeting
Of those, 40% booked a meeting with an AE
Of those, 75% began exploring the solution, validation, and negotiating
Of those, 50% signed a deal

ACME’s Past Performance

With its IICP of 75,000 accounts, that came to 303.75 deals — or roughly $15.2 million in revenue. That’s about $10 million short of ACME’s new revenue goal.

So how could the company hit $25 million? Its leaders ran the math in reverse to see what it would take.

Calculating ACME’s New Targets

Without making any changes or improvements to its marketing and sales process, ACME needed the equivalent of roughly 123,000 in-market accounts, 4,430 6QAs, or 3,330 BDR meetings to hit its new revenue goal.

With an understanding of these numbers, ACME’s next step was working out whether it had the resources to handle the volume.

Chapter 5

Step 4: Allocate Your Resources

While it’s a mistake to forget seasonality and assume a linear progression of revenue generation throughout the year, dividing planned activities by days, weeks, or months helps to generate a ballpark figure for resource allocation.

You can map your targets against your current resources to better understand how far current team sizes and budget will get you towards your revenue goal.

Mapping ACME’s Resource Allocation

As seen in the chart above, to hit its $25 million goal, ACME must book 3,333 BDR meetings. The team mapped this against approximately 260 business days in a year (in the U.S.) to reveal a target of almost 13 meetings a day.

ACME then examined past BDR performance and workload to assess whether its current headcount of two full-time BDRs could handle the volume, or if it was time to grow the team. ACME applied the same logic across its revenue team to estimate headcount. Could three AEs cover five initial calls a day, plus many follow-up conversations with buyers?

Increasing the revenue target by 66% was always going to require investment. But by breaking down the numbers and understanding how quickly engaged prospects convert into qualified sales opportunities, ACME could start to map out how much of an investment it needed to make in people, and where to make it.

Calculating Required Marketing Budget

Alongside headcount, your marketing team should look at how much budget you used to reach your previous goals. You can then divide your budget by a key measurement metric, e.g. a 6QA or SQL, to understand your marketing spend to reach this goal.

This is an important step to tie marketing back to revenue and helps you project future outputs in light of targets or budgetary changes. Here’s how it looked for ACME.

ACME’s Marketing Performance

With last year’s budget of $1 million, Acme’s marketing team generated 2,700 6QAs (or alternately, SQLs). To get the cost per 6QA, they divided the budget by the number of 6QAs generated, equalling $370. (6QA could be replaced by another metric of choice, using the same formula.)

So what would happen as ACME attempted to ramp up its revenue? To plan for this year’s budget, ACME multiplied the cost per 6QA by the new target of 4,432, giving a proposed budget of close to $1,640,000.

By also examining the cost per channel from last year, ACME’s CMO then mapped out the budget by channel to assess whether they had the resources to hit the new targets.

The resource allocation exercise unsurprisingly showed ACME would need more investment to hit its higher targets, so the revenue team set about building a ramp-up plan to reach its new goals.

Chapter 6

Step 5: Build a Ramp-Up Plan

Before investing heavily in new headcount and huge budgets, you must ensure you’re getting the most from your current investment. Efficient growth doesn’t come solely from increased demand. It comes from increasing conversion rates, too.

The law of diminishing returns means bettering conversion metrics at any stage in the funnel drives out-sized growth vs increasing activities.

How ACME Plans to Ramp Up

For example, looking at ACME’s past performance, a 1% increase in conversion between the Awareness and Consideration stage to 6QA would mean 180 more 6QAs. Following the metrics further down the funnel, that meant 20 more deals, and $1 million more revenue. Not bad at all.

So ACME’s revenue leaders went back further, to the very top of the cascade of their conversion percentages, and the total number of in-market accounts they were attempting to reach.

The team agreed to tighten their targeting to IICPs — which means going after accounts that are ready to buy and therefore most likely to close first.

Using this targeted approach, ACME can increase conversion at every stage of the funnel, driving efficient growth. By honing its focus on the accounts most likely to purchase, ACME has improved its chances of winning deals more efficiently.

As revenues lift and more resources free-up for growth, ACME can look to widen its Target Account List (TAL), which will add more IICP prospects to its funnel … and bring in more opportunities for additional sales reps to work.

By combining this more targeted approach with an increase in activities, ACME expects to smash its revenue goal.

Chapter 7

Leverage AI for Watertight Revenue Operating Plans

Following this How-To guide and ACME’s lead gives you a framework for your own revenue operating plan. But it’s by no means perfect — this plan is susceptible to human error, diminishing returns, seasonality, and threats.

To build a watertight plan, companies are turning to AI to help identify the best accounts, and accounts that are in-market. The AI does the hard work for you, gathering data from across business units to get a complete picture.

This robust data can then be effortlessly combined with past and present performance, alongside trends, seasonality, and threats to create real-time forecasts that can accurately predict future pipeline and inform your revenue operating plan.

Learn More in Our ‘No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls’ Resource Center

Interested in learning more about taking your sales and marketing effort to the next level by uncovering and targeting the accounts most likely to buy? Visit our Resource Center to find more How-To’s like this one inspired from the pages of Conant’s book.

All of 6sense’s proceeds from book sales go to GoodSense, the charitable arm of 6sense whose mission is to do our part for our community and beyond.