6 Tips for Using 6sense for ABM Campaigns

Competition is fierce for B2B marketers. Buyers conduct their research anonymously, deftly avoiding your best lead-capturing tricks. Closing a deal means winning over an entire purchasing team, not just one or two key decision-makers. To connect with potential customers and bring successful close sales, you have to adapt your approach to meet the needs of today’s buyers by using account-based marketing (ABM) techniques backed up with artificial intelligence and big data.

With more than 70% of sellers purporting to have adopted some form of it, ABM is no longer the strategic marketing advantage it once was. In a crowded marketplace that expects the ABM approach, the only way to win is to do ABM smarter than your competitors.

Fortunately, marketers have options when it comes to delivering next-level ABM campaigns. Robust, AI-driven ABM solutions like 6sense are here to provide a winning edge. 6sense’s Revenue AI platform promises to eliminate guesswork and provide sales teams with the right data for driving conversions, and it integrates beautifully with other useful marketing automation tools, including Trendemon. 

Let’s take a deeper look into why now is the time for ABM, how 6sense boosts your ABM efforts, and six tips for using it in your ABM campaigns.

Why ABM, and why now?

The old strategy of tracking and nurturing individual leads has become increasingly obsolete for B2B sellers. Significant purchases are team-driven decisions, and buyers are savvier about their privacy and less inclined to trade contact information for content. ABM is designed to address the purchasing process as it actually plays out in today’s digital marketplace.

Want proof? ABM can help companies increase their annual contract value by as much as 171%, and more than three-quarters of marketers have found that ABM generates a higher ROI than other marketing methods. 

Given what we know, switching from a lead-centric approach to ABM is only the beginning. To do B2B marketing right, you must deliver on ABM’s promise to provide only the most relevant and personalized content to the buyers who matter most.

Thanks to big data science and AI technology advances, there’s never been a better time to go all-in on ABM. The data-informed insights provided by intelligent software solutions will point you toward better targets than you can ever get with guesswork and hunches. The data allows you to present them with the right content at just the right time to drive conversions.

What is 6sense, and how does it help?

6sense is the first ABM software solution to incorporate a predictive model powered by AI that helps sales and marketing teams find the best accounts to target. 6sense’s Revenue AI platform addresses three essential characteristics of today’s B2B buyers: they’re anonymous, fragmented, and resistant. 

What this means is:

• Buyers are less likely to identify themselves to the websites they visit.
• A “B2B buyer” is almost always a team of multiple people instead of one or two key individuals.
• Most buyers try to complete as much independent research as possible before starting a dialogue with a salesperson.

By using data analytics and AI to shine a light on the hidden pathways of the buyer journey, 6sense empowers sales and marketing teams to work together. They can provide personalized content and experiences to move motivated buyers through your sales pipeline and turn them into customers.

6 Tips for Using 6sense for ABM Campaigns

Here are six tips on working with 6sense to get the most out of these powerful features, as seen through a typical ABM campaign lens.

1. Identify the Best Accounts to Target

Finding the best target accounts is the bread and butter of the 6sense platform. By analyzing your historical customer data, you can identify the firmographic patterns that define your customer base: their industry, location, size, how they found out about you, and what journey they followed to become your customer.

From there, it’s just a matter of leveraging 6sense’s predictive engine to identify prospect accounts that share these key similarities. These accounts can be narrowed and segmented even further, allowing you to rank accounts by their purchase readiness and refine your approach down to the smallest detail.

2. Learn More About Your Target Accounts

Once you know the best accounts to target, you need to go deeper and learn more about their individual wants, needs, and purchase conditions. You’ll want to find out who’s on their buying team, what their current technology stack is, and how far along they are in their buyer journey.
Much purchasing research happens in places traditional lead tracking tools can’t reach: on search engines, your competitors’ websites, and independent review outlets. 6sense calls this shadowy part of the buyer journey “the dark funnel.” They use machine learning, AI, and deep analytics to illuminate these unseen activities and show you a clear picture of the buyer’s progress and intentions

3. Get All Your Teams on the Same Page

ABM often emphasizes the importance of getting sales and marketing teams to work in alignment, but in reality, ABM works best when the entire organization has fully bought in. That means getting customer service teams and upper-level management involved in engaging prospects and ushering them through your pipeline.

With an automated, AI-driven platform like 6sense informing your marketing activities, every participant in this process can operate in sync. They will have a timely and accurate understanding of who your targets are, what they’re looking for, and how close they are to committing to a purchase. This information frees teams up to focus on what they do best.

4. Integration with Trendemon

6sense does a fantastic job of extracting actionable insights from data, but it’s still up to the seller to create and deliver the content that turns insight into revenue. Luckily, 6sense offers integrations with several powerful tools that can do just that—including Trendemon.

Trendemon is a journey orchestration solution that delivers personalized, contextual content to buyers. The best way to optimize its performance is to feed it accurate, high-quality data. Working with 6sense’s account-based data enables Trendemon to link anonymous visitors to targeted accounts, discover how target accounts engage with your content, and autonomously serve up orchestrated, relevant content at precisely the right stages in the buyer journey.

6sense IP identification capabilities power Trendemon. As a result, Trendemon can determine the account of each IP that visits your website. It uses firmographic data from 6sense to enhance account information and let you construct audiences based on account characteristics like industry, company size, revenue, and your ideal consumer profile.

Using 6sense and Trendemon together can move between 5 to 18 times more anonymous visitors into your sales pipeline and increase sales opportunities by an average of 30%.

5. Engage Effectively

When you know who your best targets are—and what they’re doing in the dark funnel—you can engage them with personalized content, at the ideal moment and in the proper context.

With predictive analytics powered by AI, you don’t have to rely on educated guesses based on customer personas. You can determine exactly what type of information your buyers are looking for and give it to them when they’re most receptive. 6sense includes a Native Retargeting feature that automatically serves relevant ads to visitors from targeted accounts, which helps to ensure that you never miss a chance to engage with a buyer at the opportune moment.

6. Track the Right KPIs

Gleaning hidden insights and uncovering obscure parts of a buyer’s journey can feel like victories in themselves, but ultimately, it’s your bottom line that matters most. By identifying and measuring the correct KPIs, you can determine how well your ABM efforts are working and decide where to make necessary adjustments.

Many businesses struggle with shifting toward ABM-centered metrics after years of fixating on lead-based KPIs. The metrics that matter to ABM include influenced pipeline, pipeline velocity, target account coverage, sales cycle length, and ROI. 6sense will capture all the required data and make it easier for you to develop accurate frameworks for evaluating a campaign’s performance. 

Unlock the Full Potential of 6sense Data with Trendemon

As a central platform for your ABM data and insights, it’s hard to beat 6sense’s combination of features, big data, and artificial intelligence. But if you want to see it shine, you’ll want to fill your ABM toolbox with solutions like Trendemon that can take full advantage of 6sense’s capabilities.

With 6sense supplying the data analytics and Trendemon leveraging them to build meaningful connections with buyers, you can leave the old ways of chasing leads behind and step boldly into B2B marketing’s account-based future. Try a free Trendemon demo today and see how it and 6sense can help you engage with better target accounts and increase your conversion rates.