ABM and AI Help Marketing "Do (2x) More With Less"

Highlights from the 6Sense Breakthrough Conference

Last week I joined 6Sense’s Breakthrough conference. I’ve been following 6Sense for a number of years now and am increasingly bullish on ABM strategies and 6Sense specifically as one of the key levers that marketers might use this year to “do more with less” 

I used account-based marketing in my first sales and marketing jobs more than 20 years ago, but it was highly manual, not scalable, and focused only on the accounts we knew (who may or may not be buying this year ). Data and AI have created a massive leap forward in surfacing “in-market” clients showing their intent to buy. The maturities of these technologies promise a world of radically more effective personalization and engagement at scale. Will we be able to 2x our marketing efficiency this year? I don’t know, but I do know the future is here. 

6Sense claims many of their clients are seeing these types of results.

Five things that stand out to me:

1. Only 5% of your target buyer is in market for a product at any period of time. There are just too many companies in the world (and our ICP) to advertise to all of them, spreading our marketing too thin. (6Sense says 78% of high-intent accounts they surface to their clients weren’t even in their CRM!) Marketing has always included awareness and sales components to reach their entire market, but since many buyers just aren’t researching, considering, and actively buying, knowing which ones ARE is invaluable to focusing spend. 

2. You don’t control or even see most of the customers’ research. I’ve seen research that 75% of a buyer’s journey in B2B happens before they even engage with your company. According to 6Sense, 95% of buyer research throughout the sales process takes place somewhere other than your website. Only 3% of website visitors fill out a form. So there’s a massive component of selling we just can’t see (termed a “dark funnel”). The ability to capture, deannonymize, and synthesize data from many different sources is game-changing. Surfacing “buyer intent” based on common buyer actions like searching on key terms, and looking at product comparisons is invaluable to focusing marketing spend. 

   

3. AI is allowing for predictive and interactive capabilities like never before. Marketers have generated maps of buyer journeys and the content buyers need for years, we’ve set up all sorts of email nurture campaigns and BDR sequences. But AI is allowing for much more intelligent, dynamic, and interactive journeys than ever before. I do believe that these can be 2x 5,x, maybe 10x more effective than the brittle, slow, manual, semi-personalized calls and emails that have come before. 

4. Account-based view of accounts aligns marketers and sales like never before.  For years, marketing has generated MQLs, often meeting our number but still being told by sales that “there are not enough quality leads!” MQL conversion rates were low because, especially for enterprise sales, a lot of individual MQL CONTACTS were consolidated into only ONE account and ONE opportunity. Additionally, a lot of contacts were influencers and not the actual buyer sales needed to reach. By focusing on the account, marketing is thinking like the salesperson and better able to give the salesperson REAL Qualified Opportunities. How many different contacts are engaged in an opportunity? (More means warmer, higher likelihood to close)? What persona types are engaged? (We need both buyers and influencers to be engaged). An account orientation forces marketers to think like salespeople. I love some of 6Sense’s data about what makes the best account: Closed deals take 15-23 contacts in the account, they have searched on these terms, engaged with these campaigns, visited this many web pages, etc. 

   

   Massive inflation is taking place and many enterprise deals need 14-25 contacts to close vs. 6-10 in the past.

Speed to engagement from AI-supported personalized outreach (at scale) will be huge. Marketers know viscerally that the faster they can follow up with an engaged buyer, the higher the likelihood of success. If someone asks for a demo on your website and gets called within 10 minutes or 5 days, there’s a massive difference in how likely they are to pick up the phone. Marketing has fought with BDRs and Account execs for years to get faster follow-up times. Sales and BDRs have (often rationally) resisted trying to prioritize their time around what they evaluate to be the highest potential opportunities. But for many marketers, there’s been a big pool of “left behind” and “too slow” contact engagements. Generative AI, if we can get it to work well, promises that we can follow up much more quickly in a personalized and interactive manner. 6Sense is using its own generative AI bot to follow up with website attendees and other contacts that previously may have been lower-priority BDR calls. 6Sense thinks they will be able to grow their own pipeline next year without hiring any additional BDRs because of the AI productivity gains for the existing BDRs! 

Speed to engagement is a huge factor in the ultimate sale

It’s a really exciting time to be a marketer. 

6 Sense claims their typical customer using ABM effectively is seeing 2x the deal size, 2x the win rate and 91% faster velocity. If this is true, will marketers be able to scale massively this year without adding big budgets? Our CEOs and board are asking us to do just this. 

I don’t know many marketers who are confident enough yet to bet their job on these big claims. But many are gunning for how they can achieve these types of results. If we can focus our marketing spend on the 5% of the customers that are in market, if we can add the right number and the right types of contacts to the hottest sales deals, if we can do lower-level engagement through effective, interactive AI bots…. Our marketing productivity and results dreams just might come true. 

P.S. 

While I’m super excited and bullish on Account Based Marketing at scale, I am seeing a few challenges in the companies where I advise.

• For some companies selling to massive enterprises with horizontal technologies, there can be many separate buying teams within one company. It’s not straightforward yet on how to identify those buying groups are or are not related. In the old days of offices, we might have been able to group the IP addresses, but in the remote/hybrid world, it’s hard to figure out how different departments inside a massive organization might be organized as different, non-related opportunities. 6Sense has some ideas and workarounds, but it’s not a standard orientation yet. 

• I’m seeing issues with marketing teams not being able to put the ABM process / flow into the everyday working process of the sales team to get adoption. While more insights about accounts should be invaluable to BDRs and account execs, if the insights aren’t well-integrated into their process and flow, you might not get the full impact. Like any new technology, making it easy to use in the chaos of all of our tools, lives, and distractions is critical to adoption and success. Some companies have been more effective than others in bridging this gap of people, processes, and systems. 

What else are you seeing?