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Buyers now expect sellers to know everything about them before they purchase a product. Maybe not consciously, but certainly in preferences for curated, personalized content.
Account-based marketing (ABM) platforms and audience intelligence tools have emerged to fill that gap in the market, providing enterprise revenue teams with the information they need to create that predictable revenue growth.
But as this market has increased in size, these companies are faced with a meta issue: How can they themselves stand out among the increasing competition? Put differently, how can they get better at account-based marketing?
Leading ABM tool 6Sense provides the perfect case study.
6sense is a tool that helps businesses with account-based marketing by providing industry-leading account identification, intent data, and predictive models. It integrates with existing technology investments and allows businesses to manage their revenue tech stack using a mix of apps and tools.
Here are some of its accolades over the last few years:
- $526M in funding across five rounds
- 2022 valuation of $5.2 billion
- Number 67 on this year’s Forbes Cloud 100
- Seven consecutive years as a G2 leader
In this week’s case study, we’ll take a look at how 6Sense is maintaining this lofty position within the ABM industry. Particularly how its acquisition of Slintel opens doors for both product and marketing improvement and how it creates truly top-notch thought-leadership content to showcase its position as an industry authority.
Let’s get started!
6Sense and the Battle Dominance in an Evolving ABM Market
Industry experts put the value of the account-based marketing software niche at around $820 million for 2023, with that number expected to reach nearly $1.5 billion over the next five years.
Here’s how 6Sense and its top competitors on G2 stack up in terms of traffic:
These numbers show 6Sense in the upper echelon of ABMs in terms of marketing performance, but it doesn’t appear to have a clear advantage — at least not according to these high-level metrics.
It’s also interesting to note that most of these companies have a backlink total that is substantially greater than the amount of traffic coming into the website (but more on that later).
Before we get into the tactics 6Sense uses to set itself apart from these competitors and the ABM tools rolled out by large companies like HubSpot, let’s take a look at the graph below showing the company’s organic performance over the past year. As you can see, 6Sense experienced a massive increase in organic traffic and the number of indexed pages over a very short period of time between mid-March and mid-April of this year — a near-vertical increase for both:
While both numbers have dropped over the last five months, they’ve settled near a new floor that is still many times over what it was earlier in the year. It’s similar to the traffic spike that Carta experienced earlier this year.
How 7-Time Industry-Leader 6Sense Sets Itself Apart
All customers across B2B and B2C now expect that the brands they engage with for business will know about them. Basically, they want contextual, relevant experiences that speak directly to their needs.
This means ABM companies — which specialize in diving deep on potential customers and creating marketing and sales content specifically for them — need to work even harder than the average SaaS brand to truly impress customers.
6sense is a revenue intelligence platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help businesses create, manage, and convert pipeline into revenue. It provides insights and predictive models to enable sales and marketing teams to target and engage with their ideal customers more effectively.
To meet the needs of enterprise sales, marketing, and RevOps teams, 6Sense has now rolled out its trademarked Revenue AI platform.
Bolstering the 6Sense Product and Brand With the Acquisition of Slintel
Most people think of acquisitions as an operation benefit that centers around a product or service itself — an investment that boosts a company’s product offering and increases its market share. But purchasing another company can help from a marketing perspective as well.
For example, when HubSpot acquired The Hustle for $30 million, it gained a popular media brand and its contact list of over a million subscribers. Likewise, the case of 6Sense acquiring Slintel isn’t just a matter of pleasant alliteration, both product and marketing benefit from the acquisition.
Product: Create the Ultimate Revenue Intelligence Platform
Slintel started as a tool providing technographic and firmographic data, then expanded into other important aspects of business intelligence like account and contact data for individual B2B profiles.
6Sense acquired Slintel because its entire mission is to capture buyer intent signals earlier to help arm SDRs, marketers, and revenue teams. In a press release shortly after the acquisition, 6Sense revealed that Slintel’s large vault of data, captured from millions of companies across 60 attributes, is the perfect tool to help fuel the ABM company’s “powerful ability to uncover buyers both before and during their purchase journey.”
Marketing: A Bank of High-Value Content for the 6Sense Website
The acquisition of Slintel turned out to be a great move by 6Sense because it could fold in the massive library of company profile pages into the 6Sense domain. The result: a subfolder with over 700,000 pages that provide actionable data on 15+ million companies, including names like Nike, Airbnb, and Uber.
This subfolder helps 6Sense rank for over a million branded keywords that drive 264,000 monthly organic visits worth nearly $225,000. Remember that massive spike in traffic and the number of pages you saw earlier? That’s where it’s coming from.
But that’s not the only benefit of these pages. 6Sense’s company profile pages also give potential customers access to the type of firmographic and technographic data that SDRs can use to inform their marketing approach:
- A general company overview
- Main pieces of the technology stack
- Gated employee profiles
- Answers to relevant FAQs
For example, the company profile page on the fleet management platform Fleetfinder brings in thousands of visits each month, giving some preliminary data like:
Of course, most of the key information is still behind a paywall, so 6Sense can use this limited version to convert users into paying customers in short order. These pages are also sprinkled with well-placed calls to action (CTAs) for visitors to sign up for Revenue AI.
For instance, click on the “see more technologies” button in the technology stack section, and you’re brought to a sign-up page. By submitting just an email address, users move further down the funnel with access to 50 B2B profiles a month.
It’s a classic play: Give the user a taste of the product and limit the amount of access they have to it.
To increase the efficacy of this product marketing, 6Sense has also built up an arsenal of thought leadership content to educate, engage, entertain, and empower its RevOps audience.
Thought-Leadership Content That Covers the 4 Es
Even though the 6Sense product and strategy have been a major benefit to the company, content creation is, in my opinion, one of its most impressive aspects. Specifically, the way it creates thought leadership material that covers all of the 4 Es of content used by top SaaS brands.
Not only does it help increase credibility in the eyes of prospective customers, but it also cements 6Sense’s status as a top ABM company for current customers. It’s great for retention too.
For instance, 6Sense is a big proponent of the “Dark Funnel” concept — so big, in fact, that it trademarked the term. The Dark Funnel refers to the customer data that is floating around on the web but inaccessible to sales and marketing teams.
It’s a concept that speaks directly to the experience of revenue teams who are struggling to meet the preferences of modern software buyers.
6Sense doesn’t stop at the conceptual, though. It has a variety of high-level thought-leadership posts spread across its various subfolders, as well as on social platforms like YouTube and LinkedIn.
Let’s take a look at some of its thought leadership in action.
Insights From the CMO, Head of Research, and Director of Strategic Marketing
It’s not a stretch to say that thought leadership is most effective when it comes from actual leaders in upper management and the C-suite. Hearing from people who have direct experience using account-based marketing to help launch and build a SaaS brand is invaluable for 6Sense customers, prospective buyers, and really just anyone in the industry.
The 6Sense resource hub is currently driven by three experts: the company’s CMO, Latané Conant, its Head of Research, Kerry Cunningham, and its Senior Director of Strategic Marketing, Eric Wittlake. Each is listed as a featured contributor near the footer of the resource library, but the content they create spreads beyond just the site.
Latané, a self-reported “recovering software sales woman,” is leading the way for 6Sense in the thought leadership department. Her book on the next generation of ABM, “No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls.,” is now in its second edition and is published by the leading education company Wiley.
The book walks through Conant’s new account-based marketing paradigm, as well as the ways sales and marketing teams can do the following:
- Uncover new demand for their product
- Prioritize accounts to work more effectively
- Engage all members of the customer buying team
- Identify and measure better success metrics
Kerry Cunningham is bringing his 25 years of experience in B2B demand generation to the forefront as the top researcher at 6Sense. As someone who’s worn a lot of different hats — Forrester Analyst, Master of Science in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, VP of Ops at CAS Systems — he has a blend of academic and industry experience that can speak to everyone involved in RevOps.
Cunningham’s content, like the “A Deep Dive Into the Dark Funnel” eBook, contains crucial insights on how revenue teams can capitalize on the massive amount of anonymized purchase intent data that buyers leave scattered across digital spaces. It’s this type of educational content that marketers and salespeople crave — it’s not laden with plugs for the Revenue AI product or even references to the company. It’s just pure learning content.
The great thing about having the top leaders in your company create long-form content like this is that it gives you endless opportunities to generate high-quality distribution content. It’s something we love to see at Foundation.
Through the “No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls.” book and the Dark Funnel eBook alone, 6Sense can distribute valuable insights through other media, reaching potential users that may not conduct their research through Google alone.
Leading the Way on LinkedIn
Although social media makes up a small percentage of referral traffic to the main 6Sense website — less than 2% according to Similarweb — the content it puts out on LinkedIn accounts for 91% of all its social referrals. That means there are still thousands of highly motivated professionals reaching the company site through content shared on the professional networking platform.
The 6Sense social media team uses a variety of different formats, topics, and styles that provide value to SDRs and marketers of varying skill levels.
For instance, one of the recent posts on the 6Sense LinkedIn page explaining the sales concept of multi-threading is perfect for aspiring, new, and intermediate SDRs.
The enticing CTA of “Steal these strategies” brings curious LinkedIn browsers to a five-part guide explaining how sales teams can identify and influence the entire buying team — a key part of the account-based approach.
For the more experienced marketers out there, 6Sense also creates distro posts promoting its case studies so potential customers get a glimpse of the benefits that the Revenue AI platform has for marketing departments. The post below, outlining how DealHub.io uses 6Sense for comprehensive attribution tracking, is a perfect example of how an ABM platform can market to decision-makers on LinkedIn:
- Leads off with a common pain point for marketing leaders — lack of attribution for conversions
- Positions 6Sense as the tool to help track attribution and reprioritize marketing efforts
- Contextualizes the benefits of the 6Sense platform with hard numbers — “inbound attribution increased from 35% to 80%”
- Enhances credibility by including a quote from a key customer demographic, SaaS CMOs
Aside from this educational and empowering social content, the 6Sense marketing team also posts celebrating its employees and customers. These advocacy-style posts help establish the company’s reputation as a great place to work and a great platform to partner with, helping build a strong pipeline of both new talent and product evangelists.
YouTube Interviews With Industry Experts
With video becoming the most popular medium for content consumption, especially among millennial and Gen Z professionals, any good content distribution strategy needs to take advantage of platforms that leverage it. YouTube still reigns as one of the best ways to distribute video content to a B2B audience.
The 6Sense YouTube channel has earned over 3.6 million views across 166 videos since it started in Dec 2014. It has a mix of channels for video content that meet all fours of the Es, including video ads, satirical videos on the sales life, product demonstrations, and interviews with sales, marketing, and revenue experts.
Looking at the most popular videos on the 6Sense YouTube channel is informative, to say the least; its top 10 posts all have view counts over six figures and cover a variety of different topics at different levels of expertise.
What stands out to me is the MakingSense series of videos. These explanatory videos give a 4-6-minute overview of key topics like lead generation, predictive analytics, ABM, intent data, and account-based metrics, communicating each in an engaging, easy-to-understand manner.
Given this, it’s no surprise that the top five videos in this series account for over one million views — nearly a third of the entire channel.
This type of educational, top-of-funnel content is undeniably great for attracting potential users, but it’s not exactly the cutting edge of thought leadership. But 6Sense has this covered too.
TalkingSense is a series of half-hour chats with high-profile leaders in the tech community hosted by CMO Latané Conant. The most popular videos in this series bring in thousands of views each and feature a laundry list of high-profile executives:
- Christina Bottis — CMO Coyote Logistics
- Adam Goyette — VP of Demandgen G2
- Sydney Sloan — CMO of SalesLoft
- Chris Barbin — CEO of Tercera
- Denise Persson — CMO of Snowflake
While these videos don’t necessarily bring in the raw traffic numbers that MakingSense and other channels do, they’re very insightful and provide tons of value to more experienced marketing and sales professionals.
Plus, these assets speak directly to the executive-level decision-makers that 6Sense is targeting. It’s thought leadership that also makes great account-based marketing material.
So, remember, don’t take thought leadership for granted. As a marketer, some of the most valuable assets for your product or service are the senior leaders and executives who have cultivated experience over a long period of time. Leveraging it can be a powerful way to generate demand and keep current customers happy.
