SalesTech Deep Dive: 6sense
Our latest SalesTech Deep Dive featured Latané Conant, CRO of 6sense.
6sense made its name pioneering account-based marketing—but it’s not just a marketing story anymore. What’s less known is that 6sense now delivers many of the core building blocks of a modern sales tech stack.
I began tracking 6sense in 2018 with its acquisition of ZenIQ (sales orchestration), followed by Slintel (sales intelligence), Fortella (pipeline intelligence), and Saleswhale (conversational email). But it wasn’t until 2023 that 6sense formally stepped into the SalesTech arena.
By January 2024, 6sense crossed the $200M ARR mark, revealing that sales intelligence and conversational email accounted for over a third of its revenue.
Latané joined 6sense 7 years ago as CMO when the company was still in single-digit ARR. Her rise to CRO, now leading all GTM functions, mirrors 6sense’s remarkable trajectory—from a MarTech disruptor to an alpha player in the GTM space.
6sense was founded to fix the broken demand gen model in large enterprises—chasing the holy grail of precise segmentation, clearer buying signals, and visibility into who’s actually on the buying team.
It means aggregating vast amounts of data and using AI to uncover patterns like ideal customer profiles and predict both the buying team and where an account is in its journey. Building this kind of platform has been 6sense’s core focus for years. For much of that time, it sold primarily its ABM application layered on top. Only in recent years has it started spinning out new applications for both marketing and sales.
During this foundational phase, acquisitions were leveraged to accelerate platform development:
It began with data orchestration to make predictions actionable. The acquisition of ZenIQ brought technologies for syncing data across systems, allowing 6sense to push and pull data across CRMs and other applications.
Initially reliant on third-party data for contact information, 6sense recognized the need for a richer dataset to identify buying teams, determine engagement levels, and understand exactly who to target—and why. The acquisition of Slintel provided the missing piece, enabling a comprehensive sales intelligence platform that combines account, contact, and technographics data, along with intent data aggregated from its own sources and partnerships like Bombora.
While email remains the primary B2B communication channel, the industry has over-indexed on automation. 6sense identified a gap in producing high-quality content at scale, leading to the acquisition of SalesWhale. This strategic move enabled 6sense to leverage its data to craft personalized, relevant content and automate the early stages of engagement via 6sense AI Agents.
Latané is passionate about how 6sense leverages its own platform. Today, 25% of 6sense's pipeline is driven by four autonomous plays: job changes, reopening closed-lost opportunities, multi-threading into high-intent accounts, and event/webinar follow-ups.
6sense’s use of its platform showcases its AI vision in action. Inbound lead qualification and appointment setting are fully automated with AI agents. For outbound prospecting—critical in enterprise sales—AI agents take over the tedious tasks that once slowed down BDRs: account selection, identifying key contacts, research, and message crafting. This enables BDRs to concentrate on high-impact activities like social outreach and calling—two key channels, with calling now being 6sense’s highest-converting. This shift has resulted in a significant productivity boost.
In March, 6sense launched its Intelligent Workflow tool, designed to leverage 6sense data, aggregated signals, and predictive models to orchestrate coordinated sales and marketing plays. Latané emphasized that, with 81% of buyers already choosing a provider before engagement and significant inbound traffic lost to zero-click interactions, according to 6sense research, there is an unprecedented need for sales and marketing alignment to engage accounts as soon as they enter the market. This requires a workflow tool that takes the complexity out of building these dynamic orchestrations. Plays like targeted ads and automated emails can run natively on the 6sense platform, while others, like in-person outreach, are handed off to third-party tools such as Sales Engagement Platforms.
With such a comprehensive offering, 6sense sometimes contends with the perception of being expensive, mainly because it consolidates what would otherwise be a patchwork of point solutions. But for organizations targeting the enterprise market with account-based strategies, the platform brings a lot and deserves a spot on your list.
There’s much more to unpack from the conversation with Latané, and I highly recommend watching it in full here.