SalesTech consolidators: 6sense
SalesTech consolidators: 6sense
This third episode of the salestech consolidator series takes us into marketing territory, where it all started for 6sense.
The company was created after a consulting engagement with Cisco, which sparked the realization that it was possible to identify businesses that are researching products similar to yours and exhibiting an “intent to buy” behavior, known as the “dark funnel”.
Initially focused on the Account-Based Marketing (ABM) space, 6Sense created a platform that lets you uncover the dark funnel and pursue accounts “in market” for your products and services by:
defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) profile;
building comprehensive lists of the accounts to target;
discovering those displaying a buying intent through a combination of first-party (such as visiting your website or engaging with your activities) and third-party signals (such as relevant internet activities or content consumed online); and
engaging with these accounts through personalized web experiences, targeted ads, and email campaigns.
The company has its own demand-side platform (DSP) as well.
The company went through the 2017 “sales predictive analytics winter” and secured a total funding of $426 million.
ABM has always been at the crossroads of sales and marketing. Additionally, 6Sense made five acquisitions, four of which have strengthened the company’s position in the salestech sector:
ZenIQ (sales intelligence and engagement)
Fortella (AI pipeline instrumentation)
Slintel (sales intelligence and technographics)
Saleswhale (conversational AI for personalizing email and sequences)
These acquisitions expanded its dataset and intelligence, turning its platform into a kind of customer data platform (CDP) managing the end-to-end pipeline. They also helped 6Sense go beyond ads and marketing campaigns into sales engagement.
In the spring of 2022, the company rebranded its platform as 6sense Revenue AI. Last month, it formally introduced 6sense Revenue AI for Sales, elevating its sales offer as a tab in its website’s main navigation
.