How Salesforce and AppExchange Apps Are Driving Record Growth for This Account Engagement Platform
Account engagement platform 6sense set company records in 2020 for employee, revenue, and customer growth. In addition to doubling its full-time employee headcount, 2020 marked the third straight year that the company achieved 100% growth of revenue. But, as the team at 6sense soon learned, tremendous growth comes with new responsibilities.
The challenges facing 6sense in the midst of its success can be boiled down to a single theme: maximizing good data. As an account engagement platform, optimizing data in order to better measure community success, gain deeper insights into the intent of accounts, and build better market strategy, all became priorities for the company. Integrating AppExchange apps with Salesforce helped 6sense turn those challenges into opportunities for growth.
We caught up with two members of the 6sense team, Chris Dutton, Senior Director of Demand Gen, and Lauren Skinner-Johnson, Marketing Operations Manager, to learn more about how Salesforce and AppExchange apps have helped drive the company’s success.
Tell us about 6sense and who its customers are.
Lauren Skinner-Johnson: 6sense is an account engagement platform. It can help you identify the best-fit accounts for your industry or business, highlight those accounts, and then predict when they may be in the market to purchase a solution that you’re selling. It’s an account engagement platform that helps orchestrate your different technologies, prioritize your accounts, and then work through that outbound flow rather than the standard inbound flow. In a nutshell, we’re helping B2B marketers identify the accounts that are actually looking to buy. 6sense helps you uncover those companies that are already looking for something similar to what you sell. It helps B2B companies uncover that demand rather than having to wait for inbound leads.
In addition to building on the Platform, you also use Salesforce in your tech stack. When did 6sense first begin leveraging Salesforce?
Chris Dutton: Salesforce has been in place for at least three years. Our internal use of Salesforce to help us streamline processes has picked up significantly over the past few years. Currently, we’re using Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Salesforce CPQ, and a number of AppExchange apps. Our relationship with Salesforce was extremely positive, so It was an easy decision for us to implement Salesforce within our tech stack.
Lauren Skinner-Johnson: Salesforce is massively helpful from a marketing automation integration standpoint as well. Our internal teams have really embraced Salesforce and continue to build it out. And, when we’re talking about our ideal customer profile, those companies all use Salesforce as well. Our partnership with Salesforce has been integral in so many ways, but especially in all of our go-to-market and marketing efforts. It’s safe to say that our relationship with Salesforce has always been strong.
You mentioned using AppExchange apps. Can you tell us which apps you use and what you use them for?
Chris Dutton: Easy Member Campaign Status is an app we utilize often. As we were looking to grow and evolve our process and governance, one of the things we wanted to do was standardize the member status based on campaign type; we wanted to build a one-to-one relationship with member statuses. By leveraging the Easy Member app, we’ve been able to reduce the need for people to manually create member statuses that don’t relate to certain campaign types. It’s really helped us put a framework in place that we know we can rely on.
Lauren Skinner-Johnson: Another app I’d like to mention is LeanData. LeanData helps us with our dynamic territory process. When we’re building our prioritized account list, our sales team is constantly identifying leads and building tiers for target accounts. We’re using LeanData to route and assign accounts to certain leads. Once an account is showing intent, then LeanData dynamically assigns that account to an account executive in real-time. It’s a major part of our overarching go-to-market strategy.
dataloader.io is also used to keep those territories dynamic. The app enables us to update our territories quickly and effectively.
Chris Dutton: Another thing we use dataloader.io for is measuring our community effectiveness. For example, we’re trying to figure out ways to track referrals without needing someone to flat out say “I was referred.” So we’re using Salesforce to run reports, export into Excel, and run logic, then we use Data Loader to go and update fields for us. And that’s something that’s happening on a weekly basis. It helps us get line of sight into the communities that people are really responding to.
Finally, Rollup Helper is another app we leverage. We want to look at everything at the account level, and the Rollup Helper app enables us to “roll up” a lot of data that is at the contact to the account. If we didn’t do that, we would be missing out on a lot of valuable insights.
What does the future hold for 6sense, and what role will Salesforce and AppExchange play?
Chris Dutton: I think 6sense does an amazing job at constantly innovating and brainstorming new ways to do things. Whether it’s new go-to-market approaches, anticipating what our future customers are going to be in need of, or simply improving processes, we’re always figuring out better, more effective ways to do things.
I’ll give you an example of how Salesforce and AppExchange helps us do that: we’re now able to identify over 10,000 people within our Salesforce instance by persona. Using multiple texts and apps that are plugging into Salesforce, we’ve implemented a framework that allows us to do roll up reporting based off of persona. We now have the ability to, on the contact object, see what that persona type is. This means we can identify all personas in our Salesforce org and be able to confidently report on them.
We see Salesforce as our one source of truth, and that’s where we go to access all of our information.
Lauren Skinner-Johnson: Data is king — it’s the foundation of everything we do. Continuing to use Salesforce and AppExchange apps to gather good, clean data, will drive the success of 6sense for years to come.
Looking back on your journey with Salesforce and 6sense, what advice would you give yourself on the first day of the job?
Chris Dutton: I would just tell myself to be better prepared for sophistication. Our Salesforce org is complex, but the complexity works. Be ready to adapt!
Lauren Skinner-Johnson: Just hold on tight! Things are going to move fast — don’t get too attached to any one process because it’s going to continuously improve and get better.
Find all the apps mentioned in this article on AppExchange.
