How to Improve Your Account-Based Marketing with AI

If you do account-based marketing (ABM), chances are that artificial intelligence can help you do it better.

6sense offers an AI-powered customer data platform that predicts where account-based marketing leads are in the buying journey. It then allows you to focus on the leads closest to closing. 

We spoke with 6sense Chief Marketing Officer Latane Conant to learn more about the tool and how it uses AI.

In a single sentence or statement, describe your company.

6sense’s patented technology is built to analyze changes in intent at a massive scale, scoring more than a quarter-billion accounts and people every day. The solution is positioned for account-based revenue teams to predict, with confidence, where any account is in its buying journey, and focus efforts on those that are in-market through personalized touch points.

How does your company use artificial intelligence in its products?

6sense offers an embedded customer data platform (CDP) and 360-degree customer insight (across an account, not a lead or contact), end-to-end AI-driven orchestration capabilities to optimize the ABM processes across sales, marketing, and customer success, a connected marketplace of execution applications customers can easily leverage for innovative engagement tactics (and those connections are dynamic, seamless, and controlled by AI orchestration) and robust analytics to show revenue teams where to focus activity and how previous activities have performed.

What are the primary marketing use cases for your AI-powered solutions?

6sense’s patented technology is built to analyze changes in intent at a massive scale, scoring more than a quarter-billion accounts and people every day. The solution is positioned for account-based revenue teams to predict, with confidence, where any account is in its buying journey, and focus efforts on those that are in-market through personalized touch points.

What makes your AI-powered solution smarter than traditional approaches and products?

6sense highlights the account-based buying journey by providing insight into what prospective accounts are doing from early-stage interest on third-party websites, all the way down to interactions with late-stage marketing content. Our solution is positioned to capture intent signals from every known and anonymous source and connect them all to prospective accounts to provide complete insight into the buying journey and accurately predict when accounts are in market. The platform then enables revenue teams to orchestrate “SmartPlays” using custom audiences based on any activity across any channel to orchestrate multi-touch, multi-channel campaigns.

Are there any minimum requirements for marketers to get value out of your AI-powered technology? (e.g. data, list size, etc.)

No.

Who are your ideal customers in terms of company size and industries?

Enterprise companies across all industries.

What do you see as the limitations of artificial intelligence as it exists today?

The limitations of AI in marketing today come from using a bunch of different AI-infused tools instead of a single platform powered by AI to engage an entire buying team across ads, email, events, social, and real-time behavioral information.

What do you see as the future potential of AI in marketing?

The next step for AI is to determine next-best actions, channels, and content based on historical data as well as current signals and engagement from target accounts. And, best of all, AI-based models will continually refine and improve themselves based on the outcome of the next-best decisions they make.

Any other thoughts on AI in marketing, or advice for marketers who are just starting with AI?

To reach the promised land of ABM at scale, you’ll need more than a few automation tools stitched together, which requires you to collect and analyze terabytes of data to understand prospect behavior at a scale that simply cannot be achieved without a robust customer data platform, machine learning, and AI. It also means you need a way to orchestrate how, when, and where to use these buyer insights on a massive, yet individualized, scale.