Sapphire Ventures
Partnering with expansion-stage, enterprise software companies that we believe can become category leaders.
Sapphire Partners
Limited partner investing in exceptional early-stage venture fund managers.
Sapphire Sport
Partnering with early-stage companies at the nexus of technology and culture.
Menu close
Sapphire
Table of contents
The Rise of AB”X” and the RevTech Revolution: Why We’re Backing 6sense
Published
April 1, 2021
Table of contents
Share

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a term that has been thrown around in B2B tech circles for several years now, but it doesn’t quite capture the breadth of what go-to-market (GTM) teams really need in order to drive revenue lift. We’re excited to partner with 6sense, a visionary company that’s driving the RevTech category by shifting the narrative away from ABM to Account-Based Everything (ABX). Our market and customer research revealed that buyers now expect a platform that provides account insights, orchestration and engagement across not only marketing, but all customer-facing teams.

The crux of ABX is to provide customer-facing teams with data and insights that drive timely and personalized engagement with prospect or customer accounts. By adopting ABX, marketing can now home in on the accounts that fit their ideal customer profile (ICP) and determine the best way to engage these accounts based on a data-driven assessment of intent to buy. Sales can finally stop wasting time with accounts that were never going to make a purchase and focus on those showing the highest intent. And customer success teams can focus their time, efforts and campaigns on accounts displaying a higher propensity to purchase more.

6sense: Lighting up the “Dark Funnel”

6sense’s ABX platform analyzes data from a variety of first-party and third-party sources to identify accounts, determines how closely these accounts fit the user’s ICP and pinpoints exactly where these accounts are in the buyer journey. No company knows the entire universe of accounts that could find their products useful, but 6sense can light up this “dark funnel” by not only identifying unknown accounts, but also predicting their readiness to purchase.

The whole point of ABX is cross-functional GTM alignment, and no company does this better than 6sense with its CRM integrations that enable sales teams to easily access an account’s behavioral history and intent data. Sales teams also benefit from 6sense’s Next Best Action recommendations, which show the best contacts to engage with next, key talking points and new contacts to uncover.

Orchestrating the Full GTM Strategy

6sense’s technology already delivers significant value by lighting up the dark funnel, but what gets us most excited is 6sense’s focus on closing the gap between account insights and GTM execution. Through integrations with sales engagement providers like Outreach (a Sapphire investment) and marketing automation vendors like Marketo, 6sense’s customers can trigger various types of engagement activities based on an account’s stage in the buyer journey using messaging and content personalized for the prospect. The possibilities are endless, and 6sense continues to raise the bar with the launch of its 6signal Graph to embed insights natively within the sales and marketing software GTM teams already use.

An Experienced Team Relentlessly Focused on Execution

We first met 6sense in 2015 and could tell the founding team was onto something special with its unique 

technology they had built to shed light on the buyer journey. When Jason Zintak joined in 2017 as CEO, he brought world-class operating expertise that has transformed 6sense into the category leader in ABX and helped drive the broader RevTech category. We believe 6sense is the central nervous system of the B2B GTM tech stack. And we are thrilled to officially join the 6sense family on their mission to help GTM teams drive revenue.

 

Legal disclaimer

Disclaimer: Nothing presented within this article is intended to constitute investment advice, and under no circumstances should any information provided herein be used or considered as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund managed by Sapphire Ventures (“Sapphire”). Information provided reflects Sapphires’ views as of a time, whereby such views are subject to change at any point and Sapphire shall not be obligated to provide notice of any change. Companies mentioned in this article are a representative sample of portfolio companies in which Sapphire has invested in which the author believes such companies fit the objective criteria stated in commentary, which do not reflect all investments made by Sapphire. A complete alphabetical list of Sapphire’s investments made by its direct growth and sports investing strategies is available here. No assumptions should be made that investments listed above were or will be profitable. Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events, results or the actual experience may differ materially from those reflected or contemplated in these statements. Nothing contained in this article may be relied upon as a guarantee or assurance as to the future success of any particular company. Past performance is not indicative of future results.