Close More Deals with 6sense Revenue AI
Ami Arad, Senior Principal Product Evangelist at 6sense, shows us how 6sense Revenue AI™ can help sales and marketing teams drive predictable growth by understanding anonymous buyer behavior.
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>> Hello everyone and welcome to Go to Market AI,
the future of your Go to Market tech stack.
I'm your host Sarah McConnell.
These days, it seems like every company has AI,
but on this show, we want to take you a level deeper so you can
see firsthand how businesses are actually applying AI to solve your business
challenges.
We're going to go deep into use cases and showing you live demos of
the latest and greatest in AI technology.
So today, I'm so excited to be joined by
Ami Arad, Senior Principal Product Evangelist at Sixth Sense.
Ami, welcome.
>> Thank you, Sarah. So happy to be here.
>> Okay. So, Ami, first question is,
can you tell us a little bit about who is Sixth Sense?
What do you guys do specifically with AI and then who are you helping in the
market right now?
>> Sure. So Sixth Sense really started by trying to answer the question,
wouldn't it be easier for sales and marketing if we just knew who was in market
to buy our products?
That's kind of the foundational question that the company was started on almost
10 years ago.
Since then, we've been able to answer a bunch of other questions that sales and
marketers have.
But as you kind of see here in a bit in the demo,
trying to figure out what that 5, 10 or 20 percent of accounts that are in
market today for what you sell
is kind of what Sixth Sense is about. So we have this revenue AI for marketing
and revenue AI for sales solutions that we sell primarily to companies selling
to other businesses
in lots of different industries with a strong foothold in high tech.
And you can kind of think of Sixth Sense is really starting in that space that
today we would call ABM
or account-based marketing, kind of advertising to other businesses is a
primary use case.
But over the last decade have really evolved to solve problems for other person
as and really kind of be the central nervous system for a lot of companies for
their entire go-to-market motion.
>> That is fantastic. I know we over here at Qualified are very happy Sixth
Sense users.
I love your product. I found it incredibly impactful for our go-to-market
motion,
which is why I was so excited to have you on the show today.
So with that being said, the main reason we wanted to have this go-to-market AI
series was so our
viewers can get a behind-the-scenes look and make AI feel really tangible for
them,
because it does feel like everyone is saying they have AI right now.
But as a user and as a marketer myself, it's hard to understand how that can
work into our tech
stack. So with that being said, Ami, I would love it if you could jump into a
demo and actually
show us a behind-the-scenes look of Sixth Sense and your AI functionality.
>> And sorry, I think you hit on an important nuance there, which is with AI.
I mean, AI is obviously, it's been around for probably three decades, maybe
more.
It's obviously become extremely popular the last few years as compute power has
allowed
AI to kind of be better at what it does. And so you have every company under
the sun kind of
bolting on AI to whatever product they've built. And so I think one of the
things that
makes Sixth Sense different, and I think you'll see it here in this demo, is
that,
really, we've had AI as part of our solution from day one. It was very much
built on sort of a big
data architecture with the goal of using AI to make sense of that data. So what
we're looking at
here is the main dashboard within Sixth Sense. And just to give you a sense of
how much data
we're talking about, this shows all the different activity that we're ingesting
from a variety of
different sources. So from a first party sort of data source standpoint, we
collect website activity.
So our customers put a little JavaScript tag on their website, every page view,
video view,
all that stuff, form fill, get sent back to Sixth Sense. In addition to that,
though, we're also
going to integrate with a customer's marketing automation platform. So think El
lequa, Marketo,
Par.HubSpot, etc. and capture all of the marketing activity. So events, webin
ars, whether they were
registered or attended, email campaigns, all of that we're ingesting into Sixth
Sense. In addition,
we're also grabbing first party data from our customer's CRM system. So think
Salesforce,
Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot. Here we're capturing every phone call that a sales
person logs,
every email that they send out, every meeting that a prospect attends. And so
website activity,
your map and your CRM activity, those are the first party data sources that we
collect.
In addition, though, we've spent the better part of 10 years trying to help
companies do what we
call light up their dark funnel. So the dark funnel is a phrase we love so much
we trademarked it.
It essentially represents kind of the research activity that prospects are
doing, usually anonymously
on websites you don't own. So a company's interested in a chat solution, let's
say,
and before they go to a qualified's website, they might be doing research on
industry publications,
blogs, they might be going to technology review sites like a G2, TrustRadius,
Gartner. And we essentially have relationships with millions of different
publishers where we
get all of that activity data and then use our own matching technology, which
is best in the
industry to associate all of that activity back to accounts. So not to
individual people, but to
the accounts that are doing that research. So you can imagine for any single
customer, we've got
tens of millions of data points about everything that's happening, kind of
leading up to when an
opportunity is open all the way through till that opportunity is closed one or
closed lost.
And so where the AI really starts to come, and by the way, there's a bunch of
AI involved in
how we track what the pages are about in the dark funnel. So we've got natural
language
processing algorithms there. One of the ways that you track your dark funnel
activity is by
entering keywords. We use AI, for example, to recommend keywords in addition to
the keywords that
you as a customer might decide you want to put in. But I think kind of the
secret sauce
the secret sauce that uses AI that we're most known for is what we would call
our predictive
model or our buying stage model. So with all of this data that we ingest, we
actually have five or
six different ML models that run on that data to produce different types of
scores. So we have an
ICP model, for example, an account profile fit model, we have a contact profile
fit model. So
which personas are most involved right before an opportunity gets open. I'm not
going to get into
all of those today. This the one that you're looking at right here is the one
that we're
probably most well known for. And by buying stage model, what it's basically
doing is it's looking
at all of your historic historical opportunities. And what were those accounts
doing right before
the opportunity was open. And it's then scoring every account in your CRM today
based on where in
that buying journey, we think they are relative to these other opportunities
that were open. So it
is a predictive model. And you can see here, this is kind of what a pretty
healthy funnel would look
like. Sixth sense did not invent the concepts of awareness consideration
decision purchase
marketers have been using those terms for probably close to 100 years now. But
it is sort of central
to what our customers revenue operating models look like, which at its core is
marketing should
focus on awareness and consideration accounts and moving them through the
buying journey. Sales
should focus on decision and purchase stage accounts and closing business with
them. And so it's a
very easy way for both marketing and sales organizations to work from the same
set of data
to have a very clear sort of division of labor as to who's responsible for what
and when.
And as you can imagine, one of the things that I think is powerful about this
is
in addition to allowing marketers to run different plays and tactics at
accounts with at least an
educated guess as to where they are in the buying journey. It also gives
sellers a wealth of
information about exactly what those accounts are doing. So what I'm showing
you here is just one
dashboard within the marketing application. But this, for example, is what a
seller would look at
on a daily basis. And essentially, those scores are determining which accounts
are hot, warm, cold,
seller should be focusing on hot and warm accounts. Obviously, I could spend an
hour just kind of
going through every bell and whistle within this application, which we call
sales intelligence.
But the idea is that sellers have been doing account-based selling for decades.
I've been in
software 25 years now. I've never been at a company that wasn't selling to
accounts. What
ABM really did was let marketing kind of catch up and work with sales on
targeting a specific
set of accounts. And so really making sure that all that data that we're giving
marketers access to
curating that for sellers in a way that it's easy for them to take action on it
is what we do
within our sales intelligence application. The last thing that I'd like to show
, because I think
we wanted to cap this demo at around 10 minutes and I'm probably there, is
there is one other
really cool spot, uh-oh, where we use AI. And it's in a product we offer called
conversational email.
The, um, I'm probably going to get in trouble for describing it this way. But
the easiest way to
describe it quickly is imagine cloning your best inside sales rep, your best B
DR.
Meaning that not only can it send out emails, which by the way, marketing
automation platforms
can do, sales engagement platforms can do, the difference with conversational
email is that it
can actually reply when the prospect response. That's the difference. So a
prospect says, I'm
interested. The conversational AI knows what to do with that information and
loop in the right
salesperson. The prospect says, I'd like more information. The conversational
AI will go get
them more information. Um, if the prospect says, you know, call me back in
three months, it will
make a note to contact them again in three months. If they don't answer, which
by the way happens
to 99% of, you know, even warm outreach these days, it will continue to try for
as long as you
tell it to, um, before it will, you know, just stop bothering that particular
prospect. Um, and so
it was actually using generative AI, but even before chat GPT sort of, um, took
the world by storm
roughly two years ago. Um, and I can't show it. What I did here was I just
quickly generated, um,
uh, an email based on a prompt that's over here. It uses, um, GPT four, uh, to
generate all these
emails. There's new functionality now that allows you to upload your own
content. So as a marketer,
think white papers, case studies, things like that to make the AI even smarter,
um, about the emails
that it writes. Um, and I don't know if I should, well, I can probably say
based on when this is
going to come out. Um, at our user conference in mid October, I'll be showing
some features that
are currently in beta, uh, that really make this start to feel human. Um, and
so this is kind of the
part of our product today that currently leverages generative AI the most. Um,
and I will say as
someone that loves to demo product, um, it is probably one of the most fun
products I've gotten
to demo in my entire career, uh, just because of how powerful GPT four is, chat
GPT, um, and, and
the results that you get, um, uh, it's a little scary how good these days. So,
um, those are some
of the areas where we use AI within six cents, kind of within 10 minutes. Um,
give me three hours and
we could probably go through it all. Um, this was fantastic. And one of the
reasons,
Ami, that I'm so excited you joined us is I was at breakthrough about this time
last year when you
guys really started to roll out conversational email. And I remember sitting in
the audience,
you were on stage. I think your head of product. I remember a lot knee was on
stage showcasing this
product. And I was blown away at how just how good it was and how powerful it
was. And I think the
fact that six cents was on the forefront of this is as well before we were
talking about chat GPT and
how to prompt and it just felt so new. And that's why I'm really excited you're
on the shows because
I do feel like six cents has just been such a pioneer in the AI space. And you
guys have been
doing this for a long time. I've been using your buying stages for a long time
with how I do my
marketing. I know you kind of made the point during your demo of it gives
marketers a good
starting point of who where people are at and they're buying journeys. And that
predictive AI is
just so beneficial for helping marketers align and run personalized messaging.
So again, this is a
great demo. And I know as a user of this, your guys's AI functionality has been
fantastic for
both our sales and marketing teams. When I know you're coming to break through
again this year,
so I can't wait for you to see what we're going to do with conversational email
this year.
I was on a call this morning with our product manager for it as well as the
founder of Sales
Whale, the company we acquired that first pioneered this technology. And I told
them, you know,
because last year there there there were AI elements to it. But there were also
parts that
were not a, you know, that are templated, probably mostly by design, just
because it sort of allowed
allows customers to feel very safe in sort of in terms of how things are going
to be responded to.
And so just the progress in a year, what we'll be showing this year a
breakthrough, I told Gabriel
the founder of Sales Whale, I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to be needed on
stage next year.
Like you'll probably just have this AI simulation of me that can write a better
friend of your script, you know, can, by the way, can probably translate the
presentation into
multiple languages, but still with my voice. So this might be my last year demo
ing something
on stage of breakthrough. I hope not, but that's that's where it seems to be
going.
Yeah, I feel like we're ready here first. In two years at breakthrough,
Ami's just going to be a hologram and it'll just be AI. You won't even need to
be there.
We don't even know. Okay, Ami, so the next and last part of this go-to-market
AI show is our
lightning round Q&A. The first question you actually already kind of answered,
but I want to circle
back to it because we've touched on it a little bit, but I do think it's very
unique for $0.6,
which is how long has $0.6 been building AI into your product?
Yeah, so a sense inception and it really was and still is kind of our big
differentiation.
Again, going back to that buying stage model, that was basically kind of like
using AI for sort of like lead qualification, account qualification, that type
of use case.
And marketers like yourself that have been doing it for a while are all used to
the lead scoring
models, increase three points for this, decrease five points for that. That's
the way that still
a lot of our competition does it. Frankly, it was the way you had to do it.
And so we were kind of this lone voice in the wilderness using AI for that
purpose.
And it was definitely lonely for a while. The last few years, we've experienced
tremendous
growth as I think the market has caught up. AI has matured. Our own models have
matured.
The amount of data we can collect has matured. Companies have matured in terms
of
now they've done the lead scoring model before many times and know what its
benefits and its
flaws are frankly. So we've really been using AI from the beginning. Again,
even in this conversational
email portion at the end, even though that product is probably three or four
years, maybe
it's four years old at most, it's been using generative AI for probably two
years. And that
demo last year of Breakthrough was probably a good six months, maybe eight
months before
chat GPT kind of, you know, just blew everyone away. So, you know, we use chat
GPT, GPT four,
we're testing, I think GPT four dot five, whatever the next version is. So we
're still, you know,
trying to stay on the bleeding edge with all of that. But AI has been a core
part of six
cents, like literally since the beginning. That's amazing. And I think I know
the answer to this
next question, but I want to ask it anyways, which I think as companies are,
you made the point,
just starting to catch up and build and the product where six cents has always
kind of had
this, but is all of this generally available for customers? People listening,
can they go start
using all these things that you showed on this demo tomorrow if they purchase
six cents?
Sarah, today, they don't even have to wait till tomorrow.
Everything I showed today, everything I showed today has been part of the
product. In fact,
you know, for months or years, the buying stage models are probably, I don't
know,
probably more than five years old at this point. I hinted at a couple of really
cool
beta features within conversational email. Those will be showing the general
public for the first
time in mid-October. Probably released either later this year, first thing next
year. But yes,
all of the kind of core AI features in our product are not only generally
available,
but I would say battle tested at this point.
Amazing. And then you've kind of hinted at this, and I don't know how much you
can share,
knowing with Breakthrough coming up here soon. But what's next on your AI
roadmap? What do you
guys at six cents thinking about in the future for AI in your product?
Yeah, so a bunch of ways to answer this. So yes, I definitely hinted at some of
it within
conversational email. Our roadmap is a closely guarded secret.
And I'm not saying that to be secretive. I am literally working with our SVP of
product again
on the product roadmap keynote for Breakthrough in less than a month. And I
still have just
barely any information about it. So what I can say safely is we will continue
to figure out areas
where we can incorporate AI throughout the products. One other area, for
example, that we've played
around with a lot is something that we call AI-driven orchestrations, meaning
that instead of you as a
marketer having to figure out which accounts you want to put in a different
segment to run
display advertising campaigns, let AI pick the accounts that it thinks are most
likely to
respond to display advertising. And that doesn't necessarily mean a click. I
mean,
clickthrough rates are dismal, B2C, B2B. That's always been the case. It's a
big reason we're
heavy on measuring view through rate. We do all see ads, even though we don't
all click on ads.
So if we think that an account might have a propensity to visit your website,
for example,
after having seen a few impressions of display ads, let's put them in a segment
rather than
forcing you as the marketer to figure out which accounts you want to do. And
you can do both.
Hey, these are 100 accounts we want to target for this reason, with this
message, for this
campaign. Of course, you'll always be able to do that. But if you also wanted
to say, hey, let me
put five grand in a campaign over here. And let me let AI pick the accounts.
That's an area of
the product where we haven't used a lot of AI historically, but we plan to. But
it is literally
kind of infused throughout the product. And I would expect that to continue.
And I will plug knowing that breakthrough is coming up. I am sure you guys will
be rolling
out some things that are exciting on your roadmap that we can't quite talk
about on the show today.
So if you're not going to break through, I am assuming that six cents will make
that publicly
available after breakthrough happens in mid October. And I'm so excited.
Don't read the roadmap. Or what you guys plug, I guess I'm sorry to interrupt.
Yeah, go to breakthrough. If you want to see the roadmap, I think it's one of
the few main
stage presentations we don't share publicly. Okay, so everyone's got to fly to
Frisco.
Yeah. Exactly. And that's Frisco, Texas, not short for San Francisco.
Yes. Someone did ask me that. We're going to Texas. It's not like you're in the
Bay Area.
Yes. Yes. Okay, Ami, last question. What other AI-powered products is your go
to market team
using in your tech stack that you've enjoyed using? Yeah. So, I mean, obviously
, like six
cents is kind of the core of our go to market. So we, there's a lot of AI in it
. We use it all.
We're testing the boundaries with it. There are a couple other kind of tools in
the toolbox that
we use on the front end. We use mutiny for personalization. There's some AI
built into that.
We use Alice as a gifting platform. It uses AI to figure out, you know, how to
personalize gifts
for folks. So frequently using that as door openers, you know, to book meetings
, generate
pipeline, things like that. We use a tool called writer or our content team is
using an AI tool
called writer to help write a lot of copy. I'm not on that team, so I'm not
privy to everything
that they're doing, but we've gotten some presentations internally about what
we're doing with it. And it's
very cool. We use Clary for revenue forecasting. We use Gong for call recording
. I know sellers are
super excited about their newest AI feature, which is kind of like the call
summary that it types
up now for you. So Gong would be another one. Those are probably kind of the
main technologies
within our tech stack that use AI. I mean, obviously, there's lots of other
tools. Those are kind of
the ones that come top of mind. Yep. Those are all great brands. And I think we
've we've heard
nothing but good things. I think about the AI functionality and all of those
tools that you mentioned.
So that wraps us on this episode of Go to Market AI. Ami, thank you so much for
joining us today and
showing us that behind the scenes look. I know it made it feel more real for me
. Even as a user,
it's always great to hear from the company themselves, how we should be
thinking about the product and
showing us this look. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for
having us.