Our Promise, From Day One

6sense recently closed our Series D funding round, and our lead investor on the round is a company called D1 Capital Partners. My first thought was wondering what “D1” stands for. Then I learned… Dan Sundheim, D1’s founder, named it for Jeff Bezos’s “Day 1” philosophy. In a nutshell, the idea is that successful companies treat every day like Day 1. Like that nervous excitement, you feel when dropping your baby off for their first day of school, or how a major league pitcher feels on opening day. Each day should give you that feeling that anything is possible. I loved this excerpt from Amazon’s statement for the SEC, filed during their original IPO in 1997:

“Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.”

When I heard the concept — I loved it. I feel like it’s Day 1 every day at 6sense. Whether I’m moonlighting as a book author, taking calls from other CMOs (anytime, anywhere!), working through new concepts with our product team, waking up early every Friday morning to host CMO Coffee Talk, coaching young marketers (future CMOs), doing podcasts, sales calls, website updates, big lighting strikes, … it's all good. Yes yes yes. But it begs the question… does a “normal person” do all this and actually enjoy it?” Because it’s A LOT of work, but somehow I’m not cranky or burned out… I’m invigorated. So over the last few weeks, between writing press releases, blogs, filming videos, and everything in between, I asked myself, WHY? Why am I such a wackadoo over this stuff?

I discovered that it’s because I am in LOVE with the problem.

I’m truly, madly, deeply in love with the problem that 6sense, our partners, investors, community, and customers are solving. I’m in love with the problem because I live in it every day. 

I’ve openly shared before that every time my CEO calls me I think I’m getting fired. (Not just this CEO, but every CEO I’ve worked for.) People think it’s ridiculous. But it’s NOT. It happens. I see it happen to my friends and it’s devastating.  

CMOing is hard and misunderstood, which may explain why so many of us have short tenures. The average CMO tenure just declined again last year, from about 43 months to 41 months — the lowest it’s been since 2009 — according to a study by advisory firm Spencer Stuart. (For comparison, the tenure of CEOs in the same group of companies was nearly twice as long, at 76 months.) 

For all those short life spans, there is a company that never reached its potential. Never executed. A marketing leader who spent too much time on the “ing” and not enough time connecting with the market. Why is that? Therein lies the problem. Let’s break it down into four parts:

1. No real market insight. What is “my market”? What does it care about? How do we identify and focus on the areas with the greatest potential? Think about how many leadership teams have had heated debates over key growth expansion opportunities — deciding whether or not to go into Europe, or to expand capabilities, or add a new product line. Too often, strategic conversations are based on debate and opinion rather than data and precision. Without probabilistic data to make those critical decisions, it’s no wonder so many companies fail to hit their goals consistently (if at all).
2. Focusing on the wrong things. Why are sales and marketing not aligned? Why are my metrics not the same as theirs? (Sound familiar?) You want to see where the problems — or as I call them, “the red” — exist, but struggle to understand where breakdowns are happening. Maybe your team is hitting target MQL goals, but sales can’t seem to close deals. Priorities are competing and there’s a disconnect in what we think we should focus on. In a study we did with Heinz Marketing, we found that 1 in 3 account-driven organizations don’t know which messages will best engage target accounts, what channels to reach them on, or which accounts to prioritize in the first place. 
3. Disjointed customer experience. It’s one thing to know your market, it’s another thing to actually show up for that market. How do we deliver differentiated experiences that reach both companies and real people? We might be account-based, but there are buying teams of humans behind those accounts, and B2B buyers expect personalized, real-time interactions that mimic their B2C experiences. Are we enabling that? Is our experience adding value with that Day 1, customer-obsessed culture that Bezos talked about? 
4. Not enabling our teams. And last, but certainly not least, is considering the needs of our own people. What are our front-line teams doing every day? Are we ensuring their time is well spent, or are they spinning their wheels with a million different priorities, tools, and processes? Salesforce did a study that showed sales reps spend 66% of their time on non-selling activities. That’s more than half their time spent on unproductive busywork that could be spent building relationships with their customers. I read this quote the other day from Peter Drucker: “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” Problems don’t get solved when we’re only focused on “managing” our teams and not on setting them up for success, with the resources and tools they need to do what they do best.

All this doesn’t get me down… just the opposite. It gets me so fired up. 

Because these problems are real, visceral, and right in front of us. But, so too is the progress we’re making. 

Conducting the orchestra

Our insights-based approach is making its way into marketing, ops, and sales teams every day and making things better. What drew me to 6sense 2.5 years ago — besides the amazing people — was the data. Building the company on top of the predictive analytics infrastructure was such a unique starting place, and I knew no other company was doing what 6sense was doing, and that it was going to grow into something really special. 

We’ve done the hard stuff. We’ve built the foundation and our customers are seeing the results. More predictable, more team-oriented, and more customer-focused. 6sense is shining a light on things like Total Addressable Market (TAM), Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), Total Addressable In-Market TAIM, and Ideal In-market Customer Profile (IICP). These insights are now in the boardroom and giving our customers a leg-up in the strategic planning process. 

Sales and marketing teams are rallying around accounts (NOT leads) and it’s working —  our customers have seen a 35% increase in average deal value, 20% improvement in opportunity conversion rate, and a 20% reduction in deal cycle time. And our technology is not only mission-critical to marketing, but also to sales. In a survey of our customer base, 99% of salespeople said taking 6sense away would seriously impact their ability to make quota. 

As my friend Ian Howells, Head of Marketing at Sage Intacct, said, “6sense is the conductor of the orchestra, orchestrating everything we do from PPC, to LinkedIn, to our website, and our Drift bot — it’s what ties everything together and makes everything better.” All of the technology throughout the funnel is connected. Every channel is connected to ensure a consistent, relevant experience. 

I recently asked my mentor, Gary Survis, Operating Partner at Insight Partners, what makes him so confident in 6sense and the future of our movement, and he had this to say: “In my role, I get to recommend technology to hundreds of portfolio companies. My favorite thing is getting an excited phone call from a CMO who says 6sense is up and running and we're already seeing results! How exciting is that?!” 

It’s definitely exciting for me. 

Our promise

But with all of our success up to this point comes an incredible sense of obligation. We have promises to make — and keep.

For our team at 6sense, we’re making a promise to transform the RevTech space, to bring more powerful, actionable data to the entire revenue team, infuse AI into the entire funnel, and orchestrate a more seamless, personalized customer experience across every channel.

We’re making a promise to empower frontline revenue professionals with the tools they need to wake up and attack each day like it’s Day 1. We want a BDR to start every day knowing she’s equipped to focus on “the right things” — her next best actions, who to reach out to at which accounts, and what relevant messages to share. 

That’s our promise… to create great experiences for both the people using our product every day, as well as the people on the receiving end of that outreach. 

I’m also making a personal promise…. to keep feeling all the feels of the problems. Feeling all the feels of our audience, and letting that fuel the fire to keep pushing, keep fighting, keep working for something better. To keep waking up every Friday morning for coffee talk, to keep taking calls (whenever, wherever!), and to keep pushing on how our product delivers. 

It’s my love of the problem, of leading a movement with our customers and partners and driving change — together — that gets me up in the morning. (Literally, those coffee talks are so early!) 

Our investors have put their confidence in us, and this funding gives us the rocket fuel to go and deliver on those promises. It’s big, it’s significant, but we are not done… this is a great moment to celebrate, but it’s just that — a moment. The big work is still ahead of us. As our CEO Jason Zintak promised: “6sense will build and deliver the next generation B2B go-to-market platform that powers the RevTech revolution.”

Are you in love with this problem? Excited by the progress? Join us in transforming B2B, owning our markets, and supercharging the RevTech revolution. It’s Day 1. Let’s go!