In our recent webinar, “Get Max Returns from Your 6sense Investment,” we shared why many GTM teams struggle to drive revenue growth with supposedly 6sense-qualified, in-market accounts—and why many sales teams are not adopting the platform. Some of the reasons for the mistrust and the challenges related to moving accounts from contact to deal closure are:
- Weak ICP Definition: While 6sense will talk about their predictive scoring, many teams are finding out that it doesn’t nail their ICP. In most cases, the ICPs on the platform are nothing more than proxies for your total relevant market. Sales and marketing teams should not want companies that look right with surface characteristics that 6sense and many other ABM and intent data platforms use. Sales and marketing should want to focus on the accounts that will predictably go all the way through the funnel, sign the deal, and provide the greatest YoY revenue growth.
- Intent Data Alone is Not Reliable – Intent data is time-lagged. By the time it is delivered and sales and marketing teams react to the intent, the accounts have moved on. They select their short-list of vendors whom they want to talk making it very challenging for sales and marketing teams to break into the accounts. We also find that intent data is not predictive of accounts being “Best Fit,” “Most Ready,” and “Most Winnable and Expandable,” as intent data is speculative.
- Limited Account Insights: While the platform can identify accounts and sometimes the individuals to engage with, ABM and intent data platforms do not provide the context behind the intent or the reasons for the intent. Sales and marketing teams lack clear direction on how to engage, land, and expand accounts. Instead of telling an account story, teams continue to tell a persona and industry story just like their competitors. This is why buyers inside “in-market accounts” are unresponsive or go dark if (and it’s a big if) they engage.
- Lack of Change Management and Limited Account-Based Enablement – If you have the wrong email/social/live/digital interactions and deliver the wrong account experiences, you will not convert “in-market” opportunities to revenue even if the accounts are showing strong intent. Most teams are simply retrofitting the tech on top of existing processes, content, messaging, and experiences, so teams are driving the pipeline with supposed ICP accounts, but they’re not converting! Sales teams are also not getting the enablement they need to continue carrying the conversation that marketing starts. Sales teams are not given the tools, content, messaging, and stories they need to multi-thread, build the specific business case, create a consensus, overcome indecisiveness, and move accounts to revenue.
Within this article, we dig deeper into these challenges and provide specific examples for those in supply chain and logistics tech.
Warehouse Robotics Company’s GTM Efforts Were Misguided by 6sense’s ICP Definitions
Diane Fonseca (our supply chain business unit leader) was the former global business development leader for a pioneer in bringing robotics into warehouse operations to improve warehouse productivity and operational efficiency and reduce labor costs for fulfillment environments. The company’s founders were among the first to integrate robotics into warehouse operations. Their intelligent, AI-driven, enterprise-grade robotics platform, combined with their fleet of purpose-built autonomous mobile robots, breaks free from the limitations of capital-intensive, grid-based automation systems that create bottlenecks and negatively impact warehouse productivity, operational efficiency, and labor costs in high-volume fulfillment environments.
As the market shifted and the customer base grew, Diane and the team realized that the company’s GTM strategy needed to transition from demand generation lead pursuit to a more targeted account outbound strategy. The company had begun to identify the characteristics of its ICP and moved to more of an ABM model. In doing so, they invested in 6sense with enthusiasm for understanding “intent” in their target market,
However, Diane and the team learned that intent-detecting platforms are limited by the keywords and overall segments in the model. The reality of intent-based ABM technology ultimately triggered too many “intent matches”, leading reps to pursue prospects that weren’t the best fit, even though the platform had identified “intent”. 6sense only identified the total relevant market and ideal customer segments vs. the ICP; it initially triggered shiny object syndrome, leading reps to chase deals that weren’t the best fit, even though 6sense labeled the accounts as a 6QA. They weren’t able to consider some of the finer nuances that defined the ICP, such as throughput volume, overtime pay, error percentage, picking area size, or worker shifts. The platform didn’t consider the shifts that companies are making to improve their service performance for customers and increase warehouse efficiency, as well as the gaps that still exist. The ICP proxies didn’t consider if an account was strategically ready for an AI-driven, enterprise-grade robotics platform. The platform didn’t consider whether a company is already investing in AI in other areas, so they are more likely to move forward than get stuck in indecision because the company is afraid of risk and disruption to warehouse and supply chain operations.
Many of the identified “high intent” accounts were already in active deals. Others were poor fits, resulting in wasted outreach and manual qualification efforts. Marketing viewed intent as a broad signal of interest, but reps chasing low-quality matches were met with unresponsive or clearly unqualified prospects. With targets missed and reps pushed to hit activity metrics, the result was frustration, fatigue, and eventually, turnover with little improvement to enterprise win rates and revenue growth.
As Scott Martinis posted on LinkedIn:
The Lessons Learned
- ICP criteria that truly matter—like operational complexity, readiness for AI integration, and change tolerance—aren’t keyword-searchable. 6sense does not pick up those ICP signals.
- No ABM platform can substitute for deep operational insight when defining an ICP.
- Building a pipeline through intent signals alone can be misleading without a disciplined approach to qualification.
- Once sales trust is broken, it’s hard to rebuild—especially when incentives reward quantity over quality.
Ultimately, the company discovered that high-growth GTM strategies require more than intent signals. They require a deliberate, account-level understanding of operational, cultural, and executional readiness—insights that 6sense cannot fully automate. It’s why you need newer AI technologies mixed with manual human insight. Now, this former GTM leader applies those hard-earned lessons to help other supply chain innovators prioritize the right accounts—the ones that will predictably land and expand.
Click here to connect with Diane – our supply chain business unit leader.
Warehouse Management & Supply Chain Execution Tech Firm Needs to Go Beyond Intent
We are engaged with a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant that is a vendor of warehouse management and companion SCE capabilities, with approximately $122 million in WMS software and services revenue. The company has over 40 years of experience in warehousing and services, with more than 350 of its 700 employees dedicated to WMS. It offers a relatively broad suite of SCM capabilities, including core and extended WMS, demand forecasting, procurement, DOM, point-of-use (POU), and pharmacy inventory management (PIMS).
This company was brought to our attention as their VP of Marketing mentioned in our ABM challenges poll that they are using 6sense, but sales are not adopting the platform.
In another poll, the VP also mentioned that expanding accounts is a challenge. A Gartner report stated that while the company is significantly expanding its use in healthcare and related sectors, its net new WMS customer acquisition is modest. The challenges in driving customer acquisition and account expansion are leading to a flat to a 1-3% improvement in FY 2025 total revenue growth.
The problem is that the supply chain tech company operates in a crowded market with many key players also utilizing platforms like 6sense, TechTarget, Demandbase, and others that provide similar intent signals.
The team cannot just rely on surface ICP characteristics and intent. Even though 6sense and other intent data platforms will promote a “predictive”: analytics platform, intent itself is not predictive. Intent data only reflects the current state of mind or interest of potential buyers, indicating what they might be looking for or considering. at a given moment, but it does not necessarily guarantee future actions or buying behavior (which is what “predictive” implies).
- Intent data captures current activity.
- Intent data tracks online behaviors, such as website visits, keyword searches, and content downloads, which reveal what a person is actively researching at that moment.
- Intent doesn’t reveal what buyers are most likely to do in the future.
- And, most importantly, intent data is not predictive of whether an account will grow with you or churn.
They need to uncover the accounts where the company is relevant and where the competition, including Microsoft, Oracle, Infor, SAP, and Manhattan Associates, is irrelevant. They need to identify the accounts that have a key strategic priority that their platform can play a strong role in and are facing a situation where the company has a differentiated, relevant story to tell. They need to add signals and account insights to ensure that named accounts are strategically, operationally, executionally, and culturally ready to connect the different systems and automate their supply chain across the warehouse, inventory management, order management, TMS, and delivery management systems.
The company needs to identify those accounts that have level 2 operations and level 1 operations if it’s a healthcare environment – and show their relevance to these accounts that can provide the greatest revenue growth YoY. This is important because the company’s platform is primarily used in Level 3 and low-level 4 warehouse operations.
Intent is your starting point. It’s a signal that indicates you may want to investigate an account further – it’s not a signal for automatic sales and marketing outreach. We need to go beyond intent and ensure that accounts are GTM qualified and that sales have the context they need to understand why they should trust the intent data and why it’s an account they should pursue.
Inventory and Order Management Company Also Needs to Go Beyond 6sense Intent, as Their Goal is Greater NRR Growth
The CMO at a leading provider of e-commerce inventory and order management software mentioned in our ABM Challenges Poll that they struggle to get maximum returns from ABM tech. We also saw in a press release that customer engagement is a priority as the company is committed to improving communication with its clients and supporting the comprehensive utilization of the platform’s capabilities. They plan to maintain the momentum of customer engagement initiatives through 2025. and continue to emphasize commitment to customer growth and scalability. They are even offering a new enhanced support module called Platinum Services for customers who need advanced support.
Conducting a land grab based on intent will not help the company achieve its NRR growth goals, as intent is not predictive of accounts that will land and expand. 6sense’s platform, which combines intent with behavioral models, can potentially predict whether an account has a good chance of moving into the pipeline. However, the ultimate goal is to predict accounts to revenue, which the platform cannot currently do.
The company needs to:
- Focus on landing their best possible accounts that will consistently renew and grow over time, as revenue in years 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and beyond is even more important than the immediate revenue. They realize that increasing the customer lifetime value is where the strongest opportunity lies for future growth.
- Be more thoughtful about the accounts they want to land and expand to become the pillars of the business. These are the accounts where they need to go beyond campaigns and focus on the individual interactions and the account experience to get accounts to revenue faster at a higher ACV and existing accounts to expand with them.
- Go beyond campaigns and consider each touchpoint, and every time their GTM teams have the opportunity to create a memorable moment with prospects and customers. ABM is about each interaction and how the human buyers in the accounts you want to win, protect, and expand feel after engaging with sales, marketing, and customer success teams. They need to shift their thinking from a campaign-oriented approach based on intent to focusing on the right accounts and customers, and how to orient their marketing and GTM strategies to those customers to maximize ARR, GRR, and NRR.
- Get the right account intelligence to get the right context and align with the evolving strategic priorities of accounts they want to win, protect, and expand.
- Become focused on revenue in years 2, 3, 4,5,6, 7, and 8, and so on, and increasing the customer lifetime value because that’s where they see the strongest opportunity for future growth.
DAT Freight and Analytics Failed to Define Their ICP and Align Content and Messaging with the ICP.
Before investing in our ICP management program and ABM readiness program, DAT defined its ICP by industry and freight spend.
They weren’t segmenting their existing customers to uncover their “best fit” and identify characteristics of those high-value accounts that were using their platform regularly (making it a must-have) versus those used on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis (making it a nice-to-have). They weren’t looking into how and why the DAT platform was being integrated into the daily programs of the most frequent users and how they were utilizing the platform differently from the others.
They didn’t examine the characteristics of the accounts that require freight rate analytics at the component level, rendering their lower-cost competitors and suites, such as E2Open, which offer analytics for free, irrelevant, as they do not provide analytics at the component level. Within the win/loss analysis we completed, we saw that DAT Freight and Analytics lost deals to Uber Freight, E2Open, and Freightwaves because their costs are 2-4X lower and the analytics are “good enough,” They weren’t focusing on the accounts where it would not be good enough to have lower quality analytics that did not even have it at the component level.
They didn’t look into supply chain maturity.
If DAT targets accounts with a level 1 or 2 maturity, they will automatically be perceived as nice-to-have because all the teams are siloed. They would not be able to look beyond the “transportation management role” and “cost savings.” They would not realize the full value and returns from their investment in DAT, which should encompass the entire supply chain, including distribution, finance, sales and marketing, and operations organization. The level 1 and level 2 maturity accounts are the ones that would find the rate analytics of DAT’s competitors good enough. If they did move forward with DAT, they would ultimately churn because the returns are not strong enough at DAT’s investment level to justify using it solely for rate benchmarking.
Because DAT did not target the right accounts and focused on its total relevant market vs. its true ICP, its enterprise win rates were low, and its churn rates were high. As their ICP did not define the accounts that would land, stay, and expand with the company, they weren’t increasing their customer lifetime value and weren’t driving the NRR growth that leadership wanted.
While completing our ABM readiness review, our team looked at hundreds of pieces of content, including articles, whitepapers, case studies, podcasts, and webinars. While the content provided thought leadership, it did not provide commercial insights that help GTM teams teach for differentiation against their competitors and the status quo.
The content didn’t reframe the prospect’s thoughts on rate benchmarking analytics, show new ways of using it or the role it can play in key priorities across the supply chain organization. They didn’t show the impact that predictive rate analytics at a component level (something others cannot deliver) can have on:
- Pricing strategies to protect future margin growth
- Demand planning, distribution, and merchandising so you can reallocate products based on balancing demand data with predictive future “industry” and “component” freight rate trends.
- Supply procurement and operations, as they can leverage demand forecasting with future component rate analytics to determine inventory levels for a stronger P&L based on inbound logistics costs.
- Sales and marketing can plan ahead for promotions at the right time, based on demand planning and predictive freight rate benchmarking, to minimize impact on margins.
- Operational scenario planning to help build out playbooks to protect future profitability.
They aren’t showing how they can help each team across the supply chain, finance, sales, marketing, and operations make decisions based on real-time and predictive rate benchmarking data at the industry level and at the component level. As a result, DAT wasn’t getting the right accounts that were showing intent into the pipeline. Because they focused on transportation managers and their pain points, most of the deals coming into the pipeline through marketing were low ACV deals. They weren’t focused on the content they needed to drive demand with high-value accounts, capture demand across the organization, and then accelerate that demand to revenue.
When reviewing the data from sales and RevOps, we observed that most engagement occurred at the transportation manager level, where the content was specifically geared. When sales spoke to a VP of Supply Chain or the Chief Supply Chain Officer, they were consistently directed to speak a few levels down to the transportation manager or director. Sales teams were not armed with the account intelligence they needed to target accounts, uncover areas of prioritization, and identify what companies were already investing in, as well as where gaps still lie that could affect the outcomes companies want. They weren’t armed with the right content to demonstrate how predictive freight rate benchmarking at the industry and component levels should impact the entire organization, making it a must-have, embedded solution.
As a result, sales focused on cost savings and the size of their data, which VPs and the C-suite viewed as a nice-to-have, as they did not see the role that DAT could play in the broader picture. Even the transportation managers saw DAT as a nice-to-have, as reports from Clozd show:
- Toyota was only going to use the DAT data to understand the value of long-term agreements between them and carriers, and they felt that they would not see the value based on the high price tag. DAT was only responding to the predefined need (use case) vs. building a vision for how their platform can be used.
- Matthews felt that they would not use the platform enough throughout the year to justify the investment.
- Dole thought the cost of the product was high to the extent that it could equate to an analyst’s salary, and they thought there could be more cost-effective solutions. They were placing the DAT platform in a transportation analyst silo and not considering the potential impact it could have across the organization.
By focusing on their true ICP and aligning content and messaging with this new ICP, DAT Freight and Analytics was able to engage, nurture, land, and expand enterprise accounts that were on Gartner’s Top 25 Supply Chain list.
Don’t Get Us Wrong – We Like 6sense…
6sense is a robust platform, but like all other ABM and intent data platforms, it has its gaps. We need to fill those gaps by getting the ICP right and adding ICP/business problem profile signals and account insights on top of intent data. We need to utilize technology to support ABM efforts and the account experience, rather than driving it, which means we cannot simply retrofit 6sense on top of existing content, messaging, and processes.
It doesn’t matter if an account is in your ICP and in-market if your team is having the wrong interactions and delivering the wrong account experiences. Using the 6sense platform will only help you with targeting, but you will still face challenges in engaging enterprise accounts and progressing them to revenue if you do not change your GTM approach and enable your teams.
Click here to see how we can help you get greater returns from 6sense.