One of the biggest mistakes I see sellers make

Ami Arad

I wish I had noticed this trend sooner because I could have saved dozens of sellers from descending into madness. When they go from having virtually no behavioral intelligence about their accounts to having lots of behavioral intelligence about their accounts, some sellers can misunderstand the mission and take things too far.

What do I mean exactly? Before 6sense, sellers are working two things:

1. Leads. Hand-raisers that fill out a form for a white paper, eBook, to see a demo, contact Sales, etc. Basically, the seller is given a name and a number/email address.
2. Accounts. They're picking which accounts they want to work, likely using questionable methods of prioritization that would shock you if they were honest about how they were picking which accounts to work, and they're prospecting into the personas they've been taught are most likely to buy your stuff. They're trying to find a way in using whatever tools are at their disposal.

Once sellers are properly trained on 6sense, now all of a sudden they have Marketing engagement all in one place, rolled up to the Account level, website visits —known and anonymous— that they likely didn't have before, plus this new keyword research intelligence which is shiny and new and comes with geo-location information about where the research may have happened.

Presented with the potential ability to pinpoint exactly who was doing what research consumes some sellers who mistakenly believe that if they can't figure out which Director-level person was researching Topic XYZ in the Greater Minneapolis Area, they'll never break into the account. That's just not true.

To be clear, sellers do get that serendipitous "find" every once in a while where the person they reach out to responds with some version of "Your ears must have been burning." But those are a teeny tiny minority of outreach when all the stars align. Far, far, far more often, a seller opens an Opportunity with a hot account by still doing all the things they were doing in #2 above, just doing them with Accounts that 6sense says are Hot or Warm instead of wasting time doing those things with Accounts that 6sense are Cold.

I'm a huge advocate of spending a limited amount of time (15 min or less) using 6sense, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and a map, to try and see if I can figure out who was doing what, and if so, is it someone I would want to talk to, and if so, taking some time to personalize some quality outreach to provoke a response. But if it ends up a rabbit hole that takes me nowhere —and that will often be the case— then go back to basics with 6sense prioritizing the Accounts into which you prospect, and influencing the messaging you choose based on whatever Marketing engagement, website visits, and keyword research you have to show the way. Try to find a way in! The difference is you're trying to find a way into an account where there is evidence of activity rather than just wishcasting an Opportunity with a shiny logo.

Kerry

This is a great bit of advice. We all need to take advantage of incremental improvements in what you know and can do with an account. There's a lot there, and as we get more experience, we can continue to take advantage of more insights. But it's certainly better to bite of bits of insights in the early going and make incremental improvements than it is to zip down rabbit holes right away. I'm a bug rabbit-holer myself, so absolutely guilty of wanting to do it all right away. But that's not normally the best way to make progress.