Prospecting with 6sense Starts Before Log In

Craig Reynolds

One thing I have been calling out more in my recent Sales Intelligence trainings is the elephant in the room: 

6sense can feel like information overload. 

If you log in, click around accounts, skim the data, and see what looks interesting, you are probably not getting much value. And it’s not because the data isn't good. 

It’s because prospecting with 6sense works best when you start with a purpose. 

Start with the End Goal, Not the Data 

Before you ever open 6sense, you should be able to clearly finish this sentence: 

“Today, I am using 6sense because I want to ______.” 

That purpose might be: 

• I want to reach out to five Hot accounts I have not called or emailed in the last 30 days. 
• I have a strong industry-specific use‑case email cadence, and I want to find accounts engaging with our industry-specific blog posts/web content. 
• I want to reengage accounts with closed/lost opps that are showing renewed interest in the solutions we solve for. 

Notice what is missing here: filters, scores, and dashboards. 

Those come after the goal. 

Work Backward from the Desired Outcome 

Once the end goal is clear, the next step is to ask: 

• What signals matter most for this goal? 
• What should I prioritize, and what should I deliberately ignore? 
• What’s the fastest path from insight to action? 

This is where 6sense becomes incredibly powerful, especially if the goal is already defined. 

This is exactly how my team thinks about the best ways to use 6sense when we’re working with customers. 

Every customer is different, so we start with their use cases, priorities, and desired outcomes first, then work backward into how 6sense can support them. That same mindset applies to individual sellers. 

End users often skip that step for themselves. 

They open the Sales Intellignce app, feel overwhelmed at the volume of data, don’t know where to start, and assume they are doing something wrong. 

They're not!

Confidence and Agency Matter, Especially for New Sellers 

Many sellers, especially those early in their careers, have not been taught how to goal‑set for prospecting. 

That is why this shift often needs to be modeled by sales managers first. 

When leaders demonstrate what purpose‑driven prospecting looks like, sellers gain: 

• Confidence in where to start 
• Clarity on what good targets & messaging looks like 
• Permission to ignore noise that does not support the goal 

The Takeaway 

6sense is not meant to be browsed. 

It's meant to be used with intent (pardon the pun), meaning a clear outcome you're working toward before you ever look at the data. 

Start with a clear outcome. Work backward to the signals and filters that support it. Then engage with confidence. 

Would love to hear from you: 

• What is your default goal when you log into Sales Intelligence? 
• How do you help your teams define purpose before they start prospecting?
• What use-cases do you recommend aligning your 6sense prospecting against?

Happy hunting!

Kyle Pheland

Great post @Craig Reynolds. Sharing this with my team of "6sense Champions" as food for thought.

At present we have 2 prospecting workstreams, or goals: Pipeline Discovery and Pipeline Acceleration.

We took a similar approach to help define our dashboard strategy (in CRM). By working backwards, we were able to take our defined goals to identify which signals matter, then craft actionable resources for our teams of sellers based on those signals.

Craig Reynolds

@Kyle Pheland thank you for sharing! I really like this approach…the distiction between Pipeline Discovery and Pipeline Acceleration is an important one.

The Pipeline Acceleration use-case is also a strong sign of 6sense maturity. Pipe-gen is often easier to operationalize for sellers because the motion is pretty clear; you find the right accounts to prospect, and then sart engaging them. Acceleration is trickier because it requires a seller to ask, "What (if anything) has changed since I opened this opp, and how does that change the strategy I'm applying to closing the deal?"

That could mean watching for competitive KW activity, new intent around use-cases that have not been discussed, or anonymous web traffic from locations that could suggest other stakeholders or buying centers are getting involved. Those are the signals that are super beneficial in helping sellers multi-thread, find the risk, and get the conversation going beyond their initial champion.

I love that your team is working backwards from the goal(s) to define which signals matter most. That is exactly how teams get beyond the analysis paralysis!