Can you oversell 6sense's AI to your sales team?

Ami Arad

The short answer is "Yes, yes you can." It is so easy to get excited about the capabilities of artificial intelligence —and 6sense's use of it— that overselling what it does can cause long-term harm. But it's not "overselling" what it does so much as leaving the impression that it's so magical, a human can't possibly understand what it's doing. Let me explain:

Let's say you (or us) spend an hour mesmerizing your sales team with what 6sense can do, emphasizing the AI it uses to prioritize accounts. Many sellers will go through a journey like this:

1. It's magic! (there's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there, and early success seems easy).
2. It's much harder to open opportunities now that I've been using this for 3 months.
3. Sheesh, some accounts have been in Decision or Purchase for months. Maybe this voodoo magic isn't so great after all?
4. I'll just go back to prioritizing my accounts the way I used to.

Phases 1-3 are almost impossible to avoid; the important thing is to prevent step 4.

Here's the truth: the Buying Stage predictive model leverages AI to analyze behaviors in ways that a person just could not. That is true.

It is also true, however, that a normal human being can very easily understand why one account is Hot and another is Cold. At the most basic level, the difference between a Hot account and a Cold account is activity, and Cold accounts often rarely show any activity at all. Take these two accounts:

Company A: zero (0) research activity in the Dark Funnel, zero (0) visitors to your website

Company B: Dark Funnel research from two (2) locations, one (1) visitor to your website

If you, as a seller, only had time to prospect into one of these accounts, which would you choose? Almost everyone would choose Company B. Let's try another:

Company C: fifteen (15) keywords researched in Dark Funnel, eight (8) website visitors, one (1) form fill, three (3) contacts interacting with Marketing activities, two (2) webinars attended.

Company D: eighteen (18) keywords researched in Dark Funnel, five (5) website visitors, two (2) form fills, two (2) contacts interacting with Marketing activities, three (3) webinars attended.

Really hard to say, right? This is where AI excels. It is capable of processing millions of data points, and identifying patterns that are not obvious to us mortals. The 6sense AI is looking, not only at the number of activities, but also which pages were they viewing, which keywords they were researching exactly, what Marketing campaigns they were interacting with, and so on. The seller should trust that the AI has put the 3rd highest account in their dashboard there for a reason. But a seller can tell for him/herself why the 40th account is where it is: it's likely showing little to no activity.

If we oversell the AI to the point where sellers think it's all black-box magic they can't possibly comprehend, they will abandon it when it stops being easy. If they understand the simpler reality that hot accounts are doing stuff and cold accounts aren't, they are far less likely to abandon it. It is common sense that they will have more luck prospecting into accounts showing activity than those that aren't.

Brandon McBride

Thank you for this, @Ami Arad. We're in the midst of sales adoption and, as anyone here can see, I'm a huge proponent of all that 6Sense has to offer. Which also means that I need to be very careful of overselling.