Custom 6QA

Like most things in life, there are pros and cons.

While a custom 6QA can improve precision and alignment, it’s essential to balance customization with simplicity and scalability. Investing in proper alignment, clear definitions, and regular reviews can mitigate many of these challenges.
Using a custom 6QA (6sense Qualified Account) within 6sense allows you to tailor account qualification criteria to your business’s specific goals, targeting strategy, and go-to-market (GTM) approach. 

Here’s why implementing a custom 6QA is valuable:

1. Aligns with Your Business Priorities : Customizing 6QA ensures that accounts are prioritized based on the attributes and intent signals that matter most to your organization, such as specific industries, firmographics, or buying stages.

2. Improves Sales and Marketing Alignment:  A custom 6QA helps ensure that both sales and marketing teams focus on the same high-value accounts, fostering collaboration and better account-based marketing (ABM) execution.

3. Adapts to Evolving GTM Strategies:  Your go-to-market strategy might shift based on new product launches, market expansions, or organizational priorities. Custom 6QA definitions allow flexibility to align qualification criteria with these changes.

4. Integrates Intent Signals: Leveraging custom thresholds for intent data, such as specific keywords or surges in activity, ensures that accounts demonstrating real interest are flagged for outreach.

By creating and using a custom 6QA, you make the most of 6sense’s predictive intelligence capabilities along with criteria for your own business. 

While creating a custom 6QA in 6sense offers significant advantages, there are also potential drawbacks to consider:

1. Complexity and Maintenance

• Building a custom 6QA requires significant time and resources to define criteria, gather input from stakeholders, and implement within 6sense with the alignment and definition being the time consuming part.
• Ongoing Adjustments: Custom models require regular monitoring and refinement to ensure they remain aligned with evolving business goals, ICP changes, or shifting market conditions.

2. Risk of Overfitting

• If the criteria are too specific, you might exclude potentially high-value accounts that don’t perfectly fit the custom 6QA but still have strong intent or potential.
• Conversely, overly broad criteria could dilute the focus and prioritize too many accounts, negating the purpose of the qualification process.

3. Data Dependency

• Quality of Input Data: Custom 6QA relies on accurate and up-to-date data (firmographics, intent, technographics, etc.). If the data is incomplete or inconsistent, the model’s effectiveness can suffer.
• Data Availability: Some industries or segments may lack sufficient data, limiting the ability to create a reliable custom 6QA.

4. Scalability Challenges

• Custom criteria might work well for a specific segment or product line but could create challenges when trying to scale to new regions, markets, or verticals.

5. Misalignment Risk

•  Internal Disagreements: Defining custom criteria can lead to misalignment between sales, marketing, and other stakeholders if priorities or interpretations of an ideal account differ.
• Changing Focus: If the organization’s GTM priorities shift frequently, a custom 6QA might need repeated updates, potentially causing confusion or delays.

Hope this helps.

Late to this discussion but adding for posterity's sake…

Make sure to have good reporting before/after reporting to measure the impact of the custom 6QAs. At the very least, you should be able to see the volume of new opps created from old/new 6QAs and ideally see the different in velocity (time in each stage), overall amount, and win %.