In the midst of rapid digital transformation, old school marketing and sales strategies are no longer effective. In fact, they’re probably driving your customers away.

In this exciting conversation with Latané Conant, CMO at 6sense, we’ll get her unique perspective on taking a totally new approach to your business development tactics.

After joining 6sense in 2018, our guest had something of an epiphany. Why ask prospects to fill out seemingly endless forms when we can leverage the vast quantity of data we already have? 

She decided to test her methodology, and it’s an experiment that’s paid off with a valuation of over $5 billion and consistent, sustainable growth.

Ready to learn more about how you can use intent data to reach new heights of revenue? Let’s dive in.

“Over and over again, we proved that an optimized customer experience results in profitability and growth.”

– Latané Conant

Finding that Perfect Culture Fit

Latané refers to herself as a “recovering software saleswoman.” Since graduating from the prestigious McIntire School of Business at the University of Virginia, she’s worn all the hats as a frontline seller, account exec, VP, and CMO. 

Latané believes that it is an exciting time to be in the marketing industry, with new developments in martech appearing practically every few seconds. 

Her remarkable experience in the technology field gives her an invaluable insight into how to utilize these advancements to create an omnichannel customer experience that sends KPIs into the stratosphere.

The Importance of Hiring

Not everyone has the chops for a career in sales. And you shouldn’t be content to sit as a sales or business dev rep seat for years. Latané jokes, “this isn’t your parents’ house, you can’t live with me forever.”

She feels it’s crucial to build a strong relationship with these young, high-energy staffers and launch them on the right career path.

Training someone to be intimately familiar with your product and processes is taking a big chance. It’s an arduous journey. What if you invest all of this time and effort into someone and they aren’t a cultural fit?

As Latané points out, “hiring risk is one of the biggest risks to any sales organization.”

“Relevance, what we want is every single outreach to be relevant.”

– Latané Conant

The Next Generation of Account-Based Sales and Marketing

Not only a vibrant and visionary CMO, but Latané is also an accomplished author and a contributor to the Forbes Communications Council. 

Her latest work is titled No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls: The next generation of account-based sales and marketing. The inspiration for this revolutionary methodology was originally a simple experiment. 

She had spent over six years immersed in a culture of customer experience that reliably optimized those innovations into profitability. Coming into the world of martech, she saw that the focus was much more on volume and velocity which didn’t always result in revenue.

Her platform was sitting on a literal mountain of unused data, and Latané saw an opportunity to use AI to convert this into an entirely new approach.

Sustainable Growth

6sense has doubled every year, and recently received a valuation of $5.2 billion. Her “all about data” strategy works and works hard. 

Thanks to harnessing the power of AI, Latané acknowledges that her “SDRs are not guessing what account to call, what they care about, what’s the right tactic to use — we’re serving that all up every single day.”

Organizations that still cling to the old ways of sales and marketing are operating in what she refers to as the “dark funnel.” By the time you’ve got a prospective customer filling out a form, you’ve probably already lost them. 

Rapidly evolving customer expectations mean if you cling to outdated strategies, you’ll go extinct.

“We’re really trying to put teams and people in a position to win and succeed and have great conversations — trying to be more human.”

 — Latané Conant

Leveraging Intent Data

Content is king, but intent data is a gold mine.

With all of the focus lately being on automation, we can’t forget to care about and engage with people, both internally and externally. To convince yourself you can help them will put you in a position of winning. 

Intent data gives you the tools you need to do this at scale. Latané points out a few of the different types you can maximize:

• Keyword-based
• Topic or category
• First party
• Second-party
• Pre-intent

She also emphasizes that it’s crucial to avoid data paralyzation: “just throwing it at them is actually not helpful, they’ll probably just keep doing what they’re doing.” 

This is where your AI slides in to save the day by recognizing patterns that you can distill down to actionable workflows. 

Relevance

It all comes down to being relevant. That’s the art of bringing all these things together to form a powerful ecosystem. 

Latané’s methodology helps companies drill down holistically to the bedrock of customer desires. Working with these rich base elements helps you create far more accurate revenue forecasting. 

To hear this interview and many more like it, subscribe to B2B Revenue Acceleration on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, our website, or anywhere you get podcasts.