Updated Oct 16, 2023: We’ve changed the structure of the article to clarify the differences between 6sense vs. Demandbase.
For modern sales and marketing professionals, automating repetitive tasks and leveraging tools that improve the efficiency of the sales process is key.
That’s why account-based marketing (ABM) has become the default way to approach sales in recent years. Account-based marketing platforms help align sales and marketing efforts, construct a B2B buyer journey, and define a specific target audience and market strategy.
When pivoting toward ABM, selecting highly-rated tools that would combine sales prospecting, digital marketing campaigns, and existing CRM data remains a challenge. Where do you even start?
Demandbase and 6sense are two of the most promising ABM engagement platforms today. Let’s compare them side by side to see which one might be a better fit for your team.
Tip: Want to add the power of buyer intent AI to your ABM? Try Lift AI. This buyer intent solution will automatically qualify every website visitor and prioritize them for your sales team.
The Role of 6sense in ABM
6sense is a comprehensive ABM platform covering sales and marketing needs, from choosing the right strategy to finding in-market accounts to reaching new audiences.
What 6sense is best at is uncovering all the hidden elements of your buyer journey, across channels.
You start by connecting existing customer relationships from your CRM. 6sense analyzes them and suggests new related accounts from its own database. After that, you can quickly create new digital experiences (e.g. email campaigns) targeted at all the high-value prospects.
In addition, 6sense provides AI-assisted insights to your existing sales stack (e.g. Salesforce or HubSpot), such as the contacts of people and the names of companies that have visited your website.
6sense works best for companies with lots of CRM data and traffic-heavy websites, since it relies on this information to provide accurate suggestions for expanding your sales pipeline.
Key features
- 31% average increase in opportunity volume
- 40% average decrease in opportunity costs
- Uncovering more of the buyer journey with the help of AI
- Audience segmentation for digital campaigns
- Seamless integration with marketing and sales stacks
The Contribution of Demandbase to ABM
Demandbase is an all-in-one account-intelligence tool that keeps both sales and marketing needs in mind.
The first thing you notice when using Demandbase is its wide range of attributes, from firmographic to technographic, to keywords, to news, to other factors. That’s because Demandbase gets its data from thousands of sources and continuously updates it to give you the latest information.
While Demandbase started as an ABM platform that they called the ABX (account-based experience) Cloud, they later expanded to identifying in-market accounts that match your precise criteria and added lots of automation and artificial intelligence to become a comprehensive go-to-market solution.
Even with its new AI capabilities, Demandbase remains an account-based marketing tool at its core, syncing with CRM data, locating in-market accounts, tracking buyer journeys, and suggesting digital experiences and industry insights for new prospects.
Demandbase is a great choice for companies operating in complex and ever-changing environments, where getting up-to-date insights is critical and relying solely on proprietary data is not enough.
Key features
- 92M+ businesses in the database
- 150M+ B2B contacts worldwide
- 550K+ intent keywords analyzed
- 3.7B+ IP addresses mapped
- Plug-and-play integrations with leading marketing & sales apps
6sense vs. Demandbase: An ABM-Focused Comparison
Looking at an overview of 6sense and Demandbase from the ABM perspective, they might seem similar. Both products analyze in-market data, help improve buyer journeys, integrate with CRMs and other sales tools, feature digital campaigns capabilities, and more. Both are among the top picks in ABM space and have high ratings among sales and marketing professionals.
How do you know which one to choose? Upon close analysis of Demandbase and 6sense, we can see that their value propositions target different ABM needs.
6sense streamlines the information in your CRM and the dataflow that goes through your website and marketing setup. Demandbase is more focused on expanding ICP opportunities using its own vast database.
Importantly, these products have more similarities than differences. The pricing for each varies based on the features needed and the number of users but is roughly similar.
In this case, what’s the next step? The best suggestion is to try both. If you contact these tools for a demo and ask for a free trial, you’ll be able to evaluate their features based on your live data and tech stack.
In the end, you’ll improve your account-based marketing strategy by going with either Demandbase or 6sense. But while both help you determine high-value prospects to focus your sales efforts on, you’d be missing out on potential clients with high buyer intent that are on your website right now.
You’re losing revenue today because you don’t know which of your website visitors are ready to buy — there’s no high-quality automated sales qualification process. That’s why real-time buyer intent is an invaluable addition to any ABM solution.
How Lift AI Enhances Your ABM Strategy with 6sense and Demandbase
To transform 6sense or Demandbase into a true omni-channel ABM martech execution machine, you need a real-time buyer-intent tool that would identify how likely every website visitor is to buy your product or service. Such as Lift AI.
Lift AI is a unique solution for identifying true buyer intent. It uses a proprietary machine-learning model that’s been trained on billions of data points and over 14 million live sales interactions.
As a result, Lift AI can identify every single visitor on your website with 85% accuracy, even if they are anonymous and haven’t been recorded in your CRM.
Once identified Lift AI segments visitors into high, medium, and low buyer intent, connecting the most promising ones directly with your BDRs and delegating the rest to a nurturing bot or a self-help guide.
Lift AI works with any sales or marketing tools, including 6sense and Demandbase, greatly enhancing their capabilities.
Key features
- Identifies 9% of your traffic that has high buyer intent
- Works with any sales or marketing automation platform
- Analyzes both first- and third-party data
- Compliant with privacy regulations
- No training or coding skills required
Guiding Your Choice: Which Platform Aligns Best with Your ABM Goals?
While you should test-drive both ABM platforms before making the final decision, you could say that companies that have lots of traffic to their web properties and a lot of data in their CRM would benefit from the AI capabilities of 6sense.
On the other hand, businesses that want to scale their lead generation and marketing efforts quickly based on their ICP might lean closer to Demandbase.
Regardless of the final choice, supercharging either platform with the power of Lift AI will see immediate benefits, such as improving live chat conversions anywhere from two to 10 times within 90 days.
Lift AI clients like PointClickCare grew their conversions from website visitors by 400%, attributing over $1M of extra revenue to their Lift AI integration. Formstack, another customer, increased their conversions by 420%.
Request your free proof of concept and get onboarded to Lift AI today. See how you can leverage real-time buyer intent and increase conversions at the same time.
