Demandbase and 6sense are the two largest ABM platforms, both pioneering account-based marketing. But they’ve evolved differently. This guide breaks down their strengths, weaknesses, and which is right for your organization.
Intent data is the foundation of modern account-based marketing. As B2B buying committees conduct research online before engaging vendors, tracking this research provides real-time signals about buying readiness. The best B2B sales and marketing teams use intent data to identify opportunities early and accelerate deal cycles.
Account-based marketing and demand generation are often presented as opposing strategies, but the reality is more nuanced. Both have merit. The question isn’t ABM or demand gen, but how to combine them.
The terms get thrown around interchangeably, but account-based marketing (ABM) and traditional outbound sales are fundamentally different approaches. Understanding the distinction is crucial for building an effective B2B growth strategy.
Technographic data describes a company’s technology environment: what applications they use, what infrastructure they run on, what tools and platforms they’ve adopted, and what technology decisions they’ve recently made. For example, knowing that a company uses Salesforce, HubSpot for marketing, and AWS for infrastructure is technographic data. Knowing that they recently upgraded from an older version of their ERP system is also technographic data.
B2B content syndication is the practice of distributing your content (whitepapers, guides, webinars, research reports) through third-party platforms to reach a broader audience. Instead of only reaching people who visit your website or subscribe to your email list, syndicating your content allows you to reach buyers researching on industry platforms, sponsored content networks, and content marketplace platforms.
Demand generation is the set of marketing activities designed to build broad awareness and drive inbound interest from prospects in your target market. ABM (account-based marketing) focuses marketing and sales efforts on a defined set of high-value accounts with coordinated, personalized campaigns.
Firmographic data is information about companies: size, industry, revenue, location, growth rate, technology stack, and organizational attributes. It is the B2B equivalent of demographic data in B2C marketing. Demographic data describes individuals (age, geography, income); firmographic data describes the organizations those individuals work for.
B2B account scoring is a methodology for ranking companies based on their likelihood and value as customers. Rather than scoring individual leads based on engagement with your marketing (the traditional lead scoring approach), account scoring evaluates entire accounts across multiple dimensions: fit for your solution, engagement level, buying signals, and strategic value.
The dark funnel is the portion of a buyer’s research and decision-making process that happens outside the direct view of sales and marketing teams. It includes conversations on Slack, Teams, private Slack groups, internal emails, phone calls, Zoom meetings between account team members, conversations with peers at other companies, Reddit threads, private Discord communities, analyst calls, and word-of-mouth recommendations. It’s called “dark” not because anything nefarious is happening, but because it’s invisible to standard marketing and sales tracking systems.
Revenue Operations, often called RevOps, is the practice of aligning and optimizing all functions that contribute to revenue generation – primarily marketing, sales, and customer success – around a unified set of processes, data, and goals. Unlike traditional siloed approaches where marketing, sales, and CS operate independently with their own metrics and systems, Revenue Operations treats revenue generation as a coordinated system where each function plays an interdependent role.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) attribution is a measurement framework that connects revenue outcomes specifically to account-level marketing activities rather than individual leads. Unlike traditional marketing attribution that tracks anonymous visitors and individual prospects through a sales funnel, ABM attribution asks a fundamentally different question: which marketing efforts and touchpoints drove engagement with our target accounts?