3 discoveries from 6sense Breakthrough ’22

The BeyondTrust team shared with session attendees this past week that while they had gone all-in on the “old way” of doing things – sending nearly 1M marketing emails in Q4 – they still weren’t achieving pipeline goals. It was time for a bold new strategy. Here are some Breakthrough ’22 session learnings about what happens when you commit to account-based advertising and stop worrying about MQLs.

Throwing out the old playbook and embracing intent-based advertising

DISCOVERY 1: When ad campaigns aren’t focused on generating leads, the freedom to experiment leads to better outcomes

For BeyondTrust, this looked like splitting the existing team into two new teams with distinct goals – demand creation and demand capture. On the demand creation side, it’s all about buyer self-education. These foundational changes created space for fresh educational content, like an animated cybersecurity cartoon series aimed at educating buyers in a lighthearted, approachable way.

The B2B buying process has evolved, and it’s time revenue teams adapt accordingly. With increasingly more of the buyer journey taking place in an online context before a prospective customer even talks to sales,  “the best work in digital selling is not happening within sales departments but rather in marketing.” (The B2B Buying Journey, Gartner) Predictably, teams who fail to throw “significant focus, resources, and political capital into creating rich digital experiences through the next five years risk alienating customers and losing business as a result.”

DISCOVERY 2: Democratize your data, and build new dashboards before rolling out a new ABX strategy. 

Socializing a major strategy shift in advance is important. Turns out, proactively updating reporting and dashboards, so the sales and leadership teams don’t think you broke marketing is also important ahead of a major shift. 

As Justin Brock, senior director of demand generation at BeyondTrust, remarked, even though the pipeline was trending upwards, “Our dashboards looked like Christmas: pipeline was green, and everything else was red.” 

After rolling out their new ABX strategy, the BeyondTrust team found themselves forced to defend their decision by validating that high-intent leads were indeed increasing and they were on the right path to the pipeline. At the same time, the team saw a notable drop in leads from low-intent channels, giving them further confidence to stay the course despite the change in lead volume. 


DISCOVERY 3: Find the right partners to go faster, together. 

For the team, access to a deep bench of subject matter experts with an understanding of BeyondTrust’s existing tech stack and go-to-market strategy was essential. The ability to launch ABM campaigns quickly and efficiently while freeing up internal resources for other strategic work was instrumental in BeyondTrust’s shift. 

Ryan Haygood, director of demand generation at BeyondTrust, said, “Working with the ROI·DNA team enables us to pivot and move a lot faster than we normally would. Having a fully supportive team with expertise in our tools and platforms has driven game-changing results.” 

It’s only been a year, but it’s made a world of difference for BeyondTrust as they’ve reimagined the function of demand generation, re-focusing on marketing-sourced pipeline. With a team of experts behind them, BeyondTrust leveraged the power of 6sense technology to drive measurable results through targeted, AI-informed engagement via digital advertising channels, ABM gifting, field marketing events, and more.