SFG 22: Jason Zintak on account intelligence for revenue teams

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In this episode of the Startup Field Guide podcast, Sandhya Hegde chats with Jason Zintak, CEO of 6Sense, an AI-powered ABM platform that is focused on arming revenue teams with the right information to engage with the right accounts.

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Be sure to check out more Startup Field Guide Podcast episodes on Spotify, Apple, and Youtube. Hosted by Unusual Ventures General Partner Sandhya Hegde (former EVP at Amplitude), the SFG podcast uncovers how the top unicorn founders of today really found product-market fit.

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‍If you are interested in learning more about some of the themes and ideas in this episode, please check out the Unusual Ventures Field Guides on self-serve PLG experiences, defining a GTM framework, and building a product roadmap.

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TL;DR

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• Prototyping a solution: The initial version of the 6sense platform would generate a score on buyer propensity but early customer feedback showed that revenue teams were skeptical. While the scores were interesting, it was hard for sales and marketing teams to trust and act on them without understanding the “why” behind them. 
• Iterating to product-market fit: Based on customer feedback, the 6sense team decided to contextualize the data and the scores and create business workflows to activate the insights which would lead to increased customer retention and interaction.
• Early signals of product-market fit: Feedback helped the team realize that customers wanted a more data-driven approach to B2B marketing and selling, which led to the development of 6Sense's platform using machine learning and algorithms
• Go-to-market strategy: 6sense’s initial GTM strategy involved a lot of networking and brute-force marketing. A lot of custom work was involved since the product required data integrations. Since customers were having difficulty understanding the “why” behind the idea, building out the UI and showing it to customers helped 6sense get to product-market fit. 
• AI strategy: 6sense has always been focused on big data and AI. Generative AI is just the next step in their evolution. They have expanded from enterprise to mid-market and SMBs, and recently launched a freemium PLG product called Revenue AI.

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Episode transcript

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Sandhya Hegde:

Welcome to the Startup Field Guide, where we learn from successful founders of unicorn startups, how their companies truly found product-market fit. I'm your host, Sandhya Hegde, and today we'll be diving into the story of 6sense. Founded in 2013, 6sense helps sales and marketing teams identify the purchase intent of their target customers and automate the process of reaching out to them and engaging them. Last valued at over $5 billion, 6sense has over 2000 customers today. It aggregates buying signals like website visits, email opens, product review hits, and then leverages machine learning to help customers do account-based marketing and automate a lot of the workflow. With us today is the CEO of 6sense, Jason Zintak. Jason, welcome to the Field Guide.

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So Jason, you joined 6sense as the CEO while the company was still pretty early — three, four years into their journey way back in 2017. I'm curious, what attracted you to this particular company? It's a very big decision to come in as CEO. How was the company doing and why did you feel like this was the team to join?

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Jason Zintak:

Yeah, sure. It's an easy answer, actually, but maybe some background will help you for context. I grew up in sales and marketing. Namely, the majority of my career was at SAP as a seller. Graduated through some roles there. Went on to be a CRO at JDA Software, now called Blue Yonder. Jon Rahm just won the Masters. I sponsor him. And then Responses, an email marketing company, and the last company before 6sense was called Platfora. Platfora was a big data visualization, Hadoop-based analytic tool. We sold it to Workday.

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And as I was sitting on the sideline thinking about what to do, the last two career stops were probably what influenced my attraction to 6sense, and that is that email marketing and then big data were the two career stops. And 6sense was trying to solve those two things for B2B marketing, so leveraging big data, data science, machine learning to solve for, "how do we market and sell better across new channels? Very early stage when I got to them, but a problem we're solving and one that I thought could evolve and why I got most excited, because it's really my former function as a career as well as the companies I was at.

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Sandhya Hegde:

How did you go about evaluating where the company was and the founding team that you would be working with? It's obviously a fairly crucial decision to make sure that you have the right chemistry with the founders. I would love to understand more about your process of how you evaluated the opportunity.

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Jason Zintak:

The introduction was pretty easy. So Battery was an investor in Platfora and also an investor in 6sense. I also had a common former CEO of PTC that was on both boards. And so this was the familiar introduction and they said, "Hey, you don't have anything to do now. Why don't you check out this company?" And effectively, we dated for probably six months. We got to know each other. It was getting to know the executive team and the employees and the product, and digging deep. It did take six months and neither of us were really pressured to do anything. It was, "Hey, there may be a match here," where the founders had gotten to a point in the company's evolution where they wanted some complimentary skillsets. And that's ultimately what... I'd say, first, we said do we like each other? And second, do we believe in a common vision? And the rest took care of itself through  multiple meetings.

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Sandhya Hegde:

And what were your observations about where the company's technology and product was at the time?

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Jason Zintak:

So, it was early stage. We were about $4 million or $5 million in ARR when I was evaluating and ultimately joined, and I'd say product-market fit was initial but not totally there. I think I mentioned that 6sense was based under the concept of, if we help understand big data and those elements around B2B, marketing, sales motions, perhaps we can learn from it through machines and leveraging algorithms, et cetera, to then predict outcomes of who might be in market to buy a certain product. And that's actually what they're doing. But I used to call it back then a black box, because all it put out was a score, a 1, 2, 3, or 4 on buyer propensity. And so at that point in time, it was really just this black box and a score. No application, effectively, and no way to interact with the data. And that's about where I met the company.

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Sandhya Hegde:

And you must have talked to early customers of the company at the time. What was your takeaway from those conversations that helped you identify this diamond in the rough?

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Jason Zintak:

Yeah, that's exactly what it was, a diamond in the rough, and why I was so encouraged with what they were doing, but yet lots to still do. The interaction with the customers told me what I presumed, which is... And by the way, this is some of my sales DNA, was "Oh hey, this account is a one. They're ready to buy." And the next question that a seller would say is, "Well, why? Who? How do you know that? Tell me, where can I see that?" And the answer was, "Well, it's just because our data science tells you to." And most sellers and marketers are skeptical and want to understand how and why. So the customer feedback, and not only my own observation was, these scores are interesting but it's hard for us to get the sales and marketing, and field teams to understand the recommendation. How do they trust the recommendation?

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And so what I thought was the big opportunity is if we could eventually contextualize that data, that score, the "why" the customer might be signaling intent to buy, and then ultimately being able to action that. So create the business workflow that contextualizes the data score or the insight, but then action on the insight. So be able to do something. We used to say, "Know anything, do anything." So if we know it, what can we do? And the do is send an email, an ad, a post to LinkedIn or Facebook. And that's ultimately what our dream was, my dream was with the team, to activate that and mature it so customer retention and interactivity with the product would become real.

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Sandhya Hegde:

Makes sense. So you've gone from black box to, "Oh, I can trust the box and I can act on what it is telling me." Even though the technology is the same, the product feels very different.

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Jason Zintak:

Right. And so, what I discovered in the dating process with 6sense and the founders was they had done the hard part. They had done all the data, mastering the application of AI, the machine learning, solving the problem, but now we need to put it in presentation format for sellers and marketers to truly collaborate, create the user interface and the business workflows that allow them to understand that data and then do something with the data. And if we could do that, we would be the next generation B2B selling and marketing platform. It took some trust because that's a lot to build, and I'm happy to say, six years later, we did, and it's here and it's actually out in the market now, which is pretty cool.

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Sandhya Hegde:

How would you describe the go-to-market strategy that got them from 0 to $4 million or $5 million in ARR, versus the changes that you all ended up making together after 2017?

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Jason Zintak:

Gosh, I think the zero to $4 million or $5 million was probably just brute force and mass networking. It wasn't a PLG product, it actually required data integrations, data mastering. We automate that now. Back then it was more custom work. So making sense of that data, organizing it to be ready to apply the AI, and leveraging who you know, the classic of investors, "Can you introduce us to your portcos? Can we try it out?" We actually started in big companies, like Cisco and Dell were some very early-stage customers. In fact, the company idea and concept was spawned out of a consulting project at Cisco. And then from there, the company was founded. "Hey, instead of doing these manually, can we create a SaaS-based product that would be a platform?"

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Sandhya Hegde:

What were some of the first few things you did? Do you remember your 90-day plan? Did you have a 90-day plan?

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Jason Zintak:

It's to learn, typically. Learn, learn, observe, observe. Very scary moments, quite candidly. We probably had 30 customers that got in the door, and I think we churned five of them in the first month and maybe another five in the next month. And by the way, this is part of like, "Hey, we believe in the mission but we're having a hard time letting the users understand the why, the context that we've talked about." And so a lot of it was just observing, well, what's going on in the market, what are customers reacting to? And they sort of gave us that answer. If you teach us and give us those as we develop the product to what I told you it has become today, that's what they're ultimately looking for.

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And we righted the ship. We actually changed some employees. We hired a complete go-to-market team, which was not really present. We had the start of a go-to-market team. Given my background with sales and marketing, it's something I understood well to do. And that ultimately was a huge complement to the founding team, in that we had some brilliant engineers at the company, data scientists, and we needed to go-to-market function to match. But I think the biggest thing was building the product to what we saw was the answer to these sales and marketing collaborative tools or workflows. And that's when we ultimately got product-market fit, was when we delivered that UI.

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Sandhya Hegde:

What were some qualitative signals of that product-market fit for you? What did you listen for when you were looking at the customer feedback and talking to people who were experiencing the new product interface, for example?

Jason Zintak:

Well, I believe that there is a generational shift or that could happen relative to B2B selling and marketing, and as mentioned, I came from a company called Responses. It was actually B2C. But we got acquired by Oracle. We integrated with the B2B version out, which is Eloqua. We competed with Marketo. So B2B marketing was thought of at that time, and selling, was sort of like Salesforce plus Marketo or Salesforce plus Eloqua. What I believed is, and there are rule-based systems, that if we did the data-driven approach, it would transform. And so B2B companies and probably their biggest spend was on an email marketing system. As I have aforementioned. And what became evident talking to customers that said, "Hey, this needs to be more data-driven, not rules-based. And we want to be able to ingest more data, not just our own first party, but third-party web traffic, et cetera, to be smarter. There's more data we can process to be more surgical in our approach."

And that was 6sense's design, is that we could leverage the better computing power, machine learning, and the algorithms to do just that. And now we're here in this next generation where actually customers have said, "Yeah, we spend more on you than we do on our old email processes, because we don't want to do this broadcast email to lists. We want to be able to listen for intent and be more surgical with a tactic that is appropriate and personal at the time."

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Sandhya Hegde:

When we talked before, you mentioned that there were definitely some near-death experiences on your way to going from 20, 30 customers to now, to over 2000 customers, which is amazing, by the way. I'm curious, can you share a little bit more about the journey, especially when you think about all the big shifts happening in the macro environment? There was a lot of unbundling, lot of spend on go-to-market tools and now people are worried they have too many. I'm curious what the past five, six years have been like, and what have been some major milestones for you and 6sense?

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Jason Zintak:

Geez, in the young years of these companies, seed, series A, B, it's really sort of scary times because you're trying to establish yourself brand-wise, product-wise, from a product-market fit, as we just talked about. We had many scary moments, if you will, or moments of, "Are we doing the right thing?" One I told you about, we had some customer churn that said, "Hey, we think you're on to something, but give it another year and come back to us." Fortunately, the majority of them stayed with us and let us evolve through that. That was one.

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You have funding scares. By the way, when I came into the company, it was very crowded in martech and salestech, and most of my advisors said, "You're crazy, don't take that job." I didn't have fear. I saw the opportunity in talking to the team, if we could develop what we, again, I aforementioned, talked about relative to our product path, they would come, people would realize that this is the next generation. But it took probably three years since I got there, to it actually become a thing, something that analysts started covering. Gartner Magic Quadrants, Forrester Waves, et cetera. And that's a scary time. Are we going to become a sector? Are we going to become a must-have versus a nice-to-have?

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And we also believed in a platform play that we could consolidate different functions so people wouldn't buy what was traditional back then is many tools that they'd stitch together. So today, you can buy from 6sense, our firmographic data, technographic data, contact data, put it into the system, use that data to then help you do the emails, the ads, the social posts, create segments and cohorts that you market to, and listen for signal in the market so you know what to do. And today, we've evolved to leveraging generative AI, and I like to say we started doing it before it became cool, because everyone's talking about it today. But we had this in the product two years ago and leveraged GPT-3 for our email product.

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Sandhya Hegde:

Got it. Makes sense. I'm curious, how has the shift to generative AI impacted the long-term product vision for 6sense? Because I think originally the core technology was very much around prediction and using data to predict signals, whereas generative AI is still prediction, but token prediction and very, very different style in terms of the product value that it adds. Does it feel very cohesive in terms of your vision? "It's all about automation, we got this." I'm curious whether there have been tough conversations internally around, is this a distraction? Is it still consistent with your mission?

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Jason Zintak:

Yeah, no, I think actually it's evolved naturally as the next thing. I think core to 6sense, we've always been big data, applied machine learning, AI, and that's some of the basics of which we got funding at the outset of the company. Today, many companies are getting funded based on generative. I'd say that was just part of our evolution path. Like I said, two years ago we were doing it, had it in the product, and we believe that the AI would evolve and we want to do all things AI, big data because we know there's too much data for humans to make sense of and sellers and marketers can no longer process simple lists to understand behavior.

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And so yeah, it's sort of next-version for us. And the neat thing is, today people are announcing products, but these products are still human and have human intervention. Our email product, because we've been building it for two years, leveraging GPT-3.5 now, is no human required. And so it actually writes first email, second email, third email and responses, and it is very human-like. And we leverage 6sense's core data and intense signals to make that even more powerful.

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Sandhya Hegde:

That sounds really awesome, obviously and I spend a lot of my time with founders and startups. So I'm really curious, given that 6sense started as its DNA with serving enterprise customers who already have a lot of data to leverage and analyze, how are you thinking about the mid-market and SMB segments? And perhaps a related question, how do you as a big, mature company, how do you start building more self-serve experiences? Because that's not easy. You have all this really strong enterprise DNA, a lot of enterprise customers, and now you need to also come up with a plan for a great bottom-up, self-serve experience. I'm curious what that process has been like at 6sense.

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Jason Zintak:

Yeah, so we founded in the enterprise segment as our customers, and look, we weren't cool. We didn't have PLG until probably a couple months ago in reality, because we went through traditional enterprise sales cycles, and these were big data projects and data was messy and needed to be cleansed and transformed. And we've since though, come down market. We went from enterprise to mid-market, and actually we now service small businesses, and 100 employees and above is generally where we start. And much to my surprise, I was actually very skeptical to go into the small business, but it turns out that my team convinced me and they had good research on it, and the product worked and we didn't have to really make any changes.

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So that was fascinating. Now, what we didn't have was PLG and we wanted to bring a freemium aspect to it so it was easier for people to adopt and buy 6sense. So naturally, as we came down market, we thought there's more of a crawl, walk, run, that should people be able to step into 6sense. To give you an example, we launched our first PLG product two weeks ago. It's called Revenue AI. In two weeks we signed up 5,000 users after announcing it. And that's a free product, so companies can go out and use it and step their way into 6sense and figure out if it's something they like, and we'll continue to mature it from there.

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Sandhya Hegde:

How do you think about the first aha moment that someone has with 6sense in the bottom-up, self-serve experience, versus when you are going through a top-down enterprise motion, the a-ha moment needs to be more about building trust and conviction as opposed to just starting with features and functionality. I'm curious how you think about that and how you are thinking about evolving your own point of view on what the future of go-to-market strategy looks like in this blended world where everyone's doing some bottom-up, some top-down all at the same time.

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Jason Zintak:

Well, maybe the best example is just our, we call it Conversational Email, which is the generative AI-backed product. That's sort of a try-and-buy. It's minimal. It's very lightweight. For example, if we were trying to target you and you got an email from me, from my outbox, my address to Sandhya, and we go back and forth three times and then I tell you at the end, "It wasn't me, it was a bot," and you're blown away because you thought we were having this wonderful conversation. Turns out it still is wonderful, it just wasn't me. That is proof in the pudding and that's actually what we use as the demo to say, "Hey, just try it this way because you'll be impressed. It's responsible, it has good conversations. You can have human intervention if you want to, when you want to, through different stages." But that is a really good way to say try it and buy it and use it. And it's proof in the pudding because people say "Wow, that's quality."

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The other aspect is our Revenue AI product, which simply, a seller can say, "I need to understand some general intent and a signal or a contact. What products do they have installed at X, Y, Z company?" Log in, grab it from 6sense and go, and then that builds the trust again in the data to do your job.

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Sandhya Hegde:

I'm curious whether the shift in the modern data stack and the data ecosystem and a better adoption of warehousing, has that impacted your customer's ability to get more value out of 6sense? What are you seeing in the data ecosystem that is a good tailwind and will help future go-to-market leaders do this better?

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Jason Zintak:

Yeah, the stack has completely changed, and that was one of my reasons I was most excited about 6sense and the vision, is just that, for instance, the old email systems were just one channel and first-party data for the most part. And we all know how data's proliferated and how many different sources it could come from. So in order to have a 360-degree view of your prospect or customer, it's more than just email. And so we aggregate all these different data sources. We aggregate G2 if you want. We're an intent supermarket if you will. We have our own proprietary intent, which we think is best in class, but we want to involve and ingest as much data as possible.

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And that's why I say let's not forget about our origin. We're a data company first that applies AI to make sense of it, know anything, do anything. Our customers tend to call us the central nervous system, and that's the pendulum swing from some of these channel-based tools to a data-centric stack or the central nervous system in 6sense, to help understand what to do so you can then execute a tactic across any channel.

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Sandhya Hegde:

I'm now curious, coming back to present day, there's been massive changes in the macro ecosystem, especially when it comes to go-to-market. People are decreasing go-to-market headcount where they can and the next year or two feels like it's going to be tough. How have you and the 6sense team adapted to that? Have there been changes you've thought about making or had to make to your positioning, your go-to market strategy, your product? How does the macro environment affect you in the next couple of years?

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Jason Zintak:

Yeah, in the last six years we've had two of those. We've had Covid, which actually impacted a lot of tech companies because there's a tighter lens looked on spend. And now of course, we have the new macro economy and the switch to a bear market from a bull market, and what does that mean? And so people have to do more with less, and we do the same. So actually, 6sense uses 6sense. We actually believe it is more with less. We need less field sources, less field people in order to reach people because we're doing it through data and specific targeting. So that helps you reduce your staff or at least have a leaner staff to leverage the intelligence.

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I think these two moments in time, Covid and the current macro economy, actually help you get better as a business. That's our experience. We had to look more tightly at what does a customer value? Are they getting value? We now issue ROI studies on our product to all our customers and report back quarterly, so they can see real impact of the product they're using. And I think for any young company that is a foreseen function in today's economy, certainly one of them is, are you delivering value to your customer? What does it look like? And do they actually see what we see? That's sobering. Let's see, what else? It's no longer growth at all costs, it's path to profitability. That's something to focus on, how you have more efficient growth. It's the new valuations high watermark. And that also makes you get smarter as a business.

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Sandhya Hegde:

I think one of the things that has been really impressive is how well you have been able to really work with the original founders of 6sense and really build on their strengths and compliment the team. I'm curious, what was your approach? What did you go in saying, "Okay, this is how I need to do this effectively"? And what would be your advice to other technical founders in a similar situation who are considering whether they should bring on a professional CEO, and what should they look for in the process?

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Jason Zintak:

I was looking for an opportunity where there were complimentary skill sets. Look, we need each other. I'm not a data scientist, they are. And that's the cool thing about working with people in general. I believe everyone brings something to the table, everyone has a respective strength and weakness, and I guess I learned through the years that that's something that evolves and to look for and leverage each other and lean on each other. And so today, this executive team, it's really cool. Half the team is the original founding team and the other half is new in the last six years, and we're all working together and not a single person has turned over in those six years.

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So it's that human, be kind and be respectful and do unto others as you'd like to them to do to you. And that was just, it was chemistry. Do we have chemistry? Do we have the same vision? We touched on it earlier. Can we get along? But you have to really be deliberate about it every day, and even today now that we're 1200 employees. The journey's different. You're reinventing yourself every six months, if not every quarter, on what's going on, what do we need to focus on? So communication is key, and respect and integrity through that process is paramount.

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Sandhya Hegde:

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Jason. This is an incredible opportunity to understand how you have helped this company go from a diamond in the rough to the juggernaut that it is today. I'm so excited about your new product-led growth strategy too, and we'll definitely encourage a lot of the founders we work with to go check out 6sense and also be inspired by the great martech product you have built. So thank you so much for joining us.

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Jason Zintak:

Yeah, I appreciate the time. It's been quite a ride. I think that's what we learn is just, everything's a new day in these startups and keep the faith, and it's fun. And have fun while you're doing it. I always like to make sure that's a denominator.

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